My time at Duke Divinity gave me a deep and abiding appreciation for all things Wesleyan. This week's Friday's Finds are my very small collection of texts around Wesleyan theology (particularly its incarnation as American Methodism). It's hard for me to choose just one of these books, because all of them, in very unique ways, have played a major role in how I think theologically.
This week I'm going to a text that those who know me best wouldn't think I'd think as influential as some of the others -- John Cobb's Grace and Responsibility: A Wesleyan Theology for Today. Cobb, after all, is one of the leading theologians in Process Theology, a theological movement that is highly indebted to Alfred North Whitehead.
I was introduced to Cobb's Grace and Responsibility in one of Tom Langford's classes as a Duke Div student. At first, I expected Cobb's book to be like the then-classic Colin Williams' John Wesley's Theology Today. But I quickly discovered that Cobb's was a much more intriguing attempt. Like Williams, Cobb utilized Wesley's theology, but unlike Williams, Cobb was in search for some "central convictions" that might offer United Methodists (and I'd argue anyone who considers themselves an evangelical Anglican like Methodists have traditionally been) resources for reaching "a consensus to move faithfully into the future" (page 15). Cobb sought a theological consensus that was at once pastoral and political -- in the ways that Wesley was those things -- at a time when Methodism needed that kind of direction.
Sadly, though, Methodism (at least in my experience) never really listened to Cobb. I love what Cobb does in this little book, so it's been a shame that his voice wasn't more widely heard. If nothing else, the last two chapters of this book would have helped Methodism chart some of the rough waters that lay ahead of it over the intervening two decades since its publication.
If you're Methodist and you've never read Cobb's book, you really should remedy that.