For
a brief background and review of the Wesleyan Quadrilateral see:
Pastor
Dawn Worden, in her sermon today, mentioned the Wesleyan
Quadrilateral as a fertile background for mutual conversations
regarding the nature of God and the spiritual life. This concept
helps us map out and share how we came to a spiritual awareness and
our understanding of God—through Scripture, experience, tradition,
and reason.
My
own religious experience involves all four aspects. From my earliest
days I have been introduced to Scripture from direct reading of it,
through Sunday school lessons, through sermons, from all types of works of art.
Likewise, from my earliest days I have considered it normal for
people (including me) to have direct and powerful spiritual
experiences—often with a surface component of “unreason.” As a
participant of Christian culture in the church and elsewhere, I have
learned of the various celebrations within the faith. I have also
become accustomed to a culture of discourse and understanding that is
greatly influenced by Scripture, experience, tradition, and reason.
Finally, reason (and pragmatism and “common sense”) within the
Methodist church has provided a check on craziness—a check on the
tendency to gut the truth of the Bible on the altar of legalism, a
discordant travesty in which the “letter” of the faith
emasculates its essential Spirit.
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