Abstract (summary)
This dissertation reinterprets John Wesley's (1703-1791) doctrine of sin with special reference to the place of faithlessness. The argument of this dissertation is John Wesley provides a mode of framing hamartiology around the everyday experience of unbelief, or, in Wesley's idiom, 'practical atheism.' That is, the ordinary condition of humanity is one where God seems comfortably absent from the heart and mind. It is Wesley's recognition of the insolubility of unbelief as the condition of everyday life that best describes his doctrine of sin. To demonstrate this the argument follows Wesley in the order of experience. Since the condition of one's being in the world is one of unbelief, then awareness of sin remains conditional upon the illumination (witness) of the Holy Spirit (Ch. 2). Sin is only known within the movements of salvation. The next two chapters unpack how unbelief factors into Wesley's wider account of the doctrine of original sin pertaining to the primal sin's origin and its effects (Chs. 3-4). Then this thesis turns to role of demonology and spiritual combat in how Wesley considers the condition of unbelief (Ch. 5). Chapters three to five demonstrate the negative side of one's lifeworld resultant from the new birth and the witness of the Holy Spirit. The final chapter explores the place of unbelief from within the contours of the holy life in conversation with Wesley's comments on 'heaviness,' 'darkness,' and 'the wilderness state,' addressing themes like doubt, temptation, and despair(Ch. 6). This interpretation of Wesley's doctrine of sin seeks to provide a thicker account of the inner life of the sanctified person as grounded within the life of the community, where the wilderness state is admitted, but not before carefully differentiating between what follows simply from one's creaturely finitude and what follows from the consequences of the Fall.