by
Bryan P. Stone

Few ethical issues today raise the question of the authority of Scripture as decisively as homosexuality. At one level, there is, of course, the important question of whether the Bible condemns homosexuality¹ as explicitly and unequivocally as the Christian tradition generally has held that it does.² But at another level, even if we grant that the Bible clearly does condemn homosexuality, we are still faced with the issue of how we are to construe its authority for us on this matter. After all, the Bible also mandates capital punishment for homosexuality (Leviticus 20:13); yet how many Christians today would consent to such a strict penalty? Then, too, some of the Bible's harshest prohibitions against homosexuality appear in the context of culturally distant and seemingly trivial prohibitions against such practices as blending two kinds of fabric, planting fields with two kinds of seeds, cross-breeding cattle, and even sexual relations during a woman's menstruation. The question naturally arises as to whether the biblical injunctions against homosexuality fall in the same category as its instructions on ceremonial or cultural matters-whether, that is, they are so tied to the particular experience and circumstances of ancient cultures that they fail to retain any dogmatic or ethical authority for us today. This question could be asked not only of the references to homosexuality in Leviticus, but even of those in Paul's writings which appear to be heavily influenced by the peculiar experiences and custom-ary values of his day (for example, the standard Stoic aversion to what- ever is "contrary to nature" (cf. Furnish: 62ff). If Paul's appeal to what is "natural" and "unnatural" is little more than the expression of a general civic morality that he borrows from his own context and culture, to what extent, if the assumptions of that morality differ from our own contemporary experience, is his interpretation of homosexuality as a perversion of "natural" human functions (Rom. 1 :26ff) authoritative for us today? Paul also depicts long hair length for men as an obvious violation of what "nature itself" teaches and as therefore dishonorable (1 Cor. 11:14), yet we don't find very many Christians today forming coalitions or sending out newsletters and pamphlets in opposition to current hair styles.

This question of the relationship between our contemporary human experience and the nature and extent of biblical authority is critical for how we go about forming our position as Christians toward homosexuality. In fact, it is doubtful that homosexuality would even pose the crisis for biblical authority that it does today if it were not for the fact that our experience and knowledge has undergone significant change in this area over the last several decades. In the first place, we have witnessed a proliferation of psychological, sociological, and biological studies of homosexuality in recent years. Then, too, the gay revolution has resulted in the fact that more and more Christians (consciously) know homosexuals and (openly) are homosexuals. Surely it is not unwarranted to assume that this revolution in our "experience" has some impact on our conclusions about homosexuality, especially for those of us who take seriously the legacy of John Wesley with regard to the value of reason and experience in the reading, interpretation, and application of Scripture.

The problem we face today can perhaps best be posed by using an illustration. As a pastor, one of my most faithful church members was a gay man (and, of necessity, quite "closeted"). He was consistent, honest, Christ-like, compassionate, and devoted to God. His Christian testimony was clear both in word and in deed. But he was gay-and both he and his partner had been so for as long as they could remember. Now as a Christian who stands in the Wesleyan tradition, do I allow my understanding of what the Bible teaches about homosexuality to qualify my assessment of my gay friend's Christianity? Is he not, perhaps, as Christian as the "fruits" of his life would indicate? Or do I allow my experience of my friend's righteous life to qualify my understanding of the Bible and how it functions as an authority in my life with regard to the question of homosexuality? Or both? Or neither? What do we do when our experience appears to contradict the plain meaning of Scripture?

Obviously, a number of issues need to be addressed in order to move toward a resolution of this problem. In the first place, as already mentioned, there are significant exegetical concerns with regard to just what the Bible says on the subject-with what literary forms, for what purpose, and in what context. In the second place, there is also the enormous task of sifting through the profusion of social-scientific studies as well as a number of significant moral and political issues³ that bear upon the topic of homosexuality while shaping our experience of it and position toward it as Christians. The specific question I would like to explore here, however, is the logically prior question of just how these two sets of data-biblical and experiential-should be interfaced, if at all, and even more specifically whether there are resources within a Wesleyan systematic theology that offer constructive clues for building a model for that interface. It is my conviction that there are such resources and that their nucleus is the distinctively Wesleyan understanding of the relationship between divine grace and human freedom. It is this unique relationship, I believe, that can serve as a liberating and creative model and analogy for the way we assert the authority of the Bible, on the one hand, and the dignity and autonomy of human experience on the other.

The purpose of this essay, then, is not to state or defend a Wesleyan position on homosexuality, but rather to explore some of the fundamental assumptions about the relationship between biblical authority and human experience that typically lie below the surface when Christians debate this important issue and that, unanswered or unclarified, tend to cloud and distort that debate. The only conclusions with regard to homosexuality that I will attempt to draw in this essay pertain to the kinds of questions that must be asked and answered in order to form an adequate Wesleyan position on homosexuality today. Thus, this paper might more properly play the role of a prolegomenon to a Wesleyan position on homosexuality.

Wesleyans have for some time operated with the notion that Scripture, as a primary source of revelation, must be interfaced with the complementary sources of tradition, reason, and experience, thus forming what Albert Outler several decades ago termed the "Wesleyan quadrilateral." What makes this quadrilateral deserving of the label "Wesleyan" is generally understood to be a fidelity to Wesley's own historical example as a model of how these various sources of religious authority coordinate with and complement one another. But the extent to which we can responsibly appeal to Wesley himself as an adequate model for theological method today is limited, however important his place as our theological model and mentor. As Outler himself admits:

There are a number of problems in bringing Wesley's theological method forward to the late twentieth century, especially his method of interfacing biblical authority with human experience. One of the first such difficulties is that Wesley himself is not always consistent in how he handles that interface. There are times, for example, when Wesley clings to the "plain, natural, obvious meaning" of the words of Scripture without so much as allowing the testimony or experience (both actual and potential) of human beings. This would be the case, for example, in Wesley's sermon on "Christian Perfection" where he argues on the basis of 1 John 5:18 that Christians do not commit sin, regardless of what we might think on the basis of our experience or reasoning.

For Wesley, of course, one may certainly adduce other texts to prove that a particular passage should not be taken at its face value.⁵ Merely because we might find it difficult (or even impossible!) to point within our experience to a non-sinning Christian in no way overturns the force of texts which claim that Christians do not sin.

At the same time, Wesley often does allow experience as a theological source, even in the very sermon just mentioned. Thus, while his argument for the sense in which Christians are perfect (so as not to sin) summarily excludes experience as even a complementary source. His argument for the sense in which Christians are not perfect (so as to be free from ignorance, mistakes, infirmities, or temptations) makes a very conscious appeal to human experience. All we have to do, says Wesley, is take a hard look at the lives of Christians and we will readily discover that Christians are not exempt from errors, illness, poor judgment, etc. It must be said, of course, that Wesley, in general, is rather conscientious about the positive value of human experience (especially religious experience-the experience of the heart) in shaping theological conclusions. There are even instances where it could be said that Wesley is willing to allow human experience not merely to confirm, but actually to qualify or temper the biblical message. In the case of allowing women to preach, for example, Wesley took quite seriously not only the testimony of women who claimed to have experienced a call to preach, but their own practical success in doing so, and this despite the "plain, natural, obvious meaning" of Paul's admonitions to the contral)'.⁶

A second obstacle to any easy imitation of Wesley today is the ever-widening gap between Wesley's context and our own with regard to continuing developments in the historical-critical understanding of Scripture. This would include not only the tools and methods at our disposal in the study and interpretation of Scripture, but a more dynamic view of the relationship between canon and tradition than was commonly held in Wesley's day, and a more keen awareness of the role of one's experience, context, and socio-political biases in the process of reading and interpreting texts. This does not mean, however, that Wesley was not profoundly open to extra-biblical resources and scholarship or that he held to a simple, mechanical literalism unconcerned with the role of tradition, experience, reason, and the interpreting community in the process of biblical interpretation. On the contrary, Wesley can often seem to have much in common with pragmatic inclinations in contemporary theology that tend to view the Bible's authority in a strictly functional context. It can scarcely be denied, nonetheless, that we approach the Bible today with a number of different presuppositions, resources, opportunities, limitations, and challenges than did Wesley.⁷

A third obstacle to simple appeals to the historical Wesley as a model for contemporary theological method is the rather slippery nature of the very term "experience." It is commonplace in Wesleyan circles to find steady appeals to Wesley in support of a strong role for experience in theology; but we should ask whether the kind of "experience" to which Wesley generally appealed as a source of religious authority is the same as the kind of "experience" to which contemporary theology has made a turn.⁸ Wesley's reliance on experience is first and foremost an insistence on "heart-religion" as opposed to a kind of nominal Christianity that dryly examines Scripture with the aid of tradition and reason. His concern is that revelation be received in the heart as well as in the head, and that the subjective experience of new birth to which the Holy Spirit testifies in the heart of the believer be allowed to count for something in drawing theological conclusions.

Thus, when Wesley argues for the validity of experience as a source of religious authority, it is generally the "religious" experience of Christian believers that he is talking about rather than the more empirical and publicly verifiable kinds of common human experience that modern theology has come to find so important. This is not to say that Wesley completely disregards experience in this broader sense, nor is it to say that modern theology has made a definite improvement over Wesley to the extent that it has preoccupied itself with the more publicly verifiable data of human experience. In fact, because of the Lockean epistemological framework within which Wesley conceives religious experience and knowledge, the experience of the heart often seems like a brand of sense perception (albeit with spiritual rather than physical senses). But however "experimental" or "inductive" was Wesley's own theological method, it is his appeal to specifically "religious" experience (i.e., the assurance of one's salvation and the personal encounter of the individual with God) that dominates his thought and gives distinctive shape to his theological method-and this in something of a contrast to the broad direction being pursued by modern theology.

For these and other reasons, Wesley is an exceedingly difficult character to appeal to in any simple or straightforward way as a model for our theological method. I question, however, whether it is only a fidelity to Wesley's historical example in handling the so-called "quadrilateral" that renders one's theological method "Wesleyan" in the first place. Are there not distinctively Wesleyan theological commitments that also inform how we go about doing theology? How, for example, do we view the relative autonomy of human experience and reason vis-a'-vis biblical authority, or how do we conceive of the whole notion of "authority" from the outset? One such theological commitment has to do with the nature and activity of God's grace in human lives that Wesley brings to the theological round-table. If the relationship between divine grace and human freedom is one of the most (if not the most⁹) distinctive elements in the entire Wesleyan outlook, it is reasonable to assume that this element might well shape our entire model of how, in practice, the relationship between biblical authority and human experience should function within the Wesleyan quadrilateral.

For Wesleyan theology, of course, grace is absolutely prior in all of human experience. Grace doesn't just appear as a remedy for sin. We couldn't even exist apart from grace. In fact, we couldn't even sin if it weren't for grace. Grace constitutes us as human beings and makes freedom possible. Furthermore, just as grace has priority in our experience, it is also universal. Grace not only touches every person's existence, it touches every aspect of a person's existence. Grace creates, convicts, guides, sustains, and redeems.

One way of understanding the distinctiveness of Wesley's view of grace and freedom is to contrast it, as he did, with either of two competing positions in his own day: (1) a view that saw grace as "super-added" to a fundamentally fallen and "un"-graced human nature (through the operation of the sacraments); and (2) a view that saw grace as irresistible and limited only to an "elect" few, identified by Wesley as the Calvinist view.¹⁰

Against the former position, Wesley believed that grace is universal-it is "in all" (III: 545) and this, quite apart from any merit or activity of human beings. According to Wesley, this grace "is found, at least in some degree, in every child" and "in every human heart" (IV: 163). Wesley agreed with the position that grace is "super"-natural, but since, to Wesley's mind, there is no person who is born in an "un-graced" state, the distinction between natural and supernatural is purely academic. We are all born graced and no one could even so much as exist apart from God's grace. Wesley describes the human situation as graced in the following way:

But if grace is "in all," it is also "for all," and so, against the Calvinists, Wesley affirmed that grace is unconditional. In other words, grace is universally present and not limited to a specific few. Furthermore, against the Calvinists, Wesley affirmed that grace is resistible The power of grace should not be understood as producing or implying the passivity of human beings. Such a view would be a misunderstanding of God's power and an attempt to model it after our own.

Ordinarily we think of power as (a) the ability to control or coerce others unilaterally and (b) the ability to resist change. It is natural, then, to assume that if God is more powerful than humans, (a) God must have supreme control and unilateral coercive power and (b) God must be supremely resistant to change. But as a number of philosophers and theologians in this century have shown, this move is a philosophical mistake that assumes perfection to be a perfection of independence rather than a perfection of relatedness, a perfection of static endurance rather than a perfection of dynamic flexibility.

John Wesley, I believe, had already captured something of this insight two centuries ago in his understanding of grace. Wesley envisions grace as supremely powerful without at the same time being coercive; as unsurpassingly perfect without at the same time being irresistible. Thus, the radical difference between our power and God's power is preserved in Wesley, but that difference is not understood as the difference between a baby and an adult. Conceiving of the grace and power of God quantitatively in contrast to ours turns out to be the problem. Even if we extended such a quantitative difference out to infinity, we still would not arrive at God's power-not because we simply cannot reach the maximum of God's power, but because it is not "more of the same" in the first place. Rather, the difference between our power and God's power is a qualitative difference that would be better imagined as analogous to the qualitative difference between the power of the cross and the power of the Roman legions. The first represents the power of persuasive, suffering love, while the second represents the power of the sword-coercive, manipulative, and domineering. For the Christian, it is the former power that is the more sovereign and effective power.

For Wesley, the "power" and "authority" of God's grace is persuasive and relational rather than coercive and static. Grace makes it possible for us to act--not by coercing us irresistibly, but by freeing us to act. In answer to the question, "Does not [God's] working thus supercede the necessity of our working at all?" Wesley replies: "First, God works; therefore you can work. Secondly, God works; therefore you must  work" (III: 206). In this way, Wesley affirms the primacy and universality of grace without negating human freedom or human responsibility.

Wesley consistently sought to hold in balance the idea of divine sovereignty and purpose with human autonomy and freedom. It was precisely at this point that his arguments over predestination flared up with the Calvinists. Wesley refused to speak of the sovereignty of God "as singly disposing [our) eternal states" (Outler, 1964: 438). His argument for human freedom points out the faulty logic of those who hold that what we do could ever both matter to God and be determined by God.

In other words, if human freedom plays no significant role in our salvation, how can God assign punishment or reward for what we do?

Wesley insists that, rather than robbing God of "glory," the affirmation of human freedom and the resistibility of grace helps to establish the sincerity and integrity of God. In "working out our own salvation," God nevertheless has all the glory. This is because "the very power to 'work together with [us)' was from God. Therefore to [God] is all the glory" (448). Wesley is battling against that whole strain of classical Christian thought which cannot turn loose of its notion of power as fundamentally "coercive" and its notion of perfection as fundamentally "legal" or "static"; which prefers, as Outler says, "to measure God's sovereignty by his freedom from the world" rather than "his victorious involvement in the world" (426).

Because of this unique and revolutionary synthesis, Wesley received a good deal of criticism. By emphasizing that grace is resistible rather than irresistible, he was accused of making God seem like a rather passive being. If God's power is not defined as coercive, unchanging, unilateral power, so the argument goes, then God must not be very powerful at all! But Wesleyan thought refuses to give in to a "trade-off" mentality that only knows how to contrast grace and freedom rather than creatively interface the two. John Cobb, I believe, captures the essence of Wesley's thought in this regard:

What we find in the Wesleyan mediating position between Catholic and Calvinist positions (at least as Wesley understood those positions) is a view that could well be described as a Christian humanism. God's will, initiative, and power are asserted emphatically, but not in a way that controls, negates, or overrules human freedom and autonomy. For Wesley, God is

As Wesley says, every part of God's wisdom is

It is precisely at this point that I wish to extend Wesley's insights about the relationship between divine grace and human freedom to the problem at hand, namely, how we are to conceive of the relationship between biblical authority and human experience. If God chooses for humans to be saved not "as trees or stones" but "as humans," is it not also true that God communicates with us not "as trees or stones" but "as humans"? Does it not then follow that the Bible's authority for us as the primary source of God's revelation is its authority for us "as humans"-its appeal to and respect for our experience "as humans" rather than its authoritarian priority over or dictatorial disregard for our experience?

Simply put, revelation is an act of grace. It therefore ought to be understood as an act of grace. What we say about the relationship between divine grace and human freedom should not suddenly disappear or be shoved to the margins once we begin considering questions about the nature of biblical authority, revelation, and inspiration.

It must be admitted that Wesley himself is an ambiguous model, at best, in this regard. When it comes to the role of grace in the process of salvation, Wesley can emphasize its resistibility without at all believing he has jeopardized the sovereignty of God or the universality of that grace. But too often his insights about grace do not carry over to his views on revelation, inspiration, or biblical authority. Instead, as William Abraham has shown, Wesley often relies on a rather strict doctrine of divine dictation that tends to presume that the truthfulness and authority of God's revelation will be increased by minimizing the degree of human freedom and creativity (and, thus, the possibility of human error) allowed in the process (1985:120-121; cf. 1982).

Perhaps this ambiguity in Wesley is the cause of the tragic oversight of much of contemporary Wesleyan evangelical theology as seen in its bifurcation of the nature of grace in saving the heart and the nature of grace in teaching the mind. When it comes to the latter, grace too often becomes viewed as irresistible, unilateral, and authoritarian, resulting in a view of the Bible as a lifeless deposit of oracles rather than as a living witness of faith. This kind of theological apartheid between epistemology and soteriology is as unwarranted by the most fundamental of Wesleyan theological commitments as it is contrary to the Johannine synthesis of knowledge and liberation in Jesus' statement, "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).

The distinctively Wesleyan relationship between divine grace and human freedom should be allowed to shape our understanding of both salvation and revelation. Not only does God save us "as humans" rather than as trees or stones," God also reveals truth to us and inspired the biblical witnesses "as humans" rather than "as trees or stones." What does it mean to be taught "as humans" rather than as "as trees and stones"?

Revelation as "Divine Pedagogy"

One of the few books that students in the fields of theology and education are equally likely to come across during their training is Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed.¹¹ Few contemporary thinkers have addressed the philosophy of educating people "as humans" rather than "as trees or stones" as convincingly and with as much practical success as Freire. His thought is relevant to the above discussion because his concern is with both education and liberation, and with how se two are effectively linked together in human lives. There are a number of parallels between Freire's proposal for carrying out the process of liberating education and a model for interfacing biblical authority with human experience that builds on the Wesleyan paradigm of divine grace and human freedom.

Freire's primary point throughout Pedagogy of the Oppressed is that any genuine involvement in the liberation of the oppressed requires a dialogical commitment to the learners as active human subjects rather than as passive inanimate objects. From the practical standpoint of developing a pedagogical method, this means for Freire the rejection of all "banking" forms of education where teaching "becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor" (58). This banking approach to education never challenges a student to critically consider reality and his or her role in shaping reality. The student is never encouraged to become "human."

What Freire instead proposes is a "problem-posing" form of education which he calls conscientizao ("conscientization"). Education according to this model dispenses with the vertical pattern of "banking" that approaches teaching as fundamentally a transferral of information. Instead, liberating education emphasizes "dialogue," and its primary aim lies in its encouragement of learners to critically reflect on their situation and to move toward action and transformation. Freire's method is controversial and has been perceived as subversive in many world areas because it teaches the poor to read, grasp their own condition, and do something about it.

Fundamental to the task of "problem-posing" education is a sincere regard for the experience and abilities of the one being taught. This requires not only an openness to dialogue, but genuine respect for that person's ability to "name the world" (76ff). The task of teaching is not, however, a mere acquiescence to the knowledge and experience of the students. Far from it. "Consciousness-raising" takes place as those being taught are challenged to think about themselves and their situations in critical ways. Thus, liberating education is constituted, according to Freire, by "posing problems" to customary interpretations of life. On the one hand, the teacher must never merely discard the students' interpretations of reality as being mistaken or infantile. On the other hand, the students' interpretations must, nonetheless, be challenged and subjected to critical reflection especially with regard to those "limit-situations" (89) in their lives where seemingly insurmountable barriers to human freedom are to be discovered.

"Problem-posing" education is not aimed at revising, negating, replacing, or skirting around the experience of those being taught, nor is it aimed at dispensing mere information about the "facts" of their situation. By asking critical questions about students' own interpretations of their experience and of their role and responsibility in shaping reality, problem-posing education creates crises both in the students' understanding of their situation and in the students' own self-understanding. The educational process, conceived and practiced along these lines, can hardly be mechanical or unilateral; neither can it be individualistic or private. The sharing of one's interpretation of reality opens the student to the questions of others and is essential to the aim of moving out, as Freire says, beyond narrowly partial or "focalized" views of reality toward "the comprehension of total reality" (99).

Critical reflection for Freire is not the end, but only the beginning of the process of "consciousness-raising." Critical reflection goes hand in hand with action to yield praxis--"reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it" (28). For Freire, action and reflection occur simultaneously; indeed, Freire even allows that critical reflection is action. What Freire wants to avoid is any dichotomy whereby "praxis could be divided into a prior stage of reflection and a subsequent stage of action" (123). But liberating action will never take place until the oppressed are able to get a handle on the limit-situations they face. It is then that they can move toward their own liberation. The oppressed must themselves move toward liberation-as subjects, not objects. While human beings can never save themselves by themselves (142), it also is true that human beings can never be liberated by others without their own consent and involvement. However much the process of liberation may be initiated by another, and however much others may play a crucial role in that process through consciousness-raising, as Freire says:

Attempting to liberate the oppressed without their reflective participation in the act of liberation is to treat them as objects which must be saved from a burning building... (52).

In other words, liberation is never a one-sided process. Indeed, it can-not be. The liberation of free beings simply cannot be unilateral or coercive or it isn't liberation. Why? Is it because we would-be liberators are not unilaterally or coercively powerful enough to achieve the liberation of the oppressed? If only we had more unilateral or coercive power, would we then be able to free the oppressed? Absolutely not! No amount of unilateral, coercive power can liberate others-not even (as Wesley might add) "divine" unilateral, coercive power! 12 This is true not because of power-limitations on our part (or on God's part), but because of the very nature of freedom itself and because of the very nature of liberation itself.

As Freire makes clear, the path to becoming free necessarily includes becoming a "subject." No amount of coercive power from another (again, even from God) can force a person to be a subject. What is required instead is a power that is far different (and far greater) than the power to invade, manipulate, and dictate. What is required is relational power-the power to influence persuasively through force of love, example, compassion, and dialogue. It is the power to make sense of our experience rather than the power to contradict or nullify our experience. It is my view that not only is Freire right in arguing that this is finally the kind of power that liberates human beings, but that this is through and through the kind of power that is characteristic of the saving and revealing grace of God discovered in Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, it is finally the respect for and compassionate identification with our human experience that inspires our trust in God and in God's authority for our lives. Perhaps that is why Paul could see in the event of Christ crucified the very "wisdom and power of God" (1 Cor. 1:24).

It should be readily apparent that Freire's pedagogical method offers rich resources for a Wesleyan understanding of the authority of Scripture, how that authority interfaces with human experience, and at what level. In the first place, if the authority of the Bible is an authority for us "as humans" and not "as rocks and trees," then that authority cannot simply rest on claims put forward by the church or even the Bible itself for its divine origin, as if our trust, assent, and obedience could thereby be commanded or coerced rather than inspired or aroused. So also, the Bible's authority can never finally lie in an alleged inerrancy of texts. Even if the texts of the Bible are inerrant, their authority for us "as humans" must still rest on the kind of credibility to our experience that could warrant our authentic and free consent to their message. In the process of salvation, grace does not "pull rank" on the human being. Why should we expect that it would be any different when it comes to the process of revelation? Revelation, if it is to function as revelation, must still be recognized as such by human beings. If the authority of the Bible as revelation is doubted by human beings today, perhaps that is not primarily the consequence of our sinful rebellion against proper divine authority, but of the fact that the Bible's authority is not understood to be rooted in the most fundamental questions and concerns of our existence.¹³ Here, again, the fallacy lies in thinking that the authority of Scripture is somehow enhanced by taking shortcuts around human experience. Authority that is located as a coercive or irresistible force outside of and over against human experience is no more than an authority over dogs and cats; it could be likened to the authority of a child over little toy soldiers. That is not really a "high" view of biblical authority, and no amount of pious chanting or religious foot-stomping can make it so.

The upshot of all this, of course, is that, regardless of how faithful or consistent to Scripture a Wesleyan theological claim or ethical position purports to be, it is not thereby exempt from the question of its credibility to human reason and experience (cf. Ogden: 4-6). Again, this is due not only to the nature of any and all authority that relates to us "as humans~ rather than "as trees and stones," but also to the level at which that authority relates to us-namely, at the level of our "interpretation" of experience (or at the level of "faith").

One recent thinker who has given extensive attention to the question of the level at which the Bible (as well as his own church's teaching magesterium) functions authoritatively for human beings is the Latin American theologian, Juan Luis Segundo.¹⁴ It is noteworthy that Segundo likens the liberating power of revelation to just the kind of educational process or "pedagogy" we have been exploring.

For Segundo, the Bible is our authority as a teacher with regard to how we "punctuate" our experience (32-35). This happens not at the level of our learning "things," but at the level of our "learning how to learn." It is at this level that the Bible functions authoritatively for human beings:

Within the Bible itself one discovers a remarkable diversity on such weighty topics as the origins of the world, the relationship of God's covenant community to the rest of the world, what happens to the human being after death, and the role of human works in our justification by God. Placed side by side in a superficial, quantitative way, this diversity may look like contradiction. But viewed as a process of God's leading us toward becoming more fully human and, thus, restored in the image of God, this pedagogy is an irreversible and infallible process of trial and error in which God respects our human limitations and frailties while pushing us beyond the comfortable seams of our experience and knowledge.

Within this educational process, the Bible constantly creates crises for our customary interpretations of experience by pressing us to re-think our lives in view of a "total" picture of reality. Revelation is not to be conceived, says Segundo, as "a mere providing of correct information about God and human beings, but as a 'true pedagogy.'" Therefore, "we must seriously modify our conception of the relationship between revelation and truth" (245). Error is tolerated within the divine process of revelation because that is "the human way" of arriving at truth. In fact, as those of us who have been teachers know full well, a provisional allowance of students' errors is often indispensable to the broader pursuit of truth. The authority of the Bible is not to be understood as the authority of a dictator to whom we must submit or forever perish. It is rather the authority of a companion and fellow-sufferer who has "been there" before, who knows our situation, who respects our "subject"-hood, who is well-trusted in the community, but who, at the same time, without overwhelming or negating us, challenges us and calls forth in us more than we ever thought possible.

The parallels between this view of revelation as an educational process and the Wesleyan interface of divine grace and human freedom are significant. In the first place, a Wesleyan can reasonably conclude that the Bible is "inspired" by God not in the sense of being a "deposit" of true information dropped down coercively on scribes who simply penned the words. "Inspiration" refers to the transforming power of grace that does not negate human frailty, error, and the other limitations with which we all live as human beings (for example, the patriarchy of the biblical witnesses), but rather enters into "dialogue" with our wounded and limited humanity and poses to it the possibility of a healed humanity. The Bible, in this view, has an authority for human experience analogous to the power that divine grace has for human freedom. Just as grace does not substitute for or bypass our freedom, the Bible's authority does not substitute for or bypass our own exploration of and learning about the world and each other.

When revelation is understood as an educational process, we no longer see its movement in quantitative terms as the "addition" to a knowledge database of true information and the subtraction from that database of incorrect information. Revelation is, instead, a qualitative process that challenges our interpretation of our knowledge and experience and the way we synthesize that knowledge and experience into a concrete life praxis. On the one hand, then, the Bible always has something objectively new and different to bring to our situation. It is a word from God. It is "instruction." It is "a divine pedagogy."¹⁵ But, trust in that word from God is not a trust that surrenders (or is asked to surrender) our experience, nor is it a trust that begins (or is asked to begin) where reason leaves off. What Segundo says of the Old Testament is undoubtedly true of the whole Bible:

There is an old saying that authority is like soap--the more of it you use, the less of it you have. That could well be the thesis of this essay for, as I understand it, it is no part of the authority claimed for the Bible by Wesleyans to override, neglect, or subordinate to itself human experience any more than grace overrides, neglects, or subordinates to itself human freedom. On this view, those who purport to hold a "higher" view of Scripture than others-because they offer unswerving obedience to the Bible by allegedly bracketing or negating human experience, science, creativity, or reason-actually hold a very low view of Scripture.

Authority that is conceived of quantitatively and externally as unilateral and irresistible often looks impressive on the face of things (in the same way that a bomb, tank, or gun looks "powerful"), but tends to function at a very low level in inspiring faith, loyalty, and confidence on the part of those at whom it is aimed. The relationship of the Christian to Scripture turns out to be quite "inhuman." Such a view of Scripture has little in common with the understanding of power and authority modeled in the Wesleyan vision of the relationship between divine grace and human freedom. Rather, it would be more "Wesleyan" to say that the full length and breadth of our human experience is the rich soil through which the Word of God enters into dialogue, thereby taking root, flourishing, and becoming something dynamic and liberating.

Of course, the Bible does pose problems to our experience. It radically challenges the way we interpret and learn from our experience. As Nigel Biggar puts it:

What does all this mean for the question of homosexuality? To some, the foregoing may seem like a long detour around the pressing subject with which we began. But, as I have tried to emphasize, how we proceed toward the formation of a Wesleyan position on homosexuality has everything to do with our presuppositions about the interface of biblical authority with human experience. To what extent, if at all, does knowledge and experience gained apart from the biblical texts (through science, testimony, observation, personal experience, etc.) have any validity in shaping our theological conclusions on homosexuality? On the basis of a Wesleyan understanding of divine grace and human freedom-and, by extension, of divine revelation and human experience-perhaps we are now in a position to formulate some of the more fundamental questions that must be asked and answered if we are to move toward a Wesleyan stance on homosexuality. I suggest four.

If revelation does not supplant or negate human experience, but rather poses problems to experience at the level of how it is "punctuated," then we must first inquire as to the experience and understanding of homosexuality available to the biblical witnesses. It is that experience and understanding, after all, which forms the soil in which God's revealing grace inspires their remarks on the subject. We know, for example, that in ancient Israel homosexual practice was commonly associated with cult prostitution in connection with the worship of foreign deities. Likewise, homosexual practice in Paul's day was basically exploitative and debaucherous--an exhibition of insatiable lust that expressed itself in a range of activities including the emasculation of boys for the lecherous satisfaction of others, brothel-keeping, slavery, and forced transvestitism (Furnish: 62ff). Then, too, it was also assumed that homosexuality was a conscious and voluntary choice by heterosexuals rather than an ''orientation'' deeply etched in one's very identity as a person. As Furnish reminds us:

Do these ancient assumptions and contexts shape the biblical witnesses' remarks on homosexuality? It should be clear by now that a Wesleyan has the best of reasons to believe that they do and not in a merely superficial way. This, of course, does not necessarily mean that Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 apply only to homosexual practice within the setting of cult prostitution, nor does it necessarily mean that Paul's remarks on the "exchange of natural relations for unnatural" are irrelevant to our discussion of homosexuality today. It certainly does not mean that our task is one of trying to strip away the "husk" of the biblical witnesses' limited and culture-bound experience in order, thereby, to expose a "kernel" of timeless truth. The reason for acquainting ourselves with the social worlds of ancient Palestine and other Near Eastern civilizations, as well as Greco-Roman culture at or around the time of Paul, is not so that we know what needs to be "distilled off" in order to reach the eternal and unchanging message of the Bible. It is so that we can gain clarity about how the Holy Spirit's gracious interaction with the biblical witnesses empowered them to detect in the "signs of their times" the path to the recovery of the image of God, as well as particular obstacles to that recovery. What we are looking for in the Bible is not more information about homosexuality. We are looking for how the biblical witnesses "learned how to learn" from within their own context, experience, and understanding. What we are ultimately looking for is the movement, trajectory, and dynamics of an educational process leading us toward the fullest expression of the imago dei in our lives.

The question of the particular experience and understanding of the biblical witnesses, then, is not only a fair question; it is, for the Wesleyan, an indispensable question. The problems posed by revelation to the experience and understanding of the biblical witnesses make little sense, offer us few clues about our own lives, and therefore function with little or no existential authority for us, apart from our attaining at least some minimal degree of clarity concerning the nature of that experience and understanding, however different it may prove to be from our own.

2. We also should ask about how the biblical texts dealing with homosexuality (as well as other related texts) function within the broader educational process initiated by God to which the Bible bears witness.

For the Wesleyan, the type of approach that simply tosses out a list of biblical texts that condemn homosexual behavior, either preceded or followed by the statement "You be the judge!" is hardly a responsible approach to biblical authority. Such a strategy treats revelation quantitatively and fails to grasp the relationship between particular texts and the "problem-posing" educational process to which those texts bear witness and in which those texts play a part. Of course, how we understand the broader movement and direction of the "divine pedagogy" in Scripture will vary from tradition to tradition, but there is no avoiding the question of how we understand this fundamental dynamic within which we evaluate individual texts.

So, for example, the Wesleyan tradition maintains that the whole of Scripture points us toward the way of salvation, understood as our restoration in the image of God, and that such a restoration is normatively expressed in our conformity to Christ's likeness that comes about through our union with and participation in the divine.¹⁶ The whole sweep of Scripture on this view is a process of God teaching us to become more fully human (and thus more holy!) as we are conformed to the image in which we were originally created. From Genesis to Revelation, that image is portrayed as an image of freedom, an image of community, and an image of creativity. Although each of these dimensions undergoes vast development through the Bible and is viewed from a wide array of perspectives, we nonetheless can detect a distinct process of "learning how to learn" when it comes to each. In the case of creativity, the human being is portrayed in the Bible as created fundamentally creative through work, play, worship, and love. That image is subsequently corrupted into a capacity that is at best barren and at worst inflexible, destructive, or even deadly. The entire compass of biblical revelation is a process of our moving from a relatively uncreative faith dictated by legal requirements and ritual duties to a more mature faith that places justice and mercy above sacrifice, to the kind of creative and dynamic faith to which Paul bears witness when he claims that "all things are lawful for me, but not all things are profitable" (1 Cor. 6:12).

Here again, the work that is required to come to a Wesleyan position on homosexuality is considerable. Simply put, we can't talk about the "biblical" view of homosexuality until we talk about the "biblical" view of what it means to be truly human. And that, of course, carries its own demands. In the first place, we must do justice to the way in which, throughout the Bible, a rich variety of witnesses point to the nature and recovery of our authentic humanity-and this despite the fragmentary and provisional nature of such witness when viewed from the vantage point of the entire pedagogical process. For example, instructions on dietary laws in the Old Testament appear rather obsolete and trivial when placed side by side with Paul's ethic of liberty in the New Testament.

We must do justice to the normative witness to the nature and recovery of the image of God discovered in the apostolic witness to Jesus found in the New Testament. If we hold that in Jesus of Nazareth we have discovered the decisive revelation both of what it means to be fully human and of the path to the recovery of that authentic humanity, we cannot avoid asking how that revelation functions as the norm by which all other biblical witness is measured and evaluated. In the case of homosexuality, that is not as simple as asking what the earliest witnesses to Jesus understood him to be saying about homosexuality. For one thing, we have no such understanding on their part. What we do have is their understanding of the path to the recovery of our authentic humanity as that is discovered in Jesus. It is this understanding that serves as the criterion by which the appropriateness of all other biblical witness is measured and it is this understanding against which any talk about the compatibility of homosexual practice with Christian faith must finally be judged-both the talk about homosexuality that occurs explicitly in the Bible and our own talk about homosexuality today.

The divine pedagogy is a process of our coming to the truth about the possibility of our own existence as human beings in relationship to God, world, and neighbor. While that process is never finished and continually poses new challenges to our experience and understanding, we can with confidence claim that the process has a normative trajectory, dynamics, and goal. The point, however, is that the normativity of revelation lies not in the particular experiences or information available to the biblical witnesses, but in the divine educational process that poses problems for how that experience is interpreted or "punctuated."

3. We should ask about our own experience and knowledge of homosexuality and how it differs, if at all, from that of the biblical witnesses.

It is perhaps at this point, rather than at any other, that the process of forming a Wesleyan position on homosexuality is likely to get short-circuited. Not only is our knowledge and experience constantly growing and changing on this topic, but the sources of that knowledge and experience are varied, complex, and often contradictory. Is homosexuality a volitional conduct or an orientation? Or both? Or neither? Is it a psychological state, the product of particular relational patterns experienced early in one's childhood, or is it, perhaps, a more innate phenomenon, possibly hormonal or genetic in origin? Is it hereditary? If it is an orientation, can it be altered? We are easily tempted to throw our hands up in despair and decide the whole issue on the basis of a few simple proof-texts from the Bible.

But if biblical authority does not bypass or override human experience, and instead appeals to it while challenging how we learn from it, the question of just what we know about homosexuality through extra-biblical sources is unavoidable. Even if it is objected that the scientific evidence and personal testimonies at our disposal are at best inconclusive and at worst contradictory, the contingent and fragmentary nature of our experience can never be an excuse for simply disposing of the question of that experience in favor of the experience of the biblical witnesses themselves. We must, of course, recognize the provisional and relative status of our experience, while subjecting it to the widest possible range of comparison and evaluation.

A Wesleyan understanding of experience is certainly not solipsistic. What is demanded is that we actively and aggressively seek out the experiences of others and hear as wide an assortment of voices as is possible, especially the voices of those who are most likely to be affected by our conclusions on homosexuality-gay men and lesbians themselves. All ethical issues have real people at their center and too often the church has failed to hear the voices of the very ones who are the most intimately involved in those issues. All this does not mean that a Wesleyan may still not conclude at the end of the day that homosexuality is utterly sinful and completely contradictory to God's will for human beings; but that conclusion must come only as a conclusion, and only after carefully hearing the evidence and listening to those persons who can be our best teachers about what homosexuality is and isn't-namely, the hundreds of thousands of real, hurting people who are involved directly.

The more remote and incomprehensible to our experience is a particular object or behavior (for example, homosexuality), the less we are able to interface our experience with biblical authority when it comes to thinking about that object or behavior. The message of the Bible ends up being received in a kind of "experiential vacuum" without any roots in the historical projects, concerns, and interests that shape and give meaning to our lives. Nor is it a question of simply "taking the Bible's word" on the subject. In a Wesleyan model of the interface between grace and freedom, or revelation and experience, no one side of the interface can be bracketed without harming our understanding of the other side. Just as the power and sovereignty of grace is not made stronger by reducing or eliminating human freedom, so also the authority of the Bible is not enhanced by reducing or eliminating human experience and reason.

We have seen how inimical to the Wesleyan model of grace and freedom is any view of biblical authority that relies on an understanding of revelation as a finished deposit of truth "bankrolled" by God in the pages of the Bible, to which our response is merely reception, conservation, and application. On the contrary, biblical authority is augmented rather than diminished to the degree that human creativity and experience is respected and appealed to by the divine pedagogy of grace. This means that "tradition" is more than simply an empty conduit for the handing on of divine "data," but is itself ~ creative participant in that educational process. As Segundo says:

Because our contemporary experience and understanding of homosexuality differ substantially from that of the biblical witnesses as well as from that of the antecedent Christian tradition, we cannot merely imitate their learning process in any easy, mechanical, or superficial way. Nor can their discoveries simply be superimposed onto our experience. It is one thing to detect how God's revealing grace interacted with and posed problems for, say, Paul's understanding and experience of human sexuality. It is quite another to ask how God's revealing grace enters into dialogue with our own understanding and experience of human sexuality. Because of the dynamic character of the educational process that is divine revelation, and because of the real differences between our experience and that of the biblical witnesses, we should even be prepared for the possibility (and I underscore that I am talking only about a possibility) that a "yes" to homosexuality today may not be the precise opposite of a "no" to homosexuality in the Bible. That is because the relationship between "truth" and "error" is much more dynamic and fluid when truth is viewed qualitatively within an educational process rather than quantitatively as a unilateral "deposit" from God.

Slavery, for example, was for centuries assumed to be a permanent fixture in human society. Few people considered looking past a quantitative reading of certain New Testament references commanding slaves to be obedient to their masters (Eph. 6:5, Col. 3:22, 1 Tim. 6:1). Slavery was finally condemned as immoral only when Christians began to question the assumption that God's truth is a timeless and unchanging deposit and began to reassess the institution of slavery by interfacing their concrete experience of the personal and social effects of slavery with the broader witness in the Bible concerning the universal equality of all people (Acts 10, Gal. 3:28, Col. 3:11).

Whether a similar shift in the traditional Christian understanding of homosexuality is called for today is beyond the scope of the present inquiry. In a number of ways, the issue of slavery is not a fair parallel to the issue of homosexuality. For one thing, while we can construe a number of verses in the Bible as challenging the institution of slavery, it is virtually impossible to construe any biblical passages as being at all permissive of homosexuality. What is called for today, however, is a reassessment of homosexuality by interfacing our concrete experience and knowledge of the nature, origin, and consequences of homosexuality with the broader witness discovered in the Bible.

How and at what point(s) is this antecedent process of "learning to learn" able to guide and challenge how we interpret our experience and knowledge of homosexuality? In keeping with the Wesleyan understanding of the divine pedagogy as the path to the recovery of our true humanity as we are restored in the image of God, and in keeping with what we know about sexuality today as an integral expression of human identity, I suggest that the fundamental question revelation poses to our experience today is the question of whether, given what we know about homosexuality (and sexuality in general), homosexual practice can in any way be construed as compatible with the image of God in which we are created and toward which we are being drawn by God's prevenient and sanctifying grace.

The more we know about human sexuality, the more we realize how central to who we are as human persons is this important dimension of our lives and how impossible it is to separate our sexuality (including our sexual "practice") from our very identity as persons. Sexual activity is not just a tool for procreation. So, if homosexuality is a sin, it is vastly different than sins such as murder, gossip, or adultery. Unlike other sins, children grow up hating and deceiving themselves for this sin which they did not will or want. If homosexuality is indeed a sin, it is an incomparably menacing form of sin, one that involves the human person at the core of his or her identity so that the often-repeated adage, "love the sinner, hate the sin," lands rather wide of the mark when it comes to homosexuality. We must inevitably ask, then: Is homosexual practice always incompatible with the freedom, community, and creativity that constitute our creation in the image of God?

In the first place, if the image of God is an image of freedom and if, throughout the entire Bible, we are pushed toward ever new understandings of the character and scope of that freedom, can homosexual practice ever be construed as a legitimate expression of that freedom, or must it always be only a trap, a seduction, a form of servitude, bondage, and oppression? To answer this question we must take a hard look at what we know and can learn about homosexual relationships today. Are these relationships ever characterized by the kind of authentic human freedom to which the biblical witness points? Or do heterosexual relationships have a distinct advantage over homosexual relationships when it comes to creating an environment where enslavement and bondage are minimized?

In the second place, if the image of God is an image of community and if, throughout the entire Bible, we detect the divine pedagogy challenging us to move beyond narrow, tribalistic, self-serving notions of community toward an understanding of community as mutual, nurturing, and liberating, can homosexual practice ever be construed as a legitimate expression of that "image-of-God" community, or must it always be only an expression of selfishness, alienation, and exploitation? Paul's experience certainly seems to be that homosexuality was fundamentally exploitative. Is the same thing true of our experience? Is there such a thing as the possibility of a homosexual relationship that does not reduce sexuality to mere "sport" and that is not manipulative, domineering, self-centered, or decadent? The question of the image of God as an image of community also drives us to take account of the relationship between male and female that appears explicitly in the context of our creation in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Just how central is heterosexuality to imago dei? Is homosexuality fundamentally a violation of our creation "as male and female" in God's image?

Finally, if the image of God is an image of creativity and if, throughout the entire Bible, we find ourselves confronted with the possibility of moving beyond not only destructive and inflexible patterns of human living but also beyond narrow and mechanical understandings of human creativity as mere productivity or ritual, can homosexual practice ever be construed as a legitimate expression of authentically human creativity-creativity as it is intended by God--or must it always be only an expression of destructiveness, barrenness, futility, and sterility?

It is the answers to questions such as these, I hold, that can move us closer to a Wesleyan position on homosexuality today. These are certainly not the only questions that need answering. And obviously the answers to even these questions entail a tremendous amount of work and reflection. It is not now a few isolated verses in the Bible that become the texts by which we evaluate the compatibility of homosexuality with Christian faith, but the entire pedagogy that is the Bible itself. If homosexuality is inherently sinful, that is not, in the first place, because it contradicts six Bible verses, but because in some way it violates the image of God in which we have been created and to which the entire Bible is a faithful witness. Furthermore, not only are hard work and critical reflection required of us in such an endeavor, but so also are the disciplines of integrity and honesty. Our fear of where we may end up on an issue can never be allowed to override the integrity of the inquiry itself.

Perhaps there is something like a "coercive" moment to God's grace that coincides eschatologically with God's final purpose for the world, so that revelation overrides human limitation, error, and weakness-a moment in which we will "know fully just as [we] have been fully known" (1 Cor. 13:12). Until then, however, we must settle for our very "human" way of knowing and of our "creative venturing toward the truth" (Segundo: 118)-a way that relies upon and even values trial and error, that endures the limitations and contingencies of our experience, and yet rejoices in its richness and novelty.

ENDNOTES

¹1t is common today to distinguish between homosexual orientation and homosexual practice. A number of Christians today, for example, would argue that, while a homosexual orientation or attraction might be compatible with Christian faith, engaging in homosexual acts never is. While this distinction is helpful, we should guard against drawing too neat a dividing line between orientation and act (is sexual fantasy, for example, a part of orientation or does it belong to the realm of act?). Nevertheless, for the sake of clarity, when I use the word "homosexuality" throughout this essay I am referring especially, unless otherwise indicated, to the practical expression of homosexual desires and attractions through deliberate homosexual relationships, activity, and union.

²There is a long list of those who have raised questions about the extent to which the Bible explicitly and intentionally addresses itself to homosexuality. D. S. Bailey's influential treatment of the subject, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, for example, offer a revisionist interpretation of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, arguing that it contains no reference to homosexuality, but instead has to do with the violation of customs of hospitality to sojourners in the land. He also notes that it was not until well into the history of its interpretation that the Sodom story was explicitly linked with sexual sin. Other more recent interpreters, such as John McNeill (The Church and the Homosexual) or Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott (Is The Homosexual My Neighbor?), have followed this basic line of reasoning while arguing that the Sodom story "must be studied in the context of the reprehensibleness of inhospitality and gang rape" rather than as a clear example of homosexual attack (Scanzoni and Mollenkott, 65). Other scholars, such as Victor Furnish, find this revisionist interpretation unconvincing and stress the high likelihood of a sexual context for understanding the meaning of the word "to know" in the Sodom story (55). Furnish does point out, however, that the homosexual dimension in the story is not of uppermost importance to later biblical interpreters, such as Ezekiel, who describes Sodom's sin in terms of arrogance, pride, and a failure to help the poor (16:58-60).

As to Paul's statements about homosexuality in Romans 1 (including the only mention of lesbianism in the Bible), John Boswell has recently contended that Paul is here not referring to genuinely gay men and lesbians but to heterosexuals who have given up their "natural" orientations arbitrarily. Likewise, Scanzoni and Mollenkott conclude that the context for Paul's remarks on "unnatural" relations in Romans 1 is to be understood as that of idolatry and lust: "No reference is made to persons whose own 'nature,' or primary orientation, is homosexual, as that term is understood by behavioral scientists" (65).

Finally, there is also considerable debate around just what is meant by the terms malakoi and arsenokoitai which appear in 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10. Simply consulting any number of modern translations reveals the enormous variety of translations of these words, though it is clear that most scholars see in the terms at least some kind of reference to homosexual activity. The first of these, which certainly has a wide range of meaning, is taken by John Boswell to refer to "the morally weak," while he understands the second to be referring to "the sexually aggressive." In that case, Paul is not even explicitly referring to homosexuality in the two passages. Scanzoni and Mollenkott are willing to allow that, at most, Paul is referring to same-sex 'abuses" and not necessarily to all homosexual practice (69).

³Today, for example, Christians find themselves facing not only the question

of whether homosexuality is compatible with Christian faith, but questions concerning gay "marriages," gays in the military, civil rights for gays in areas such as housing and employment, gay parenting, and the ordination of gays to Christian ministry.

⁴A11 citations of Wesley, unless otherwise specified, refer to the bicentennial edition of The Works of John Wesley, Frank Baker and Richard Heitzenrater, editors-in-chief.

⁵1n the case of the issue of sin in believers, Wesley will allow New Testament passages only (cf. 1:111).

⁶Qualifying Paul's instructions in 1 Corinthians 14:34 that women should be silent in the churches, Wesley adds in his Notes on the New Testament: "unless they are under an extraordinary impulse of the Spirit."

⁷See Larry Shelton's warning against anachronistic projections onto Wesley's eighteenth-century hermeneutic ("strongly influenced by Patristic and Reformation sources" [38]) of uniquely twentieth-century concerns about the Bible's purpose and authority. For example, the fundamentalist appeal to selected Wesley texts for a variety of positions, ranging from the inerrancy of the original autographs of Scripture to the propositional character of divine revelation is in many ways guided by a nineteenth-century epistemology that is as foreign to Wesley as are the conclusions of modern form criticism or redaction criticism. As Shelton says about Wesley, "not only is he pre-critical in his approach to Scripture, but he is also pre-Fundamentalist" (40).

⁸See Donald Gelpi's The Turn to Experience in Contemporary Theology, which provides an interesting comparison of the influence of Kantian and Cartesian constructs of experience in contemporary theology with what he takes to be the more correct and helpful constructs of experience offered by the pragmatist philosophies of Royce, Dewey, and Pierce.

⁹Randy Maddox, borrowing from Gerhard Sauter the category of "orienting concept" ("the integrative thematic perspective in light of which all other theological concepts are understood and given their relative meaning or value"--Maddox: 10), argues convincingly that "responsible grace" is just such an "orienting concept" for John Wesley. "Responsible grace," says Maddox, "is not simply a doctrine discussed by Wesley. It is a fundamental conviction about the nature of divine-human interaction which provided the distinctive slant to all of Wesley's theology" (12). Unfortunately, Maddox does not go on to extend the usefulness of this orienting concept to a doctrine of biblical authority, though he does explore its importance for other major doctrines in systematic theology.

¹⁰Cf. Wesley's sermon, "Free Grace," (III: 544-563).

¹¹Freire's book has become something of a handbook for theological reflection in third-world countries and for the development of the "base community" churches that have exploded onto the scene by the tens of thousands in those same countries, especially Freire's native Brazil.

¹²All this is not to claim that there is no coercive dimension to God's gracious activity with human beings-moments of unilateral and irresistible power that influence the course of events whether we cooperate or not. As Randy Maddox notes, "It was Wesley's conviction that. . . God may on occasion irresistibly constrain a person to perform a specific task in fulfilling divine providence." But, as Maddox adds, "such was never the case in relation to personal salvation" (13; cf. Outler, 1964: 433). Thus, however one construes the reality of "coercive moments" in God's activity (and such a construal would require nothing short of a full metaphysical treatment of the subject of divine grace and human freedom), such moments should never be understood in such a way as to lessen the role of human freedom, responsibility, and experience in the process of salvation. Wesley finds the proper balance in an interesting quotation from Augustine: "He that made us without ourselves will not save us without ourselves" (III: 208).

¹³This is finally also the problem, as I see it, with standard appeals to the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti. For example, H. Ray Dunning rejects grounding the authority of the Bible in either its alleged inerrancy or in the Bible's own testimony to itself. Instead, he appeals to the "internal testimony of the Holy Spirit" as a "special case" of Wesley's doctrine of prevenient grace and, therefore, "extended to all men [sic] equally" (63). This, of course, leaves him with the problem of why all human beings do not accept the authority of the Bible. The culprit, for Dunning, is a prior "issue of existential authority" by which he means our own sinful hostility to God which translates into a resistance to the authority of the Bible. Could it be, however, that this prior issue of existential authority has as much or more to do with the heteronomous nature of the authority that is too often claimed for the Bible by the church-an authority that bypasses or is merely thrown at human experience from outside and above human experience?

¹⁴Liberation of Dogma (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1992); Faith and Ideologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1984); and The Liberation of Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1976).

¹⁵1 borrow this phrase from Juan Luis Segundo who himself takes it from the Vatican II document, Dei Verbum 15.

¹⁶See especially K. Steve McCormick's article, "Theosis in Chrysostom and Wesley: An Eastern Paradigm on Faith and Love," for a reminder of how central to Wesley's ordo salutis is the typically eastern emphasis on the deifying union with God, or restoration of the imago dei, that comes through the coincidence of divine energy and human freedom.

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