John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity: A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine

John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity: A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine

by Thomas C. Oden
John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity: A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine

John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity: A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine

by Thomas C. Oden

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Overview

The first presentation of John Wesley's doctrinal teachings in a systematic form that is also faithful to Wesley's own writings. Wesley was a prolific writer and commentator on Scripture, yet it is commonly held that he was not systematic or internally consistent in his theology and doctrinal teachings. On the contrary, Thomas C. Oden intends to demonstrate here that Wesley displayed a remarkable degree of consistency over sixty years of preaching and ministry. The book helps readers to grasp Wesley's essential teachings in an accessible form so that the person desiring to go directly to Wesley's own writings (which fill eighteen volumes) will know exactly where to turn. This volume focuses on the main doctrinal teachings of Wesley. Subsequent volumes in this series will deal with his pastoral and ethical teachings.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780310753216
Publisher: Zondervan Academic
Publication date: 10/25/1994
Pages: 384
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Thomas C. Oden (Ph D, Yale) is Director of the Center for Early African Christianity at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania and Henry Anson Buttz Professor of Theology and Ethics at Drew University. He is an ordained Methodist minister and the author of many books, including The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity, How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind: Rediscovering the African Seedbed of Western Christianity, Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition, and Classic Christianity. Dr. Oden is also the general editor for the widely-used Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture series.

Read an Excerpt

John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity

A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine

Chapter One

God

Wesley is seldom classified as one who reflected profoundly or passionately on the nature and existence of God. Yet in a series of homilies from his mature years, he entered into a meticulous, detailed consideration of the divine attributes, especially the eternity, omnipresence, and unity of God. Though spare, they freight ample argument sufficient to indicate the main lines of Wesley's doctrine of God.

ATTRIBUTES OF GOD

Non-Wesleyan evangelical readers will find Wesley to be particularly close to classic Protestant sources on the knowledge and attributes of God, while not ceasing to build bridges with the ancient Christian writers and pre-Constantinian eastern Christian orthodox theology.

Wesley summarized key points of his doctrine of God in his renowned "Letter to a Roman Catholic": "As I am assured that there is an infinite and independent Being and that it is impossible there should be more than one, so I believe that this one God is the Father of all things," especially of self-determining rational creatures, and that this One "is in a peculiar manner the Father of those whom he regenerates by his Spirit, whom he adopts in his Son as coheirs with him."

On Eternity

Ps. 90:2: "From everlasting to everlasting thou art God." [Homily #54 1789 B2:358-72 J#54 VI: 189-98]

As immensity is boundless space, so eternity is "boundless duration." As omnipresence refers to God's relation to space, as sovereignly present in every location, eternity refers to God's relation to time as intimately present in every moment.

Eternity Past and Future

There was no time when God was not. There will be no time when God will not be. If eternity is from everlasting to everlasting, it can be thought of as distinguishable in two directions: eternity past is that duration that reaches from everlasting, eternity before creation, time viewed as before, the eternity that precedes this now and all past nows (a parte ante). Then there is the eternity yet to come, the duration that reaches to everlasting, which will have no end, the whole of time after now, everything eternally on the future side of now (a parte post).

Time viewed synoptically is a "fragment of eternity broken off at both ends." The eternity of God embraces and surrounds time. Time is that portion of duration that begins when the world begins and ends when the world ends. We do not see all of time, but only a momentary glimpse, which we call the present.

Eternity as Decision Now

For those who stand before God as if accountable eternally, everything is changed, all relationships reshaped, reborn, reformed. Social change and ethical accountability come from the change of heart of each person one by one, in due time affecting the structures of political order and economic life. Only the renewed, whole person serious about eternity is fitted to work effectively to transform society, not the broken, guilty, anxious, bored, narcissistic, time-enslaved.

Wesley offers a practical, nonspeculative way of thinking personally about the eternity of God by placing his hearer imaginatively on the brink of a here and now decision: Think of yourself as deciding now for or against eternal life. Each hearer is invited to enter now into an unending relation with the Eternal by choosing a happy eternity, a life of eternal blessedness, or the misery of missing what is eternally good and worthy of worship. This is the choice being offered in the emerging reign of God.

This decision is being made implicitly every temporal moment. It is hidden tacitly in every discrete human experience of time. This continuing choice has profound consequences for human happiness. It is no exaggeration to view human existence as deciding every moment toward the joy of eternal life or toward the despair of eternal emptiness. Only when one thinks of oneself as standing on the edge of either a happy or pitiable eternity does present life become meaningful and serious. "The Creator bids thee now stretch out thy hand either to the one or to the other."

Just take the exercise as a pragmatic hypothesis: Suppose it might be the case that your personal life will continue beyond bodily death in eternity. What does that do to behavior, to social accountability? Wesley thought that the bare hypothesis alone had the latent power of transforming human relationships.

Time

Every moment of the whole of time has the fleeting character of beginning and ending. That is what characterizes it as time. It is not a sad thought that time, which had a finite beginning in God and which has a fleeting present, will have a consummate ending in God, who in God's own time is in process of duly completing and fittingly refinishing the good but fallen creation. Nothing that happens within the distortions of history has power to undo God's long range eternal purpose within time.

Just as we experience our living souls only as embodied within space, so we experience eternity only from within time. This is why we who are so enmeshed in temporal life, so permeated with finitude, have such great difficulty in grasping the very concept of eternity. Our human awareness, being a creature of fleet time, can form a veiled idea of eternity only by fragile analogy. As God is immense beyond any conceivable finite immensity, so eternity is infinite beyond any imaginable duration of time.

Time remains for temporal minds an ever-flowing mystery. There is no nontemporal moment or place for the finite mind to step away, as if apart from time, to think transtemporally about time. Time is an uncommon mystery difficult to get our minds around precisely because we are creatures lodged in time. We are called within this temporal sphere to understand ourselves within the frame of reference of eternity, living life in this world as if accountable to the giver of time.

God in the Now

What divides past and future is now, the infinitely fleeting moment that can never be possessed as a fixed entity. One can never capture or hold a moment except in the tenuous form of memory. This is why temporal life is rightly compared to a dream.

What we call "now" keeps on vanishing, eluding our grasp, changing its face. Yet it is the only position from which anyone can ever know or see the world, through the tiny keyhole of this constantly disappearing moment we call now. This fleeting present lies "between two eternities"! The moment I say "now" I have already lost the now in which I just said "now." We have this little splinter of ongoing time, which itself is a continuing refraction of the eternal.

God meets us in time, but as the incomparable Creator of time God is not bound by time. Only One who is simultaneously present with every moment of time can fully know the future and past reaches of eternity. That One we call God.

Knowing Time From Within Time

God is radically different from creatures in that God inhabits all eternity, whereas creatures inhabit only fleeting successive temporal moments. Since God has a present relation to all past and future moments, God can know the temporal flow beyond our knowing. God's complete memory and foreknowledge of time do not coercively predetermine events to come or arbitrarily undo events that have occurred. God's relation to the future and past is entirely different from ours.

Time-drenched minds have some vulnerable access through memory to their personal past and to their future through imagination. Meanwhile, the eternal God is always already present to the past, embracing its entirety. Harder to conceive is the premise that God is present to all future moments, a premise essential to the Christian teaching of the eternal God-that God already knows the future because eternally present to all moments. "Strictly speaking, there is no 'fore' knowledge no more than 'after' knowledge with God: but all things are known to Him as present from eternity to eternity."

This does not mean that God determines the future so as to ignore or arbitrarily overrule human freedom. Divine foreknowledge does not imply predetermination. It simply means that God knows what outcomes the freedom of creatures will bring, and how the free choices of creatures will interplay with incalculable contingencies. God has become paradoxically revealed in history as having already secured final outcomes that are still in process of unfolding in the decisions of free creatures in time.

Whether Spiritual Creatures Have a Beginning in Time

Human soul (psuche, anima) is the living aspect of human existence in time. Through conception and birth we are entrusted with soul, which is to say a life, an enlivening of flesh. The soul is generated in sexual procreation as a gift of God. Once given, psuche continues to exist beyond death as a relation with the eternal Life-giver. Jewish and Christian Scriptures promise that the soul will be reunited with the body in the resurrection on the last day. The soul (psuche, anima) is created, hence not eternal in time past, but having been created, does not finally come to nothing in death.

If you think of a corpse, you have a body without life, without soul. Death is defined as the separation of life (that which God breathes into the body) from the body. When the motion of the body ceases, its cardiovascular movement ceases, the life or soul leaves the body, but thereby does not simply end, but awaits a final reckoning. That end-time event is called the resurrection. What happens at the end of history is the mystery of bodily resurrection, in a glorified body that transcends simple physicality, yet a resurrection of the same body. Death does not end the life of the soul or even finally of the body, since in the resurrection body and soul are reunited.

Whether Material Creation Is Eternal

Matter is not eternal, since matter is created. Yet matter once created will not be annihilated but finally transformed so as to mirror once again the beauty and goodness of the original creation. Once God makes matter, God permits it continually to change, but not to be exterminated. The Almighty has sufficient power, of course, to annihilate atoms, but no reason to do so.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity by Thomas C. Oden Copyright © 1994 by Zondervan. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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