You Don't Understand Wesleyan Theology.

You don’t understand John Wesley—at least, not if you have separated him from the Bible, the Church Fathers, and the Anglican tradition that formed him. Modern Wesleyan theology often takes Wesley’s language—grace, love, experience, catholic spirit, Christian perfection, and entire sanctification—and detaches it from its original theological world. The result is a modern ideology dressed in an eighteenth-century wig. But Wesley was not trying to reinvent Christianity for the modern world. He was trying to recover what he called “primitive Christianity”: the biblical faith and life of the ancient Church. That means we cannot fully understand Wesley without reading the Christians who shaped his imagination: • Ephrem the Syrian and the theological power of hymnody • John Chrysostom and the centrality of preaching • Basil the Great and Gregory of Nyssa on holiness and care for the poor • Irenaeus and the early Church’s vision of salvation • The Anglican sacramental and liturgical tradition • Thomas Oden’s recovery of classical, patristic Wesleyan theology Thomas Oden recognized that modern assumptions had begun controlling how Wesley was interpreted. His solution was not to make Wesley more relevant to modernity, but to recover the ancient Christian consensus that made Wesley intelligible in the first place. Wesley did not want modern experience to transform Scripture and tradition. He wanted Scripture and the ancient Christian tradition to transform us. Welcome to the Wild-Eyed Wesleyan. #JohnWesley #WesleyanTheology #ChurchFathers