John Wesley's Doctrine of Salvation (and Perfection)

I.   Introduction
“At the same time, justified and sinner.”  This is Luther’s appraisal of the Christian condition. Wesley, who owed much to Luther for his doctrine of justification by faith, stressed that the Christian must be not only justified, but sanctified. In the following post I show how Wesley defines salvation as the entire process which begins at conversion and is completed after death.  I will address each of Wesley’s phases of salvation in the Christian life, taking particular note of his much mis-understood doctrine of Christian perfection.

II.  Salvation Defined
For Wesley salvation does not consist of merely “going to heaven” because it is not an after-death experience but “a present thing”(The Scripture Way of Salvation, 44).  While Wesley calls salvation a “present thing,” he does not mean that “all this salvation is given at once”(A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, 380).  Rather, he means it is presently occurring, for salvation is

Schleiermacher: On Religion

I.  Introduction
In a time when religion had nearly been discarded by German intellectuals following Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher presented it in a new light which reinvigorated interest and made him the founding father of liberal Protestantism.  How he accomplished this was in large part a matter of his skill for neologizing.  In this post, I  consider how Schleiermacher defines religion, which he also calls piety, as well as what relationship there is, in his view, between Christianity and religion.

II.  Schleiermacher’s Religion
We will begin our inquiry into Schleiermacher’s religion by first understanding what he wanted to clarify was not the essence of religion.  Schleiermacher challenges the widespread belief that religion was a combination of doctrines and actions, or knowing and doing.