Dr. David Watson: Convocation Address 2026

The Mercy of Orthodoxy

Convocation Address Transcript, August 27, 2026

Years ago, I was on the staff of a church, and I was teaching disciple Bible study. There was a man in the class named Lawrence. He was about 80 years old, and he was a sweet guy. He’d been a member of that church for decades, and somehow the topic of the Trinity came up, and Lawrence said,

“Well, I just think you got God Almighty up here, and Jesus and the Holy Spirit down here. That’s not right, is it?”

Theologians. okay, yeah. Tom McCall shaking his head like, uh-uh. And so he says other, like, well, Lawrence, you know that that’s not generally how Christians have thought about the Trinity. That’s called subordinationism, and it means that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are less than God, and we had the Council of Nicaea and Constantinople and Ephesus and Chalcedon, and we really talk about God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all equal, co-eternal, et cetera, et cetera.

And I was like the two guys in the Irish guys, you know the Saint Patrick bad analogies video, and Lawrence looked up at me and he said, “Well, I just think you got God Almighty up here and Jesus and the Holy Spirit down here. Is that okay?”

Now that’s kind of a funny story, but as I thought about it over the years, I also think it’s a sad story. This man had been going to church his whole life, and the church never taught him properly about the nature of the God he worshiped every week.

It never quite got across that God the Father sent God the Son to become incarnate for us and for our salvation, God, the Holy Spirit abides with us and draws us into the divine life.

That seems important to me. That seems like something we Christians should not only know but give thanks for and celebrate.

We Christians are the recipients of a rich heritage, what Jude calls the faith once and for all entrusted to the saints. This faith is an expression of the mercy of God, and throughout my career, I’ve watched pastors, bishops, and theologians set aside that faith for something they feel is more fitting, but to reject what the church has taught us from its early days is not kindness. It’s cruelty.

In his book The Cruelty of Heresy, C. Fitzsimmons Allison writes, “We are susceptible to heretical teachings because, in one form or another, they nurture and reflect the way we would have it be, rather than the way God has provided, which is infinitely better for us. As they lead us into the blind alleys of self-indulgence and escape from life, heresies pander to the most unworthy tendencies of the human heart. It is astonishing how little attention has been given to these aspects of heresy, its cruelty, and its pandering to sin.”

God once said through the prophet Hosea, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

It happened in the eighth century B.C. and it happens today.

Jeroboam the second was a bad king. At least God seemed to think so. In one Kings 1424, we read that Jeroboam did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.

Now, in this sense, he’s like all the kings of Israel; they were all bad. To say that Jeroboam was a bad king is like saying the Cleveland Browns are having a bad season. We know that we take it for granted.

Jeroboam probably would have been surprised to learn he was regarded as a bad king. His reign was marked by political stability, economic prosperity, and territorial expansion. That’s the stuff good kings do, right?

Well, it depends.

Because while this was going on, the poor were becoming poorer, the rich were growing richer, charging interest, buying up ancestral land, and joining house to house. God doesn’t like that.

Writing around the same time as Hosea, the prophet Amos indicts Israel for trampling upon the poor.

Thus says the Lord: “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment, because they sell the righteous for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, they who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth and push the afflicted out of the way, father and son go into the same girl, so that my holy name is profaned. They lay themselves down behind beside every altar on garments taken in pledge, and in the house of their God they drink wine bought with fines they imposed.”

Hosea, like Amos, is concerned about injustice, but he drills down into the root cause of Israel’s spiritual and moral decline: idolatry.

The image of adultery that characterizes Hosea one through three is a representation of Israel’s idolatry.

Hosea 2:13 reads, “I will punish her for the festival days of the Baals, when she offered incense to them and decked herself with a ring and jewelry and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the Lord.”

Israel has turned away from God. The people have rejected the law; they worship idols.

And the priests and prophets are the special objects of divine wrath in Hosea. They’re supposed to guide the people in the knowledge of and obedience to God, but instead they’ve become purveyors of lies. They haven’t told the truth about God. They haven’t told the truth, obligations to God.

Thus, God laments, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

The Hebrew word yada doesn’t just refer to factual knowledge; it refers to deep personal knowledge. It’s not just knowing God, what God wants us to do—it’s knowing God.

If we offer our worship to idols, we cannot know God.

Psalm 115 says of idols, “Those who make them are like them. So are all who trust in them.”

We become like what we worship.

It is no kindness to tell people that one expression of faith is as good as another. It is no kindness for the church to endure endorse the lies we tell about ourselves.

It is no kindness to allow those who walk through the doors of our churches to ignore the inspired word of God, or worse yet, to bend its meaning into novel and unwarranted interpretations.

It is cruelty to tickle the ears of our congregants with affirmations that will lead them away from God and the life He intends for them.

It is dereliction of duty to speak smooth words and guide them toward the wide gate that leads to destruction.

I once attended a class called “Meet the Methodists.” It was taught by a retired pastor who was still on the staff of the church, and as you might guess, it was a class for people who were newer to our tradition and wanted to find out if this United Methodist congregation was the right place for them.

Well, there’s a period of Q and A, and a young woman asks, “Do Methodists believe in life after death?”

Now, if there has ever been a softball that a pastor should simply knock all the way out of the stadium, that’s it.

But this pastor responded, “Well, I don’t.”

Now I admit I almost came unglued.

First, I’m sure that woman never came back to our church.

Second, the pastor ordained to word sacrament and order spoke out of his malformed private judgment rather than out of the teaching of the church that authorized him in this role.

But third, his answer was cruel.

What if she just lost her father or mother? What if she just been diagnosed with a terminal illness?

And then, of course, there is the Apostle Paul’s admonition: “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

This pastor was deeply confused. He felt that his private judgment mattered more than the historic witness of the church he was ordained to represent.

Like the priests and prophets of Hosea, he did not fulfill the duties of his office. If he were unable to represent the church’s faith in good conscience, he might, he should have stepped aside and done something else with his time.

He might have been a great engineer, or math teacher, or park ranger, but when it came to the teaching of the church’s faith, he was a disaster.

This was in part because he did not see it as his job, as to teach the church’s faith.

Peter Bowler’s words to Wesley, “Preach faith until you have faith,” would have seemed utter nonsense to him.

Preaching and teaching were exercises in private judgment and self-expression, and he was in no way unusual among 20th-century mainline clergy.

My people perish for lack of knowledge, says God.

I’ve seen this time after time in the churches, bishops crying peace, peace where there is no peace, Christian celebrities who develop an inflated, an unrealistic sense of their own discernment, church growth strategies geared toward giving people what they want rather than confronting them with the reality of a just and loving God.

Our faith is not something we invent, but something we inherit. Yet how often we squander that inheritance.

God’s people perish for lack of knowledge, but that is not his will.

In the prologue to John’s Gospel, John uses a term so packed with meaning it’s hard to comprehend.

Logos.

In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God.

Now these days, stoicism is known as something that tech bros and their fanboys practice. I suppose it’s an attempt to stave off the hopelessness of the world they’re trying to construct. One writer I read renamed it Broicism.

But long before it took root in Silicon Valley, Stoicism was an ancient Greek philosophical school that developed a complex understanding of the logos.

In Stoicism, the logos is a divine intelligence, the basic rationality and cosmic order that holds all things together. It’s what gives the universe its coherence.

Without the logos, there would only be chaos.

People manifest the logos when they think, speak, and act according to reason. Logic, order, and rationality are all expressions of the logos.

Remember, though, neither John nor his readers are Stoics. Stoicism was part of the cultural sea in which they swam, but John was a Jew and a follower of Jesus, and so were the first readers of his gospel.

So while these Stoic ideas must have been in the mix, another set of ideas was much more important for these early Christians, and these ideas come from the Jewish wisdom tradition.

Wisdom was God’s coworker in creation; the very nature of creation reflects the wisdom of God.

To the extent we act in keeping with God, with God’s created order, we reflect God’s wisdom. To the extent we reject God’s created order, we reject God’s wisdom.

Now, one of the Jewish wisdom texts, Sirach, describes wisdom making a place for her dwelling, her tent, among Israel.

Then the Creator of all things gave me a command, and my Creator chose a place for my tent. He said, “Make your dwelling in Jacob and in Israel receive your inheritance. Before the ages, in the beginning He created me, and for all the ages, I shall not cease to be. In the holy tent I ministered before Him, and so I was established in Zion.

Thus, in the beloved city, He gave me a resting place, and in Jerusalem was my domain. I took root in an honored people, in the portion of the Lord, His heritage.”

This understanding of wisdom is one of the ingredients baked into John’s Christology.

Just as wisdom is God’s agent in creation, John says that the Logos, all things came into being through Him. Without Him, not one thing came into being.

Just as wisdom pitched her tent and made her dwelling among Jacob, John says that the logos became flesh and lived among us.

The Greek word the NRSV translates as live is skeinao, and it means to tent or encamp. The logos tented among us.

It would be a mistake, however, simply to think of Jesus as incarnate wisdom is more than that, the logos was with God, and the logos was God.

What John is getting at then by using this word, so loaded with connotations both from Stoicism and the Jewish wisdom tradition, is that he’s using the philosophical language available to him to express that God’s wisdom, creative power, sustaining power, rationality, and righteousness are all present in this one man, Jesus.

Now that may sound very complicated, so here’s the TLDR version: Jesus is truth.

He doesn’t just tell the truth. He is the embodiment of truth.

He is truth so great we cannot comprehend him in his fullness. We may as well try to fit the ocean into a water glass.

We must be humble in our expression, cognizant of the limitations of human mind as we try to grasp the infinite.

Nevertheless, God has not left us in utter mystery. In Jesus, God has revealed Himself to us, and we neglect that self-revelation at the expense of our own salvation.

When I was a young seminary student, I was fascinated by the novelty of liberal Protestantism.

There I am, Harriet. Do you remember that guy? It’s been a while, huh?

I won’t say I was convinced by it, by the liberal Protestant tradition. At that point in my life, I just don’t think I really knew what I believed.

But it hit me at some point that liberal Protestantism is a flywheel of endless revisionism.

The church can never settle on specific truth because the liberal tradition, what is now called progressive Christianity, is an ongoing attempt to accommodate the church to the ambient intellectual environment, and that environment is always changing, so liberal Protestantism never lands.

It wherever floats upon the spirit of the age.

On what then could I base my life? How could I ever know God if God were always a moving target?

How could you or I be saved if the meaning of salvation was ever transient?

How could I avoid sin if the understanding of sin were subject to constant revision?

Although it sounds like mercy to patch together a faith that fits their tastes, it is in fact Cruelty.

Imagine you went to the doctor, and the doctor said,

“Well, I got good news and I got bad news.”

Okay. Say, “Well, okay. Well, give me the bad news first, doctor.”

“You’re dying.”

Wow, that is bad news.

“Okay. Well, what’s the good news?”

“Well, here’s the good news. There’s a cure, and it works 100 percent of the time.”

Wow! Great. Let’s have it.

Doc says, “Well, slow your roll. You see, if I were to give you the cure, I’d be impinging on your individuality and your capacity to choose your own path toward health and wellness. So here’s a stack of medical books. Read through these. The answer is somewhere in there. Good luck. I hope you figure it out before you die.”

Now that would amount to medical malpractice, but that is too often how we’ve treated the spiritual sickness unto death—that is sin—and the spiritual medicine of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The message of Jesus was carried into the world by his apostles, and that witness, as Irenaeus, constitutes the revealed truth God has given us for healing and life.

He writes that the apostles who were commissioned to find out the wanderers, and to be sight to those who saw not, and medicine to the weak, certainly did not address them in accordance with their opinion at the time, but according to the revealed truth.

No person acting properly, he says, would advise a blind person just about to fall over a cliff to continue walking in that direction.

No doctor anxious to heal a sick person would prescribe in accordance with the patient’s whims and not according to the requisite medicine.

Those who continued to be continue in the truth entrusted to the apostles, continue in this work of guidance and healing.

By contrast, the heretics are like people who provide lethal guidance and spread disease.

Reflection on the apostolic witness gave rise to what Thomas Oden calls consensual Christianity.

This tradition emerged gradually. No single theologian, pope, emperor, or ecumenical council is responsible for its shape and contents.

It is the gradual outworking of the apostolic tradition across centuries.

Here’s what Odin writes: “The authority of any ancient Christian writer has weight only through the degree that he, by general consent, accurately represented the mind of the whole church. No single voice taken alone can claim to carry every nuance to the full consent of the whole church in all things. However great Augustine may have been, his views of predestination were never fully received and often modified. So those particular views can hardly be regarded as having received the consent necessary for being viewed as an ancient ecumenical consensual tradition.”

Vincent of Laurent argued that even the church’s greatest theologians may err, but those errors are in time corrected by the lack of consent.

And while orthodoxy is sometimes way painted as way of maintaining power and keeping unwanted elements out of the church, the true reason for the handing on of the consensual tradition is that it is a means of grace, a pathway into the life of God.

To insist upon the consensual tradition is mercy. It is an act of love.

Following the European Enlightenment, scholars have often challenged the validity of the church’s claims to have maintained the apostolic witness.

They’ve raised significant questions that have required careful and discerning answers.

Did the church get it right about Jesus, or have Christians for two millennia been deceived by her teaching?

When it comes to questions of his own nature and the salvation he offers us, has God continued to guide the church into all truth, or have we been on our own all this time?

Did God breathe into Scripture, or are the Scriptures simply historical artifacts of ancient Judaism in the early church?

Did God guide the formation of the Christian canon, or are these simply the reflections of the theologies that won the day?

Are the decisions of Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon legitimate extrapolations of the apostolic witness, or are they, as so many have argued, misguided renderings of the earliest Christian preaching?

Are the Christological developments expressed in our creeds the result of the Church’s sanctified reason and imagination, or should we set them aside as the products of imperial power struggles and Neoplatonic fantasies?

There are two central questions at the heart of all of these:

Has God revealed Himself to us, and has He guided the church in our understanding of that revelation?

If we don’t believe God has revealed Himself to us, and if we don’t believe He has guided us in our understanding of that revelation, then let’s just admit that when it comes to God, we’re lost.

We don’t know His will.

We don’t know how to relate to Him.

We don’t know if we need to be saved or are just fine on our own.

Without His self-revelation, God is entirely mysterious. In fact, we can only have some vague and speculative notion of his existence.

We may as well find some philosophy like Broicism that provides some structure to our lives and seek solace in the earthly pleasures that precede our meaningless death.

But for 1000s of years, in different parts of the globe, people of various nations and tongues, first Jews and then Christians, have insisted not only that there is a God, but that He has spoken to us in many and various ways.

They have believed in a God who revealed Himself because He has revealed Himself to them in the most perfect self-revelation of God is in Jesus Christ, a revelation that was taken up by the apostles, whom He sent out to be His witnesses.

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

To insist upon the faith once and for all entrusted to the saints is mercy, and you and I have been called to preserve and protect the great inheritance that has been passed on to us.

Have mercy on those who are Perishing, have mercy on those who are lost in their sins.

Have mercy and proclaim this faith revealed in Scripture and illuminated by the consensual tradition.

When you press back against the spirit of the age, you will be cast as hateful, bigoted, and close-minded.

But doctors who insist on effective treatments are none of these.

Mechanics who follow precise methods in fixing your car do not hate your car.

Airline pilots who follow the flight plan don’t do so because they’re close-minded.

They do so because some weight leads to life, and others to death, and thus it is with the faith we proclaim.

To insist upon the orthodox faith is not an act of rigidity, intellectual sacrifice, or cruelty.

It is mercy.

So go out and be merciful in Jesus’ name.