John Wesley

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas S. Koskela
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Community Of Faith ◽  
Important Evidence ◽  
Genuine Knowledge

This chapter explores the epistemological vision of the eighteenth-century Anglican evangelist John Wesley, particularly as it relates to knowledge of God. The primary thesis of the chapter is that Wesley’s epistemology of theology centred on the interplay between testimony and perception of the divine. He understood scripture to provide the primary content of what is known about God and salvation. In this respect, scripture functioned for Wesley as divine testimony to divine salvific work, though this testimony was mediated in various modes through the community of faith. Wesley also considered immediate perception of the divine to provide the strongest and most important evidence that those claims are true. He thus understood the agency of God to be essential to the formation of genuine knowledge of God, a factor which makes divine revelation an inescapable category when coming to terms with Wesley’s epistemology.

The Nonconformist Inheritance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Rivers
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Bunyan ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Religious Attitudes ◽  
Pilgrim's Progress ◽  
The Many ◽  
John Owen

This chapter analyses the editions, abridgements, and recommendations of texts by seventeenth-century nonconformists that were made by eighteenth-century dissenters, Methodists, and Church of England evangelicals. The nonconformist writers they chose include Joseph Alleine, Richard Baxter, John Flavel, John Owen, and John Bunyan. The editors and recommenders include Philip Doddridge, John Wesley, Edward Williams, Benjamin Fawcett, George Burder, John Newton, William Mason, and Thomas Scott. Detailed accounts are provided of the large number of Baxter’s works that were edited, notably A Call to the Unconverted and The Saints Everlasting Rest, and a case study is devoted to the many annotated editions of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the ways in which they were used. The editors took into account length, intelligibility, religious attitudes, and cost, and sometimes criticized their rivals’ versions on theological grounds.

Traditionalism and Revelation

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Francesca Aran Murphy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Original Source ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
Biblical Anthropology

Traditionalism is the doctrine that God revealed himself to our first parents, and this revelation is the source of our knowledge of God: ‘the knowledge’, as London cabbies still call it, was passed on from its original recipients down the generations. Our knowledge of God is thus mediated through tradition; its only direct source is a divine revelation made to our original forebears. Traditionalism thus tends to accentuate that we cannot know God through our own efforts, for instance by philosophical proofs. Transmission from a single original source explains the analogies between religions and mythologies, while the ‘telephone game’, or ‘Chinese whispers’, over the millennia explains the diversities. Invented in the nineteenth century, traditionalism was at once a contribution to theory of religions, a piece of biblical anthropology, and a theory of revelation and its development. Traditionalists have held that without an original, igniting act of divine revelation to our first ancestors, it would be impossible for the human race to become a knowing, speaking creature, to create institutions, and act morally, or to obtain knowledge of God.

John Wesley

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Church ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Christian History

This chapter examines the teachings of John Wesley, one of the most influential men of the eighteenth century. Wesley’s theology of salvation, though not unique in Christian history, is an important and unmistakably Protestant view, rooted in the theology of the early church, though with an emphasis on God’s universal salvific will together with unlimited atonement.

Inward Baptism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baird Tipson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Jonathan Edwards ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Evangelical Christian ◽  
New Birth ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
George Whitefield

Inward Baptism describes theological developments leading up to the great evangelical revivals in the mid-eighteenth century. It argues that Martin Luther’s insistence that a participant’s faith was essential to a sacrament’s efficacy would inevitably lead to the insistence on an immediate, perceptible communication from the Holy Spirit, which evangelicals continue to call the “new birth.” A description of “conversion” through the sacrament of penance in late-medieval Western Christianity leads to an exploration of Luther’s critique of that system, to the willingness of Reformed theologians to follow Luther’s logic, to an emphasis on “inward” rather than “outward” baptism, to William Perkins’s development of a conscience religion, to late-seventeenth-century efforts to understand religion chiefly as morality, and finally to the theological rationale for the new birth from George Whitefield, John Wesley, and Jonathan Edwards. If the average Christian around the year 1500 encountered God primarily through sacraments presided over by priests, an evangelical Christian around 1750 received God directly into his or her heart without the need for clerical mediation, and he or she would be conscious of God’s presence there.

Revealing sparks: John Wesley and the religious utility of electrical healing

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 341-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
PAOLA BERTUCCI
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Applications ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
Therapeutic Uses ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Fear Of God

In the eighteenth century, dramatic electrical performances were favourite entertainments for the upper classes, yet the therapeutic uses of electricity also reached the lower strata of society. This change in the social composition of electrical audiences attracted the attention of John Wesley, who became interested in the subject in the late 1740s. The paper analyses Wesley's involvement in the medical applications of electricity by taking into account his theological views and his proselytizing strategies. It sets his advocacy of medical electricity in the context of his philanthropic endeavours aimed at the sick poor, connecting them to his attempts to spread Methodism especially among the lower classes. It is argued that the healing virtues of electricity entailed a revision of the morality of electrical experiment which made electric sparks powerful resources for the popularization of the Methodist way of life, based on discipline, obedience to established authorities and love and fear of God.

Orthodoxy, rationalism and the world in eighteenth-century Holland

1973 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 173-192
Author(s):  
J. Van Den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Other ◽  
Knowledge Of God ◽  
The Road ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Revival Movements

As far as the protestant countries are concerned the eighteenth century, the ‘age of reason’, might as well be called ‘the age of revival’. On the one hand, we meet with a strong desire to escape the snares of this world by concentrating upon the mysteries of salvation: the road to sanctity is a narrow road, to be trodden in fear and trembling. On the other hand there are those for whom this world is a world full of new and unexpected possibilities, a world to be explored and to be made instrumental to the fulfilment of the divine plan with regard to the development of humanity in its secular context. Naturally, also in the eighteenth century ‘sanctity’ and ‘secularity’ were not seen as in themselves mutually exclusive concepts. While many revivalists looked forward to the enlightenment of this world by the knowledge of God, many men of the enlightenment saw before them the prospect of the sanctification of the world by the combined influences of reason and revelation. Some of the fathers of the enlightenment - notably Locke and Leibniz - were essentially committed to the cause of Christianity, while on the other hand protagonists of the pietist and revival movements such as Francke and Edwards cannot in fairness be accused of an anti-rational attitude and of a lack of interest in the well-being of this world. Nevertheless, within the circle of eighteenth-century protestant Christianity there were conspicuous differences with regard to the evaluation of and the attitude towards the world in which the Christian community, while living in the expectation of the kingdom, still had to find its way and its place.

A “Religious Society under Heaven”: John Wesley and the Identity of Methodism

1986 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Dreyer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Dual Role ◽  
John Wesley ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Town

Methodism figures as a kind of puzzle in the history of eighteenth-century England. Even writers who are not unsympathetic to John Wesley sometimes find his thought incoherent and confused. “The truth should be faced,” writes Frank Baker, “that Wesley (like most of us) was a bundle of contradictions.” Albert Outler celebrates Wesley's merits not as a thinker but as a popularizer of other men's doctrines. His Wesley was “by talent and intent, afolk-theologian: an eclectic who had mastered the secret of plastic synthesis, simple profundity, the common touch.” One man's eclecticism, however, is another man's humbug. The very qualities that Outler admires are those that E. P. Thompson condemns inThe Making of the English Working Class. Here Methodist theology is dismissed as “opportunist, anti-intellectual, and otiose.” Wesley “appears to have dispensed with the best and selected unhesitatingly the worst elements of Puritanism.” In doctrinal terms Methodism was not a plastic synthesis but “a mule.” What offends Thompson is not so much Wesley's incoherence as the social ambivalence of the movement that he had created. In class terms Methodism was, Thompson says, “hermaphroditic.” It attracted both masters and men. It catered to hostile social interests. It served a “dual role, as the religion of both the exploiters and the exploited.” The belief that Methodism is socially incomprehensible and perhaps in some sense socially illegitimate is not original with Thompson. Early statements of this assumption can be found in Richard Niebuhr'sThe Social Sources of Denominationalismand in John and Barbara Hammond's The Town Labourer.

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