Triune Love: John Wesley's Theology

God is with us and in us for the redemption of the world, the New Creation gathered into God’s life as it mirrors and participates in the glory of God’s love. With a Trinitarian approach firmly in view, this book maps John Wesley’s understanding of the connections and trajectories of God’s Triune love as it illuminates what is unique to each of Wesley’s salient doctrines of the Christian life.
 
At a very early age, the Church of England began to form and shape John Wesley’s vision of God with its abiding faith and rich theological narrative that drank deeply from the Church catholic. Eventually, what emerged was a catholic spirit—the universal love of God—that connects all Christians to the Church and gives to them the necessary “means of grace” to participate in the “hope of glory.”
 
What did John Wesley do to make his Christian Anglican heritage his own? Wesley assimilated the ‘Way’ of the “Primitive Christian Faith” into his own synthesis of the “Scripture Way of Salvation.”  Moreover, Wesley would connect his “Scripture Way of Salvation” to God’s promise of “New Creation,” and then hold these two together with his doxological vision of a missional ecclesiology.  “Methodist Connexionalism” was the Trinitarian lynch pin to hold his twin doctrines of soteriology and eschatology together.
 
As “transcripts of the trinity,” gathered and scripted into the fellowship of God, the Church is now “connected’ by the Spirit in the fellowship of Triune love, and sent out into the world to participate in God’s mission to make all things new, rectifying all creation back into the glory of God. The soteriologic of God’s mission would be argued by Wesley in the following ‘way’: because God’s “name and nature is love,” to partake of God’s nature “is” to participate in God’s mission. And so, as we are gathered, scripted, and “filled with the energy of love”—God uses our energy, our love, to “connect” and rectify all creation back into the glory of God. By the Spirit’s gathering into the fellowship of the Triune God, the people of God are given the means of grace to participate in the “hope of glory,” in all of the “connections” here “on earth as in heaven.”