John Wesley’s Theological Framework of Authority and the Enlightenment

By Adam Urrutia From Baylor’s The Pulse:

His life spanning the greater part of the Enlightenment, John Wesley (1703-1791) witnessed the ill effects of an unprecedented degree of faith in reason, that mental faculty whereby one acquires, through logical reflection, an understanding of reality. This “faith” in human understanding challenged Christian beliefs as it encouraged a newfound skepticism of doctrines such as the Tri-unity of God, the divinity of Christ, and the historical reality of miracles. These doctrines, as they are not necessarily logically self-evident from either inductive or deductive approaches, were dismissed by those who insisted on using reason alone. As a result, many Enlightenment intellectuals, or philosophes, turned to “rational religions” (Kraynak 125) such as Deism, physico-theology, and Unitarianism, through which they discarded the more mystical doctrines of Christianity “as irrational relics of a less enlightened age which modern people, especially educated people, had outgrown” (126). Moreover, religious services fell into “spiritual bankruptcy” as an unparalleled focus on reason left little room for emphasizing spiritual reality and building relationships with the Divine (Cell 3).