What is Wesleyan Biblical Interpretation?
The following is an adaptation of a short paper I delivered as part of a panel on Wesleyan biblical interpretation during the recent meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society.
The questions before us today are, “What are the signs that a Wesleyan biblical interpretation is happening? How do we know a Wesleyan biblical interpretation when we see it?" These are questions I’ve spent considerable time thinking about over the years. Developing a specifically Wesleyan approach to biblical interpretation is like trying to make a sculpture out of a large blob of jello. There are a few reasons for this. First, to get at what John Wesley thought about Scripture, we must extrapolate from his writings. He doesn’t lay them down anywhere in systematic form. Second, as is indicated by the title of Scott Jones’s monograph on the topic, Wesley’s conception of Scripture and his use of Scripture were not always entirely consistent. Third, many people from different Wesleyan traditions have written in different ways about Scripture. This leads us to a fourth reason, the ambiguity of whether “Wesleyan biblical interpretation” refers to Wesley’s own writings, the works of later writers in the Wesleyan tradition, or some combination of these.
To try to provide a mold for this jello, I’ll focus primarily on Wesley. This seems to be the most productive course since later writers in the Wesleyan tradition have varied widely in their interpretive methods and, at times, have approached the Bible in ways that Wesley himself would not have considered valid. In what follows I’ll argue that we can identify Wesleyan biblical interpretation as taking place when the interpreter (a) regards the Bible as divine revelation, (b) reads in conversation with the Great Tradition, (c) engages with Wesleyan soteriology, and (d) reads in a way that lends itself to preaching.
A necessary but not sufficient sign that Wesleyan biblical interpretation is happening is that the interpreter understands the Bible as divine revelation. Wesley certainly did. Some thinkers, such as Karl Barth and Billy Abraham, have not viewed the Bible itself as divine revelation, but as bearing witness to revelation. This isn’t how Wesley viewed it at all. He thought of Scripture as the “oracles of God.” He believed some parts of Scripture to contain a “particular” revelation, one involving specific words to specific people—what we might call divine speaking. He believed that other parts of Scripture, while inspired, did not represent this kind of verbal transmission. The whole of Scripture, however, came from God. To recognize Scripture as Wesleyan, then, the first characteristic is that we must regard it as divine revelation.
Another necessary but not sufficient condition that Wesleyan biblical interpretation is taking place is that the interpreter reads in conversation with the Great Tradition of Christian faith. Wesley assumed the basic doctrinal claims of the Church of England. An interesting deviation from Wesleyan biblical interpretation would come in the next generation of Methodist leaders in the work of Adam Clarke. Clarke was a pious man who wrote a commentary on the entire Bible, not simply as a scholarly exercise but as an act of devotion to God. Yet in his commentary on Luke, he denied the doctrine of eternal Sonship, and, correlatively, the doctrine of the Trinity. Wesley would not have tolerated this among his preachers. Had he been alive to see it, I suspect he would have been livid. Wesley believed that the religion of the Church of England, taken seriously and lived out properly, was the religion of the early church. He would not have seen it as his prerogative to deny core Christian doctrine. The assumption of basic Christian doctrine was foundational to his theological vision.
While he didn’t deny any important historic doctrines or develop any novel doctrines of his own, Wesley did develop a vision of salvation, a via salutis, with particular emphases that are definitive for what we call Wesleyan theology. Like other Protestants he believed in justification by grace through faith and resurrection life in the world to come. Like some other Protestants he believed in preventing grace and the freedom of the will to move toward God in repentance. But what makes him distinctive, though not entirely unique, is his strong emphasis upon the New Birth, regeneration, and sanctification, and especially entire sanctification. The emphasis on holiness within the via salutis is of central importance for our theological tradition.
Another characteristic by which we might identify Wesleyan biblical interpretation, then, is its engagement with Wesleyan soteriology. Now here’s the interesting part: Wesley believed that this soteriology was the subject matter of the whole Bible. In “The Scripture Way of Salvation” he writes, “[T]hese two little words, I mean faith and salvation, include the substance of all the Bible, the marrow, as it were, of the whole Scripture.” Whatever else the different parts of the Bible were about, they were finally about the salvation we have in Jesus Christ, including the divine gift of holiness. Adam and Eve, the call of Abraham, the story of the Levite and his concubine in Judges 19, the Song of Songs, the psalms of praise, the imprecatory psalms, the call of Isaiah, the jeremiads of Jeremiah, the young man who runs away naked when Jesus is arrested, the story of Simon the magician, Paul’s anger at the Galatians, 3 John’s report that everyone has testified favorably about Demetrius… the whole kettle of fish is about salvation.
Many biblical scholars will find this not just a bridge too far, but several bridges too far. They might identify it as eisegesis or use stronger language like “doing violence to the text.” Particularly those whose primary commitments in biblical interpretation are to higher criticism may balk at the idea that we may interpret the whole of Scripture through this soteriological lens. Note that I use the term primary commitments, because I don’t think that higher criticism is entirely incompatible with theological interpretation of the Bible, including Wesleyan interpretation. But we have to decide where our epistemological commitments are. Can the historian allow for divine agency and divine action? Ernst Troeltsch and Van Harvey would say no. I don’t think they’re right about this, though Billy Abraham did. Regardless of whether or not they’re right, however, I’m not concerned about whether or not I can properly be called a historian. I’m far more concerned with interpreting the Bible in ways that edify the church and advance her evangelistic mission, and Wesley was, too.
We can easily go along with Wesley in affirming that all the Bible is about salvation simply by affirming that Scripture is multivalent. Did those who wrote down the stories of the call of Abraham have Jesus in mind as they wrote? I doubt it. But God did. At one level, the story of the call of Abraham is about how God called Abraham out of his homeland and sent him to the land of Canaan, and out of his offspring made a great nation. Yet the meaning of the story of Abraham is part of the much larger biblical story of salvation. The story of Abraham serves a larger purpose, a canonical purpose, as do all of the parts of Scripture. That purpose is soteriological. And without going medieval on your… interpretive lenses… I will suggest that this kind of soteriological interpretation is as valid as any other. The methodological atheism that has characterized so much guild scholarship since the late nineteenth century is a novel approach, while multivalence and explicitly theological readings have a long and important history in the church, one that can and should inform our work today.
In closing, I’ll mention one more characteristic of Wesleyan biblical interpretation: It should lend itself to good preaching. After all, preaching was the primary setting for Wesley’s use of Scripture. Preaching—the proclamation of the Gospel—was among his most significant work. For Wesley, the study of the Bible was not simply an academic pursuit. Though he himself was a skilled academician, teaching Greek and philosophy for a time at Oxford, he was first and foremost an evangelist. Likewise, while he understood that the individual study of Scripture could be a means of grace, its proclamation in corporate worship was for him every bit as important as devotional reading. If we want to interpret the Bible like Wesley did, then, we eventually have to move out of the study and into the pulpit.
To clarify the task of Wesleyan biblical interpretation is an important part of the ongoing recovery of our Wesleyan heritage. As I have argued here, it will involve an understanding of the Bible as divine revelation, reading in dialogue with the Great Tradition and the Wesleyan via salutis, and a constant eye toward the public proclamation of the Gospel. I make no claims that this is an exhaustive list, but perhaps it will help to propel the conversation forward as we think not just about our past as Wesleyans, but about how we will move forward faithfully into the future.
David F. Watson is President of Asbury Theological Seminary and a member of the Editorial Board Lead Team for Firebrand.