This is a systematic theology for the clergy and alert laypersons of the many Wesleyan-Holiness denominations and parachurch groups and for United Methodism itself--as well as others who wish to know or need to know what the shape of Wesleayn-Holiness theology is. The views are supported basically from Scripture, with corroborative support from John Wesley and the Holiness Movement--and from the entire remembered past of the Church. It prefers John Wesley (a father of the church birthed later on) to the Holiness Movement on many issues, as on the witness of the Spirit. It prefers the Holiness Movement to Mr. Wesley on two important matters: entire sanctification as instantaneous only and not also gradual (although sanctification as such is gradual); and on entire sanctification’s being effected by Christ’s baptism with the Holy Spirit.
A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle.
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A fine reference and advanced primer in theology,
By Roger Baker "Methodist Clergy & MS patient" (Burke, Virginia (USA)) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology (Hardcover)
If you're a committed Arminian/Wesleyan/Holiness type, this is a great shelf reference or a good bedside read. It is readable (not easy in a theology text) and very practical. Grider's treatment of issues is purely from the Wesleyan/Holiness end of the theological spectrum. If you're a Presbyterian or Baptist, get an R.C. Sproul volume instead.
I like the fact that the nuts and bolts are treated in reasonable simplicity while including detail, without getting too bogged down in the arcana typical in an academic work. You can read this book. The footnotes are quite good (again, this is not an academic text for MDiv/DMin students) and surprising in their content and variety. This was one of the best gifts I have received as a preacher. I recommend it to any Arminian as a great reference, laity training tool, or as a desk reference for pastors/preachers of other Christian traditions.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wesleyan Holiness Theology,
This review is from: A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology (Hardcover)
Two of the finest theologians in the Church of the Nazarene published works which distill a lifetime of reading and thinking and teaching, giving us slightly different versions of the "scriptural holiness" espoused by the denomination which has nurtured them. I read J. Kenneth Grider's recently-released A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, c. 1994) and decided to re-read it while re-reading H. Ray Dunning's Grace, Faith & Holiness: A Wesleyan Systematic Theology (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, c. 1988), which I'd read shortly after its publication. By moving from one to the other, comparing their presentation of different subjects, I was able to make some comparisons--as well as learn from both of them! By and large, the two men have much in common. Were I so inclined, I could simply show how they jointly support the central dogmas of the Christian faith. They both believe in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They both assert Jesus was God's Son, fully God and fully man, who was crucified and rose again. However, there are some important differences between the two, so I'll focus on a few of them.
First of all, on a simple stylistic level, I find Grider's work the more readable of the two, even though it's more clearly based on his class lectures and lacks some of the tightly-reasoned discussions and scholarly quotations which mark the Dunning treatise. Grider has a sense of literary style, uses illustrations, cites biblical texts, and presents his material more simply than Dunning, who is admittedly more thorough, more analytical, more carefully organized, persistently dialoguing with assorted theologians of his generation. Consequently, Dunning's language often grows ponderous and overly-abstract, making it more accessible to professors than students of theology. Grider, furthermore, seems more attuned to the methodology and theology of the Early Church than Dunning, who more diligently explores the works of John Wesley and contemporary thinkers such as Paul Tillich. Grider, for example, looks to St Athanasius for guidance, unabashed by his antiquity, whereas Dunning tends to treat him as an admirable architect of an antiquated culture. Grider tends to find Augustine's insights as nourishing today as when first written, whereas Dunning treats him more as an interesting reflection of his era--as, for example, when he responded as he did (in The City of God) to Rome's collapse. Dunning seems con¬cerned to root himself in the Enlightenment's worldview, staying attuned to "modernity." Grider, more like Tom Oden, who writes a complimentary foreword for him, espouses a "pre-modern" approach which may well be better suited to the "post-modern" world we now, perhaps, inhabit. The differences between the two men is further evident their modus operandi. Grider's methodology, which he labels "biblical realism," proposes that we can know truth about God as Reality; he thus aligns itself with the realist tradition in philosophy. By contrast, Dunning's "relational model of ontology" (GFH, p. 14) seems (to me) best described as a "relational existentialism" which is rooted in a Kantian idealism. "By biblical realism," Grider says, "is meant a perspective, supported surely by Scripture, in which we do not deny physicality as largely unreal but instead celebrate it as constituting even a residency of grace. This view owns the world as God's creation and affirms it as the milieu in which God's grace is mediated to us" (WHT, p. 42). So "All creation, including our bodily nature, is to be celebrated" (ibid.). We're real persons, living in a real world, and we can know it as our thoughts are true as they correspond with reality. Identifying himself as a "realist," Grider embraces an ancient stance, shared by theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, which insists we discover truth in objective Reality--we don't devise it in our own minds. This allows Grider to consider creation as knowable and worthy of our attention and respect. While he would disavow much that flies the flag of "natural theology," he contends that "the Christian doctrine of redemption is as broad as the Christian doctrine of creation. It means that the world itself is Christic, that it is sacramental, that we are to view it eucharistically. It means that in the thingliness of things there is a residency of grace" (WHT, p. 44). In concert with scores of "orthodox" theologians, Grider's biblical realism enables him, for example, to "look to a Christ who really was virgin born and who really was raised from the dead" (WHT, p. 56). The world--and human history--is real and we can really know it. Scripture tells us about actual historical events and persons, realit¬ies which exist in their own right, not symbols of some transcendent ideal or mystical truth. Dunning, conversely, repeatedly reflects (to a degree, in my judgment) the implicit epistemological agnosticism of Kant and his successors who contend we cannot know truth about any ontological reality, arguing we develop (in relationships) adequate "models" of truth which enable us to deal with reality. Pre-modern views, holding that ontologically real persons indwell and actually know truths about an objectively real world, Dunning apparently finds untenable. In apparent agreement he quotes W.T. Jones' declaration that modern philosophers have discarded the notion of a real "self" negotiating a "real" world: "'Self and object are not distinct, unchanging entities that face each other across a metaphysical and epistemological chasm; self and object are structures that arise within experience. There is not object without self, and there is no self without object'" (GFH, pp. 14-15). For Dunning, then, truth apparently becomes true for us as it is actualized in our own ex¬perience, as it enables us to make sense of our experience. One cannot know, as realists contend, durable truth about independent, enduring realities, whether they be God, nature, or man. Rather, we carve out truth for ourselves as we live in "relationships" with various "others" which are, it seems to me, no more objectively real than ourselves. So the ultimate authority for things theological is the testimonium internum Spiritus sanctu--the internal witness of the Holy Spirit--or the subjectivity which determines truth for existential thinkers. From Martin Luther and John Calvin to H. Orton Wiley and Paul Tillich, Dunning insists, Protestants (shunning the authority of Church or the reasoned consensus of councils and creeds) have relied on this inner witness, individually apprehended, to establish truth. As one would expect, Grider's "realism" leads him to appreciate nature more than Dunning, who joins those existential thinkers whose focus on the inner self allows little concern for the natural world. Discussing "the Christian doctrine of creation," Grider assembles poetic biblical texts which declare the glory of God stands revealed in the marvels of creation; he then grants some credibility to the cosmological and teleological arguments for God's existence as long as we acknowledge that nature reveals little about His nature. Dunning deals not with creation itself but with "God the Creator." The creation accounts in the Bible are less concerned, he says, with creation in se than with directing our minds to the One God, the Creator who made, ex nihilo, a good world. God freely created all things and is not limited by His creation, so though we can formulate some creation-rooted analogies to think of Him, there's no way to discover, in nature itself, any "purpose of God in creation" (GFH, p. 247). Indeed, he asserts, "from the biblical perspective, nature was never a source of knowledge of the character of God, although certain expressions of nature have validly served as illustrations of God's power and wisdom" (GFH, pp. 55-56). Unlike realists, who hold there is a clear correspon¬dence between our ideas and the realities they grasp, Dunning thinks we don't really "know" truth about Reality--instead, "one either is or is not in essential relation to the Truth" (GF&H, p. 141). We don't understand truth about Reality; we become aware of Truth as we indwell relationships. Thanks to the power of prevenient grace, operating in what remains of the imago dei in us, Dunning declares "one's experience of the world raises the question of God because one is already aware of an impinging presence" (GFH, p. 163). We are, he argues, in relationship with God, and we have a certain intimations of Him, just as we are in relationships with and thus aware of friends in our presence. To this degree, Dunning allows for a "general revelation" of God in human experience. Though creation in itself, Grider says, tells us little about God's nature, Sc¬ripture rationally reveals Him. True to their tradition as Nazarene scholars, both theologians take seriously the plenary inspiration of Scripture, embracing the "dynamic" theory of inspiration espoused by most Wesleyans. They distance themselves from the "dictation" or "verbal" inspiration stance of those who espouse "inerrancy" as an article of faith. "God only," says Grider, "and not Scripture, is absolutely authoritative. Yet, as a written-down revelation of what the absolutely authoritative God has done and offers to do, and of what God's will is, Scripture is the primary written authority" (W¬HT, p. 84). As a "biblical realist," of course, Grider contends--if I interpret him rightly--that words rightly refer to realities, that knowing the real meaning of words enables one to know the essence of their referents. Here, of course, Grider's realism enables him to simply assume there's a real world which we can know, taking it for granted that we can politely brick up Kant's epistemological... Read more ›
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Theological Work,
This review is from: A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology (Hardcover)
Sound theology presented in a scholarly, yet easy to understand writing method.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
