Scripture and Ethics (and Wesley) (4)
Reflections on Wesley's Hermeneutic
In part one of this four-part series, I mapped something of the contemporary conversation on Scripture and Christian ethics. Part two focused on the way modern biblical studies has exacerbated the troubled relationship between the Bible and ethics, with the wide gulf it posits between then and now. What does John Wesley bring to the conversation? In part three, I explored Wesley’s reading of 1 Pet 3:3–4 in his sermon “On Dress.” Here, I draw out some of Wesley’s hermeneutical commitments.
John Wesley’s sermon “On Dress” makes for interesting reading as a case study in how Wesley has read the words of 1 Peter into the pews of eighteenth-century churches.1 What can be said about his hermeneutical approach?
First, he is interested in history and historical background. However, in a stunning departure from modern standards of historical-critical inquiry, Wesley never seems to have entertained the idea that historical interests would cause us to limit a text’s meaning to its original, historical situation. History guides interpretation, but does not reduce the hermeneutical reach of the text. Historical inquiry is servant, not master.
This means, second, that Wesley could think in terms of the simultaneity of Scripture. This is the ability of one scriptural text to speak effectively to its original audience and, at the same time, to the church that identifies these biblical writings as its Scripture.
We can think about what Wesley is doing this way. According to the classical definition, the church is “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.” To say that the church is “one” is to admit that the people of God to whom 1 Peter was originally addressed, the people of God in Wesley’s day, the people of God in our day, and those who will be gathered as the end-time people of God—all of these are actually the one people of God. This is because the church is “one.”
So words addressed to God’s people in the first century may not have been written to but were certainly written for the whole people of God (cf. Rom 15:4), everywhere and at all times. This theological affirmation speaks to the ongoing significance of biblical texts written in ancient times and places.
Accordingly, Wesley did not need to adopt a two-stage approach to reading 1 Peter. His sermon does not first establish what 1 Peter must have meant in the first century (What it meant”) so that Wesley could then add a section entitled, “The Relevance of 1 Peter for Today” (“What it means”). But neither did he imagine that 1 Peter had been written in eighteenth-century Great Britain, as though it were written to address the theological arguments and everyday concerns of the methodist movement.
Although Wesley’s sermon “On Dress” only begins to illustrate them, we should mention two other aspects of Wesley’s approach, both of which have to do with the unity of Scripture.
Third, throughout his interpretive work, Wesley seems little concerned with “authorial intent”—that arbiter of “meaning” on which historical-critical approaches would soon center. Instead, he operates with the assumption that behind the biblical writings—even though they come from different times and places, and from different pens, so to speak, and even though they address different circumstances—stands a single Author. These are the words of God, and this allows him to move freely around the Old and New Testaments—for example, by allowing Paul’s directive to “dress yourself with the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 13:14; cf. Gal 3:27) to fill out his message from 1 Peter regarding proper dress.
Fourth, reading the Bible for its “literal sense” meant for Wesley a reading that coincided with “the general tenor of Scripture.” To put it differently, he practiced reading biblical texts against the backdrop of what he called “the analogy of faith.” “The analogy of faith” refers to those doctrinal affirmations that in some sense arise from the biblical texts themselves, and which are then used to guide faithful readings of the Bible.
For Wesley, the analogy of faith concerns above all the Christian affirmation of the Triune God and the order of salvation, with its emphasis on sin, free grace, and holiness of heart and life. Other Reformers had appealed to the analogy of faith, though this interpretive principle was actually at work much earlier, in the first centuries of the church. There we find the language of the “rule of faith” or the “rule of truth”—typically, a narrative account of the church’s faith structured around the Christian affirmation of the Triune God.
How does this “rule” or “analogy” guide biblical interpretation? It is not that we read the creed back into the Bible. Rather, we test our readings of the Bible in light of the creed. And, coming to Scripture, we ask: Reading the Bible in the light of the prism of this Analogy of Faith, what do we see? We do not assume that any particular biblical text teaches the creed per se, but we claim that, as a whole, the Bible is interpreted faithfully when our interpretations cohere with the creed. Luke Timothy Johnson sounds this note in a helpful way: “The creed provides a measure or rule for the proper reading of Scripture. Such a rule is necessary for a coherent communal understanding of Scripture.”2
This essay resumes after this book recommendation. [Note: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn a small commission if you click through and make a purchase. This doesn’t affect the price you pay and helps support this website.]
Joel B. Green, Reading Scripture as Wesleyans (Nashville: Abingdon, 2010). ISBN: 9781426706912. 186 pp.
Green presents a concise guide to how John Wesley read and used the Bible, emphasizing a distinctively Wesleyan pattern of interpretation. He argues that Wesley treated Scripture as the primary source for the journey of salvation, focusing on how texts shape spiritual formation, character, and faithful practice. He shows Wesley reading the New Testament in light of God’s saving work in Christ, constantly connecting doctrine, ethics, and heart‑transformation, all within the community of faith.
Questions for discussion and reflection are included.
In the case of Wesley, the analogy of faith took a particular form, structured around the journey of salvation. Since he could assume that methodists were practicing members of the Church of England, and therefore affirmed the Church’s Articles of Religion, he was free to emphasize more narrowly the order of salvation: original sin, justification by faith and the new birth, and growth in holiness or sanctification.
Resident in these last two points is an assumption that the Bible is a single book, even though it is also a collection of sixty-six books (in its Protestant version). Written over a lengthy period of time, by disparate writers and editors, to address different aims among God’s people, these books nevertheless comprise one book, speaking with the one voice of its divine author, God. Importantly, the unity of Scripture is not so much a property integral to the biblical materials themselves. As modern biblical studies has aptly demonstrated, the biblical writings speak with many accents, in many times, for many reasons. Instead, the unity of Scripture resides in the analogy of faith, itself taught by the whole (“the general tenor”) of Scripture.
Even as recently as twenty or thirty years ago, Wesley’s interpretive sensibilities might have seemed hopelessly naive and out of step with the times. Fresh initiatives in the recovery of theological hermeneutics in recent years put him in a somewhat different light, however. In fact, it is not too much to say that each of the interpretive assumptions we have noted has been identified as important in ecclesially located biblical studies.
Two Caveats
Let me add two caveats to this discussion of Wesley’s hermeneutics. First, it almost goes without saying that Wesley lived in the dawning years of the modern period while we occupy its waning years. We ought not imagine that we can simply turn back the clock, as though the intervening years, during which the light of modern criticism has shown so brightly, did not happen or were not important. We can admit, though, that the brilliance of the historical-critical light blinded students of the Bible to other approaches and interests, and that the dimming of that light in recent years has allowed us to see again and recover what had for too long been hidden in the shadows. I refer, for example, to the ramifications of a theological hermeneutics able to appreciate sociohistorical interests without reducing the meaning of a biblical text to its context of origin. Wesley’s work thus serves as an exemplar from whom we might learn something of the road ahead, those of us interested in the ongoing role of Scripture in the life of the church.
Second, learning from Wesley does not mean that we situate ourselves in the eighteenth century, nor that we parrot Wesley’s sermons. Instead, being Wesleyan involves us in the process of learning from the progenitor of our tradition certain interpretive habits, patterns, and sensibilities. We consider how best to follow critically along the path marked by Wesley’s engagement with Scripture.
Biblical citations follow the Common English Bible. Here, I am adapting material from my essay, “Reading Scripture with Wesley,” Firebrand (17 February 2026); https://firebrandmag.com/articles/reading-scripture-with-wesley.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why It Matters (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 47.