I've started several of my normal posts (Paul, explanatory notes...), but launching the seminary has been all consuming. See the seminary update on my seminary blog. We had our first seminary convocation yesterday (it was great!) and so I may have a little time to do some catch up this week.
It may sound strange, but I have been increasingly thankful to Asbury Seminary as we have continued designing the program. Because the Wesleyan Church has not had its own seminary, our leaders have inevitably gone to many different places for further training. John Wesley was only a hair's breadth from Calvin, and so there is a legitimate cohesion that can take place between elements of Calvinism and Wesleyanism, and there has been a good deal of grass roots cohesion between fundamentalism and Wesleyanism. I call this element in the Wesleyan Church "Calvino-Wesleyan" or "Calvinized Wesleyans."
I didn't get that at Asbury, and I doubt those who went to Nazarene Theological Seminary did either. We didn't read D. A. Carson or Grant Osborne there (of course Osborne hadn't written his book yet) but did pure inductive Bible. I had no sense at Asbury that I had any reason to want to join the Calvinist dominated Evangelical Theological Society.
I'm hoping we can keep to an Asbury-NTS trajectory at IWU's seminary... we'll see.
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Hi Ken. Sorry to use the comments section, but I sent you an e-mail a while back and didn't get a reply. Did it get through? Either way, do send me an e-mail and hopefully if I reply to it, my message won't get caught in your spam filter.
This comment, alas, will not self destruct. So please delete it! :)
yes, yes.
Ken, I'm a little confused at this post. So are you saying that you don't want the legitimate cohesion that takes place between Wesleyanism and Calvinism to happen at the new seminary?
Is the hair's breadth that Wesley claimed a bad thing? When I first read this I thought you were saying the second paragraph was a good thing and the third was a negative one. Then after reading it again I guess you're saying just the opposite.
Just looking for a little clarification for my dense brain.
BTW - I hope I can look John Wesley in the glorified eye someday and say, "A hair's breadth, John? Really? You're sticking with that? Really?"
Worthy of its own post. Let me try to frame what I mean with more specifics. In my mind it is basically being open to more rather than excluding everything that seems to typify conservative Calvinism today.
I'm all for that, Ken. Thanks.
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