Dear Editor,
I have enormous sympathy for Armorel Carlyon (Letter, en May) and I heartily agree with John Wesley’s robust assertion of his belief in the authority of the Bible which she quoted, but, sadly, the battle she is trying to fight was lost more than a century ago.
I left the Methodist Church in 1980; I should have left in 1970. I recall a brief conversation, in 1964, with a Pentecostal minister who told me that he had left the Methodist Church when its constituent denominations united in 1932 and I remember wondering whether I would have done the same had I been in his position. More recently I have learned that both the Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists, by their actions, if not by formal declarations, had totally rejected Wesley’s admirable view of the Bible, before the First World War.
By the early years of the 20th century, despite protests from a few Methodists (now derided as ‘fundamentalist’ by at least one leading Methodist ‘evangelical’) the training of Wesleyan and Primitive Methodist ministers was in the hands of men who had accepted the theology of Schleiermacher and the destructive Biblical criticism that had gained traction in academic circles in the second half of the 19th century.
The crunch issue for me came in the late 1960s when the Methodist Conference agreed to proposals for uniting with the Church of England; those proposals specified four views of the Bible which were held in both denominations and decreed that all of them must be regarded as legitimate; only one of those views was that held by evangelicals. After 1970, although Methodists were still allowed to hold John Wesley’s view, they had no grounds for complaint if contrary views were taught from Methodist pulpits.
Around the time when the Methodists had refused to reject theological liberalism and its low view of the Bible, CICCU did the opposite by disaffiliating from SCM and so gave birth to what is now UCCF and IFES; it is salutary to compare the subsequent history of the two organisations.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew J. Proud Bristol
