This session highlights the research of scholars associated with the Manchester Wesley Research Centre. The first presentation will focus on the use of qdš in the Torah and its implications for a Wesleyan understanding of holiness. Susanna Wesley’s foundational influence on her son John’s evolving commitment to celibacy is the subject of the second presentation. The final presentation will explore the evolving teaching of Wesleyan minister Maynard James on the second coming of Christ.
This paper examines the Torah’s understanding of qdš with specific attention to Yahweh’s self-revelation and call to His people to be “qdš” with a reflection on implications for a Wesleyan understanding of holiness. The holiness of God is widely attested in Scripture and upheld in the Wesleyan theological tradition. But what is the background and context to this Hebrew word “qdš”? David Clines demonstrated that whilst the verb (qdš) is presented frequently in Hebrew lexicons with the basic meaning of “to separate,” this is an inadequate rendering based on the textual evidence. The root “qdš” is directly related to the deity and that which belongs to the deity rather than primarily “to be separated” or “to be clean.” The context of this term will be explored with a brief reflection on the theological implications.
This presentation examines the mother and milieu contributing to John Wesley’s sense of a calling or vocation to a single life. In the absence of formal monastic communities to provide accountability to vows of celibacy in eighteenth-century England, Susanna Wesley raised young John and his siblings as a kind of miniature monastic community with a rule of life all its own in a literal backwater on the formerly isolated Isle of Axholme. This research draws on previously unpublished evidences of everyday life in the Epworth Rectory from the John Rylands Library. It is part of a larger, co-authored project exploring the foundation, evolution, and implications of John Wesley’s commitment to celibacy across a life the majority of which he lived as a single person in communities.
This paper examines the teaching of British Wesleyan minister Maynard James on the second coming of Christ before, during, and following World War II. James interpreted the second coming of Christ through the lens of current national and world events, often engaging prophetic discourse and scriptural reference. James wrote articles and editorials interpreting current events in Britain and elsewhere in the world through the lens this view of Christ’s second coming. The imminence of Christ’s return and prophetic interpretation intensified for James during World War II. As the twentieth century progressed and James aligned with the Church of the Nazarene and changed his view. Reflecting the Nazarene Articles of Faith, he came to teach the essential aspects of the doctrine of Christ’s return and the rapture of the saints: the second coming of Christ and resurrection, judgment, and destiny.