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"A Foundation for Theological Education" (AFTE) is a small private fund, based largely in Texas, with a predominantly United Methodist constituency and a special interest in the renewal and transvaluation of the Wesleyan tradition — not "for Methodists only" but for the Christian community at large. Its board, which includes bishops, theological professors, pastors and …
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I. Postmodernism According to David Ray Griffin With the variety of postmodernisms espoused or referred to in recent times, a short excursus into what David Griffin means by postmodernism, and how his is a constructive version, seems necessary. Postmodernism, according to Griffin, refers to a diffuse sentiment – that humanity can and must go beyond …
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“How well do philosophy and religion agree in a man [sic] of sound understanding!” – John Wesley (Journal, Tuesday, July 3, 1753) The bulk of this paper entails my descriptions of four elements in a typology. I describe types of Wesleyan philosophy in terms of interests that those in the Wesleyan Philosophical Society might pursue. …
Continue reading “Types of Wesleyan Philosophy: The General Landscape and My Own Research”
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What can Wesley do for us today? That has been the issue of all of these lectures. It has been my proposal that he can support Wesleyan evangelicals and free them from their tendency to knee-jerk conservatism, moralism, and negativism. He can support Wesleyan liberals and free them from their tendency to humanism, to relativism, …
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I am a Wesleyan. In one sense I have always known that. Although in my childhood I attended chiefly ecumenical Protestant churches in Japan, I knew that I was a Methodist. I was baptized by a Japanese Methodist bishop, and I joined a Southern Methodist church in Georgia at the age of seven. By then …
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My dictionary gives as its first meaning of “liberal” a political definition. To be liberal is to support “political views or policies that favor non revolutionary progress and reform.” In Wesley’s day that definition fit the Whigs rather than the Tories. But Wesley was a Tory. The progress and reform advocated by the Whigs was …
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Calling Wesley an evangelical and a liberal is not particularly anachronistic. These terms have well-established meaning in relation to eighteenth-century figures, and both clearly apply to him. I have of course gone on to speculate about how Wesley would have responded to issues he did not face, and there I may be accused of anachronism. …
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You may understandably think that this title is the most anachronistic of all. If a process theologian is one who has been influenced by philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, then obviously you are right. Historical influence does not work backwards in time. But my argument is that in a general sense …
