Wesley and Torrance

John Wesley (1703-1791) is one of the major figures of Christian history. Today the World Methodist Council includes denominations claiming over forty million members, while some estimates of members and adherents rise to seventy million and more. But while Wesley has been recognized as the originator of a major Christian tradition, as a great evangelist, and as a key figure in the eighteenth-century revival of evangelical Christianity, it is only comparatively recently that he has been regarded as a significant theologian. George Croft Cell was one of the first to do so, but it was really only with Colin Williams’ work that an attempt was made to lay out his thinking as a kind of systematic theology. It was the Methodist patristics scholar, Albert Outler, who had the leading role in the rise of Wesley Studies, proposing that Wesley should be regarded as a “folk theologian.” That description was perhaps appropriate in a day when Tillich was dominant in America, and theology was almost regarded as a subdivision of philosophy. Today, when theology is primarily related to the Church rather than the academy, it is more appropriate to describe Wesley as a pastoral or practical theologian, though not a dogmatician. He was, however, a systematic thinker, and major works by Randy Maddox, Kenneth Collins and others, have examined comprehensively his writings on every major Christian doctrine. Thomas Oden brought together a compendium of his doctrines....