Conclusion: The Wesleyan in IWU, etc...

You all will be glad to know (as I am), that I have pieced together 47 pages of blathering about what the "Wesleyan" in Indiana Wesleyan, etc... means. Soon I will start blogging toward the paper I'm presenting at the end of the month at the IWU truth conference: "The Bible and Postmodernism."

But the thing needs a conclusion, after which I'll post the integrated piece on my archive site.

So here goes...

6. Conclusion
The purpose of this piece has been to explore what the word Wesleyan means when it appears in the name (or title deed) of a Wesleyan college or university. Let me boil down the discussion to five points:

1. It means that the institution is owned by the Wesleyan church. It serves at the behest of its owner.

2. It means that the priviledged position both in behavior and knowledge is the Wesleyan position.

3. Because of the personal orientation of the Wesleyan church, all faculty at Wesleyan institutions will need to have personal relationships with God through Christ Jesus.

4. Similarly, given the ethical orientation of the Wesleyan church, all faculty will need to observe certain canons of behavior.

5. The focal task of a Wesleyan institution is, by definition, teaching. But the Wesleyan nature of that teaching implies that "as you teach," a number of other characteristics will be in play:

a. Wesleyans will teach with the goal of seeing individuals who are not in relationship brought into relationship with God. For those in relationship with God, Wesleyans will teach with the goal of discipleship and the deepening of their relationship.

b. Wesleyan will teach with a view to the whole person, body, mental health, family, economics, interpersonal relationships.

c. Wesleyans will teach with an optimism of grace, with a sense that God can and wants to change the world in every dimension of life, that He wants to lead people out of sin, disempowerment, unwellness, and injustice. For example, the position of a Wesleyan university is for the full enablement of women in all roles of leadership.

6. In the content of their teaching, Wesleys will

a. Guard the core presuppositions of the Christian faith. No faculty will be hired who is in dissent from this core (e.g., the bodily resurrection of Christ).

b. Map their teaching to the consensus of the church. A good deal of leeway should be given in how that mapping takes place, but the goal is integration under the rubric of "all truth is God's truth."

This is the area of greatest conflict and the area where the greatest nuance is required. A number of very important caveats should be in play. Scripture has the greatest weight in the dialog of truths, but it is not strictly speaking the original meaning of individual passages but Scripture as received by the church, what I have called Scripture-as-churched and the sensus receptus.

Here we mention also factors that I have called the “Protestant principle of reform” and our need to affirm a critical realism epistemology. In short, neither the consensus ecclesiae, the interpretation and integration of biblical meaning, nor the conclusions of individual disciplines are static and un-moveable matters. They all have changed from time to time in the history of the church and are likely to do so in the future. For this reason dialog on these issues is healthy and necessary.

c. Integrate the Christian love ethic into the application and practice of individual disciplines.

d. The Wesleyan position on relevant issues will remain the emphatic position of the university, although it seems desirable that some diversity beyond Wesleyanism be represented at the university, particularly outside religion departments and divisions. In other words, a healthy institution will likely allow within agreed parameters for a certain amount of faculty who are not strictly Wesleyan.

The current parameters are that 33% of religion divisions and 50% of the broader faculty must be Wesleyan in denomination. Similarly, presidents and high level administrators, as well as religion division chairpersons, must be Wesleyan in denomination. The church probably needs to “complexify” these parameters into three tiers, with a certain percentage of Wesleyans proper, and then a broader percentage that are Wesleyan in theology. Beyond these limits it seems Wesleyan to allow for a limited but generous orthodoxy to apply.

Here endeth the reading...