Wesley's Metaphysics: A Summa for Subscribers (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798188218102)

John Wesley never wrote a system of divinity, and said he never would. Yet across half a century of occasional sermons a single, consistent metaphysic runs from end to end. This book argues that what looks like the absence of system in Wesley's thought is the presence of a genre - the serial discourse written for a lay reading public, not the architectonic treatise - and reconstructs the whole generative structure that genre concealed: a single doctrine of God unfolding, chapter by chapter, into creation, providence, the invisible world, the human creature, and the last things.

Wesley did the work of a systematic theologian in the tools of a magazine editor. He furnished a whole cosmos - the vehicle of the soul, the empiricism of the invisible, the conscious intermediate state, a providence that reaches to the particular - and never once collected it. This is the gathering: not a new way to read Wesley, but the plan of the system he had all along, laid out at last under its classical heads.

Set beside the companion critical edition, Wesley's Metaphysical Sermons, which gathers the thirty-eight sermons themselves under the same six loci. By Wilson Pruitt.