Wesleyan Church Today 2

2. Wesleyans are people of the Bible.

Wesleyans are people of the book. The Bible is our playground, the air we breathe. As good Wesley-ans, we wisely recognize that there are always other factors in play, factors like Christian tradition and the experience of the Holy Spirit. But we usually factor these things into our discussion as we look at biblical texts. And when we reach the end of the discussion, we usually express our conclusions in biblical terms.

From where we stand today looking back, we recognize that our fathers and mothers read the Bible much the way the New Testament authors and church fathers did. They joined their "Spiritual common sense" to an intimate knowledge of the biblical text. As they did this, they typically read the Bible as God's Word to them, often without paying too much attention to the meaning God intended for its original audiences.

It is good for us now to pursue a deep understanding as a denomination and as educational institutions of the original meaning as well. But we are also in a good position now to recognize that the "Spiritual, church" approach of our forebears is what the Bible itself models, as indeed have the "community of saints" throughout the ages. When the Spirit speaks to the church through the words in this way, woe to the one who questions the message!

Yet in addition, many of our biblical scholars have also been classic evangelicals. Dr. Stephen Paine, president of Houghton, single-handedly convinced the Wesleyan Methodist Church in the 1950s to add the word inerrancy to its Discipline. And while the broader church may not have known much about the issues he was wrestling with, the Pilgrim Holiness Church agreed to include it in the Wesleyan Discipline in the 1968 merger as an affirmation of faith in the trustworthiness of the Bible.

But the Wesleyan Church has never defined exactly what the term inerrancy means, unlike the Southern Baptists. It is for us a strong affirmation of the truthfulness of the Bible in all its parts, that the Bible both in individual passages and as a whole is truthful in what it affirms. But inerrancy has never been a modernist straightjacket for us as it has been for some other churches of a more fundamentalist flavor. In contrast to them, our leaders and general conferences have consistently defined us as having more in common with evangelicals than with fundamentalists (although I would argue that our "spiritual" approach has more untapped potential than both!). This is a great advantage for us as a church, because it means our identity is not locked up with a passing phase of mid-twentieth century culture.

As we will see subsequently, individuals and denominations must prioritize the content of the Bible as they move from its diverse texts toward constructing a sense of "the Bible" as a unified voice and theology. This process involves selecting certain control texts and concepts through which the other texts are filtered. For example, most Christians filter the teaching of the OT law through the teachings of Paul.

Accordingly, our denominational identity is more revealed by the specific passages and interpretations that God has led us to focus on throughout our history, even more than our official statement of faith in the Bible. Here are a few identity texts for Wesleyans:

1 Thessalonians 5:22-23 (KJV): “Abstain from all appearance of evil. And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

These two verses are perhaps the best single embodiment of Wesleyan identity for its first hundred years. The first embodies well the sense that God must be Lord of every nook and cranny of our lives, that we are to “do all to the glory of God” (cf. 1 Cor. 10:31; Col. 3:17). The second is a classic text on entire sanctification. Along with other passages like Romans 12:1-2, it embodies our belief in “complete cleansing” from sin and “radical blamelessness.”

Acts 4:31: “And when they had prayed, the place where they were gathered was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and they spoke the word of God with boldness.”

We used to formulate our belief in radical victory over sin by way of the Spirit-fillings of Acts. I think these passages, especially this particular verse in Acts 4, can continue as strong launching pads for our particular understanding of Pentecostal power and our need for not just a little of the Spirit, but the “fullness” of the Spirit.

1 Corinthians 10:13: “No temptation has taken you that is not common to humanity. But God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted above what you are able, but will make along with the temptation also the way out so you are able to endure it.”

This verse is a good representation of our belief that willful sin is not an essential part of a Christian’s life. And I learned it as a child in Sunday School. I guarantee you that Baptist children don’t learn it as one of their memory verses. Our focus on verses like this one reveals one of the most distinctive elements in our identity.

Acts 2:17: “‘And it will happen in the last days,’ God says, ‘I will pour out from my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy and your young men will see dreams...”

We as a denomination are historically and prophetically committed to the full salvation of women, including from the sins of Eve. Women have the Spirit just as much as men, so a woman can lead spiritually in any role to which God calls her—from lay leader to General Superintendent.

Matthew 28:19-20: “As you go, make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to keep all the things I have commanded you.”

I would say that for the last thirty years, this verse has been our primary theme. In this period, we balanced out the personal piety of our earlier history with the importance of the church’s mission to evangelize our communities and to plan for growth. We had always been involved in missions, but we now focused on growing the local church.

What’s next? I hear the Spirit “bubbling up” verses like the following:

Luke 4:18 (Isaiah 61): “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, who—because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor—has sent me to preach release to the enslaved and restored sight to the blind, to send the broken on with forgiveness, to proclaim the appointed year of the Lord!”

Wesleyan institutions of higher learning will thus map the teaching of various disciplines to relevant biblical material. As we will discuss subsequently, I mean in particular the Christian, "canonical" understanding of the biblical material, which is a higher authority for the Christian than any individual discipline.

But in general the mapping of discipline to Bible should be conducted in the manner of a dialog rather than a strictly one way conversation in either direction. We can easily demonstrate that both the biblical interpretations of biblical scholars and the scientific theories of scientists can change over time. It is for this reason that I emphasize the Christian, theological meaning of the Bible as what is most important in the dialog, rather than the individual original meanings of various texts (see below).

The Bible must always be in the cognitive conversation when its content is pertinent. A Wesleyan model of integration is not a "two kingdoms" model where theology does its thing and history or economics or science does its thing. When the content of each overlaps, both must be in the discussion. And the received meaning of Scripture by the church holds the highest authority in the dialog.