Contractarianism and Church Membership

Jeffrey Stout engages in a critique of Rawls’s contractarian social ethics (Stout, Jeffrey, Democracy and Tradition, 64-85). In it he claims that it is impossible to base political dialogue on premises or principles that no reasonable person could reject. Stout argues that we cannot expect to reach the level of holding common premises or principles in common while at the same time maintaining freedom of expression. In order to create consensus, we would have to resort to oppressive forms of social control.

The MB church operates in exactly this framework. The denomination has created a document – the confession of faith – that has been granted status as those principles and approaches that demarcate the boundaries of belonging. The content of the confession is what establishes the terms and limits of acceptable dialogue and beliefs in our denomination. People are disciplined (i.e. excluded from the discourse) when they are at variance with the confession. 

The problem with this system is twofold. First, to place the confession of faith on an authoritative plane is to deny that it is a human document, arrived at by a process of political compromise. In other words, it is a human document, created out of flawed human systems. Therefore, we must insist that it is subject to the same flaws as humans and therefore must be open to critique. (As an aside – the Bible functions in much the same way – only by appealing to divine authorship can it be placed on a plane above the human. But, this divinization of The Book seems to violate the principle of the Incarnation). 

Second, this elevation of the confession denies the reality that as individuals and persons we are all on a different continuum when it comes to theological beliefs and opinions. In a Hegelian sense, our theological norms and commitments are always in the process of being simultaneously held, simultaneously deconstructed and simultaneously innovated upon. An attempt to fix the conversational aspects of our theological beliefs violates their true nature.

Because of these two problems, I believe that a concept of membership and belonging to a particular church or tradition cannot be based on a contractarian understanding. We must find a more supple way to speak about belonging and what constitutes membership in a particular church or denomination.  I am still trying to formulate what exactly that looks like.