A Wesleyan Perspective on Coherence

So what might a Wesleyan understanding of Scriptural coherence be at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Our discussion has dabbled in at least three models of coherence, and we would suggest that all three are potentially valid from a Wesleyan perspective. The first is the pneumatic model, in which the reading of Scripture can be quite individual and particular to a specific group’s understanding. The revival preachers of the holiness movement believed that they had heard God speak through the words of the Bible, and they proclaimed these messages with the authority of God. We would now recognize in their preaching a persistent lack of attention to the original context and, thus, to any likely original meaning of the texts they preached and still preach today.

However, their use of Scripture is not completely unlike the way the New Testament authors themselves used the Old Testament. On what basis could we say definitively that the Holy Spirit no longer speaks in this way? Certainly we could not say such a thing on the basis of the Bible itself. The New Testament never abandons pneumatic exegesis, nor does it indicate that such exegesis will ever be inappropriate in the future.

A second valid way to read the books of the Bible is surely in terms of their original meanings. We do not have full access to these meanings, and we have reason to believe that such readings fall short in themselves from the fullest Christian understanding of these texts. The original meanings are diverse, for they span a thousand years and three languages. They are often situational, since the books of the Bible often addressed particular situations and would have given different admonitions if those situations had been different. They are progressive, if we are to believe that God has led His people to our current understandings as Christians. The Old Testament does not understand God yet as well as the New Testament does, and the New Testament is only the beginning of the understanding that the church would clarify in the creeds.

The coherence of these disparate original meanings is found in our overarching sense of the Christian story. The events, characters, and settings of that story are found in Scripture. The books of the Bible provide the building blocks of the story, the elements of our theological understanding. But our sense of the story itself is larger than the Bible and is ultimately a perspective we take from the outside of the Bible looking in. In that sense, the Bible alone is secondary to the unified perspective we bring to it as Christians.

In short, the most Christian perspective on Scripture and its coherence is one that reads it through the lenses of the “rule of faith” and the “law of love,” as Wesley and Augustine did. Here Green is right to point out that the text understood this way is to us from God. We are reading our mail and not just the mail of people who have been dead for two or three thousand years. Here Vanhoozer is right to see Scripture as a divine speech-act God is communicating to His people. Such meanings are almost certainly different from the original meaning at many points, and such meanings cannot do away with the reality of the original meaning as something distinct from them. But they are the most “Christian” readings that understand the Jewish Bible to be the Christian Old Testament rather than the Jewish Scriptures. And we read the New Testament as the Scripture of the church catholic and not as Gnostics or those early Christians who did not believe Jesus was God.

It remains for the Wesleyan tradition of the future to determine the ways in which its hermeneutic might be distinctive in coming days. We can say, however, that it seems more flexible than several other Protestant traditions and indeed that it might potentially thrive in our current setting. Its ability to accommodate the pneumatic, contextual, and “canonical” approaches to Scripture is a distinctive. At the same time, a further distinction will of course be that it brings with it, as part of its tradition, certain pre-dispositions toward parts of the biblical text. It will emphasize passages that other traditions do not, and it will find different passages to be “clear” than others. And as with the rest of Christendom, it will ultimately see the unity of the text in the unity of the God who gave it and the One whose story it embodies.