If you hang around Checkpoint long enough, you’ll hear us reference something called the Quadrilateral. Here’s what that actually is.
Quick note on origin first: the Quadrilateral wasn’t something John Wesley sat down and invented as a named framework. It came later — a scholar looked back at Wesley’s writing and theological style and noticed a consistent pattern, then organized it into the four-part structure we now call the Quadrilateral. The framework is borrowed. The ideas underneath it are genuinely his.
So what is it? Four lenses we use to understand the world and do the actual work of theology:
Scripture. The Bible — our primary source, our starting point, the biggest piece of the four.
Tradition. What did the people who came before us believe? How did earlier generations of the church wrestle with this same question?
Reason. What does logic tell us? What do we understand about how the world works, philosophically and practically?
Experience. What have I actually lived through? Have I had a moment I can only describe as encountering the Holy Spirit? What has my own life taught me that theory alone couldn’t?
Here’s the part that trips people up: this isn’t saying all four are equal partners with Scripture just being one vote among four. You might’ve heard the phrase sola scriptura — Scripture alone — used in some Christian traditions. We don’t hold to that. We’d describe our approach instead as prima scriptura — Scripture first. It’s the base, the primary grounding. Tradition, reason, and experience don’t compete with it; they help us keep interpreting it faithfully as the world keeps changing around us.
This is genuinely a tool I use constantly, not just a slide in a new-member class. Any time I’m thinking through something — a Nerdy Sermon topic, a DLC theme, a question somebody asks in the Discord — I’m running it through some version of these four lenses. What does Scripture say? What has the church historically said? Does this hold up logically? And does this match what people, myself included, have actually experienced to be true?
Next up: what all of that theological groundwork actually adds up to — what United Methodists, and Checkpoint by extension, actually believe.