John Wesley

This chapter explores the epistemological vision of the eighteenth-century Anglican evangelist John Wesley, particularly as it relates to knowledge of God. The primary thesis of the chapter is that Wesley’s epistemology of theology centred on the interplay between testimony and perception of the divine. He understood scripture to provide the primary content of what is known about God and salvation. In this respect, scripture functioned for Wesley as divine testimony to divine salvific work, though this testimony was mediated in various modes through the community of faith. Wesley also considered immediate perception of the divine to provide the strongest and most important evidence that those claims are true. He thus understood the agency of God to be essential to the formation of genuine knowledge of God, a factor which makes divine revelation an inescapable category when coming to terms with Wesley’s epistemology.