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

Mission-Shaped Church 1: Summary

Mission-Shaped Church: Church Planting and Fresh Expressions in a Changing Context is a rare example of a denominational report written by a committee that actually has gained a wider audience and affected considerable change.  First published in 2004, this report was written to address the challenges facing the Church of England in a changing context.  This post reconstructs the report’s the major argument in the terms of a practical theological project, and a follow up engages critically with a central theme with significant implications: what the report dubs “the incarnational principle.”

Neil Cole's Organic Church: Summary & Review

Neil Cole believes “that church should happen wherever life happens” (24).  As founder of the Awakening Chapels network and Church Multiplication Associates which claims 700 churches in 32 states and 23 nations, Cole is a leader in what is most-often referred to as the house church movement.  He dislikes the “house church” designation—citing the fact that many of the churches in his movement meet in parking lots and bars not houses and the connotations “house church” carries of disillusioned and disgruntled defectors from the mainstream church—preferring instead to call them “organic churches” (22).  This brief essay will explore some of the key theoretical and methodological proposals found in Cole’s most widely read book, Organic Church: Growing Faith Where Life Happens (2005) and offer a critical insights.

As the title suggests, Organic Church is as much about ecclesiology as church planting methodology.  Cole finds the list of characteristics

Ed Stetzer's Planting Missional Churches: Summary & Review

As an updated and renamed version of Stetzer’s 2003 text, Planting New Churches in a Postmodern Age, Planting Missional Churches seeks to ride the wave of enthusiasm among evangelicals for all things “missional” and seemingly targets an audience of young conservative (male) would-be church planters.  As a result, the writing style is down-to-earth, pastoral and practical rather than deeply theological or academicly sophisticated.  With twenty nine chapters, there are few, if any, aspects of starting a new church that Stetzer doesn’t treat.  Given that each chapter can not be addressed, this summary will focus on the five “major messages” of the book which Stetzer identifies in chapter one.  He links each with a key word: missional, incarnational, theological, ecclesiological, and spiritual (2-3).

Missional
According to Stetzer, being missional means assuming the posture of a missionary—one sent—as Jesus was—to “seek and save the lost.”  Stetzer’s opening chapter seeks to establish church planting as the most appropriate missional response to what he portrays starkly as a North American church in decline and growing ranks of non-Christian Americans.  Being missional, for Stetzer, means taking action to reverse these trends, and he presents planting new churches as the proper remedy, touting it as both the “most effective method of evangelism” and the biblical response to the church’s “decline” (14).  Chapter two is devoted to “redeveloping a missional mind-set” and invokes classic quotes from Newbigin, Bosch and Kahler to present the church as the sent agent of a sending God, and as the instrument of the missio Dei, a popular term which Stetzer invokes but leaves disappointingly unspecified.    

Newbigin's Gospel in a Pluralist Society: Summary

A while back I was invited to speak to a group called Theology on Tap about "The Gospel in a Post-Christian World.  The topic, it seemed to me, begged two questions.  The first is “What is the gospel?” and the second is “Where are we? What is this post-Christian world in which we live?”  Of course, putting those two questions next to each other raises a third:  Does when and where you are affect what the gospel is?  Does context matter for an understanding of the gospel?  Is the gospel different now than it used to be?  If so, how?  Or is the gospel something fixed, maybe a permanent set of doctrinal propositions or a universal set of ethical norms?

I’m going to approach each of these important questions through the work of Lesslie Newbigin who spent decades thinking and writing about each of them.  For some background on Lesslie Newbigin--missionary, bishop, and ecumenist--check out this biography and legacy post. 

Several scholars, including his authoritative biographer, have suggested that Newbigin’s most important legacy was in his call for a true “missionary encounter with Western culture,” which brings us back to the three questions I began with.  What is the gospel?  Where are we? And does context matter for our understanding of the gospel?  Most of what I will share can be found in a book Newbigin published in 1989 titled, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society.

Where are we?
We are going to begin where Newbigin does, with that second question: Where are we?  And by “we,” I mean those who live in the West--Europe, the U.S. Canada, Australia.  What kind of cultural context are we present-day Westerners in?

Hendrik Kraemer's "The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World" (1938): Summary

Hendrik Kraemer (1888-1965) was a lay Dutch missiologist and prominent figure in the ecumenical movement from Dutch Reformed Church in the Netherlands.  Kraemer worked for the Dutch Bible Society in Indonesia (1922-1937), was professor of the history and phenomenology of religion at Leiden University (1937-1947) and served as the first director of the Ecumenical Institute in Bossey (1948-1955).  Kraemer was an excellent linguist with a deep understanding of Islam, of the importance of independent churches, the role of the laity, and the encounter between God and man in the midst of social and religious crises. 

The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World (1938)
This 477 page tome was commissioned for the World Missionary Conference held in Tamram, India in 1938, and it had a wide impact on overseas mission.  Its task was to “state the fundamental position of the Christian Church as a witness-bearing body in the modern world, relating this to different conflicting views of the attitude to be taken by Christians towards other faiths, and dealing in detail with the evangelistic approach to the great non-Christian faiths” (v).

Whose Mission? What Church? Hoekendijk, Blauw, and the WCC on the Missionary Church

This post explores the way the church and mission are related and developed in three documents written between 1951 and 1967: “The Church in Missionary Thinking” by J. C. Hoekendijk (1952), The Missionary Nature of the Church by Johannes Blauw (1962), and The Church for Others, published by the World Council of Churches (1967).  In conclusion, I offer reflections on the resonant and discordant perspectives therein.

In “The Church in Missionary Thinking,” J.C. Hoekendijk lamented how ecclesiology had, in recent decades, swallowed up mission.  It had done this, he points out, by using such concise verbiage as that offered by Dr. Durr: “Mission is the road from the Church to the Church” (324).  Indeed, the church had, in his view, both eliminated the world by making it a “a sort of ecclesiastical training-ground” and dealt with the kingdom by either subsuming it within its ecclesiastical bounds or relegating it to far off in the eschatological distance (324).  Hoekendijk labeled this way of thinking church-ism, and asserted that younger churches had assimilated it to the point of expecting an independent church to be a “Church-free-from-the-Mission” (327). 

Formation of the Moral Self by J. van der Ven: Summary

Johannes A. van der Ven’s Formation of the Moral Self arises as a response to the widespread concerns about deterioration of the moral fabric of Western society.  The questions which reveal this instability include: What is good? What is right? What is wise? What is purposive?  Van der Ven’s intention is not to offer definitive resolution to these questions, or to quell the tumult of concern, but to direct this energy into a discussion of the various modes of moral education, their merits and shortcomings, and lift up his preferred approach.

Drawing from Habermas, van der Ven establishes the categories of morality he uses throughout.  Purposive morality is strictly a matter of whether the means employed effect the ends intended.  If so the end justifies the means.  The good is something determined by the individual who makes a judgment about what values and virtues are believed to be appropriate for themselves.  Determining what is right requires consideration of the “life, interests, welfare, or good life of others” (5).  In order to resolve the inevitable conflicts between what is good (for the individual) and what is right (for others) van der Ven looks to

Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours? by Roland Allen: Summary

In my assessment, no other early 20th century missiologist is more in vogue than Roland Allen.  His books are being widely recommended and read in missional church and church planting circles, so if you care about these things, you should get acquainted.  This post offers a brief profile of Allen himself, as well as summary of one of his most celebrated books.

Allen (1868-1947) was an Anglican minister who served as a missionary in China with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel from 1895 to 1903 and later worked in East Africa.  He was born in England as the son of an Anglican minster, but orphaned early in life.  In 1895 he was sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel

American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving by Christian Smith: Book Review

As the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame, Christian Smith is a notable figure in contemporary Sociology of Religion.  His recent work has explored American Evangelicalism as well as the religious lives of teenagers and emerging adults.  According to his faculty page, his “larger theoretical agenda has been to move culture, morality, and identity to the center of sociological theorizing.”  Released in 1998, American Evangelicalism preceded the increased national and media attention on Evangelicals after they

Book Review: Christian Smith's Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture

Christian Smith is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.  He is the author of numerous books including Christian America: What Evangelicals Really Want, Evangelicals: Embattled and Thriving and very recently, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers and What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up which shares and develops themes from Moral, Believing Animals which was released in 2003.

The seven chapters of Moral, Believing Animals begin by identifying Smith’s agenda as resolving the age-old question of how to describe what it means to be a human.  Smith’s thesis is that

Christianity Rediscovered by Vincent Donovan: Summary & Review

To put words in the mouth of Vincent J. Donovan:  After a futile century of missionary strategies in Africa that centered on purchasing slaves or educating Africans, I felt compelled to pursue a different, more direct approach: to simply go to the Maasai people and talk to them about Christ (13).  I was driven by one conviction:  Christianity is of value to the world and all people have a right to hear it (1, 133).   The Maasai are an elegant, polygamous, cow-herding, monotheistic people nonetheless beset by fears about evil spirits.  When I arrived, I was met repeatedly with the question “If this is why you came, why did you wait so long to bring the message?” 

I began by expressing my belief that the Maasai were very pious already knew about God (20).  From this launching point, I attempted to convey only the essential message of Christianity, removing from it not only the accretions of Western culture (54) but also elements of biblical cultures that would prove a stumbling block such as the agricultural propaganda of the creation

Book Review: The Celtic Way of Evangelism by George Hunter

According to George Hunter III:  The way St. Patrick and those who followed in his legacy went about evangelism has much to teach us today.  Patrick’s experience in slavery among the Celts attuned him to Celtic culture and informed his approach when he returned decades later as missionary bishop.  His strategy included a team that wouldset up camp near a settlement, engage with the local leader, converse with all, pray for the sick and make open-air presentations of the gospel in culturally familiar forms including story, poetry, parable, symbol and drama, all with the goal of planting a church (21).  Church took shape as lay monastic communities that offered a visible place of hospitality free from violence (29).  Celtic Christianity (CC) prized the imminence of God and thus gave attention to the middle-level issues of life and

Evangelism after Christendom: Review and Reflections Pt. 1

If you haven't read Bryan Stone's Evangelism After Christendom: The Theology and Practice of Christian Witness, consider these next three posts a primer to this significant contribution to the theology of evangelism.  

Stone’s overarching thesis is that faithful evangelism is most fundamentally accomplished in the “beauty of holiness made real in the church” (12). Laying the foundation for this thesis, he identifies evangelism as a veritable practice—a virtuous activity whose ends are intrinsic. Moreover, evangelism is a constitutive Christian practice (47); the whole Christian life can be described as evangelism and the absence of evangelism, broadly defined as witness, is effectively the absence of Christianity. Stone asserts that most of what has been written in recent decades on evangelism is misguided due to a focus either on pragmatics or apologetics, both of which are grounded in non-Christian narratives. The primary logic of evangelism is that