Once again experience is touted as having priority over the word of God

A review of Professor Erwin Barron’s third installment, "The priority of experience in moral debate”

The last installment of Professor Erwin Barron’s three part article on homosexuality, the Bible, experience and ethical decision making is entitled, “The priority of experience in moral debate.” It was posted Sunday on the Outlook and linked to at Presbyweb today.1

Barron’s last installment does not offer any new suggestions on decision making but is instead a conclusion of his two earlier pieces. He presents the experiences of both a More Light Church and a Confessing Church and once again concludes that they are making their decisions from experience rather than from the biblical text.

He, seemingly is not suggesting that each church made decisions from there own experiences, but that they must listen to each other's experience. Otherwise according to Barron's description they are already doing what he has suggested. This means that the people in the Confessing Church must listen to the experiences of the people in the MLP Church and they to those in the Confessing Church.

But the way Barron has set up his scenario, with his suggestion that people in the Confessing Church do not know any LGBT people, this simply amounts to the MLP people being the ones to offer new information. The Confessing Church people will have nothing to say, unless of course they turn first to the Bible. But of course most Evangelicals know LGBT people and have friends in their community. This is simply a false scenario which doesn't work either way.

Barron does, in this last installment, make minor use of two Christian ethicist, James Gustafson and Richard Hays. He writes that Gustafson “says that of all moral authority, human experience has ‘priority.’” Of Hays, Barron writes, “Conservative ethicist Richard Hays says that personal experience is a ‘notoriously tricky guide’ to moral authority because people are so easily self deceived,” and “Hays agrees that the experiences of a Christian community can lead to the establishment of moral norms that sometimes even contradict Scripture, but only ‘after sustained and agonizing scrutiny by a consensus of the faithful.”2

Therefore, Barron concludes “as long as we don’t become ‘experiential fundamentalists’ or ‘biblical fundamentalists,’ then these two sources can both guide us in our moral-decision making.”

Using Gustafson, Barron gives hardly any clues at all about the ethicist’s philosophical or theological positions The reader cannot be sure what it is Gustafson believes or in what position he places the Bible as a moral authority. On the other hand, Barron takes Hays’ negative positions about experience and uses them to bolster his own positive views about experience. And he does this while failing, once again, to explain where Hays places the biblical text in relation to moral authority. This seems to me to be, itself, unethical.

The title of my last review of Barron’s three part series was May his word overthrow us and we be transformed by his grace:. I meant that as a prayer title. Reading his last installment, “The priority of experience in moral debate,” I return to my earlier title. We must allow our experiences to be overthrown by God’s word. We must allow our sinful natures to be transformed by the grace of Jesus Christ.

Human experience is important, of course, but our experiences are always partially shaped by fallen human nature and by creation, which also awaits our final redemption. We seek in the Holy Scripture a remedy for all brokenness. And find there a crucified Savior who calls us out of ourselves and into a redemptive relationship with him.

Within that relationship, within God's word, we find love, Christ's love given on the cross, Christ's justice bought on the cross with his blood, Christ's transforming power given by the Holy Spirit because of his bodily resurrection. And we come under Christ's kingly authority made known only in the Old and New Testaments.

“And he himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by his wounds you were healed. For you were continually straying like sheep, but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Guardian of your souls.” (1 Peter 2:24-25)

1 Presbyweb is an independent Presbyterian news source with the best coverage of Presbyterian news on the Internet. Hans Cornelder, the founder and Editor, writes of its content, “Voices from the entire Spectrum.” He not only links to Presbyterian news but also to news of other churches in the United States and around the world. And many of the articles he posts are unique to his site. It is a subscription site but well worth the low price.

2 As someone trained to write history and a researcher who was taught the importance of footnoting, I object to Barron’s use of these two ethicist with out giving a proper reference.