Wesleyan Quotes

I've always had a theory that some of us are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies

Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.

A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.

Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. “Miss O’Connor,” he said, “why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” I said. He looked crushed. “Well, Miss O’Connor,” he said, “what is the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that’s what’s happening to the teaching of literature.

I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor.

I listen to the gunfire we cannot hear, and begin this journey with the light of knowing the root of my own furious love.

Do not make me into that man of hatred for whom I feel only hatred.

I want to be bruised by God. I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out. I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed. I want to be entered and picked clean.

Blessed are those who break off from separateness theirs is wild heaven.

He is being nibbled to death by ducks. --More Later, Less the Same

And if all I know how to do is speak, it is for you that I shall speak. My lips shall speak for miseries that have no mouth, my voice shall be the liberty of those who languish in the dungeon of despair… And above all my body as well as my soul, beware of folding your arms in the sterile attitude of spectator, for life is not a spectacle, for a sea of pain is not a proscenium.

They didn't have much trouble teaching the ape to write poems: first they strapped him into a chair, then tied the pencil around his hand (the paper had already been nailed down). Then Dr. Bluespire leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear: 'You look like a god sitting there. Why don't you try writing something?

we can speculate on the relay of our common activity, make a circle round our errant roots. Dancing is what we make of falling. Music is what we make of music's absence, the real presence making music underneath. I'm exhausted so my soul is rested.

You used to be alive, now you’re almost mythic.

When a clock dies no one wakes.

Although upon doctrines of grace our views differ from those avowed by Arminian Methodists, we have usually found that on the great evangelical truths we are in full agreement, and we have been comforted by the belief that Wesleyans were solid upon the central doctrines.

Putting my hands on. What April couldn't fix Wasn't worth the time: Egg shell & dried placenta Light as memory. Patches of fur, feathers, & bits of skin. A nest Of small deaths among anemone. A canopy edged over, shadowplaying The struggle underneath As if it never happened

About the same time I came in contact with another Christian family. At their suggestion I attended the Wesleyan church every Sunday. For these days I also had their standing invitation to dinner. The church did not make a favourable impression on me. The sermons seemed to be uninspiring. The congregation did not strike me as being particularly religious. They were not an assembly of devout souls; they appeared rather to be wordly-minded people, going to church for recreation and in conformity to custom. Here, at times, I would involuntarily doze. I was ashamed, but some of my neighbours, who were in no better case, lightened the shame. I could not go on long like this, and soon gave up attending the service.

be they lawyers soldiers princesses prostitutes actors activists or acrobats on five continents in dozens of countries in the world the women are lying down for the men the men of many museums (in ‘At the musée de l’homme’)

With the stone question In the heads of Greek statues Who ask where their arms And legs and the tips of their noses Have gone.

Wesleyanism was at its most influential when it was a people movement that was reproducing like mad. It

That’s their philosophy,” said Greder, whose day job was associate dean of students at Illinois Wesleyan. “Dance with the ones who brought you.

Inside my skin, loving you, I am this space my body believes in. — Yuself Komunyakaa, from “Unnatural State of the Unicorn,” Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. (Wesleyan University Press 1993)

known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral: “Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason.

I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book] trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)

I write by the light of what is not revealed in what I express. — Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions, II. The Book of Yukel, III. Return to the Book], trans.by Rosmarie Waldrop (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever make sense.

Our lives are eschatologically stretched between the sneak preview of the new world being born among us in the church, and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. In the meantime, which is the only time the church has ever known, we live as those who know something about the fate of the world that the world does not yet know. And that makes us different. —Will Willimon, Conversion in the Wesleyan Tradition

A Blessing on the Poets Patient earth-digger, impatient fire-maker, Hungry word-taker and roving sound-lover, Sharer and saver, muser and acher, You who are open to hide or uncover, Time-keeper and –hater, wake-sleeper, sleep-waker; May language’s language, the silence that lies Under each word, move you over and over, Turning you, wondering, back to surprise.

Don’t sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live. ― Paul Celan, “Don’t sign your name,” Glottal Stop. Translated by Heather McHugh & Nikolai Popov. (Wesleyan; 1st edition September 30, 2000)

The men she met all seemed to say they were “several years out of Wesleyan.” Their beds were never made, or else made poorly, when she climbed into them. No one yet had the time or inclination to take care of themselves, and it was unclear when that would ever begin.

The year after that novel was published, I was invited to teach at Wesleyan. I congratulated myself on a completed plan on that first day of classes. I know some people condescend to me when I mention that I was once a waiter, but I will never regret it. Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.

I ponder these questions by taking seriously this ancient, ambiguous, and diverse Bible we have as well as honoring my humanity—my experiences, my reasoning, when and where I was born—and I try to get all these factors to talk to each other. That may ring a bell with some of you. I am echoing the so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral. We are always processing God and faith not from a high place, but from the vantage point of our inescapable humanity—our reason, experience, tradition, and scripture. (The Episcopal Three-Legged Stool is similar, but it combines reason and experience.)

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale as to be capable of them. The 'saved' thief experiences an ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but that does not alter the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he has conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man... Now though the state of the believers in the atonement may thus be the happier, it is most certainly not more desirable from the point of view of the community. The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. Whether Socrates got as much happiness out of life as Wesley is an unanswerable question; but a nation of Socrateses would be much safer and happier than a nation of Wesleys; and its individuals would be higher in the evolutionary scale. At all events it is in the Socratic man and not in the Wesleyan that our hope lies now. Consequently, even if it were mentally possible for all of us to believe in the Atonement, we should have to cry off it, as we evidently have a right to do. Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.'

I read at Wesleyan last week— “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” After the reading, I went to one of their classes to answer questions. There were several young teachers in there and one began by saying, “Miss O’Connor, why was the Misfit’s hat black?” I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked quite disappointed. Then he said, “Miss O’Connor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?” “He does not,” says I. He really looked hurt at that. Finally he said, “Well Miss O’Connor, what IS the significance of the Misfit’s hat?” "To cover his head," I said. He looked crushed then and left me alone." - Flannery O'Connor to Caroline Gordon

you have to wonder how a boy or the shape of a boy wound up here in this unstable field.

i know everyone i love who’s dead didn’t actually become the poem i wrote about them.

I believe in the violence of not knowing.

but all I see in the space between the words, / between drops of rain / is how we are both sad / in any language

In the updraft, the particulate glitz is beside itself.

Today could be described as a retired man humming tunelessly to himself.

We can also recite the failures of institutions and systems that are near and dear to us. The good news is that the past can be forgiven.

i’d lash myself to any new mast

Holiness is wholeness and health, and everything God requires of the person from the first stirrings of conviction to the last act of life is in the interest of that wholesomeness.

I wake to a simple longing, all I want of this ordinary hour, this ordinary earth that was long ago married to time: to hear as a sand crab hears the waves, loud as a second heart; to see as a green thing sees the sun, with the undividing attention of blind love. — Jane Hirshfield, from “Rain in May,” Of Gravity & Angels. (Wesleyan; 1 edition February 15, 1988)

We have said that the duende likes the edge of things, the wound, and that it is drawn to where forms fuse themselves in a longing greater than their visible expressions. — Federico García Lorca, from “Theory and Function of the Duende,” trans. J. L. Gilli, 1933, Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950, ed. Melissa Kwasny (Wesleyan University Press, 2004)

Purity is not an end in itself. Purity permits the personality to live in full expression of love to God and man. It is the power of a single-hearted devotion and must be kept intact by a daily fellowship with God.

For too long has everything divine been utilized, And all the heavenly powers, the kindly ones, thrown away, Consumed for kicks by thankless, Cunning men, who, when the exalted One works in their fields, think they Know the daylight and the Thunderer, And their telescope might see them all and Count and name all the stars in heaven; But the Father covers our eyes with holy Night so we might remain. He loves no wildness! Our expanding power will never force heaven.

10. The most important single characteristic of the biblical meaning of perfection is its positive nature. Perfection is not, principally, the absence of all that is less than perfect, but the presence of love with all the dynamic meaning of love.

In this sense, then, sanctification is primarily the process of redemption. It is process precisely because it is moral and personal and not simply legal. But in the process lie crisis points without which moral degenerates into a nonmoral naturalism.

At present, under the burden of canons and the burden of language’s deep complicity with countless atrocities, the very making of poems requires audacity. And if the audacity is well-intended, it requires a certain awkwardness as proof of its unrehearsed refusal to comply with silence.

Three in Translation]" for WCW I wish I understood the beauty in leaves falling. To whom are we beautiful as we go? I lie in the field still, absorbing the stars and silently throwing off their presence. Silently I breathe and die by turns. He was ripe and fell to the ground from a bough out where the wind is free of the branches

At the end of the small hours: life flat on its face, miscarried dreams and nowhere to put them, the river of life listless in its hopeless bed, not rising or falling, unsure of its flow, lamentably empty, the heavy impartial shadow of boredom creeping over the quality of all things, the air stagnant, unbroken by the brightness of a single bird.

It reminded me of how I’d felt applying to college. Night after night, I sat with my father in his study while he read aloud from Baron’s. He’d read the name of the college, the number of men and the number of women, and a description in guidebook prose; then he’d say, ‘How does that sound?’ and I’d think, Sounds just like the last one. It took me a few nights to realize that my father was reading only the colleges that I had some chance of getting into – not Brown but Bowling Green; not Wesleyan but Ohio Wesleyan; not Williams or Smith, but William Smith. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my grades and test scores over the years were anything more than individual humiliations; I hadn’t realized that one day all of them would add up and count against me.

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, explains, “Racism is a structure, not an event.”13 American women’s struggle for suffrage illustrates how institutional power transforms prejudice and discrimination into structures of oppression. Everyone has prejudice and discriminates, but structures of oppression go well beyond individuals. While women could be prejudiced and discriminate against men in individual interactions, women as a group could not deny men their civil rights. But men as a group could and did deny women their civil rights. Men could do so because they controlled all the institutions. Therefore, the only way women could gain suffrage was for men to grant it to them; women could not grant suffrage to themselves.

What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as “scumble,” “pinky,” or “extrapolate?” What if I maneuvered conversation in the hope that others would pronounce these words? Perhaps the excitement would come from the way the other person touched them lightly and carelessly with his tongue. What if “of” were such a hot button? “Scumble of bushes.” What if there were a hidden pleasure in calling one thing by another’s name?

We believe evangelism is more relational than confrontational, more communal than solitary, and is more a beginning point than an end. Evangelism involves not only sharing our faith with others, but also welcoming them into a community and enabling them to begin to grow in their faith. Above all evangelism is about love: God’s love for us in Jesus, our love for our neighbor, and the invitation to receive and grow in a new life that is characterized by love.

LOVE takes the Harshness out of Holiness. Love takes the Incredibility out of Perfection. Love takes the Antinomianism out of Faith. Love takes the Moralism out of Obedience. Love takes the Gnosticism out of Cleansing. Love takes the Abstraction out of Truth. Love puts the Personal into Truth. Love puts the Ethical into Holiness. Love puts Process into Life. Love puts Urgency into Crisis. Love puts Seriousness into Sin. Love puts Fellowship into Perfection. —M. B. W.

J’habite une blessure sacrée j’habite des ancêtres imaginaires j’habite un vouloir obscur j’habite un long silence j’habite une soif irrémédiable j’habite un voyage de mille ans j’habite une guerre de trois cent ans j’habite un culte désaffecté entre bulbe et caïeu j’habite l’espace inexploité j’habite du basalte non une coulée mais de la lave le mascaret qui remonte la valleuse à toute allure et brûle toutes les mosquées je m’accommode de mon mieux de cet avatar d’une version du paradis absurdement ratée -c’est bien pire qu’un enfer- j’habite de temps en temps une de mes plaies chaque minute je change d’appartement et toute paix m’effraie tourbillon de feu ascidie comme nulle autre pour poussières de mondes égarés ayant crachés volcan mes entrailles d’eau vive je reste avec mes pains de mots et mes minerais secrets j’habite donc une vaste pensée mais le plus souvent je préfère me confiner dans la plus petite de mes idées

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By June the revival began to wane. But Roberts’s vision had been realized. An estimated 100,000 confessed Christ. The Congregationalists added 26,500 members. Another 24,000 Welsh joined the Calvinist Methodist Church. About 4,000 opted for the Wesleyan Church. The remainder were split between the Anglicans and several Baptist groups.13 The effect on Welsh society was undeniable. Output from the coal mines famously slowed because the horses wouldn’t move. Miners converted in the revival no longer kicked or swore at the horses, so the horses didn’t know what to do.14 Judges closed their courtrooms with nothing to judge. Christians wielded the revival as apologetic against the growing number of skeptics who derided religion. Stead argued: The most thoroughgoing materialist who resolutely and forever rejects as inconceivable the existence of the soul in man, and to whom “the universe is but the infinite empty eye-socket of a dead God,” could not fail to be impressed by the pathetic sincerity of these men; nor, if he were just, could he refuse to recognize that out of their faith in the creed which he has rejected they have drawn, and are drawing, a motive power that makes for righteousness, and not only for righteousness, but for the joy of living, that he would be powerless to give them.15

The car ploughed uphill through the long squalid straggle of Tevershall, the blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal-dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. The stacks of soap in the grocers’ shops, the rhubarb and lemons in the green-grocers’! the awful hats in the milliners’! all went by ugly, ugly, ugly, followed by the plaster-and-gilt horror of the cinema with its wet picture announcements, “A Woman’s Love!”, and the new big Primitive chapel, primitive enough in its stark brick and big panes of greenish and raspberry glass in the windows. The Wesleyan chapel, higher up, was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs. The Congregational chapel, which thought itself superior, was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple, but not a very high one. Just beyond were the new school buildings, expensive pink brick, and graveled playground inside iron railings, all very imposing, and mixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison. Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson, just finishing the la-me-do-la exercises and beginning a “sweet children’s song.” Anything more unlike song, spontaneous song, would be impossible to imagine: a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune. It was not like savages: savages have subtle rhythms. It was not like animals: animals mean something when they yell. It was like nothing on earth, and it was called singing... What could possibly become of such a people, a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails, and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will power remained?

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, professor of American studies and anthropology at Wesleyan University, explains, “Racism is a structure, not an event.”13

Humans do not die simply because of Adam’s sin, but because of Adam’s and their own sin.

But it does mean that if you are, say, a Lutheran, you must not cut yourself off from what is right and good in the Wesleyan, Reformed, charismatic, Anabaptist, and other lines. (And of course, I could have rephrased that sentence in any combination.)

I had feigned shock when my acceptance to Wesleyan came in the mail. I wasn’t surprised, but I felt the need to pretend I was, and I didn’t understand why. It would be years before I realized that girls weren’t supposed to own their ambition, just lease it from time to time when it didn’t offend anyone else.

Clark, forty-five, was a Wesleyan graduate (possibly the only graduate from the famously liberal school to work for Trump or even vote for him) and a close associate of Bill Stepien’s. He had become a kind of self-appointed sheriff, trying to keep the grifters, kooks, and obvious self-dealers out of Trumptown—and away from the campaign’s money.

Then, when I was eighteen, the admissions officers at Columbia, Wesleyan, and Brown decided I should go to the University of Chicago. I love my alma mater, and it has changed a lot for the better since I was there, but back then it wasn’t exactly the sort of get-in-touch-with-your-feelings place that would help thaw my emotional ice age. My favorite saying about Chicago is this one: It’s a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students Saint Thomas Aquinas. The students there still wear T-shirts that read, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?” And so into this heady world I traipsed and…shocker, I fit right in.

It is the Wesleyan tradition—that is, the interpretation of Protestant Christian faith derived primarily from the teachings of John Wesley (1703-91)—that will provide our lens for reading and telling the Story of God.

The Wesleyan tradition, following Wesley not as a guru but as a guide, has then placed great emphasis upon the experience of the Holy Spirit.

Third, holiness is expansive. By this, I mean that the Wesleyan tradition, with love for God and others burning at its center, entails an acceptance of, and openness toward, those of differing traditions within the Christian faith.

the Wesleyan tradition has been characterized by a particular persuasion that such conscious awareness of God’s presence in human life is constantly to be expected and can actually be experienced.

The Rise of Theological Liberalism and the Decline of American Methodism,

Wesleyan denominations have tended to view the Bible not as an inerrant science or history text, but as a witness to the blessings of saving relation to God through Christ, “inerrantly revealing the will of God concerning us in all things necessary to our salvation.

Though the Hindu, Buddhist, or Jew, for example, will hardly interpret and describe his or her religious experience in recognizably Christian terms, a Wesleyan estimation would be that such people truly do (or at least may) experience and respond to God according to their capacities and understanding, or “light.” Wesley, in fact, typified such an awareness of God as the “faith of a servant,” while the relation to God through Jesus Christ is the “faith of a son” (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:1 -7). This understanding of prevenient grace would not give an automatic stamp of approval to every claim to spiritual experience, for we should all be aware of the human capacity for self-deception, error, and distortion—it happens, after all, among Christians too.

So also a Wesleyan estimation of other religions (as potential examples of the “faith of a servant”), while it need not belittle their adherents’ experiences of the divine, also will “lift up Christ” as the One through whom all convictions, practices, and experiences are to be sifted and judged (the

In the 1960s and 1970s, a professor of sociology at Wesleyan named Hubert O’Gorman found that those who advocated for segregation were the most likely to believe that those around them also supported segregation. On the other hand, those advocating change from the status quo were much more likely to think that they were alone, even though they were not. “The closer whites came to endorsing the value of strict racial segregation,” O’Gorman observed, “the more apt they were to assume that the majority of whites in their areas agreed with them.”53 By misreading others and keeping quiet about their true views, people thus damaged their own integrity and the greater cause they privately hoped would advance.54

Sin will beg to be tolerated, ask to be accepted and then demand to be celebrated.

Other people subjected to the early drafts were Tony Sheeder; Dr. Steve Horst of Wesleyan University, who made extensive and very lucid comments on everything having to do with brains and computers (and who suddenly came down with a virus about one hour after reading it); and my brother-in-law,

Among the more important were the British-based Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS), which was prominent in Sierra Leone; the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, which had bases and schools along the west African coastal region; and the London Missionary Society (LMS), which initially worked mainly in southern Africa. Protestant missions also came from France, Germany, Holland and the United States. French Catholic missions followed later in the century.

That view came to be embodied in a highly influential 1950 report by a special committee of the American Political Science Association, titled “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System.” The commission, chaired by political scientist E. E. Schattschneider of Wesleyan University, argued that the parties should sharpen their ideological appeals, better highlight their differences, nationalize their internal infrastructure, and work to make their core voters more energized and engaged. Some critics could see the risks of such an approach, and they focused precisely on the threat it posed to the capacity of our system to engender cohesion. Political scientist James Q. Wilson warned in 1962 that such reforms would “mean that political conflict will be intensified, social cleavages will be exaggerated, party leaders will tend to be men skilled in the rhetorical arts, and the parties’ ability to produce agreement by trading issue free resources will be reduced.” In retrospect, he was prophetic.

A conversation about grace in Wesleyan terms entails at least four different elements: the grace revealed in Jesus Christ, the free and unbounded character of God’s grace, grace in both creation and redemption, and the implications for living in and through grace.

Some historians have suggested that the Wesleyan revival saved England from a bloody revolution like the one France would shortly experience.

the northern part of the city, where a women’s college stood upon a hill, its windows dark. Claimed to be the first in the world to grant a degree to a woman, the future Wesleyan College had its roots in Ellen’s father’s work, too, in a female seminary he had helped found. At the school’s first baccalaureate address, its president—a preacher well known to Ellen’s enslaving family—was exultant as he exhorted, “Woman can do more! It is her province, her right, her duty.… “Come forth and live!” he urged. “Let your understandings swell out to the fullness of their native dimensions, and walk abroad majestic in thought.

For Wesley, there was no such thing as faith focused on personal piety; it was a contradiction in terms. Solitary religion disconnected from works of mercy and justice was simply not a possibility for Wesleyans.

Wesley and most of his descendants developed a doctrine of Scripture that focused on its role in transforming the believer’s inner being as the ground for reordering behavior. Fundamentalism, on the other hand, developed a doctrine of Scripture that tended to focus on reordering behavior in obedience to a body of propositional truths.

At the risk of being simplistic, a railway metaphor comes to mind. John Wesley's marriage was a train wreck (Wesleyan historian, Henry Rack called it a 'disaster' and 'catastrophe'); [George] Whitefield's was a freight train (satisfactory but functional); and [John] Newton's was a scenic passenger train (enjoyable and relational).

from a Wesleyan perspective, we can easily see how the imagination is one of the ways the Holy Spirit works preveniently in our lives—before we’re even aware of God’s presence.

Agape has suffered almost irreparable damage by translating it “love,” without the catharsis of careful scholarship.

Christian love creates an atmosphere in which all the creative conflicts may not only exist but also be matured and fully utilized without tearing apart the fabric of Christian unity.

Love is the gospel message. Christian love, revealed by God in Christ, is the correction of man’s limited, selfish, selective, perverted love. It stands against any human concept of love projected into a theory of God’s nature and His way with man. It is precisely this unlimited, impartial, indestructible love that needed to be “revealed” because the best in human love has been limited. The very nature of sin is love’s perversion, which makes the self the object of its own dedication.

Could the dogma of particular election as understood by some theological traditions be the projection of faulty human love into the very nature of God? The gospel was not born in human philosophy but in God’s heart revealed in Christ. This Wesley declared.

Happiness is not an emotional titillation but a harmony of the whole of the self.

The New Testament writer’s use of “death” to signify separation from God was well understood by the Jews, as was “life” by contrast.

and no race has a monopoly on beauty, on intelligence, on strength

Be particularly careful in speaking of yourself: You may not, indeed, deny the work of God; but speak of it, when you are called thereto, in the most inoffensive manner possible. Avoid all magnificent, pompous words; indeed, you need give it no general name; neither perfection, sanctification, the second blessing, nor the having attained. Rather speak of the particulars which God has wrought for you. You may say, “At such a time I felt a change which I am not able to express; and since that time, I have not felt pride, or self-will, or anger, or unbelief; nor anything but a fullness of love to God and to all mankind.” And answer any other plain question that is asked with modesty and simplicity. And if any of you should at any time fall from what you now are, if you should again feel pride or unbelief, or any temper from which you are now delivered; do not deny, do not hide, do not disguise it at all, at the peril of your soul. At all events go to one in whom you can confide, and speak just what you feel. God will enable him to speak a word in season, which shall be health to your soul. (Works, XI, 434-35, italics mine)

The second problem has to do with the way men appropriate grace. A question sharpens the issue. Does faith precede or follow repentance? Is obedience necessary, and why? These simply open the door to many more questions like them. In Scripture it is impossible to isolate such words as faith and love so that they could be said to stand in chronological order to each other. There is an element of repentance in faith that cannot be deleted. Faith is meaningless apart from enough awareness of sin and hatred of it to make believing decisive. Faith must always have enough self-awareness to reject one thing, enough to accept another. Biblical repentance is shot through with faith and obedience. In Scripture, faith is never divorced from the total personality. It must be supported by everything the man is.

Fear closes the mind and the heart and dries up the source of love.

The point Wesley was making as he discussed law and faith puts his whole theology into focus. Faith, then, was originally designed of God to reestablish the law of love…. It is the grand means of restoring that holy love where in man was originally created. It follows that altho faith is of no value in itself … yet as it leads to that end, the establishing anew the law unspeakable blessing to man, and of unspeakable value before God. (Ibid., 464)

3. Perfectionism may manifest itself in moralism. External conformity to law is of prior importance. Every human act is regulated by law. The law becomes so complex and intricate that dress styles and colors for both men and women, recreational possibilities, and every minutia of personal and corporate life are carefully proscribed. Holiness is measured by this conformity. That a very unpleasant and harsh spirit may accompany this conformity is no argument against it. In fact, it is said, harshness is needed to maintain it and is finally considered to be a sign and assurance of perfection and sanctity.