The Methodist Faith

One of the most serious challenges facing any comparative study of religion, particularly for the person of faith, is the impulse to break with scholarly objectivity and embrace an ethos of evaluation that has the effect of making undue assumptions or judgments about the objects of investigation. The lessons of tolerance and humility in the face of the faith of those who to a student of religion who is also a person of faith, and more than this a professed Christian, may seem alien or even dangerous merely because their beliefs are "Other" are difficult to learn.

Yet the obligation remains, as injunctions from both biblical and secular sources attest:

What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? (Micah, 6.8)

Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted (Matt. 23.12)

In heads replete with thoughts of other men;

Wisdom in minds attentive to their own. . . .

Knowledge is proud that he has learn'd so much;

Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

--William Cowper, The Winter Walk at Noon, Book 6

This study began as a strategy for enlarging personal religious understanding and developed into a project of widening the scope of und

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ard, Methodist belief has it that the experience of grace is not connected to sacramental use but instead is a function of "'witness of the Spirit' to the soul of the individual believer and the consequent assurance of salvation," which are described as "distinctive doctrines of Methodism" (Weber). An absence of sin in an individual, which is connected to the Christian witness, does not mean that the individual cannot continue to grow in grace. That explains evidence of a pedagogical attitude in Methodist teachings, even though they may also contain evidence of social and cultural progressiveness. The views of Methodist scholar and commentator Howard A. Snyder illustrate a distinctively Christian voice in public discourse, but his view of evangelical Christianity is not to be associated with doctrinaire rigidity in the face of fluid experience. Instead, he calls on the vocabulary of the Christian witness to illustrate and lend moral authority to his views. "It is safe to say," he comments in an article on the religious implications of ecology preservation, "that the environment has not been prominent on the evangelical agenda" ("Why" 15), but he does not formulate his argument in "environmentalist" or "New Age" terms. Instead, he
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3029
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)