1. Preface to Wesleyan Ideological History

1. While it is obvious to those who are actual experts in the areas on which I write, I consider it an advantage to the rest of the church that I often write on topics I only know enough about to be dangerous. This has served my undergraduate students greatly over the years, for I have well gotten them in the door of knowledge by being intelligible. Then they remember much better the corrections of the real experts when they go on to more detailed study.

And so, like the fool I am, for some time, I have wanted to write an ideological history of The Wesleyan Church. After my first wee faith crisis in seminary, I determined that God was a God of truth. This may seem obvious, but what it meant to me was that if the truth seemed to come into conflict with the traditions I grew up with, then choosing truth was making a choice for what God thinks -- even if it went against my traditional understandings. My crisis ensued when I came to grips with the fact that Hosea 11:1 was not originally a prophecy about the Messiah going down to Egypt. Could Matthew have been wrong, because it was obvious Hosea 11:1 wasn't even a prophecy about the future, let alone about Jesus in its original context?

I've since concluded that Matthew was not wrong but, rather, that the lovely chart in the back of my Thompson Chain Reference KJV was misleading. Matthew was reading the Old Testament in a spiritual sense, not a literal one. It was perfectly acceptable for a Jewish interpreter of his day and, indeed, was not unlike some of the spiritual interpretations I grew up with in the holiness tradition.

I concluded that God was not a trickster. God was not a Loki. God was not putting me to the test as if to say, "I've made it look like Matthew is wrong here to test your willingness to ignore all reason and blindly believe things that appear to be stupid." Nope. That would be the Devil's approach to things. "All truth is God's truth," the saying goes.

I do believe there's a time to say, "The evidence and reason seem to point in this direction but by faith I'm going to go in another direction." That's honest. More often, I have found Christian thinkers go through the motion of reason and weighing evidence when it is clear that they are making the evidence fit what they want it to fit. I'd rather them just be honest and say, "Because of my presuppositions, I'm going to go in this direction despite the evidence and reason."

2. All of that is to say that I think I might be a little more "honest" about Wesleyan history than some others. It is a human tendency to idolize our heroes. I remember in college feeling a little naughty to suggest that Wesley might not have been someone to get marital advice from. Can a Wesleyan critique Wesley?

But then again, the holiness tradition I grew up in didn't really pay much attention to Wesley. We believed our preaching came straight from the Bible. At least in my experience, we had almost no idea of the historical influences leading us to interpret the Bible the way we did. I never heard about Phoebe Palmer, yet hers was the principal voice in any sermon on entire sanctification growing up. I had never heard of John Nelson Darby, and yet his voice was the source of all the teaching I heard on the Tribulation and Antichrist.

We were what I sometimes call "unreflective" interpreters of the Bible. We stood 100% on the Bible... and had no idea that we overwhelmingly interpreted the Bible through glasses we had inherited from our tradition and environment.

Wesley lived in the early days of what I might call historical consciousness. It would be hard for me to find much contextual interpretation before the 1600s and 1700s that wasn't two-dimensional, and it really wasn't until the late 1800s that historical consciousness came into its own, in my estimation. By two-dimensional, I mean that interpretation was largely literary without a strong sense of how culture and history impact the meaning of words.

Melanchthon, the systematizer of Luther, famously said that theology was simply the application of grammar to the words of Scripture. I was impressed when I first encountered this quote in college. It is also significantly mistaken. Melanchthon didn't understand that the meaning of words is a function of how they are being used at the time they are used. Accordingly, you can't fully understand a word of the Bible for what it really meant without knowing something about the world that used those words at the time.

Melanchthon was thus a "pre-reflective" interpreter, as to a great extent were Luther and Calvin. They were brilliant at the world "within" the text. But they were significantly blind to how the world "behind" the text affected its meaning. Luther's idea that "Scripture interprets Scripture" is a tell because it reveals that Luther didn't fully understand that the context of each book of the Bible is different and thus that the words of one book may not mean the same thing as the words of another. They saw the meaning of the Bible as static without much awareness of the movement of revelation.

Wesley was also pre-reflective. Yes, he knew Bengel, and Bengel was one of the first to begin to read the Bible in three dimensions. But many of Wesley's interpretations seemed obviously out of context to me even when I had just learned inductive Bible study at Asbury (e.g., his interpretation of Matthew 5:48, which was based on how he understood perfection rather than how the context seems to understand it).

3. My dear friend Keith Drury and I had some interesting exchanges about how some idealize Wesley. I think some Methodists especially do this. Growing up in the American holiness movement, we did not feel as tied to him. I once told Keith that Wesley was like our grandfather. Most of us do not treat our grandfather -- or even our father's thought as inerrant. Drury remarked, "He's more like our great-grandfather."

Of course, The Wesleyan Church's beliefs are dictated by the current Discipline, not the sermons or practices of Wesley, not the beliefs of the Wesleyan Methodist or Pilgrim Holiness Church, not even the 1968 Discipline. At the same time, at least on a popular level, we have drunk deeply from the "baptistification of America," as Martin Marty put it. There are probably ways in which our detachment from Wesley has made us more susceptible to the ebbs and flow of American religious culture.

With all this in mind, I start this journey through the story of Wesleyan ideology. It would be helpful if we knew the winds that have blown us to where we are. Then we will less likely mistake them for the Bible or the Spirit. On the other hand, some of those winds may actually have come from the Spirit. It will be easier for us to decide if we are aware of them.

Thus starts the journey...