Dr. Larry Wood to be published in scholarly journal

Larry Wood, Frank Paul Morris Professor of Systematic Theology at Asbury Seminary, has written two scholarly articles that will be published in The Wesleyan Theological Journal. 

"The Need for a Contextual Interpretation of Wesley's Sermons," The Wesleyan Theological Journal Volume 45, No. 1 (Spring 2010). In this article, Wood shows that Wesley's theology underwent significant development--that one must not confuse Wesley's mature theology of his later years simply with the theology of his earliest sermons and writings. Wesley was a reformer and he functioned like a trailblazer, who helped to stake out the path in helping us to understand the way of salvation. The Scriptures were the foundation of Wesley's theology, but he believed experience confirmed or disconfirmed one's understanding of doctrines contained in the Scriptures. Wesley's own experience helped him to develop new nuances of understanding. His openness to new insights means one must respect the fact that Wesley did not intend to be an academic theologian, but he was an evangelist who wrote out of the practical needs of his burgeoning Methodist movement. Wood also argues this is one of the enduring insights of Wesleyan theology--theology is best done in the context of real life and the believing community. Wood also offers a critique of Wesley scholars who treat Wesley as if he were a Protestant scholastic and fail to take adequate notice of Wesley's developing theology out of the learning experiences of his ministry.

"Divine Omniscience: Boethius or Open Theism?" The Wesleyan Theological Journal, Volume 45, No. 2 (Fall 2010). This article explores the meaning of human freedom and God's foreknowledge--considering whether or not these ideas are in conflict. This is a hot topic in Evangelical circles, and Wood defends the historical view (as also defended by John Wesley) that God's eternity is the "instant" moment of the past, present, and future, and what God knows of our future is caused by what will be as opposed to the idea that God's knowledge causes it to happen. So God's omniscient knowledge is not in conflict with human freedom. Wood uses space-time relativity theory to show that the concept of the instant moment is an intelligible idea--by illustrating it from Einstein's theory of time dilation.