For a movement still in its infancy when compared against other traditions and movements within the Christian oikoumene the Wesleyan church tradition has already reached a high level of diversity both in theology and practice. John Wesley was not a systematic theologian. His theology, like the apostle Paul, came out of the practical needs of the people he ministered to.1 Wesley was more focus on what he need to teach his parishioners and how best to teach them along with what the entire revival should be doing to best serve God and neighbor.2 Somewhere between Wesley’s revival and the modern church, the Wesleyan tradition lost its focus and started down unknown paths. Engaging with the Wesleyan theological tradition the core of Wesleyan theological thought can be sufficiently reduced to a study on the nature and work of the Triune God and that God’s universal plan to bring all creation into relationships of love with himself.
Read more...The selected readings from chapter two of Walter Klaiber and Manfred Marquardt’s Living Grace: An Outline of United Methodist Theology focus on two traditional flashpoints in Western Christianity’s tension between the ever-growing body of secular truths and theories about the natural world and the all-powerful, loving creator God of the Old and New Testaments. In the first selection - pages 93 to 102 - the authors focus on the tension between the Judeo-Christian belief in ex nihilo1 creation and natural science’s discovered truths and generally accepted theories over the last several centuries. In the second selection - pages 115 to 126 - the authors focus their attention on the Wesleyan theology of theodicy; how we explain and embrace the seemingly contradictory nature of a loving God who allows suffering. In both selections the authors juxtapose the seemingly nihilistic nature of modern atheistic, secular thought against the always-creating Christian God of love. Rather than furthering the conflict, the authors in both selections bridge the gap between worldviews by presenting a theology of God that is larger than ancient Mesopotamian understandings of creation and beyond the machinations of DNA chains and the “chance” of natural selection.
Read more...Background
“O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing” was written in May 1739 by Charles Wesley in remembrance of his moment of assurance and full conversion. The year before, Charles had become very sick and was cared for by a group of Christians. Their service, prayers, and testimonies during his sickness greatly affected Charles and caused him great reflection. While on the mend after the sickness, he was reading from his Bible and had an experience that would later be mirrored by his brother John at Aldersgate. Charles would point to this even as a great renewal of his faith. Hymn 57 in the United Methodist Hymnal was written in remembrance of this great renewal originally as an 18 stanza poem, but later shorted into a hymn for the Methodist hymnal of 1780.
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