By William J. Abraham
In his day, John Wesley provided very important insights on find out how to receive wisdom of God that bears fruit in our personal occasions. As premier Wesleyan pupil William Abraham indicates, Wesley's most famed non secular adventure is rife with philosophical value and implications. all through, Abraham brings Wesley's paintings into fruitful dialog with probably the most vital paintings in modern epistemology. Lyrically and succinctly he explores the simultaneous epistemological quest and non secular pilgrimage that have been relevant to Wesley and the Evangelical Revival of the eighteenth century. In so doing, he presents a realized and eye-opening meditation upon the connection among cause and religion.
Read Online or Download Aldersgate and Athens: John Wesley and the Foundations of Christian Belief PDF
Best protestantism books
Fathers, Pastors and Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth-century France
Fathers, Pastors and Kings explores how conceptions of episcopacy (government of a church by means of bishops) formed the identification of the bishops of France within the wake of the reforming Council of Trent (1545-63). It demonstrates how the episcopate, at first demoralized by way of the Wars of faith, constructed a strong ideology of privilege, management and pastorate that enabled it to turn into a flourishing player within the non secular, political and social lifetime of the ancien r?
Breaking Intimidation: How to Overcome Fear and Release the Gifts of God in Your Life
For Ingest purely - info should be wiped clean up for all items being loaded
Religion, food, and eating in North America
The way non secular humans devour displays not just their knowing of foodstuff and spiritual perform but in addition their belief of society and their position inside it. This anthology considers theological foodways, identification foodways, negotiated foodways, and activist foodways within the usa, Canada, and the Caribbean.
- The quest for spiritual hunger
- A Pentecostal Political Theology for American Renewal: Spirit of the Kingdoms, Citizens of the Cities
- The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life: Historical, Interdisciplinary, and Renewal Perspectives
- Redeemed from poverty, sickness and death
- Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church
Additional info for Aldersgate and Athens: John Wesley and the Foundations of Christian Belief
Example text
What Alston posits is that we can rightly construe much Christian experience of God in terms of perception of the divine. Thus he begins, as Wesley does, with the potential analogies between ordinary sense perception and perception of God. In earlier efforts to run the analogies the common strategy was simply to think of one mode of perception and then look for its manifestations in various modes. The problem for religious experience 32 Aldersgate and Athens was immediately apparent. The disanalogies between sense perception and perception of God were so obvious that the veridicality of religious perception quickly came into question.
The amount of material available on the relationship between faith and reason is absolutely staggering. And the debate rages on today. Indeed the last forty years have seen an amazing turnaround in the discussion. When I was trained in philosophy in the late 1960s in the splendid philosophy department at Queen’s University in Belfast, I could not initially find anyone to teach me philosophy of religion. It was simply assumed that religious discourse lacked intellectual content, so there was no point in discussing the relation between faith and reason.
The claim to have seen the truth about God through the inner witness stays intact unless it is defeated. One way to defeat it is to draw attention to the absence of the testimony of our own spirits, that is, to draw attention to the fact that the fruits of the Holy Spirit are conspicuously absent from our lives. If someone claims to have the inner witness but their lives are marked by anger, fear, cruelty, and the like, then he or she is deluded. Thus Wesley has in hand ways of withdrawing the claim that someone has come to gain filial knowledge of God, but he does so in a way that keeps the original reliance on the spiritual senses intact.