Process & Outcome

Imagine that you and another person each follow the same decision-making process and yet end up with different choices. Why? What has happened? Why isn't the process itself determinative?

What has happened when you follow the same steps in making a decision as someone else, yet you reach a different conclusion? The most logical inference to draw from this is that some other element--integral to the scenario or the decision at hand--is different.

Just so. Take, for instance, a decision on what kind of milkshake to order. You have before you the menu of options at ice cream shop, you factor in what others have said about the quality of various flavors there, what you have ordered previously at other places, and your personal tastes. You order chocolate.

I read off the same menu board, factor in what others have said and done, what I have ordered before, my personal tastes--just the same process as you. I order strawberry. The same process, the same set of factors taken into consideration. One thing is different, and this leads to a different conclusion.

Change up the scenario just a bit. It's thirty years earlier, and you are at the same location, only then it was called a soda fountain. You move through the same decision-making process. Obviously, some of the factors are different: a different era might mean the quality of the ice cream (or other ingredients) is different, and so the reputation surrounding various flavors as an input factor is different. So too are the friends whose opinions you take into consideration. And you--are you the same or a different person?

You are different. You may well end up making a similar choice--chocolate--but the experiences you have over those thirty years make you a different person.

Now, move the whole conversation over to a subject of a different depth of import, and as a Christian making moral and ethical decisions with the Bible as our primary guide. As a Wesleyan, I will add, three other factors that weigh in early Church Tradition, logic or reasoning, and the testimony of personal (and contemporary community) experience. These four, Scripture, Tradition, reason and experience, are the factors that guide us in making moral and ethical decisions.

Suppose that you--or even a whole group of people in the same church denomination--return to a decision that you-all made thirty years ago. You are determined to retrace the decision-making process, and use that prior decision as a guide: you will return to study the same set of Scriptures; you return to seek the wisdom of the same Church Fathers; you follow the same logic and reasoning processes; and you give weight in the same way to experience.

And you reach a different conclusion. What has changed? Not the Scriptures. You might be focusing on a broader set of Scriptures or give higher priority to some texts over others. That would be a change. But on the whole, you value the Bible with the same conviction and seek the God's wisdom via Scripture in the same way. Similarly, the voice of Church Tradition has not changed. Though you are certainly reading the Bible and "hearing" the Church Fathers differently for some reason.

Ah reason: but, no, you have determined to follow the same mental processes. That has not changed, though the outcome certainly has. The answer, obviously, is experience. Over thirty years, your experiences (individually and collectively) have added to insight.

Just the one factor. Of course, as we've noted, that simple change (additional experience) also floods over to other factors. Experience does affect how you read the Bible, how you receive the wisdom of Tradition, how you give weight to certain factors in reasoning processes.