[Note: What is written here is an attempt to try to put into words my response to NT Wright’s method for making sense of the New Testament and Paul in particular. The concepts being used emerged from the blending of learning from various disciplines, so it will be disjointed in its organization and lacking in analytic clarity.]

Stories are the glue that keeps our social worlds together. When I got together to visit with cousins who I had not seen in a while, we recemented our bonds by telling stories of when we were younger. My cousin Anna¹ and I reminisced about the time when we were very young and were eating at local Arby’s. Conjured up in the magical brains of kids was the bright idea, lets see who can drink from our cups with the most straws at the same time. She won. Being three years older to me, this is a story that cemented her (friendly) superiority over me as kids. Or, at least, that is what we thought. But then her husband John, sitting at the table, jokingly quipped that we destroyed the environment. With this new piece of information, I quipped, “So, Anna, you did more to the destroy the environment. So, I actually won!” Nearly three decades later, a story that had playfully meant one thing, that I lost to my cousin, was transformed into a different story: that I had actually won.

Of course, while this story isn’t serious as Anna and I care about each other and do not seriously care about who won or lost, there is something serious about the way stories function. The meaning of stories are not always fixed. What was a story of one’s superiority when it comes to drinking from many straws was turn into a story of environmental waste, where the “better” person was different. But nothing about the story itself really changed. If we were to tell the story again after this, the basic fundamental pieces of the narrative would remain the same. Rather how the story becomes interpreted has changed. Whereas previously the story was evaluated in terms of an idea of competition that was part of the story, another way of interpreting the story was provided from “outside” the narrative. What has changed is that the story of Anna and I playing a silly game was interpreted through the lens of another narrative: that of environmental waste.

While such an analysis of this could ruin the whole fun of what took place yesterday. Narratives do not themselves have meanings for us outside of the way we appropriate those narratives. To use a metaphor from physics, narratives have potential energy stored within them to provide meaning, but narratives only take on kinetic energy to generate meaning when they are used. The way we use narratives determines the meaning generated by stories. Put more simply: narratives have various potential meanings, but it is how they get used that leads to actual meaning in the mind of a person.

I want to explore this notion of potential meanings more fully. What is it that gives narratives the possibility of conveying meaning? Narratives can convey meaning because there is some similarity and correspondence between our cognitive understanding of the narrative and our cognitive understanding of what we apply our narratives to. We use narratives to understand those persons, things, events, etc. that resemble the narrative. The resemblance may be concrete and specific (such as the involvement of the same people at two different points of time) or more abstract (such as the similarity of the idea between the generic narrative of personal enslavement in Greco-Roman times and the story of moral transformation for Paul in Romans 6), but narratives work because of resemblance.

That narratives works because of resemblances means something: narratives are not themselves the basic constituents of human thinking. That a narrative generates meaning only through its resemblance to something else entails that the meaning of narratives are conditioned to consistent elements that are understood to be a part of the narrative. I would suggest that is because narratives are like a big box packed with many smaller presents. Put more analytically, narratives are a system of constituent elements of human cognition. While the narrative as a whole is significant for generating meaning, it is the constituent parts of the narrative that provide potentially places where we can “grip” the narrative to use it. In the story shared between Anna and I, it is the more basic elements of multiple straws, the presence of Anna and I, and the idea of one person being better than another at something. Based upon the idea of conceptual blending as described by Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, these basic elements then blended with the idea of environmental waste that turn a story that was playfully about Anna’s victory and my death to a story of Anna’s transgression.

However, it is important to note this. The way we generate meaning is almost always unconscious; occasionally we might gener

In summary, narratives convey meaning only on the basis of other, more constituent elements that determine how narratives are used to create meaning. While the meaning generated from narratives can not be reduced to an analysis of its conistuent parts, the meaning of the narrative is largely determined by what of its constituent parts are significant and have salience for the circumstances that are used to make sense of.

From this comes a specific implication as it pertains to the study of the Apostle Paul: worldview as a collection of narratives presents a useful but limited perspective to understanding Paul. It is here that places a potential tension with NT Wright’s interpretive work on the New Testament in general and Paul in particularly. In New Testament and the PEople of God, Wright describes the central role narrative has:

Human life, then, can be seen as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another. This runs contrary to the popular belief that a story is there to ‘illustrate’ some point or other which can in principle be stated without recourse to the clumsy vehicle of a narrative. Stories are often wrongly regarded as a poor person’s substitute for the ‘real thing’, which is to be found either in some abstract truth or in statements about ‘bare facts’. An equally unsatisfactory alternative is to regard the story as a showcase for a rhetorical saying or set of such sayings. Stories are a basic constituent of human life; they are, in fact, one key element within the total construction of a worldview. I shall argue in chapter 5 that all worldviews contain an irreducible narrative element, which stands alongside the other worldview elements (symbol, praxis, and basic questions and answers), none of which can be simply ‘reduced’ to terms of the others. As we shall see, worldviews, the grid through which humans perceive reality, emerge into explicit consciousness in terms of human beliefs and aims, which function as in principle debatable expressions of the worldviews. The stories which characterize the worldview itself are thus located, on the map of human knowing, at a more fundamental level than explicitly formulated beliefs, including theological beliefs.²

While I certainly agree that narrative and worldview analysis provides tremendous benefit to Biblical interpretation, I think it is important to state that stories are not the “basic constituent of human life” and explore the implications of this. They are important, but are not basic.

For instance, how can an infant participate in human life when they have no real sense of narratives? Nevertheless, infants are able to make sense of the world, but it is not until around two years old when the foundation for higher cognitive thinking begins to develop. As these higher cognitive functions develop, it allows the child to make sense of how they were making sense of the world in pre-symbolic, pre-abstraction, pre-narratival terms. However, this isn’t strictly meta-cognition as it isn’t thinking about thinking, where we analyze our mode of thinking through the very same mode. Rather, the awareness of the infant is tacit, whereas the growing awareness of higher cognitive begins to conglomerate the various ways in which we tacitly make sense of the world into an integrated, singular, and conscious through patterns. In other words, narratives as higher cognition are a system of constituent elements from lower-level cognition, although they can come to also include other types of high-cognitive schemas, such as other narratives, symbols, etc.

Why is all this significant for understanding the Apostle Paul? If narratives are not basic to human life but rather make sense of the basic constituents of human life, then we are left with a distinct possibility: if there is a radical disruption in basic constituents of human life, then either a) the way narratives are used to convey meaning will be disrupted or b) narratives themselves will be irrupted and broken to make way new narratives. This is what I would contend happens for Paul on the Road to Damascus. Paul has an encounter with the risen Lord that not only challenges him personally but the way the Jewish narratives were employed in support of his persecution of Christians.

Some people might be inclined to refer to this as a paradigm shift, but I think this language is misleading. Firstly, paradigms are not the same as narratives. More importantly, paradigm shifts as developed by Thomas Kuhn was a shift from one cognitive structure to make sense of a field of science to another cognitive structure. This is a shift from one higher-level cognitive schema to another higher-level cognitive schema. A new paradigm may emerge within a person over a period of time, but it will emerge from our tacit, implicit, unconscious thinking before it becomes formalized into a relatively stable paradigm. But the lack of a clear, persistent paradigm doesn’t entail a lack of comprehension or knowledge. One can still make sense in the absence of a higher-order cognitive schema, but we become closer to infants in our understanding until the emergence of a new schema.

Also paradigms are not as flexible to use in meaning-making as narratives are; paradigms are used in relatively unambiguous, clear ways over a specific set of events and cirumstances that bear strong resemblance to each other, whereas narratives create ambiguity and can may applied to a wider set of events and circumstnaces that may not bear such a strong resemblance. For instance, Einstein’s theory of relativity applies to what is considered to the basic constituents of the physical universe, such as light, speed, gravity, etc. The theory of relativity does not readily apply to human relationships, however. By contrast, the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection can be applied to matters of life and death, of struggle, of change and transformation, etc. Whereas paradigms are used under relatively clear conditions, narratievs are not.

So, instead of analyzing Paul in terms of a paradigm shift, it is better to suggest that there a) disruption in some narrative usage leading to reconstruction through the same narratives and b) irruption in other narratives leading to a destruction of those narratives for other narratives. 

In the case of disruption, you would see elements of continuity and discontinuity. Continuity would be in continued usage of specific narratives, such as the Abrahamic and Mosaic narratives, but discontinuity would occur in what meaning is drawn from them. For instance, God is still going to be faithful to His promise to Abraham, but rather than the promise coming to all the people of genealogical Israel it comes to all the world through the descendant Jesus Christ. Or, rather than Torah being the means by which God creates a righteous, holy people, the Torah is prepatory for the coming of Christ so that through faith people will become the righteous, holy people of God.

However, there are also narratives that may be irrupted. For instance, in Romans, Paul shows signs of an awareness of a Maccabean-like zeal fomenting among Roman Jews.³ Whereas the Maccabean narrative suggested God’s deliverance come in the midst of military conflict, either through military victory or faithfully facing persecution as a result of it, Paul’s narrative around Jesus suggests God’s deliverance comes through people being themselves conformed to the life of Christ through the power of the life-giving Spirit. Here, there is an narrative irruption, where the Maccabean narrative of deliverance is replaced with a Christ-o-centric narrative of deliverance.

Understanding Paul, then, entails not just knowing the narratives, but how he a) employed these narratives in dramatically different ways and b) rejected other narratives as not being true or useful. Whereas N.T. Wright suggests we understand these new meanings through analysis of the worldview, which contains the narratives,⁴ this suggests that narratives that make up worldviews are not the basic constituents by which we can make sense of new meanings. Rather, to make sense of this new meaning entails a recognition that there are pre-symbolic cognitive structures that impact what new meaning emerges. Only when ones combines the narratives and worldviews with a recognition of the change of the basic constituents in human life can one adequately make sense of new meanings in Paul.

Giles Fauconnier’s conceptual blending necessitates at least different mental spaces or, in the terms used in this blog, cognitive schemas by which a third mental space/schema emerges. Trying to analyze the emergent schema in terms of only one part of the blend is to stand at the risk of missing a critical element. For Wright, his analysis priorities the narrative continuity, leading to an inclination to retain the harmonious, continuity between the Old Testament narrative(s) and Paul’s Christ-narrative. This form of exegetical analysis works if Paul does not experience any significant disruption or irruption. But the revelation of the risen Lord to Paul has all the hallmarks of being the type of event to create a dramatic disruption in how Paul employs the OT narratives. It would be an overstatement to suggest Paul goes through a conversion experience that leads to a new identity and religion; this would be the case of narrative irruption. Aside from a few select instances like the Maccabean narrative, Paul does not undergo a narrative irruption. However, the best fit to me appears to be that Paul does undergo a narrative disruption, dramatically changing how narratives of God’s relationship to the Patriarchs and to Israel are employed and used in relation to Jesus Christ.

Thus, I would suggest that the best way to make sense of this is to recognize that the basic constituents of Paul’s life and sense-making were disrupted that influences how Paul employs the Jewish narratives around the person of Jesus Christ, even if we can not clearly reconstruct how this all occurs. While narrative and worldview analysis can bear much fruit, there needs to be a recognition that such a method can predispose one towards a greater sense of continuity between the OT and Paul that may not be warranted.

The most distinctive theological tension that is had in Protestant theology is the tension between faith and works. Once Martin Luther propounded the doctrine of justification by faith from the Apostle Paul in contradistinction to the works of the Law that he connected to the Roman Catholic system of penance and absolution of sins, particuarly throough indulgences. Since that point, Protestant theology has had to deal with the tension of relating faith that justifies with the role of works that is routinely spoken of as the criteria of the final judgment throughout the Bible, including the New Testament.

Wesleyan theology developed a distinctive response to this by Wesley’s emphasis on the doctrine of sanctification. Where when coming to faith, the God’s grace justifies the believer, the person has become freed from sin and the work of God leads them to become sanctified. Justifying grace and sanctifying grace are two of the linchpins of Wesleyan soteriology that address the Protestant tension between faith and works.

However, the third part of Wesley’s soteriology including the notion of prevenient grace that comes to a person prior to belief. The primary function prevenient grace has had within Wesleyan soteriology is to define an Arminian that accepted the Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity while not leading to the conclusion that God only predestined a limited number of people for salvation. By positing that God was bestowing grace upon non-believers that restored a sense of free will lost as a result of the Fall that enabled them to repent and believe in Jesus Christ, Calvinist predestination was not the logical conclusion of Total Depravity. In essence, prevenient grace within Wesleyan theology allows a response to the tension between the spiritual weakness of humanity and the universal love of God.

However, in light of my own readings of the Gospel of John and Romans (particularly Romans 5), I would suggest that the doctrine of Total Depravity and the Fall is deeply problematic from an exegetical perspective, not to mention theologically suspect. The Calvinist doctrine of Total Depravity posits an ontological change in what it means to be human, pulling from Augustine’s own understanding of the Fall; because of sin, humans lost all ability to response to God and are only left in darkness. However, as much as the idea of human nature is of interested in philosophy and later theology influenced by philosophical thinking (such as Platonism for Augustine), to Bible lacks any concept for what we would call “human nature.” The closest we get in the New Testament is the concept of σάρξ/flesh that runs through Paul, but it is more accurate to suggest this refers to people’s embodied nature in relationship to the world and other people due to Stoic influence upon Paul’s vocabulary. Furthermore, the changes that are said to occur in Genesis as the result of the fall aren’t a ontological/genetic change in humans, but rather a) separation from the tree of life and b) a distancing from the presence of God. The Biblical narrative describes the fall more so in environmental/cosmological and relational changes that it does any approaching a “human nature.”

If this reading of the Bible renders the doctrine of Total Depravity as either a) false or b) in need of a reformulation, what place does prevenient grace have in a Wesley theology that is re-situated to this theological interpretation of Scripture? If it no longer necessary as a logical axiom to traverse the gap between human inability to respond to God and God’s universal love wishing all people be saved, what significance would it play?

In his sermon “On Working Out Your Own Salvation,” Wesley describes two modes of grace that precedes the saving, justifying grace that comes with faith: preventing and convincing grace. The former was connected to early notions of a nascent desire to please God and very rudimentary knowledge about God’s will and the sin the non-believer has. The later, convincing grace, Wesley describe as bringing “a larger measure of self-knowledge, and a farther deliverance from the heart of stone.” The tradition of Wesleyan theology has collapses these two modes of grace into one mode of grace called prevenient grace, but what is shared in common by both forms is this: grace that provides a specific sense of desire and emotional affect and degree of knowledge. The conjunction of motivaton in desire and emotional and intelligence in knowledge can be brought together in one word: learning.

However, it is important here to distinguish two different overlapping meanings of the word “learning.” Most people’s definition of learning will come from the idea of school, where people are taught on certain subjects to get a certain grade and pass. Given that this education is compulsory in the Western world up to a certain age, most people’s notions of learning are influenced by the setting. I am not referring to a formal teaching setting. I am actually referring to something closer to what happens in post-graduate research degrees, but without any need for professors, deadlines, evaluations, and all the reading. Learning as something we people do when we are a) interested in something and b) are given opportunity to take in knowledge about what we are interesting in. This form of learning happens from infancy, where the curiosity of the child motivates them to observe and learn about the environment around them. This form of learning happens when kids go out exploring places on their own, or playing games with their friends, or, as I did, try to make “inventions.” This form of learning happens when adults going on vacation for a foreign country are interested in learning about the culture. It is a learning where desire, opportunity, and experience/information meet together.

Put in this light, we might tentatively reframe Wesley’s idea of prevenient grace as this: God providing people the desire, opportunity, and experiences/information to learn about Him prior to coming to faith. One of the common criticisms of prevenient grace is that it doesn’t seem to be easy to find in the Scriptures. By connecting it to the concept of enabling a free will to repent and believe, which at best is only minimally referenced in the Scriptures in a rather oblique manner, prevenient grace seem to be exegetically under-determined at best, wild speculation at worst. However, connecting prevenient grace to the concept of learning can be readily seen in the Gospel of John and in the Apostle Paul.

Firstly, John 6.44-45 predicates God’s drawing and teaching of people as occurring prior to them coming to Jesus. Through this, they would come to believe in Jesus who was God’s Logos/very wisdom embodied as a human person,¹ allowing people to become children of God.² Then, through continued observance of Jesus’ teaching, people would be set free from sin.³ Here, we can see learning, faith, and spiritual formation all functioning together.

Then Paul in 1 Corinthians 2.1-5 describes his evangelistic “method” as being bare bones, only entailing a narrative testimony about the crucifixion of Jesus and a powerful demonstration of the Spirit so that people would have faith in God.⁴ However, there was an expectation of maturity by which people could receive and learning wisdom as in 1 Corinthians 2.6-16. However, as Paul states in 1 Corinthians 3.1-4, before they could receive that, the Corinthians would have to put into Christian mutual love into practice rather than the Greco-Roman conventions regarding status. Once again, you see learning, faith, and spiritual formation being joined together.

However, there is one notable difference between the Johannine order and the Pauline order. In the Gospel of John, learning from Jesus precedes being set free from sin. However, for Paul, being able to learn wisdom follows a change of behavior. At one hand, we might suggest these are two conflicting models. However, another option would be a suggestion via this metaphor: learning from God is the engine that pulls the train cars of faith and formation. Put in a more analytic matter, learning precedes faith, follows faith and precede formation, and learning follows formation.

However, here is an important place to clarify. We often think of learning as gaining some set of abstract knowledge that we can express verbally. But there are other forms of learning, such as tacit learning, where we may not be able to clearly express what we are learning, but it does nevertheless change how we think, feel, and act. We might refer to this more colloquially as unconscious learning. However, people can become conscious of such tacit learning, although it is routinely of a more shadowy, hazy type of recognition than that which has any sense of clear, analytic or linguistic precision associated with it. For instance, Dru Johnson observes the disciples seemed to come up with a tacit awareness after Jesus’ breaking of bread after their walk to Emmaus when they said. “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24.32)⁵ What is critical, however, is that people’s patterns of thinking, feeling, and action experience sort of change, particularly towards a specific object, person, topic, or focus of attention, such as God.

Furthermore, this form of learning doesn’t convey a form of learning that an analytic philosopher of epistemology would refer to as knowledge. For them, knowledge is a true belief that has obtained some sort of justification for belief. For many philosophers engaging in epistemology, knowledge has some degree of clear reasons for such a belief. However, this is not the type of knowledge being described here. In fact, Paul eschews such a form of knowledge in 1 Corinthians 8.1-3, which would have a Stoic epistemology in the background where knowledge was a sure, unshakable belief drawn from a comprehensive understanding. For Paul, it wasn’t important to gain this form of epistemic knowledge as it could actually undermine the mutual love through people considering themselves of a higher status than fellow believers. Rather, for Paul, the concern was to be known by God instead. God is the know-er of us as people as we love him, rather than us becoming a know-er of God.

Rather, this form of learning directs people in how they think, feel, and act, particularly in reference to God. It may in some instances culminate in a more analytic form of knowledge as part of an undergirding motivation for an Anselmian “faith seeking understanding.” However, this is a form of learning that precedes and enables faith as much as it is might strengthen and come to comprehend faith. It provides the underlying concepts by which we come to understand God’s will and character that moves us to trust Jesus to show us the way to God.⁶ It is the type of learning that determines the type of judgments we make, rather than learning of specific judgments themselves.⁷ Thus, through this manner in which human judgments are formed, people come to recognize Jesus as coming from God, enabling faith, and coming to recognize God’s will and one’s own behavior in comparison to God’s will, enabling sanctification.

Thus, by connecting Wesley’s notion of prevenient grace to the idea of learning, we provide a rich framework for understanding the normative manner in which God’s ultimate telos of forming humanity into the image of God in Jesus Christ, that is sanctification, occurs. Furthermore, Wesleyan theology is given a much more solid grounding within the Scriptures, as opposed to trying to connect it to some concept of free will that at best is only marginally referred to in an oblique manner in a couple of places.

But as I said before, this is done as part of re-situating Wesleyan theology in a different context from the standard Western account of the Fall. Rather than prevenient grace being an act in which there is a metaphysical change to human nature, such as providing what we know as free will, the change that occurs with prevenient grace is predicated of God’s relation to humanity. God draws near, comes close. John 1.1-18 is the story of how the life found in the Logos, through whom all things were created, is embodied in a human person. The two effects of the Fall in Genesis, the deprivation of life and the distance from God, are remedied when the Logos became flesh. Even the Torah, which the Johannine prologue makes references to, and it’s tabernacle system later constituted within the Temple⁸ could be considered an early form of God’s nearing presence (but not so close, so clear, so intimate) that teaches and prepares people for faith in Jesus.⁹ As God draws nears, discloses Himself, and acts, God engages in a Divine pedagogy of human persons, remedying the epistemic absence of God’s distancing from the Fall, hindering any reliable knowing of God. Thus, in the end, prevenient grace isn’t so much about what happens to us as humans in our human nature, but what God does to us to guide us in our learning of Him and His will. Rather than God transforming human nature so that we can know God, learning of God through what only God can do transforms us to know God.

Consequently, this puts the standard Protestant tension between faith and works into the background, placing the emphasis upon the Divine pedagogy of human learning that precedes, enables, and even follows faith and sanctification. There is no faith without God’s disclosure and teaching, nor knowledge of God’s will nor the self-knowledge of one’s own sin that enables sanctification. Learning from God is the engine that drives faith and works.

It was during my first senior year of college (The realities of being in college five years means that I must clarify my two senior years) that I was enrolled in an experimental psychology class. Even though I got an A in that course I wasn’t a particularly good student at that time, skipping probably 1/3 of the assigned class meetings. But late in the semester, we got design and do our own study, and I developed a questionnaire that assessed the relationship between the time people said they engaged in specific “religious behaviors,” such as reading the Bible, prayer, etc., and their own emotional and mental status, including coping behaviors. My purpose was to see if there was a correlation between religious behaviors and what the psychological literature I surveyed deemed healthy and unhealthy coping behaviors. It wasn’t the best designed survey of all time, but it certainly piqued my interest as there were correlations observed in the type of religious behaviors people reported they engaged in and their own mental health outcomes. While I have forgotten most of the results, behaviors such as Scripture reading and prayer were correlated with better mental health outcomes and coping.

Of course, anyone vaguely familiar will statistics will have this chant seered into their brain: “Correlation does not equal causation.” Maybe it wasn’t that people who read Scripture and prayed were healthier, but people who were healthier prayed and read Scripture more. Then, there are a host of other considerations, such as my sample being only college students attending a campus ministry worship and whether people are really honest in their surveys. So, there would be no real value in trying to see if I can recover the results I found, but there is something deeply valuable principle behind it: not all religious beliefs and behavior are of equal value from a mental health standpoint.

Now, this would have sounded a bit dissonant with the prevailing wisdom in the psychology department at that time: they were busy telling students that religious behavior, no matter what type, was correlated to better health outcomes. And indeed, the statistics do bear this out. But as so often happens with the interpretation of statistics, we often treat certain statistical findings like the average/mean tell us a law about all people, rather than a general, aggregate reality that doesn’t play out as true in all circumstances for all people. My research did bear this out, as some religious behaviors were correlated with negative health outcomes and negative coping styles.

This provoked a question for me as a Christian: in what ways can Christian faith be used in adaptive and mal-adaptive fashions? Are their forms of Christian theology that exemplify and manifest these adaptive and mal-adaptive patterns? But in asking this question, it is important to make a couple quick clarifications in thinking about such a question.

Firstly, consequentialist outcomes do not themselves determine the truth value of various Christian beliefs; simply because a belief leads to an outcome we like or dislike does not mean that believe in true or false in terms of describing reality, or even necessarily our moral norms of right and wrong. For instance, one might point to the crucifixion of Jesus as a negative outcome from one perspective. But for Paul, negatives outcomes considered from one angle may be a source of God’s grace and power from another angle. So, it is important to not immediately jump to conclusions in saying “mal-adaptive religious beliefs are false or wrong.” Certainly, I can imagine this being the case more often than not, but one should not determine truth and rightness solely on the basis of a singular consideration such as mental health outcomes.

Secondly, because the Christian faith places value on the long-run/eternity, it would be fruitful to consider that what produces negative mental health outcomes in the short run may produce positive outcomes in the long run. For instance, if a person has developed a set of beliefs that allow them to feel that they are okay but has caused serious problems or harm to others. They experience some degree of negative self-esteem because of the way people treat them in response, but they maintain a sense of belief in their own satisfaction through judging themselves in a superior position to another, which is at the heart of narcissism. In such a case, the act and attitude of repentance may produce short-term negative outcomes as a person comes to deal with the feeling of grief that comes from repentance means that they no longer feel comfortable in their own skin, so to speak. But, as they change and adapt their way of relating to others in a more pro-social manner, they may experience increased self-esteem and satisfaction from better relations to others while also feeling an increased sense of wellness.

With this in mind, we are able to think through the basic question: what type of faith and religious behavior is conducive to mental health and what types are harmful?

A helpful framework is to consider one way of dividing coping styles: problem-focused coping (PFC) vs. emotion-focused coping (EFC). In PFC, we try to address problems that exist around us. We attempt to create some change. EFC, by contrast, focuses on alleviating our own emotional state. The two styles are not necessarily opposites, as our attempts to change our circumstances may be intertwined with our attempts to manage our own emotions. But, analyzing in terms of themselves, PFC engages our attempts to control the outcomes of the environment we are in, whereas EFC tries to control ourselves and our own experience. Both styles at the extreme can lead to two mal-adaptive styles of coping however: habitual controlling and habitual avoidance.

When in our coping we are always geared towards trying to solve the problems, we are inclined to construe events in terms of how they are significant for us and then engage in actions to enforce this understanding onto others. For instance, one person whenever they feel slighted by someone else’s remarks may immediately jump to an attempt to guilt and shame someone for those remarks to get them to acquiesce to their own views. While there are some instances where a person might accommodate to such control, very often this will lead to offense, resistance, and distancing, thereby making the slighted person feel even more insulted. While there may be times to address a grievance, and there may even be times to exhibit strong action, inflexibly relying on a problem-focused style of coping can lead to negative outcomes.

For instance in Christian settings, a focus on the moral and ethical teachings of the Bible can lead one to take a problem-focused style of coping through trying to address perceived wrongs. A person may commit themselves to a rigorous understanding of right and wrong behaviors as a way to addressed these injustices. While this can be done in a healthy way, inordinate focus on Christian morality and ethics that we use to assess other people’s behaviors can lead to a habit of problem-focused coping mechanism that become manifested in repetitive and/or strong attempts at controlling outcomes. Typically speaking, this style of coping becomes rather suspicious of people, constantly analyzing them to see if they are morally dangerous or not on the basis of slim evidence. Such coping styles to the extreme can lead to stereotyping of other people in terms of being a “problem,” which when expressed only exacerbates the damage they do to others through constant attempts to control.

Examples of this can include prominent religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, who famously thought the purple teletubby was “gay.” Many progressive Christians today can similarly act in such a manner, seeing homophobia and racism around every corner, tainting everything. There may be a reality of the behaviors people fear taking place. Racism has been an unfortunate part of the past of many white American churches. Also, it is not uncommon that people fear problems that exist within themselves and project that blame outwards. Nevertheless, an inordinate emphasis in trying to assess and address moral problems can lead to a high degree of suspicion that can reduce the Christian faith to a moralism. This is best exemplified by the word “preachy” that has a negative connotation: an excessive moralism can push people away, thereby hindering one’s own well-being.

On the other hand, EFC presents its own challenges. EFC commonly entails attempts to soothe one’s own emotional feelings, such as reframe/reinterpreting events, distracting oneself, getting away from stress problems, externalizing problems so they don’t feel so close, immediate, and/or hard to manage, etc. Rather than try to directly control stressors and problems, however, EFC can lead to trying to avoid addressing such stressors and problems. Cognitive avoidance through distraction and fantasy and behavorial avoidance through procrastination and putting things off. The end result of such avoidance leaves such problems unattended to and can lead a person to deny the problems in the first place. Unfortunately, this style of coping when used unthinkingly often stands in a “complementary” relationship to abusive people employing extreme and harmful forms of problem-focused coping; emotional-focused coping that denies the problems leaders to them failing to stop being taken advantaged of and being harmed.

In Christian circles, this style of coping is commonly reinforced by the idea of faith. But it isn’t just any sort of faith, such as a faith that God is working all things towards good, but a sort of faith that imagines the stresses and problems of the immediate moment are either not real, are going to be readily resolved, or are simply of a demonic nature that if one simply resists through relying on God will go away. Faith is often times readily employed as a way to shield us from the problems we observe and experience. This isn’t necessarily bad in the short run, but in the long run, it can leave many of the same problems perpetuating again and again, when some direct action may be what is in store.

However, even though both extreme forms of EFC along extreme forms of PFC look different in terms of action, they share one feature in common: they are built around imagination. Imagining how things are not bad or will be better or imagining how we can make things better or not so bad. Such imagination is not inherently false; in fact, it is through imagination that we often time discover what is true and good. However, when both EFC and PFC styles get to their extremes, they rely more so on imagination than direct perception and open engagement.

Hence, a useful tool in many counseling and therapeutic settings has been reality-testing. To pay attention and test reality to see if things match what one believes (that is, imagines) to be the case. While this doesn’t solve deep, pervasive problems in the short run and can even cause some emotional disturbances in the short run if one comes face to face with their own errors in thinking through disconfirmation, over the course of the long run, it grounds the way we think and imagine that helps to determine when and how we employ PFC and EFC.

Within the Christian setting, reality testing overlaps with one thing that is said to precede faith: perceiving and/or listening. As Christians, we don’t believe that we believe or obey first; rather, we believe that God acts and makes Himself known before we trust and obey. And people who do not believe, they do not must up faith and obedience to a God they do not believe or trust in; something beholds them, whether in the immediate moment or over time, and then they come to faith and hopefully obedience. Furthermore, in the pattern of the Psalms, we don’t deny the problems we experience that we trust that God can deal with, but we speak honestly with God about these problems, opening our hearts and minds to witness God’s faithfulness in action and demonstration.

This goes back to the findings that I do remember from my survey: that Scripture reading and prayer were associated with better health outcomes. Now, to be clear, not all Scripture reading and prayer is going to be engaged in an open reception and an attentive listening; reading and praying can be primarily a practice of seeing and saying what we think. Nevertheless, from what I can remember, the religious behaviors that were associated with better outcomes would be associated with this manner of perceiving and listening.

However, even this style can have one draw back: it can mercilessly tear apart the imagination if it isn’t confirmed. However, not all things that are true are always confirmed when or how we wish them to be confirmed. God is no object of scientific testing, who can be predicted and put under the microscope. The lack of confirmation doesn’t mean one’s imagination is wrong or misguided, nor does it mean God is faithless or does not exist. So even then, an overemphasis on reality testing styles of perceptual and listening aspects can mislead and misguide us also.

While this is more anecdotal and more an exercise of imagination about coping and theology, I hope it sheds light on the complex way in which Christian life and coping styles can intermingle. While I don’t think it is helpful to reduce the Christian life to therapeutic terms, nor to simply treat therapy as a tool for Christian faith and ethics, seeing the complex interactions between then can be a fruitful way for us to read the Scriptures and assess our theological fruitfully and faithfully in relation to therapeutic and mental health concerns.

In the task of evangelizing and disciplining new believers, it is common to see and hear of new believers being directed to read the Gospel of John. As even John 20:31 says, the Gospel was written in order to move people to believe in Jesus. So, obviously, it would seem to be important for new believers to read John.

But there seems to be more to it than just that: On the surface, the Gospel of John seems so simple and basic. You read topics such as being born again, believing in Jesus, and the importance of loving one another in John 13-17 and it many of the basic norms of Christian faith seems to be laid our: believe and love.

Of course, this simplicity can cause us to overlook the deep complexity of much of the Gospel. For every statement and idea that seems to be simple, Jesus engages in some rather initially opaque or elusive statements. What does it mean to mean to eat his flesh and blood (John 6.56)? There there are the are the various metaphors such as Jesus being a good shepherd and being the true vine that seem clear, but much like the parables in the Synoptic Gospels, they often invite people to confusion and wrong understanding. For instance, the shepherd metaphor in John 6.25-29 has been interpreted to mean that believer are eternally secure. Meanwhile, the vine metaphor in 15.6 has been used to state that people can lose their salvation. Clearly then, these seemingly simple metaphors are not so easily read and understood on the surface.

The point of this post isn’t to try to try to say “you don’t really understand the Gospel.” Rather, it is to state something more important, to understand the whole of the Gospel of John, one must understanding that the Gospel does not convey a simple message about belief, but it does something much more impacting: it invites people in the way to know God through Jesus Christ.

Allow me to start at the most well-known verse: John 3.16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life.” It seems simple on the surface to our modern Protestant hermeneutics: we are saved by faith, so John is saying if we believe, we get to go to heaven. The assumed connection between believing in Jesus and eternal life is almost like a contract or exchange: if I believe in Jesus, God is going to give me eternal life in return.

However, this idea is dissonant with the context that immediately precedes it: Jesus is engaging with Nicodemus in a dialogue about being born again/from above (in the original language, the word can be understood as both “again” and “from above”) to enter the kingdom of heaven. Nicodemus misunderstands Jesus to mean to be born again, to which Jesus explains refer to the Spirit and the metaphor of wind (both spoken of through the same word in Greek). However, Nicodemus still doesn’t understand this metaphor, to which Jesus explains in what is most likely a rhetorical question hinted with sarcasm: “You are a teacher of Israel and you don’t understand this? Here, the status of Nicodemus as an educated Pharisee is in focus, suggesting his knowledge doesn’t equip him to understand this truth from God that Jesus is speaking.

It is here that Jesus combines two different images that seem to have little to do with each other, the idea of ascension into to heaven and the serpent in the wilderness. In the first image, by saying no one as ascended to heaven except Himself as the one who descended, Jesus is saying that He is alone is qualified to communicate the deep things of God (Compare this to John 1.18). The second image of the serpent in the wilderness is one in which Israel was healed by seeing a serpent that Moses lifted, believing in Jesus will bring people into eternal life. What is blended together in these two images is 1) a social epistemology as to what person is qualified to be listen to and trusted to know what is true and 2) coming into the life that never ceases. These two images/themes tie together the two overlapping themes in the discourse about being born again 1) understanding and 2) coming into God’s kingdom. To understand John 3.1-15, we need to understand epistemology being joined together with everlasting light.

In this light, to believe in Jesus isn’t about an exchange with God. Rather, it is about knowing the way to eternal life. To believe in Jesus is a change in our way of understanding, whether we trust and listen to Jesus and through this, we are lead to the way to eternal life. Jesus (nor John) never imagines the condition of entering of the final judgment determined granted on the basis of belief, but as in John 5.28-29, those who do good will receive the resurrection of life, but evil will be met with a resurrection to condemnation. Rather, as immediately follows in John 3.17-21, one’s belief in Jesus is reflective people’s own way of life in whether they are willing to be exposed to the light of Christ in’s one’s life or not. To believe in Jesus is to welcome the light of Christ to expose who we are. For the Gospel of John, there is a condemnation in the present world because one’s belief in Jesus or the lack thereof is a proxy for one’s own way of life.

However, it bears mentioning that John 3.20-21 is not speaking of something attainment of perfection. They are not described as perfectly righteous, but rather simply as people “who do what is true.” Jesus later goes on to state that it is those who are taught by the Father who come to Jesus (John 6.43-45). To do what is true is to be trying to align one’s life to the truth that God has made known, which makes room for a person to engage in repentance and seek to bring their present life into alignment with God’s truth. So, the John 3.20-21 isn’t saying “only those really good, really righteous, perfect people genuinely believe in Jesus.” Rather, if I were translate it a bit more dynamically and in an extended fashion, it would be “those who having been given truth genuinely seek to live life according to that truth.” It isn’t about avoiding sin enough or being righteous enough; it is matter of what we seeks to do in one’s life in accordance to the truth one has. We might contrast this genuinely seeking to live according to the truth one knows with being mere hears of the word that Paul and James both warn against (Romans 2.13; James 1.22).

However, at stake here is the understanding that believing in Jesus is not the condition of an exchange for eternal life, but rather the way God leads us through Jesus to find the way and the truth of eternal life (John 14.6). Our faith in Christ is the means by which God teaches us and leads us.

This brings the prologue of John 1.1-18 into view. Reference to the logos/Word, the act of creation, and the epistemic metaphor of light, all are themes that are consistent with the idea of wisdom, both in the Jewish Scriptures and Greek philosophy. To the original hearers of the Gospel of John, they would have heard some much richer and deeper than the idea of Incarnation that our orthodox Christian hermeneutic has trained us to rightly see. Because the Word has become flesh, the entire treasure of wisdom, God’s wisdom, has become available to people that goes beyond the Torah that Moses provides, but comes in all its fullness. The Incarnation is not the only significant expression, God’s wisdom has been made available to humans through a person just like themselves. The prologue does (meta)physics in order to ground an epistemology of God’s wisdom.

To read the Gospel of John is to be introduced and invited into a whole new way of knowing truth.

Of course, this thread runs much deeper through the Gospel of John than what I said. The theme of knowing pervades the whole Gospel, fleshing out an intricate view of knowing God. It is this form of coming into knowing that can then alter the way we read the Gospel and various of Jesus’ more opaque and easily misunderstood metaphors, because just as Nicodemus’ failure to understand what Jesus meant by saying  “born from above” is represented by his interpreting Jesus to be saying “born again,” so to our interpretation of the Gospel of John will be guided by our believing in Jesus, rather than believing in eternal life through Jesus. I would suggest that the Gospel of John was crafted with this hermeneutical epistemology in mind.

To be clear, this isn’t to say “here is the single key to rightly reading the Gospel of John. This idea explains everything.” That isn’t what I am saying. Rather, I am saying something must simpler and more intuitive: “by learning from Jesus, you will come to learn what Jesus means and so you will come to comprehensively know God in and through Jesus.”

After my highly rhetorical post “No longer an evangelical,” I received some feedback from Facebook friends who are Wesleyan and orthodox as I am. Their point can be summarized this way: the type of evangelicalism I am leaving behind isn’t the brand of evangelicalism that they adhere to. I can understand where they are coming from, because I myself considered myself marginally attached to the evangelical label for a while. I have long wanted to maintain some connection to that identity.

In fact, that was part of the reason I became United Methodist in college, as I wanted to be evangelical but in a different way; I wanted to be faithful to what I know of God through the Scriptures, but I didn’t want to do it the way I had routinely witnessed with my Baptist heritage.¹ Although I wouldn’t have it described it this way at the time, I saw in Wesleyan theology the resources to be faithful to the Scriptures but in a different way. However, paradoxically, it is the very same motivation that lead me to try to be a different sort of evangelical that has lead me to drop the identity altogether. In that sense, then, my heart may be very close to theirs even if we disagree on how to treat evangelicalism.

My rationale for no longer being evangelical isn’t exactly the same as a lot of the other stories. Many people have left behind the evangelicals because they don’t like many of the ethical views commonly expressed by evangelicals, such as the exclusivity of sex to a marriage between a female and male, the way women are treated in churches, feelings of judgmentalism towards people, political and social positions, etc. As a consequence, many people who kissed evangelicalism goodbye but did not leave faith have identified themselves with the smorgasbord of other labels. They have gone to what others might label as liberal or progressive Christianity, although they might not self-identify that way.

I do share concerns that may be related to their concerns, such as the way LGBTQ persons have been mistreated, that women have been barred from serving where God has equipped them, a frustration for how evangelical doctrine of ‘sin’ leads to contempt and fear, how evangelicals have engaged in typically conservative politics, the anxiety that evangelicals have about science. However, I don’t share the same responses to this that many who have left evangelicalism have. While I eschew the wrongful treatment of LGBTQ persons, I don’t think there should be a change about how the Church views sex. While I think women can be just as equipped and qualified as a male to be a pastor, teacher, and leader in the Church and should be given the opportunities to demonstrate this, I don’t seek to promote what I call one-model egalitarianism.² While I think the doctrine of sin in the evangelicalism is deficient if not at times dreadful, I do think a doctrine of sin is very important. While I disdain the political games and dreams of forming the nation into evangelical imagine, I share many of the stated concerns about social and political issues, such as abortion. I do think evangelicals can be a bit too trepidatious about science, I do think it is important to recognize there are real epistemic limitations to the sciences, both in terms of what science can study and what science can say about good and bad.

IF you understand what I am stating, you might see signs of a reformulating of evangelical doctrine, or someone who is evangelical but simply is a different type of evangelical. After all, many of the things I have stated are not radically novel. Many of my fellow orthodox Wesleyans who consider themselves evangelical would echo many of my sentiments.

But here is the thing: so far as these views are simply considered an offshoot off of evangelical faith, as a different form but still under the same label, then these views will routinely be seen as some deviance from the prototypical form of evangelical faith. From evangelical insiders, my theology, ethics, and ecclesiology will always be judged against the standard evangelical form. In addition, if I call myself evangelical, many people who are outsiders to Christian faith and evangelicalism in particular will tend to jump to the stereotype of anti-LGBT, anti-woman, shaming, politically domineering, and anti-science. From the inside and from the outside, to call myself evangelical is to label myself in a way that is misleading and can breed mistrust.

If the label was simply stereotyped by outsiders, but my views would be considered mainstream to the inside of evangelicalism, I would consider keeping the label. If the label was considered of high regard by outsiders, but I was engaged in an internal debate/strife over what it meant to be truly evangelical, I would consider keeping the label. However, from where I stand, to keep the label of evangelical would be to engage in a spiritual conflict on two fronts, one that I do not wish to fight.

So, I have deep issues with how evangelicalism has become expressed in it’s social and political actions.  Furthermore, as I stated in another post “Wesleyan orthodox instead of evangelical,” I think evangelical theology as it is typically understood doesn’t have the resources to remain orthodox while resist the social pressures that formed what the most visible form of evangelicalism has become. However, with this in tow, I would still consider myself according to the label if I didn’t leave me and other people like me who seek to follow Jesus and walk by the Spirit in the form of an authentic Wesleyan orthodoxy on the defensive on two fronts. I would even persevere with labels that identify me as a follower of Christ, such as Christian, under such conditions, but not evangelical.

Know that I don’t judge you personally if you are a Wesleyan orthodox or another theological branch of orthodoxy that seeks to avoid this mess but you still accept the label of evangelical. I get the reasons for it, as it’s original emphasis placed the focus upon doctrines such as personal faith and justification and the authority of the Scriptures. It has a long history with many great Christian teachers and leaders, including even John Wesley. But when I survey the social, political, cultural, and theological landscape, I find the reasons for breaking free from the identity far outweigh the reasons for keeping the identity.

Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps God will do something that will reestablish the original roots of evangelicalism. Or maybe I am not rightly understanding the social, political, cultural, and theological landscape. I am willing to be wrong on this; part of me wants to be wrong about this. But since I am unaware of where I am wrong about where things are in this present day and age in American, I act based upon what I see. And since I do not know God to be one who is concerned about keeping the labels and institutions as much as leading His people to reflect His light through Jesus Christ, I will make my judgment and decision based upon what I can see in the social, political, cultural, and theological landscape.

As I spent my first few months as part of the Logos Institute at the University of St. Andrews in 2017, I began to engage with a form of theology that had both of a sense of familiarity and a sense of newness to it in the form of analytic theology. I was simultaneously intimidated but yet felt a sense of understanding about what analytic theology is about. I had more of a natural predilection to Biblical Studies, so when I would hear NT Wright lecture, I felt at home. But my early engagement with analytic theology was quite ambiguous, not being sure if I did or didn’t understand what was happening.

Upon further reflection in the later months, I came upon a realization: what analytic theology attempts to do is somewhat similar to what John Wesley did in his developing theology. To be clear: no analytic theologian would read John Wesley and think: this is an analytic theologian. However, as I compared what I read and knew about John Wesley in comparison to other theologians such as Barth, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Luther, etc. I though that Wesley’s style is much closer to the analytic style that many other theologians of the past two millenia.

By analytic style, I appeal to the definition of the analytic style by Michael Rea:

P1. Write as if philosophical positions and conclusions can be adequately formulated in sentences that can be formalized and logically manipulated.’
P2. Prioritize precision, clarity, and logical coherence.
P3. Avoid substantive (non-decorative) use of metaphor and other tropes whose semantic content outstrips their propositional content.’
P4. Work as much as possible with well-understood primitive concepts, and concepts that can be analyzed in terms of those.
P5. Treat conceptual analysis (insofar as it is possible) as a source of evidence.¹

Of these five prescriptions for analytic theology, I would suggest that Wesley best embodies the spirit of P2. In additional, his theological discourse often comes into alignment with P3. Finally, while he does not engage in conceptual analysis on a wide scale, he shows a familiarity behind the different uses of words.

It is important to consider that Wesley studied logic at the University of Oxford. He was quite at home and comfortable with engaging in discussion and logic and epistemology. For instance, he wrote a somewhat review/somewhat commentary to John Locke’s Essay of Human Understanding. I present for reading, however, a paragraph from his “An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.”

32. You know, likewise, that before it is possible for you to form a true judgment of them, it is absolutely necessary that you have a clear apprehension of the things of God, and that your ideas thereof be all fixed, distinct, and determinate. And seeing our ideas are not innate, but must all originally come from our senses, it is certainly necessary that you have senses capable of discerning objects of this kind: Not those only which are called natural senses, which in this respect profit nothing, as being altogether incapable of discerning objects of a spiritual kind; but spiritual senses, exercised to discern spiritual good and evil. It is necessary that you have the hearing ear, and the seeing eye, emphatically so called; that you have a new class of senses opened in your soul, not depending on organs of flesh and blood, to be “the evidence of things not seen,” as your bodily senses are of visible things; to be the avenues to the invisible world, to discern spiritual objects, and to furnish you with ideas of what the outward “eye hath not seen, neither the ear heard.”²

While this paragraph would never pass as part of a treatise in modern, analytic epistemology, one can not how Wesley is at pains to be precise in what is happening in how one’s knowledge of God emerges from sensations, but of a spiritual kind. Meanwhile, his usage of non-decorative metaphor is relatively limited to references to the “hearing ear” and the “seeing eye.” I would contend that this passage exhibits characteristics of P2 and P3.

Meanwhile, a few paragraphs beforehand, Wesley shows an awareness regarding word usage and clarification:

28. We join with you then in desiring a religion founded on reason, and every way agreeable thereto. But one question still remains to be asked, What do you mean by reason? I suppose you mean the eternal reason, or the nature of things; the nature of God, and the nature of man, with the relations necessarily subsisting between them. Why, this is the very religion we preach; a religion evidently founded on, and every way agreeable to, eternal reason, to the essential nature of things. Its foundation stands on the nature of God and the nature of man, together with their mutual relations. And it is every way suitable thereto; to the nature of God; for it begins in knowing him: And where, but in the true knowledge of God, can you conceive true religion to begin? It goes on in loving him and all mankind; for you cannot but imitate whom you love: It ends in serving him; in doing his will; in obeying him whom we know and love.³

Here, Wesley begins to introduce a topic on which he will identify himself in a way that is distinct from his audience on the meaning and understanding of reason. However, it needs to be pointed out that Wesley is probably engaging in a little bit of a rhetorical ploy here. He initially “supposes” that they mean the same thing that Wesley holds to as an attempt to present his own theology as built on reason. Then in paragraph 30, Wesley shifts focus from reason as order/nature to reason as thinking, which serves as a segue for him to present his theological epistemology of the spiritual senses as a form of reason as thinking.

Now, most of Wesley’s works, such as his journal articles and sermons, do not take on such a logical, analytic style. But even if his sermons are not so rigorous, his sermons evidence that analytic style in the ideas he presents.

Consider sermon 85: “On Working Out Your Own Salvation.” He starts of the sermon in describing the truths about God that have been known in “heathen world.” From that point, however, he presents two key doctrines that serve to distinguish the uniqueness of the Christian faith from a heathen faith:

those which relate to the eternal Son of God, and the Spirit of God: To the Son, giving himself to be “a propitiation for the sins of the world;” and to the Spirit of God, renewing men in that image of God wherein they were created.⁴ 

He describes these truths as not available to the heathen world, but only known through revelation, which he describes through the metaphorical language of “light by the gospel.”⁵ This sermon starts off on establishing a clear foundation for understanding salvation based upon the distinctive elements of Christian faith, the work of the Triune God. Wesley goes on to describe briefly the example of Jesus Christ based upon Philippians 2.6-11. From there, Wesley expounds upon Phillippians 2.12-13 elaborates on describing the ongoing movement towards of God’s works towards salvation.

His description of this work of God is described in II.1 as made up of three elements: preventing grace, convincing grace, justification, and sanctification.⁶ Preventing and convincing grace relate to God’s action on behalf of people prior to the works of justification and sanctification, which correspond to the two doctrines he mentioned of the Son of God and of the Spirit of God. In describing these four steps in God’s work, Wesley engages in an analytic-like engagement with Christian experience of the work of God. But Wesley has been at pains earlier in the sermon to establish that what happens in preventing grace, convincing grace, justification, and sanctification stems from God’s will to “breath into us every good desire… and every good desire to good effect.”⁷

In the midst of the sermon, Wesley has an underlying structure to his ideas his sermons presents. His introduction presents what we might term of pre-revelatory and post-revelatory truths. From that point, Wesley’s reading of Phil. 2.12-13 is understand to state that God is at work during each of these stages of human knowing about God, to which Wesley then describes the way God’s saving work manifests itself in specific desires, actions, and experiences.

The thought structure beneath the sermon’s rhetorical structure is very systematic in nature, with clear, yet simple distinctions. While Wesley has been critiqued for not being a systematic theologian, this isn’t because Wesley isn’t a systematic thinker. He is very systematic, but his systematic thinking is typically embedded in discussing the actual modes of thinking and human experience as to relate to the work and nature of God, rather than focuses on God as an object of knowledge. While much systematic theology engages with God qua God, Wesley peculiar focuses engages with talking about God qua Savior of humanity, which stems from his overriding focus on knowing “the way to heaven.” This entails an awareness about human experience and thinking, which can never be as easily present in a the usual systematic forms.

However, my hope is that I have presented to you some reasons to consider that John Wesley was a theologian who might rightly be called proto-analytic and that he contained a systematic impulse in his thinking.

I present this to make the following suggestion about the beneficial relationship that has exist and can be strengthened between Wesleyan and analytic theology. in a couple of my previous posts, I have established myself as a Wesleyan orthodox, while rejecting the evangelical label and identity. But there does lie a specific problem with trying to blend Wesleyan theology with orthodoxy: Wesleyan theology has been used to form theologies that have become very theologically and ethically deviant from the orthodox Christian faith of the past two millennia. Nothing about using Wesleyan ideas reliably ensures retaining orthodoxy.

It is important to qualify what I mean here: Wesleyan ideas, as with any other idea, can be extracted from one context and appropriated for another context. The specific ideas that we label “Wesleyan” can be used in a variety of manners. This is because Wesley exhibits characteristics of both logical and social/relational thinking. One does not have to particularly think in a logically rigorous way to understand and use Wesley’s more social/relational ideas. When one extracts Wesley’s ideas from the logical structure that provides the contours of his theological reasoning, they become more free-floating ideas that can be used in circumstances that Wesley would not have applied them to.

Therefore, to be authentically Wesleyan, at least as I understand it, I would suggest that one needs to be able to engage in Wesley’s logical, proto-analytic style to fruitfully use and reason things out from a Wesleyan perspective to strengthen the connection of Wesleyan theology and orthodoxy. This doesn’t mean we need to reproduce Wesley’s logical education which was principally grounded in Aristotle: I would say there are many warranted reasons for considering more modern forms of reasoning, without necessarily abandoning Aristotelian logic entirely. Rather, it means that Wesley’s theology did have an undergirding, systematic structure that can only be satisfactorily understood by engaging in an intentional understanding and study of reasoning.

My hopes for the future is that the emerging field of analytic theology will find a greater home in the Wesleyan tradition. Scholars like William Abraham and Tom McCall, two of the bigger names in analytic theology, paint a way of how Wesleyans can do analytic theology in service of orthodoxy. While I don’t consider myself an analytic theologian as much as an aspiring Biblical scholar with impulse towards philosophy and biblical theology, I know of a couple fellow Asbury grads who are part of the Logos Institute and a couple other people from elsewhere who don’t identify as Wesleyan but are very amenable to Wesleyan ideas.

Such a fusion of Wesleyan and analytic theology will be very important for the coming challenges that United Methodists who are Wesleyan orthodox are facing and will continue to face regarding questions surrounding sexuality, the Trinity, the Incarnation, etc. And if the Wesleyan orthodoxy is going to define itself more on its own terms rather than the American evangelical theology it has been often related to, it will need analytic thinkers who can a) distinguish the Wesleyan distinctives from evangelical theology and b) communicate these effectively to people without the training in logic and analysis.

This is not to say that analytic theology will solve all the future challenges of Wesleyan theology. As Wesleyan theology is increasingly part of the movement of world Christianity, analytic frameworks are often left without the necessary resources to engage in the forms of reasoning that emerges from other cultures. Continental and anthropological thinkers, which the analytic style is often contrasted again, will probably have great importance in relating the various peoples of worldwide Christianity in the Wesleyan tradition. But within anglophone Christianity and even Western Christianity more broadly, investing in analytic theology has great potential to make use of our Wesleyan resources in the emerging days, months, and years.

Yesterday in my very rhetorical acknowledgment that I no consider myself evangelical and the reasons for it, I presented at the what would consider to be my present theological “identity:” Wesleyan orthodoxy. At first blush to disidentify with evangelicalism but to identify with Wesleyan orthodoxy might seem a bit disjarring: aren’t many Wesleyan orthodox persons evangelical, such as many people who participate in the Wesleyan Covenant Association, Asbury Theology Seminary, Free Methodists, Nazarenes, etc.? Or, by saying Wesleyan orthodox do I mean something different from what they would consider Wesleyan orthodox?

The answer is somewhat in between. For me, when I talk about Wesleyan orthodoxy, I am referring to a type of theological and ethical beliefs that strongly resemble what we presently see in Wesleyan orthodoxy, but without the pressures and influences that come from trying to be evangelical at the same time. For me, to dissociate Wesleyan orthodoxy from evangelicalism isn’t as much about looking for something that is altgoether unrecognizable from what is presented now; rather, it is look to a a way of doing theology where the Wesleyan theology of John and Charles Wesley is used as a lens to make sense of the orthodox Christian faith shared a) through two millennia and b) worldwide, rather than using Wesleyan theology to make sense of what we would call evangelical faith today in the United States.

So, my movement is more than just simply dropping an identity, but it is about avoiding the implicit draw and pressures to try to fit a Wesleyan orthodoxy into a present-day evangelical mold. For me, the problems I see with wider evangelicalism, which we might call political evangelicalism, can be derived from the theology and ethical shape that evangelical theology tends to take, which we might refer to as theological evangelicalism. While I don’t think to be a theological evangelical makes one a political evangelical, many of the ways evangelicalism has come to define the shape and contours of Christian faith can have deep, social implications that a) doesn’t have many resources to resist what today amounts to a political evangelicalism while b) having many views about God and people that contribute to the problem when it becomes political evangelicalism. For me, the concern is to search after as Wesleyan orthodoxy that has greater theological resources to resist the political demagoguery while providing a more dignity-giving, and ultimately more Scriptural, theology and anthropology.

The task is difficult and can be a matter of subtle clarifications because a person who see the orthodox faith through the lens of John and Charles Wesley will have beliefs that share a family resemblance to what is typically considered evangelical faith.

For instance, John Wesley never held to a doctrine of the inerrant of Scripture it is commonly talked about today, but I would describe his view more closer to the absolute trustworthiness of Scripture. Scriptural inerrancy often times has a veiled ontology and epistemology wrapped up in it where we think of Scripture as providing propositional beliefs that directly represent truth through literal interpretations. While certainly not all evangelicals would hold to such a specific understanding of inerrancy, the problem is that when one thinks of inerrancy, people generally and unconsciously think about propositional beliefs, representational truth, and literal interpretations, even if they don’t recognize that is what they are thinking about.

While these are not bad themselves and there are certainly many contexts where these three are useful, a brief perusal of the Psalms would suggest how much this trifecta just doesn’t work. Or, read the whole Golden Calf narrative in Exodus 32-34 and realize that trying to describe whether God is an angry God or not can not be answered in a straightforward, propositional manner; God is both raging at Israel and yet slow to anger. The tensions within the narrative about God’s anger invite further reflection rather than propositionalizing. Then there is Revelation, which is highly invested in symbolic language that doesn’t directly represent what is happening and what will happen (at least in the earthly theater of the spiritual war), but rather directs people to a personal belief/trust in God’s power in face of the ultimately cosmic, spiritual war that is being fought.

Then, there is the matter of apparent contradictions in the various historical accounts in both the Old Testament and New Testament. Did God or Satan move David to take a census, and what were the precise options for the possible consequences? What was the order of the temptations that Jesus faced? When did Jesus purify the Temple: early in his ministry at in the Gospel of John or late in the ministry as in the Synoptics? What women were there when they saw the empty Tomb? How many times and when did Paul make his way to Jerusalem? Some of these apparent contradictions may have perfectly reasonable resolutions, but what if there is no resolution and there is no original manuscript that resolves the contradiction? For me, such contradictions would be largely immaterial if I believed that God raised Jesus from the dead.

For me, it is more theologically consistent and important to place our trustworthiness of the Scriptures in the God who makes Himself known rather than in specific, assumed logical, ontological, epistemology, and hermeneutical assumptions that are held a priori. In addition, that the prototypical doctrine of inerrancy subscribes to a specific hermeneutic framework to obtain truth, what role does the Spirit have in conveying the thoughts of God as they are expressed through Scripture? Can the meanings be mined from the Scripture by simply having the right hermeneutics, making the Holy Spirit ‘immaterial?’

This is where Wesley’s trust in the Scriptures can be more valuable, having been expressed before the battle of the doctrine of Scripture took full force in the face of the emerging science and historical/literary criticism. Wesley trusts the Scriptures, but because the Scripture is an expression of God’s promises.¹ Scripture for Wesley is how God shows the way to heaven.² Scripture is ultimately oriented towards a knowing and fellowship with a faithful God. And, as in his notes in 1 Corinthians 2.13-14, the Scripture comes from the Spirit and the things of the Spirit must be discerned through the Spirit.

In presenting this, I am not saying that Wesley has what I would deem a perfect understanding about the function of Scripture.³ I think instrumentalizing Scripture as a way to heaven, if by heaven he means eternal life, is a bit too narrow and can begin feed into the “get to heaven and avoid hell” mentality in evangelicalism. Additionally, I don’t think 1 Corinthians 2.13-14 should be used in analogy to Scripture. This is why I speak of a Wesleyan orthodoxy as trying to make sense of the orthodox, Christian faith through the Wesleyan framework: I give preference to orthodoxy over Wesleyan theology when Scripture and tradition have a strong push back against some aspects of Wesley’s theology, which may mean sometimes Wesley’s ideas get augmented.

But, beneath what I feel to be small differences between Wesley and I is something much more significant: Scripture is part of God’s disclosure with His people. At stake then is a view of Scripture that understands Scripture as it pertains to trusting God rather than necessarily gaining true knowledge apart from God in relation through His Spirit.

I present this as merely a brief, theological case study to demonstrate my point. I think a Wesley orthodoxy needs to be free from trying to fit into an evangelical mold. The more people of a Wesleyan orthodox try to present themselves as evangelicals, the legitimacy of bearing that identity will be judged according to certain ideas within theological evangelicalism. To try to be evangelical as the term has come to mean in this present age is to essentially submit the theology of a Wesleyan orthodoxy to the judgments of (stereo)typical evangelical doctrine, both from inside and from the outside. Rather, instead, I myself think of the relation of Wesleyan orthodoxy to evangelical theology as analogous to the Old Testament prophets to Israel: both the prophets and the religion of Israel as practiced held to a common set of ideas and beliefs pull from Israel’s history, but the prophets saw something insidious and deeply detrimental in the way the Israelite religion was being practiced and taught.

So, this is what I mean by Wesleyan orthodox and why I consider myself that but not evangelical. The identity of “evangelical” has ceased to become trustworthy to others and so I abandon it in part for that reasons. But I also think that theological evangelicalism, while it doesn’t share in the evils of its political counterpart, is unable to really intellectually resist it but in facts tends to lead to supporting of the ideals of its political manifestation when put under specific conditions. To put in perhaps an oversimplified manner, evangelical faith does not have the theological resources to both a) retain orthodoxy and b) love while engaging in deep ideological, social, and political disagreements and conflicts. I think Wesleyan orthodoxy does, but it will take having to set oneself apart from evangelicalism to explore Wesleyan orthodoxy on its own terms rather than on evangelical terms.

I am not usually what someone might consider a mushy, emotional type. I have my deep sense of passion and I do feel deeply, but I have an aversion to emotional expressions. Call it the traumas of being an emotionally sensitive young boy or call it the instinct to survive and push forward through painful life circumstances, but it is a rare day when I let someone see me deeply emotional. I don’t mind people knowing that I do I feel, knowing that I do bleed, knowing that I do struggle, but I won’t let you see it in my face and in my voice.

However, there is a deeper, philosophical underpinning to my feelings about feelings. However, it isn’t rooted in some supposedly logical aversion to feeling. I think that emotions, even deep emotions, can be perfectly “rational” in many situations. As I am studying Stoicism for my work on the Apostle Paul, I have found my views on emotions make me no Stoic. While certainly strong emotions can mislead us to do some foolish, irrational, wrong, or even sometimes evil things, they are deeply important in motivating us, directing us, and even stirring up creativity within us. Stoics shun the strong emotions they call the passions that misleading reasoning; I say that the battle to learn to rightly direct one’s emotions, which entails standing on the margins between contained feelings and passion, is an education itself that one should not overlook or besmirch.

Rather, my philosophical underpinning of emotions asks this question: what is the value of this emotion? Not in trying to figure out if it serves some pre-formed “logical” purpose, but rather what is the value that this emotion compelled me towards and is this value something really should value? Certainly, this is a very reflective attitude you can’t really have in the heat of the moment often times, but it is a way that forms my understanding of emotions and feelings.

Granted there are some values to emotions and their expression that go beyond what they are immediately expressions for. Expressing emotions allow other people to know where you are personally in those moments. They allow people to bond, to form connections. Emotions are as much social as they are personal. People will laugh a lot more at something funny if they are around people, whereas they are not as prone to laugh if the same funny thing happens while they are in private. But past this social role, the question is this: what is the value of emotions?

In particular, one question has stirred around in my mind for the past few days. What is the value of being broken? Technically speaking, we wouldn’t say being “broken” is an emotion, but a state of one’s life that causes deep pain and emotional turmoil.

The question came to my mind as I heard a story from a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. She told a story of how she had lost a child of hers, with pain in her eyes. But in the midst of the pain, she shared news of how she welcomed a new baby into her life, but it was going to be hard to move forward.  As I saw a mixture of pain and joy in her eyes, I wanted to hug her that I am happy for her, but I didn’t really have the opportunity to do so. But that story she shared hit me, even in my usually stolid demeanor.

So, why? Why is our brokenness important? What is the value of all the emotions that come with our brokenness? What is the value that comes in lingering suffering, pain, loneliness, etc.? Shouldn’t life be pain-free? Shouldn’t life be full of joy? Isn’t it better that when something bad happens, we get up, deal with what needs to be dealt with, and then move back to joy? What value is there in brokenness?

Now the answer I have worked myself towards is not a valorization of suffering. Suffering is not something we should pursue. We shouldn’t seek it out and play it up. I do have many concerns about how the language of “brokenness” can reinforce this very attitude: that I need to be broken. Similarly, it can reinforce an attitude of victimization in the implicit passivity of being broken. Alternatively, it can make people who haven’t deeply suffered exaggerate the nature of their pains. So in speak of the value of brokenness, there are real qualification and limits to this answer.

The value of brokenness is this: it can uncover the veil from our eyes the fantasies we have chosen to believe about ourselves, about others, about the world.

As human beings, we are prone to pursue what we enjoy and to imagine this. We deal with and cope with many of the struggles in such a way so that we can get back to the enjoying and imagining. To be human means to desire, to want, to crave, to enjoy. And despite the warnings the New Testament gives about lusts, which is more about unrestrained desire (closer to the Stoic sense of the passions) rather than desire itself, this is a good thing about us: to play, to love, to eat, to drink, to learn, to have sex, to accomplish, to laugh: all of these are good things when done well.

But, the pull of desire has an epistemic curse attached to it. We are easily lead to believe narratives of hope that sound plausible if they meanwhile emotionally satisfy us. This is true both in our desires and our immediate response to our aversions: if some narrative provides an ending we want, we are more inclined to believe it if it only sounds plausible. But plausibility is not the same as a probability. To believe something that seems plausible to our minds is sometimes to believe something that is unlikely. Our status of desiring creatures had made us susceptible to the hypnotic hope and seductive suggestion of the pleasing, plausible possibility.

By contrast, if some narrative seems to go against the happy ending we want, we can demand a lot more proof and evidence or even become utterly skeptical and unmoved by anything that favors any such narrative.

The net effect of this is that we are prone to believe pleasing falsehoods over painful truths. This is all the more powerful in the narrative buffet of technological post-modernity, where we are exposed to a litany of narratives through mass and social media, many of which can be made to sound plausible and can appeal to our desires. The phenomenon of “fake news” is the power of the pleasing, plausible possibility in technological post-modernity. So, we become even more solidified in our fantasies as they are reinforced again and again, causing us to become resolute in our dismissal of narratives that do speak real, yet painful, truths.

However, occasionally, the epistemic bias of being a desiring human gets turned off. For reasons I will make clear in a moment, I call this the epistemology of suffering. There are occasional points for some people where our epistemic bias is against what we desire and want, where we don’t believe we get what w want. When it happens, it may look like depression and desperation because these are commonly experience in such a phase. But, not all depression and desperation necessarily meet this epistemic frame of mind, so please do not hear me extolling the virtues of depression. Speaking from personal experience, depression itself is hell.

This epistemic mode emerges out of the context of suffering, but of a particular sort. Not of suffering due to self-inflicting loathing. Not a suffering due to untreated mental illness. These are sufferings that should be treated. But it is a suffering of broken hopes and dreams, of life failing to meet the expectations we had hoped it would be. It is a suffering born out of pain that we don’t deserve that challenge all the meaning structures built from the materials of desire.

This deep challenge to meaning is commonly associated with the idea of psychological trauma, where life events throw out something that undergirded our understanding and hopes about life. But even here, I want to distinguish between the deep pain that challenges our meaning and the traumatic memories that can often emerge. Trauma itself is not good; speaking from personal experience, trauma is hell.

I lack the fullest ability to express what exactly it is I am referring to, but it is the state of mind where a person experiences a prolonged sense of suffering born out of loss and pain such that the epistemic bias of desire is countered by a cognitive openness and recognition that pain does exist, it does occur, it will happen, and it can sometimes overwhelm. In this place, many of the pleasing, plausible possibilities that we have learned to believe no longer sound so plausible or possible. It isn’t that one rejects these possibilities and desires as bad or wrong, but rather there is the refusal to accept the narratives that have told us how life will find that happiness, that peace, that joy.

The value of brokenness is that it takes the veils from our eyes from the hypnotic seductions we have fallen prey to. It doesn’t necessarily provide us the truth, but it wisks away what is false in our own mind or even in the minds of others who look upon them. The value of brokenness is that it produces a receptivity to something new, something different, something one might even say is holy in the sense of unqualified uniqueness and distinctiveness.

Read then the words of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 2.1-5 in mind as you see him talk about his own fear and trembling as expressions of his own utter weakness and brokenness:

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I came to you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. My speech and my proclamation were not with plausible words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.¹

In my previous post, I made a rather dramatic and scathing, to be honest, criticism of my evangelical background. I didn’t write that lightly as there was much from my evangelical background that I do cherish and think is important. It is such that if you were to engage me in many Biblical and theological discussions, you might me saying some things that are similar to what evangelicals have said. However, despite these similarities, I have seen the way the Christian faith has become to be expressed by evangelicals in America is deeply problematic.

I am not the first one. One might even say I am somewhat late to the party. Even though I knew of my problems for a while, I couldn’t entirely disassociate myself from the evangelical identity. It wasn’t that I didn’t see the problems, but I didn’t know the right direction to go. So, I considered myself marginally identified with evangelicals as I engaged what could be described as a personal reimagining of Christian faith. It was only as I knew where I was going that I could finally say it isn’t the evangelical direction.

Of course, many people have talked about reimagining the Christian throughout the past few years, across the theological spectrum from evangelicals to progressives. But, as can clearly be seen, there are very different results in the Christian reimagination as evangelicals and progressive reimaginations have come up with a very different set of practices and theological expressions.

You might classify the evangelical reimagination as reapplication of the Christian message. A common motto is that the message of Christ remains the same but the way you express it changes. The question here pertains to how you can apply the same doctrinal teachings and the same ethical and spiritual principles to a different context. This version would see that the Christian churches of the past have become stale as the times have changed, so one has to figure out how to live in a new era. This form of reimagination has a past orientation, looking to the past for foundations that provide the answers for the future.

Another form of reimagination that can be associated with progressives and many exvangelical Christians is the revision of the Christian message. Here, there is a deep dissatisfication with the way many churches have operated, particuarly of a more traditional/evangelical orientation. To them, the problem isn’t that the message got stale; the problem is that the message was very wrong and was responsible for many evils. Thus, these Christians feel the need to revise what it means to be Christian, either abandoning orthodoxy or picking and choosing what of it the past traditions it finds true for today. This form of reimagination has a future orientation, looking to the idealized future to determine how to appropriate the past.

But, there is something that is held in common with the reapplication and revision forms of reimagination: the new imagination emerges as a result of our thinking, whether it be thinking about the doctrines of the past or about the directions of the future. If we can just figure at the right theological and ethical framework, we can fix all the problems that we see our churches have. Meanwhile, Jesus Christ is taken as important in both forms of reimagination.

However, there is a third way of reimagining Christian faith that is starkly different. It takes neither the past nor the future as the starting point of thinking, nor does it take our own analysis and reasoning as the starting point of reimagining. To rediscover the Christian faith is a praying, trusting, and hoping that God brings forth a new understanding. But we don’t know exactly what it is God will be giving, but we wait until it comes.

Consider the disciples waiting in Jerusalem after the ascension of Jesus. These are disciples who had heard time and time again the words of the Torah and the message of the prophets. They walked alongside Jesus. But there were told to wait. Meanwhile, they were anxiously wanting to know what the future held in store because Jesus had been raised from the dead: is it now that their political world would be set right? But they were told that wasn’t something they should now. Neither knowing what happened in the past was sufficient to prepare the disciples, nor was a sense of the future given to them to direct them.

But, when the Holy Spirit fell upon them as in the days of Pentecost, they suddenly had words to speak as Peter gave a sermon that connecting this present, in the moment outpouring of the Holy Spirit as a sign of the present age being under the rule of Jesus Christ. It was after the Spirit had been poured that they proclaimed the message that made sense of who Jesus is and the significance of His death and resurrection. Through knowing Jesus and through the pouring of the Spirit, the disciples discovered the message of God’s Kingdom, even as they did not know what the future would have in store.

Thus, as we see the Christian faith undergoing many tensions and pressures today in the West, some have tried to reapply the message, some have tried to revise the message. But another option is to rediscover, to linger and wait where we are at for God to show us the way to go.

In rediscovery, we discover what the message applies to before trying to reapply the message. In rediscovery, we discover what the message is pointing towards to before trying to figure out what direction we are to head. Then can past and future can be brought together.

But to get here, it will take a caution about our attempts to reimagine based upon our own analysis from past to the future or future to the past. By starting from our own thinking, we will inevitably pick an Archimedean point to start from that everything new will encircle if we hope to have any sort of coherent message. This is unavoidable. But we have no way we can rationally analyze what Archimedean point we should start from without assuming an Archimedean point. And there are a littany of plausible sounding starting points. Even saying Jesus or the Holy Spirit doesn’t fully define because how is that we do understand Jesus and how do we understand the Holy Spirit?

A coherent message that represents God’s will will take God providing the Archimedean point the centers our thinking. This is where rediscovery comes in: the center of our understanding is somehow reoriented, perhaps in a mystery through the mundane moments, perhaps in a miracle of the stupendous moments. But the critical factor is that we wait in faith, and then when we rediscover, one goes from that point in the light of what God has done.

So if we place too much trust in our own theological and ethical reasoning and analysis, we won’t be satisfied to wait. We won’t be open to receive. We will be ready to go now.

However, at the same time, if we disengage from theological and ethical reasoning and analysis in some sort of apathetic mood, raising our hands up in exhaustion rather than prayer, we won’t be ready to make sense of what we receive. Discovery happens because you can receive what you discover, but if you are unaware you will remain unaware.

Rediscovery doesn’t abandon understanding the past or the future, but it simply says: only by your will God will we understand rightly. Only by the action of God in Christ and through the Spirit will we comprehend.

Today, I respectfully submit my intentions to resign my membership as an “evangelical.” It has been a decision long in the making, but I can no longer in good conscience consider myself a member. It isn’t that I hate evangelicalism. It isn’t that I reject everything that evangelicalism has stood for. I can say that I uphold many of the values that evangelicalism has been purported to hold to. It’s just that I can no longer be a part of the direction evangelicalism is going.

You see, for me, my understanding about being an evangelical was that it was a commitment to live my life according to the will of God made known in Jesus and through the Spirit that is expressed in and through the Scriptures. I hear in God’s Word a call to be distinct from the surrounding culture while embracing a love for the people. In the Gospel, I hear a call to action that consider no person or people my enemy, but that we are engaging in a spiritual battle against the deeper, pervasive powers of a spiritual nature. In so doing, I am a part of a long, nearly two millenia history of a Christians confession that Jesus is Lord.

I had hoped my heart could continue to be joined with you in the continuing mission, but I came to the realization that it can’t. You see, I see evangelical as a term of social conflict now. You fear liberals and progressives, you disdain them as people, you want to keep them out of power. Your enemies are people and earthly powers. That is why you have inaugurated all too earthly man, one whose history exhibits all the characteristics of living by the flesh, as the political hero in support of your movement.

And I can get why. Progressives and liberals have engaged in and celebrated many practices that we would consider inconsistent with what we trust to be God’s will for His people. You were scared as the family-friendly society you were accustomed to was being, or at least that you wanted to live in, has been undone with every election of a Democrat and multiple court cases.

But here is the difference between you and me. People who don’t live like me, who don’t believe as me are not my enemy. Sure, they have ideas that I disagree with that I think would have negative, unintended consequences if they become widespread. But guess what? I share the same sentiments about much of your evangelical politics. I don’t think you really understand. You see, I know you are sincere in believing in Jesus Christ, but I don’t think you have yet to understand what it really means to follow Jesus. You talk about it, but what I see is someone who wants to maintain the way things used to be and you use Scripture to justify that. You aren’t really following Jesus when you do that, but you are following the America of the past. That’s why you support making America great again; that’s why you thought someone a qualified leader because he supposedly had great business sense all while news of sexual trangressions that matched if not exceeded the man you sought to impeach a couple decades back. Your politics weren’t about Jesus; it was about America, an America you wanted to return, an America you wanted to keep, an America you wanted to create.

Allow me to diagnose the problem: you thought you understand and knew what Jesus wanted because you read the Bible and treated it with veneration as the infallible Word of God. But even the devil knew and quoted Scripture as he tempted Jesus to use and seek power for Himself. That wily old serpent was aware of God’s command to not eat of the tree as he mislead Eve. And even Peter talks about how people distort the Scriptures along with the writings of Paul. You see, knowing and using the Scriptures makes you no more a follower of Jesus than Satan himself.

The Pharisees searched the Scriptures, but they were searching for something other than God: they were searching something for themselves, eternal life. They wanted a blessed life because of the threatening Roman power that always loomed on their horizon. That is why that didn’t come to Jesus: they were looking for the wrong thing. And what is it that Jesus later said of these same people? As they insisted they were truly God’s people because they were children of Abraham, Jesus said, “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do what your father’s desires.”

Now you might say: “But we have faith in Jesus.” Of course, didn’t James say even the demons believe, and yet shudder? But “God gave His only Son so that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” Read John 2.23-24: did Jesus open Himself up to everyone who thought they believed in him? Coming to Jesus because you read the Bible seeking eternal life makes you more like the Pharisees than you even know.

You see, that John 3.16 you love to quote isn’t saying “Come to Jesus to find eternal life.” It is about the why of God’s purposes and His sending of Christ, not human motivations. God’s purposes and why God does what He does, so that by coming to Jesus we may enjoy eternal life with Him. But you have made it about your own purposes and thus have treated faith as a condition of your security rather than the means by which God transforms us from our fleshly existence into a life being formed by the Spirit. By faith, God leads us to eternal life, that God and people may be reunited in fellowship and love. But many of you evangelicals have only sought the end product.

You will no doubt quote Paul, saying “we are justified by faith.” Indeed, we are. That is the point. God has brought us on a whole new trajectory of life when we place our trust in Him through Jesus, so what is not true of us will become true. But it is Paul who says “to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory, honor, and immortality, he will give eternal life.” But you have made faith the condition of your obtaining eternal life, rather than the means by which God brings you into eternal life as you seek after God. In the end, your faith is about what you can possess as a result of your own actions. No wonder, then, that you think you can possess a nation by your own political actions.

So as a physician occasionally has the unfortunate job of making a diagnosis of terminal illness, I feel I have to do the same. Many who considered themselves as representatives of evangelicalism have misunderstood the Scriptures, have misunderstood Paul, have used the Scriptures for their own purposes. And what is the diagnosis: evangelicalism is acting more like they are the people of the devil rather than the people of God.

But as I said, my enemy is not other people; you are not my enemies evangelicals. In fact, there is still much I can say that I share with you, even if there is much I must say no to. Rather my enemies are the deeper, more pervasive powers that bind people. I beg you, leave this behind because you do not realize what is happening.

Allow me to demonstrate: do you not see that as the serpent deceived and ultimately harmed Eve, many of you have deceived women? Many seek to keep them under the curse of being ruled by the male all the while many of them have cried out to the sexual exploitation and abuse they have undergone including in the churches. You might think yourself “Yeah. It is unfortunate. But it happens everywhere.” Indeed! You would be absolutely correct. How wise you are! So, doesn’t that mean the church is acting more like the rest of society; does that not mean you exemplify the deeds of the devil? It is for this reason that the Son of God was revealed to the world: to destroy the devil’s works. If you truly desire God’s will, such abuse would break your heart. And yet, you celebrate a man as your hero who has been accused of such abuse towards women. Lying about a sexual affair was worthy of your contempt, but sexual abuse doesn’t faze you?

Allow me to demonstrate yet again: do you not see that as the devil tempted Jesus to take power for himself, many of you have tempted the Body of Christ to the same? And as the devil offered to give the kingdoms of the world, have you not tempted the Body of Christ to take the nation back? As you use the Scriptures to honor your political hero, as you have repeatedly sought people to win back the nation so that they will inaugurate a vision of American society in accordance to the words of the Scripture, are you not doing the very same thing the devil did?

Do you see it now? The very Scriptures paint a picture of the devil that looks curiously like what I see.

So, I say this in our break up: It’s not me, it’s you. No doubt, like a jilted lover, you will try to convince yourself that I am really the problem, that I am really the faithless one. You might think I am like any of your former, now ‘exvangelical‘ lovers who jilted you, that there must have been another lover the whole time who turned them against you. But that isn’t it. It is just that you weren’t who I thought you were. I was in love with someone that you really weren’t. I thought as your words matched the feelings of my heart, we were one. While you had me and all the others who later left you, you cheated on us with someone who never cared for you but seduced you as you seduced us. But my heart and faith remains the same, but it is you that I can no longer trust.  Your words have masked what is really there, and I would much rather go find someone who I can genuinely love. So really, it’s not me, it’s you.

You can mail my stuff to my address: Wesleyan orthodoxy. I know that some of you have never trekked to that part of town. I know others who have never been there though you might think you have been. And that there are some who have been there, but you just haven’t realized it. But there are plenty of us who would be glad to point you out in the right direction and remind you where it is if you decide to break your current love-obsession off and try to be friends. I just hope that happens before you get really hurt.

Owen