Whenever Christians articulate, inculcate, reformulate, or defend primary theological convictions, they operate (implicitly or explicitly) with assumptions about where one can obtain reliable input regarding these issues and how one should draw upon this input to insure truly Christian convictions. That is, they operate with assumptions about the manner of revelation and the criteria of doctrinal decisions. This chapter will assess Wesley's assumptions about these "meta-theological" issues.

An initial caveat is in order. I have chosen to discuss these issues prior to consideration of Wesley's theological worldview only because it provides a helpful context for understanding some of his doctrinal decisions. I am not meaning to imply that Wesley developed explicit stances on these issues prior to engaging in doctrinal reflection. He was not subject to the "paralysis of analysis" that plagues modern theologians, leaving them hesitant to engage in actual doctrinal reflection until they have solved all methodological puzzles. Indeed, Wesley seldom provided extended articulations of his methodological assumptions. He postulated them in passing, or exemplified them in the process of actual theological activity. I will be gathering these scattered insights, while watching for any developments or tensions.

The Fount of Knowledge—God's Gracious Self-Revelation

One set of meta-theological assumptions concerns the sources of theological knowledge. How and where can we have access to knowledge about God and God's will for us? The best way to approach Wesley's answer to this question is in light of his general epistemological commitments.

Excursus: Wesley's Epistemology

Discussions of epistemology, which inquires into the sources of human knowledge, had divided into two major camps in the Western intellectual traditions by Wesley's time. The rationalist camp (hailing back to Plato) stressed the role of reason in providing the most important knowledge, particularly through innate ideas—ideas resident in our minds prior to any experience. By contrast, empiricists (championing Aristotle) denied that there were innate ideas, arguing that experience was the source of all foundational human knowledge. Where did Wesley fit in this debate?

The issue of Wesley's epistemological commitments has attracted considerable scholarly interest recently. What has become clear through this study is that Wesley self-consciously sided with the empiricist denial of innate ideas. He frequently quoted the slogan nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit prius in sensu, "nothing is in the mind that is not first in the senses". He embraced the Aristotelian logical tradition at Oxford. He commented favorably on John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding, and he appended an abridgement of Peter Browne's The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding to his compendium of natural philosophy.

This is not to say that Wesley agreed totally with (then current) Lockean empiricism. He dissented from this tradition in two significant ways. In the first place, Wesley was epistemologically more optimistic than Locke. He considered Locke much too prone to believe that our senses could mislead us, or that the abstractions which our minds form based on our experience might not correspond to the way things really are.

Wesley's second divergence from contemporary empiricists dealt specifically with the issue of knowledge of God. Most contemporary empiricists assumed that knowledge of God was available only by inference from our experience of the world or by assent to the external testimony of Scripture. While Wesley allowed a role for such indirect knowledge of God, he desired more direct knowledge as well. Yet, since he agreed with empiricists that direct knowledge must come through the senses, he postulated (in conscious contrast with Locke and Browne) that God provided humans with spiritual senses to sense spiritual realities, just as our physical senses sense physical realities.

Where could Wesley have found such a notion of spiritual senses? One possible source was his reading of John Norris, who espoused a form of Malebranchean Platonism that included an important role for spiritual senses as the means of our perception of God. Another likely source was his study of early Eastern Christian writers. In particular, this theme was common in the Macarian Homilies. The theme can also be found in Western spiritualist, Pietist, and Puritan writers.

Whatever its source, Wesley called upon this notion of spiritual senses in two distinct contexts. Sometimes he was primarily concerned to explain how Christians could have an assurance that they are accepted by God. At other times he further credited the spiritual senses with providing immediate perceptual access to such spiritual realities as the existence of our soul, angels, and the afterlife. It is the latter appeal that will be of most interest as we turn now to considering how Wesley's basic epistemological commitments found expression in his understanding of the nature of revelation.

The Gracious Character of All Revelation

There has been an ongoing debate in recent Wesley scholarship over whether Wesley believed that human beings could have knowledge of God apart from God's definitive revelation in Jesus Christ. This debate appears to result more from an inappropriate framing of the question than from ambiguities in Wesley. The debate has typically been framed in terms of whether Wesley affirmed a "natural revelation" or a "natural theology." Behind such designations is the assumption that any universal knowledge of God available through consideration of the world and human life would necessarily be "natural" knowledge rather than "gracious" knowledge.

It is not surprising that the question is frequently framed this way, because the polarization of nature and grace increasingly characterized Western theology, becoming definitive of much of Protestantism. Thus when Wesley is read in a Protestant paradigm (as is most common), he is forced toward one or the other of opposing alternatives: either he is assumed to affirm that humans can have some knowledge of God apart from grace, or he is read to deny the existence of any significant knowledge outside of definitive Christian revelation.

By contrast with later Western theology, early Greek theologians and the continuing Eastern Orthodox tradition have rejected such polarization. They make no absolute separation between general and Christian revelation, but they see both as based in God's grace, with God's revelation in Christ...