by,
Donald W. Dayton

I was elected promotional secretary of the Wesleyan Theological Society in 1975 and served in that office for eleven years. Fortunately, we have the help of John Merritt’s history of the first two decades of the WTS (WTJ, 21:1-2, 1986). His regular citing of my annual reports frees me to explore broader questions of interpretation.

As I have reflected on this task, I have wondered if a theological society goes through stages of development parallel to those of a human being. If there is any parallel, the second decade of the WTS would encompass late childhood, puberty, and adolescence. The metaphor may finally fail, but it strikes me that such an image might well characterize the themes of these years of the second decade. They were awkward years of struggle toward maturity—toward an independent identity in a larger arena of theology and scholarship.

Let me illustrate these dynamics with three themes, all of which are introduced in Merritt’s essay, but to which I would like to add additional details and nuance. I think that you will understand the first better if I indulge in a moment of persona! autobiography that illumines a dimension of the development of the WTS.

I was born into the Wesleyan Church, one of the wings of the holiness movement most influenced by "fundamentalism"—to the extent of officially embracing the doctrine of the "inerrancy of the Scriptures" that was the identity marker of the "neo-evangelical" movement during the founding years of the WTS. It is no accident that the original organizing committee of the WTS was dominated by Wesleyans. Unfortunately, for a period of years I accepted the fundamentalist logic (that Christian faith is unthinkable without this doctrine) and was prevented from embracing Christianity, let alone Wesleyanism, until I was at Yale Divinity School and there became able to develop an authentically authoritative but non-inerrantist doctrine of Scripture.

During my sojourn at Yale I was invited to a meeting of graduate students that came to be known as the "Rye Conference," even when in later years this meeting was held at Free Methodist headquarters in Winona Lake, Indiana. In its early years this meeting was somewhat secretively supported by sympathetic figures in Winona Lake who squeezed a little blood out of their budgetary turnips to enable these discussions. I will always honor these Free Methodist leaders for this creative project that was an extraordinary help to many of us struggling in graduate school. I will never forget one Rye paper by Frank Thompson of Greenville College, who wept as he agonized over the extent to which the early WTS commitments to the doctrine of inerrancy precluded his (and others!) participation in the theological society of his tradition. The members of the Rye Conference petitioned George Turner of Asbury Theological Seminary to carry to the next WTS meeting a request that this orientation be changed.

I, of course, was not present at the 1969 meeting in Marion. Indiana, and have never been sure whether the reports about this meeting (the tensions, tie votes, etc.) might be apocryphal. But the WTS articles of faith were modified sufficiently in the direction of a doctrine of "infallibility" that I and others took the changes as an invitation to join the Society in the following years. Without these changes I and many others would not be here today. When I reflect on this history I am astonished that I have had any role in the Society at al! and how close the Society came to a very different history.

A crucial compromise of that Marion meeting quoted the Random House Dictionary definition of "infallibility"—citing the source as "RHD." These cryptic initials raised many questions in the following years about the nature of this unidentified theological authority. It was not until the end of the seventies that the Society felt free to rid itself of this theological gaucherie, ostensibly for stylistic reasons, but more profoundly and courageously disassociating the Society and its theological tradition from fundamentalism. Melvin Dieter was the WTS president at the time and we debated the issue for some years before agreeing that the executive committee would not make a formal recommendation, but that I could make a motion from the floor. We were all astonished when the motion provoked only minor discussion and only two negative votes.

But it was a second issue—the debates about the Baptism of the Holy Spirit—that dominated the middle decade of my assignment. This war was started with a 1972 shot fired across the Atlantic from Britain by Nazarene pastor Herbert McGonigle. He could not be present, but sent his paper "Pneumatological Nomenclature in Early Methodism" that puzzled over the lack of "pentecostal" vocabulary in the Wesleys (see WTJ, Spring, 1973). At the time I was working on nineteenth-century Oberlin Perfectionism in my doctoral studies at the University of Chicago. Prompted by McGonigle, I thought I had found the hinge of this transition in mid- 19th century holiness currents. I presented my conclusions in my first WTS paper in 1973 on Asa Mahan of Oberlin College (WTJ, Spring, 1974).

With this essay, the "theology hit the fan" and created some explosions behind the scenes that occasionally broke into the open. The 1974 WTJ arrived in Taiwan where Charles Carter was reading the proofs of a book on the Holy Spirit that reflected the late nineteenth-century developments and had already been endorsed by the Christian Holiness Association. My essay was attacked in a two-page footnote added to the galleys and I felt compelled to respond in a review of Carter’s book in Christianity Today. About this time Timothy Smith joined the fray, and the war was on. Behind the scenes caucuses of CHA leadership and others raised the specter of church splits and the theological collapse of the tradition. The motives of scholars on both sides of the question were impugned, and many wondered if we could emerge from these debates unscathed. The issues came to a head in the 1977 and 1978 Society meetings, then soon subsided without any clear resolution.

I have always thought this debate very important in the life of our Society—completely apart from any resolution of the issues. To me it revealed the genius of the WTS and the importance of our continuing to do our work together. It has always seemed to me that the Nazarenes have done better leading us beyond the debates about the doctrine of Scripture than the often-paralyzed Wesleyans and Free Methodists. The Nazarene’s history of isolation from fundamentalism (perhaps from "sectarian" motives) allowed them to finesse the issues involved, while they found themselves more threatened by the "pneumatological nomenclature" debates that were not so threatening to the Wesleyans and Free Methodists, whose identities were less shaped by the late nineteenth-century developments.

More important, if I had any reason for pushing this debate, it was because of my intuition that it would advance our own theological maturity by raising questions from within rather than from without the tradition. This issue raised some very important questions that challenged our biblicism about these issues and raised significant questions about the development of doctrine. We are a movement with two generating moments—one in the Wesleyanism of the 18th century and one in the holiness movement of the 19th century. These are not entirely congruent, and our struggle with these differences may help free us to face the challenges of articulating the Wesleyan message into the 20th and 21St centuries. We cannot meet these challenges by repeating the cliches of either the 18th or 19th centuries.

A final issue may seem on the surface to be trivial, but I am convinced that it serves as a measure of our theological self-confidence and willingness to engage in wider dialogue. The issue arose in the midst of the battles over the "baptism with the Spirit." Charles Carter returned from Taiwan. I proposed that he chair the nominating committee, and the report of his committee became a test of the future direction of the Society. In 1975, at the Society’s meeting on the campus of Circleville Bible College, we had some very tense votes. Their deeper significance was whether we would short-circuit the move away from fundamentalism or move back toward it. I remember discovering in that meeting that the Society sometimes would vote one direction on a secret ballot and another in a public voice vote or display of hands.

This became clear to me as we debated the question of whether to invite "outside speakers" to participate in our meetings. My memory is that it was by secret ballot that we accepted in principle an openness to the participation of leaders outside the Wesleyan tradition. In this meeting I made one of my most egregious miscalculations. It seemed to me that we might appropriately invite Vinson Synan of the Pentecostal Holiness Church to give a paper. He had been a member of the Society and had so admired the WTS that he used it in part as a model for the founding of the Society for Pentecostal Studies. I had underestimated the anti-pentecostal animus of the WTS and how it could (and did) create a backlash to this proposal. The negative response was so strong that it would be another eight years before the issue could be seriously broached again. In 1983, at the Society’s meeting on the campus of Anderson University, John Howard Yoder became our first "outside speaker" by responding to a panel exploring the significance of the "restorationist" motif in the holiness movement. The next year we met at Emory University to celebrate the Methodist Bicentennial and heard Albert Outler reflect on the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Since then we have not always felt compelled to have these outside speakers, but we seem no longer threatened by their appearance—and a number of important scholars and theologians have participated in our work without derailing us.

Such developments seem to me to be signs of growing self-confidence and the maturing of identity in the late adolescence of the Wesleyan Theological Society. Now moving toward middle age, we can look back on this tumultuous WTS decade with more equanimity—but with the realization that it was a decade that set us on our current path. Only time will tell the wisdom of these implicit decisions, but I continue to be encouraged by our theological health and vigor. Sometimes, in the midst of the conflicts, it has been difficult to see our maturation and development—and to celebrate it. Even so, the Society has been precocious in its development—much more precocious than I would have perceived in the years of its childhood.

Edited by Michael Mattei for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
© Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology

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