Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Deal With The Devil: Pragmatic Mission And Early American Methodism’S Complicity With Slavery, William Payne

The Asbury Journal

Early American Methodism inherited a staunch abolitionist position from John Wesley. Bishops Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke strongly opposed slavery. Under their leadership, the early minutes and disciplines included a series of rules that required preachers to free their slaves and ameliorate the effects of slavery. They also waged an ongoing “war” with the various state legislatures that allowed slavery. After a strong backlash threatened Methodism’s ability to minister to slaves, enter plantations, and work in the South, the church prioritized the evangelistic mandate over the cultural mandate. The compromise mitigated social hostility and allowed Methodism to become the largest …

The Rise Of The Phoenix: The Re-Emergence Of The Oral Roberts University Graduate School Of Theology In 1975, James Shelton, James A Hewett

Spiritus: ORU Journal of Theology

The re-emergence of the Graduate School of Theology after its closure in 1969 provides testimony to the bold vision of Oral Roberts of ecumenical higher education in the gifts and power of the Holy Spirit. Undeterred by the closure of the first Graduate School of Theology, Roberts’ launch of the second seminary in 1976 under James Buskirk showed a continued emphasis on educating and empowering the whole body of Christ.

(Special Section) The Hymn As Protest Song In England And Its Empire, 1819–1919, Oskar Cox Jensen

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Hymns played a role in envoicing the politics of protest in England long before their integration in the established Church – and do so to this day. Yet it was nineteenth-century radical movements that embraced the hymn as in many ways the ideal musical form. From the bloody field of Peterloo to the secularising South Place Society, from the mass meetings of Chartists to the top-down productions of the Fabian socialists, the century resounded with this increasingly familiar music.

Many writers laid claim to the rhetoric of the hymn to advance causes from abolitionism to solidarity with Poles exiled to …

Review Of Eighteenth-Century Women’S Writing And The Methodist Media Revolution, By Andrew O. Winckles, Rebecca Nesvet

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830

No abstract provided.

"Immortal Until His Work Is Done": Northern Methodists And The Klan In Reconstruction Alabama, Christopher T. Lough

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Although the congressional report from the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Hearings has featured prominently in the historiography of Reconstruction, the insight it offers into its witnesses’ religious experiences has gone largely unnoticed. Using the testimony of Arad Simon Lakin, a Northern Methodist preacher who ministered in Alabama following the Civil War, this article seeks to fill in the gaps. Lakin’s work and the violent resistance he encountered is understood as a microcosm of the Christian life in the Reconstruction South. Building on analyses of the Ku Klux Klan as the embodiment of apocalyptic rhetoric in Southern evangelicalism, I argue that …

Methodism As Context For Joseph Smith’S First Vision, John Wigger

BYU Studies Quarterly

When I started looking at early American Methodism thirty years ago, the first thing that struck me was how full of vibrant supernaturalism it was. Early American Methodists lived in a world where visions, prophetic dreams, and supernatural impressions were everywhere. God spoke to them directly. They talked about these things openly, without embarrassment. Supernaturalism was a part of everyday life and central to their connection to one another.

John Wesley’S Mission Of Spreading Scriptural Holiness: A Case Study In World Mission And Evangelism, Laurence W. Wood

The Asbury Journal

A manual of discipline, called The Large Minutes, was given to all Methodist preachers when they joined John Wesley’s annual conference, containing this explanation: “God’s design in raising up the people called ‘Methodists’” was “to spread scriptural holiness over the land.” This paper will trace a narrow slice of the larger developing story of how John Wesley arrived at his distinction between justifying faith and full sanctifying grace. It will also serve as a case study to show that the call to justification by faith and a subsequent experience of sanctification by faith became the theme of his evangelistic preaching. …

Methodism In An Orthodox Context: History, Theology, And (Sadly) Politics, Mark R. Elliott

The Asbury Journal

The history of Methodism and Eastern Orthodoxy goes back to the early days of Wesley and his interest in the teachings of the Greek Church Fathers. The relationship between Methodists and the Orthodox Church has gone through positive and negative periods, but the growth of the Soviet Union and the challenge of Communism placed new challenges on both groups. The emergence of the Russian Orthodox Church and its reaction to growing Protestant missions has led to new problems, although the ongoing hope is that commonalities in our theology will overcome some of the challenges of current political realities. This paper …

Paganism, Wesley, And The Means Of Grace, Joseph R. Dongell

The Asbury Journal

No abstract provided.

A Time-Line Narrative Of How The Idea Of Pentecostal Sanctification Developed In John Wesley And John Fletcher, Laurence W. Wood

The Asbury Journal

No abstract provided.

The Normative Use Of Pentecostal Sanctification In British And American Methodism, Laurence W. Wood

The Asbury Journal

No abstract provided.

Mr. Wesley, Since You Wanted To Help The Poor, Why Did You Ignore The English Poor Law Of Your Day?, George E. Hendricks, M. Elton Hendricks

The Asbury Journal

No abstract provided.

Imagining Methodism In Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, And The Borders Of The Self: Book Review, Robin Runia

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

I n her sensitive and thoughtful afterword, Misty Anderson rehearses the investment of literary criticism in "restaging the opposition between a religious past and a secular modernity" (236). She makes clear how the discipline of literary studies has largely refused to acknowledge its own ideology of secularization. Quoting Michael Kauffman, Anderson offers her audience the following call to action: "Anyone constructing a narrative of secularization (even if finally to refute it) needs to evaluate certain ideas, truth claims, or values that may seem more or less spiritual, more or less 'religious"' (236). Following her own thorough consideration of the relationship …

"A Classless Society?": The Pneumatology Of E. Stanley Jones In Conversation With Mortimer Arias' Theology Of The Kingdom Of God, Angel Santiago-Vendrell

The Asbury Journal

This lecture addresses the pneumatology of E. Stanley Jones in

conversation with Mortimer Arias' theology of the kingdom of God. Jones was an advocate of what is known today in Latin America as mission integral. Integral mission seeks to restore every dimension of human life by requiring from Christians to be completely involved in the historical moment by the concrete demonstration of the power of the gospel in everyday life. Later, this illlderstanding of mission was used in Bolivia to propagate the gospel illldera brutal right-wing military regime by Bishop Mortimer Allas. Therefore, the kingdom of God as used …

"If God ... See Fit To Call You Out": "Public" And "Private" In The Writings Of Methodist Women, 1760-1840, Joanna Cruickshank

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

In 1770, the renowned Methodist leader Mary Bosanquet (later Fletcher) published a letter of advice she had written to a young woman named Elizabeth Andrews. Amidst a flood of detailed advice about the life of faith, including recommendations about spiritual disciplines, reading matter, and marriage, Bosanquet urged her young friend:

Strive to be little and unknown; and remember that our Lord lived thirty years in private, and only three in publick, and that the word of God allows a woman, professing godliness, no adorning but that of a meek and quiet spirit. Strive, I say, to be little and unknown; …

Religion In The Age Of Enlightenment: Putting John Wesley In Context, Jeremy Gregory

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Wesley's long life ( 1703-91) spanned almost the whole of the eighteenth century, and any attempt to understand him undoubtedly needs to include some sense of the period in which he lived. There have, of course, been many attempts to evoke Wesley's context, whether broadly defined-as in the thousands of books and scholarly articles that have been written about the era in general, ranging from the economy, politics, and society to cultural, intellectual, and religious matters (and much else besides), or in the various studies that have more directly positioned Wesley, and early Methodism, within his, and its, time. Most …

Heart Religion In The British Enlightenment: Gender And Emotion In Early Methodism: Book Review, Dustin D. Stewart

Religion in the Age of Enlightenment

Problems of agency often materialize as problems of attribution. Early in her remarkable new study, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment, historian Phyllis Mack describes how eighteenthcentury Methodists are typically viewed as either "emotionally needy followers or ... a mob of hysterical worshippers run amok:' Such Methodists, Mack contends, "have rarely been viewed as thinkers and actors" in their own right (5). To make amends, Mack delves into the agency of the everyday. She discloses how lay Methodists and leaders, men and women alike, used various forms of writing as tools for the work of emotional self-fashioning. What made …