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This article explores the theological significance of Charles Wesley's Hymns for the Nativity of Our Lord (1745) and Hymns on the Trinity (1767). It does so by situating these hymn collections against the backdrop of the English Trinitarian controversy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The article also contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the theological significance of sermons, hymns, and other practical materials. On this front, it helps to nuance more carefully the story of theology in the modern period by stressing the deep connection between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of salvation in Wesley's hymns.
In early Christian theology, the doctrine of God is intimately connected with the doctrine of salvation. Consider Athanasius's famous remark, "[The Word] was made man that we might be made God."1 Similar to this is Gregory of Nazianzuss well-known dictum, "For that which he has not assumed, he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved."2 Likewise, in his "Address on Religious Instruction," Gregory of Nyssa says, "[God] united himself with our nature, in order that by its union with the Divine it might become Divine, being rescued from death and freed from the tyranny of the adversary. For with his return from death, our mortal race begins its return to immortal life."3
By the seventeenth century, the intimate connection in Christian theology between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of salvation was being reworked along epistemological lines. Increasingly, salvation had to do with rational assent to intelligible propositions in Scripture. With the severing of this connection, the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity came to appear irrational and therefore unrelated to salvation. This is especially true for late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English Latitudinarian theologians, whose repeated attempts to render the Trinity intelligible according to Cartesian and Lockean conceptions of personhood reflect the deep estrangement of the immanent Trinity (the doctrine of God) from the divine economy (the doctrine of salvation).
Many historical theologians trace the loss of the connection between the doctrine of God and the doctrine of salvation to the late medieval period.4 At least one theologian has argued that the connection was loosened, if not severed, as early as...