Dr. Kerry Fulcher
President, Point Loma Nazarene University
Introduction
In an anxious and polarized age, outrage is often mistaken for moral conviction and certainty is too easily confused with faithfulness. We all see this play out daily in our news feeds, our conversations, and sometimes even within our churches. Both the Church and our wider culture are longing for something deeper…a truer light by which to see and live.
What is needed are communities not shaped by ideological alignment, but by love: the kind of love Scripture describes as patient, truthful, and steadfast. It is a love able to speak without clamor and to listen without fear. It holds conviction without contempt. It refuses to separate truth from grace.
This kind of life should feel familiar to us as Christians. After all, our faith has always held together truths that the world struggles to reconcile. Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human. The Kingdom of God is already here, and not yet complete. Scripture calls us to speak the truth—and to do so in love. These tensions are not problems to eliminate, but realities to inhabit faithfully, which we often forget when we are pressured to choose sides or to quickly locate ourselves within opposing camps.
Christian universities—and especially communities like ours at Point Loma Nazarene University—are uniquely positioned to nurture such communities: places where rigorous inquiry unfolds within relationships of trust, where disagreement does not dissolve dignity, and where wisdom grows at the intersection of Scripture, the Spirit’s leading, and shared life together.
However, this kind of witness cannot be sustained merely by pursuing academic excellence or by ensuring clear mission language alone. It requires a renewed vision of wholeness—one that reflects the reconciling life of Christ. It calls us to forms of teaching and scholarship that are not only excellent by the world’s standards, but distinctly shaped by the truth, character, and mission of Jesus.
As a Christian university, PLNU is called to step into this deeply polarizing moment not by retreating from disagreement or aligning with cultural camps, but by embodying a form of life shaped by Christ himself. In a world where differences are too often met with suspicion, contempt, or fear, Christian higher education has a unique opportunity to model another way: a community where truth is pursued with love, where convictions are held without weaponizing them, and where persons are honored even amid deep disagreement.
This series explores how our shared Christian calling invites us to practice such a way of life–one that resists the logic of polarization and bears faithful witness to the reconciling love of Christ in a divided age.
In Part I, I begin by reflecting on the calling of Christian universities in this moment and introducing the Wesleyan vision of faithful tension as a way of holding truth and love together. I then turn to some of the cultural and spiritual dynamics shaping our present moment, including the patterns of language and polarization that often pull apart truths that belong together. In Part II, I turn more directly to John Wesley, examining his practice of discernment and the theological instincts that enabled him to hold together truths that others in his day often separated. Finally, in Part III, I consider what this way of discernment might look like in our own time--particularly within Christian universities, churches, and communities seeking to live faithfully amid deep disagreement. Together, these reflections point toward a path that calls us to pursue truth with humility, to hold conviction together with charity, and to resist the patterns of division that so often shape our common life.
While this essay is rooted in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition that shapes Point Loma Nazarene University, the questions it raises and the hope it holds out are not limited to that tradition or to any one denomination or theological stream. If you care about truth, integrity, and the formation of lives marked by both conviction and compassion, I invite you to reflect with us.
As you read, consider the places and spaces in your own life that call for faithful tension—moments when truths that belong together are pulled apart by the pressures of our age, yet through discernment and humility can be held together in a shared calling to live a Christlike life.
This calling is not abstract for us at Point Loma Nazarene University. It has been part of our story for generations.
Recovering and Reimagining Faith and Learning
When I first arrived at PLNU over three decades ago, I stepped into a university animated by a deeply integrated faith-and-learning culture. Scripture, theology, and scholarship were not siloed; they shaped our teaching, our questions, and our sense of calling. Faculty gathered in conversation that was both intellectually rigorous and spiritually formative. Conferences across Nazarene higher education created space for collective discernment, shaping the very imagination of what Christian universities could be. While the emphasis on faith and spiritual formation was strong, the institutional structures and professional standards for academic teaching still needed to mature.
Over time, our pursuit of academic quality, pedagogical innovation, and professional excellence has rightly sharpened. This kind of growth was necessary, and in many ways, it strengthened us as a university. As our focus on these areas increased, we grew in the ways a maturing university should. But in many places, the shared theological practices that once rooted and formed our faith and learning culture became less visible, not because we ceased to believe in them, but because the institutional structures that sustained them slowly gave way.
We have grown in remarkable ways. The path forward is not a return to the past, but a transformation—one that neither dilutes the Christian faith nor treats academic excellence as a competing allegiance. Faithfulness to our founding Christian mission invites us to both recover and reimagine the deep relationship between faith and learning, not as parallel commitments to be balanced, but as a single, animating vision. This calling has implications not only for the intellectual life of a Christian university but also for how Christians learn to live and speak together in a divided world. John Wesley captured this vision when he urged Christians to “unite the two so long divided, knowledge and vital piety,” resisting both cold intellectualism and spiritual enthusiasm severed from truth.1 In this vision, Scripture does not stand apart from intellectual inquiry but orders it; reason does not rival the Spirit but is enlivened by it; and excellence is not pursued as an end in itself, but as a form of faithful stewardship shaped by love. This is the kind of wholeness required for Christian higher education in a new era.
The Way of Faithful Tension
I call this posture the Way of Faithful Tension—the disciplined Christian practice of holding together truths that our culture too easily pulls apart, through Spirit-led, Scripture-shaped discernment—like truth and love, conviction and humility, grace and holiness. As a Christian university, PLNU is called to take the discoveries and insights of the academy with full seriousness, engaging them honestly and rigorously, without fear or retreat. At the same time, we confess that all knowledge is ultimately grounded in God, and that Christ himself is not merely an object of study but the living source and coherence of truth.
The tension arises not because faith and learning are opposed, but because they are held together without reduction. This faithful tension—intellectual openness joined to theological conviction—is the gift we are called to offer our students, our churches, and a divided world. This is not always comfortable work. It requires patience, humility, and a willingness to remain in tension longer than we might prefer.
At PLNU, this means we will not serve as chaplains to the ideological agendas of the right or the left, nor allow our community to be drawn into the fears, hostilities, or oversimplifications that mark our cultural moment. Instead, we seek to form a university shaped by the model of discernment John Wesley embodied, applied to our current context.
I believe this calling shapes who we hire, how we teach, how we engage one another, and the kind of campus life we cultivate. In practice, this often means slowing down conversations rather than accelerating them, and asking better questions before offering quick answers. Our aim is not to mirror the divisions of the age, but to form people who embody both conviction and compassion. Christian higher education, our churches, and our communities desperately need this, and PLNU can be that example— a shining light on the hill.
Scripture, Authority, and the Bounds of Faithful Discernment
Before turning more fully to the cultural dynamics shaping our moment, it is important to clarify the theological ground on which this essay stands. Christians have long differed in how Scripture’s authority is understood and practiced.
Within Protestant Christianity, these differences are often described in terms of sola scriptura, in which Scripture alone functions as the final infallible authority, and prima scriptura, in which Scripture is held as the primary norm while being interpreted in conversation with the wisdom of the historic Church, reason, and sanctified experience.
Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions likewise stand firmly within historic Christian orthodoxy, but understand Scripture as received, preserved, and authoritatively interpreted within the life of the Church across time—through its teaching, worship, and shared discernment.
While all these traditions differ in structure and emphasis, they share a common conviction: that Scripture is the uniquely inspired and normative witness to God’s revelation in Jesus Christ—the primary way we know who God is and how we are called to live. In this sense, Scripture is authoritative for the Church’s faith and life because it faithfully reveals God in Christ, guiding salvation and forming holy love, rather than functioning as an exhaustive handbook for every domain of human inquiry.
Throughout this essay, Discernment is understood within these orthodox bounds: not as the discovery of new truth, but as the Spirit-enabled work of testing every claim by its conformity to Christ as revealed in Scripture and confessed by the historic Church. In this context, references to Christian orthodoxy do not point to the authority of any single institution or cultural power, but to the shared creedal witness of the early Church as it sought to faithfully interpret the revelation of God in Scripture and the person of Jesus Christ. Here, “tradition” refers not to every later ecclesial opinion, but to what many theologians have called the church’s consensual or canonical tradition—the broadly received doctrinal confession that proclaims who God is, what Christ has accomplished for our salvation, and how believers respond in faith. Discernment, then, is practiced as we slow down, listen carefully, and ask not simply “Is this persuasive?” but “Is this faithful to Jesus?”
This does not suggest that Scripture answers every question the academy can ask, but that it offers the theological and moral horizon within which all other forms of knowledge are ordered, interpreted, and directed toward faithful living. What falls outside Christian orthodoxy, then, is not disagreement over how Scripture is interpreted or mediated, but any relocation of final authority away from Scripture, and thus away from the Christ to whom Scripture bears normative witness. This shift may take the form of appeals to autonomous reason, private experience, cultural consensus, or claims of ongoing revelation that supersede the canonical witness.2
Wesley affirmed the proper role of reason in Christian discernment, yet insisted that it remain ordered by revelation. As he wrote, “Let reason do all that reason can; but let it not attempt to do what reason cannot do.”3 Reason is a gift of God, but it must never displace the authority of Scripture—through which Christ is revealed—or the illuminating work of the Holy Spirit. This theological vision matters because it shapes how we engage the world we actually inhabit.
A Climate of Contention
Before fleshing out what it means to live more fully into this better way, it is important to acknowledge the cultural forces that shape our moment. Early in my own vocation at PLNU, I saw firsthand how culture-war dynamics could distort conversations that were meant to seek truth. Those experiences taught me to better recognize the patterns more quickly– sometimes in myself, as well as in others– and to long for a more Christlike way of discerning together.
Much of our public discourse today operates by what might be called a culture-war logic with a common playbook. These conflicts are driven less by a search for truth than by a desire to win. In such a mindset, the ends justify the means: if a tactic secures victory in the court of public opinion, it is deemed acceptable, even if it is untruthful, uncharitable, or inconsistent with the character of Christ.4 Complex issues are framed as simplistic binaries; nuance is seen as compromise; opponents are cast as enemies; and stories are curated or exaggerated to provoke outrage rather than understanding. We’ve all felt the pressure to simplify issues in these ways, especially when conversations move quickly or become emotionally charged.
These tactics are not the property of one side. In culture wars, both sides adopt the same strategies: selecting support materials for their emotional impact rather than their accuracy, creating guilt by association, or rallying key influencers through pressure, fear, or selective evidence. The point is persuasion by intensity, not formation by truth. These tactics appear across perspectives, including ones we may be sympathetic toward.
But the way of Jesus refuses such methods. Paul reminds us that Christian witness rejects “secret and shameful ways,” refusing to “use deception,” but instead “setting forth the truth plainly” (2 Corinthians 4:2). And James describes godly wisdom as “pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruit” (James 3:17)—a posture entirely at odds with the manipulative, fear-driven habits that culture wars normalize.
This dynamic does more than distort our conversations; it forms us in subtle yet powerful ways. It trains us to react instead of reflect, to assume the worst rather than seek the truth, and to treat our neighbors as combatants rather than God’s image bearers. As John Mark Comer observes, “We are all being formed all the time, whether we realize it or not. The question isn’t Are you being formed? It’s Who or what are you being formed into?”5 In other words, culture-war habits do not merely shape our opinions; they shape us—our instincts, our expectations, and even our sense of what faithfulness looks like. And if left unchecked, they can quietly lead us into patterns of thinking and acting that bear little resemblance to the Jesus we claim to follow. For Christians, this is never neutral ground. These habits can make us comfortable with practices Jesus never authorized—practices that value victory over virtue and impact over integrity.
Naming these dynamics is important because it clarifies why we cannot accept the usual cultural patterns as our guides. I believe that if we are to follow Christ faithfully in this moment, we must find a way of engaging that does not mirror the tactics of the age—”For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does” (2 Cor 10:3).
At Point Loma Nazarene University, our Wesleyan-Holiness heritage offers a particular gift to the Church and our culture precisely because it calls us to lives wholly devoted to Jesus Christ. This vision, deeply rooted in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition that gave rise to the Church of the Nazarene and institutions like PLNU, calls us to pursue both truth and holiness through lives transformed by God’s grace. In this tradition, holiness is not withdrawal from the world, but a life set apart for God’s purposes—formed by grace, shaped by love, and ordered toward faithful obedience. Sanctification names this ongoing work of God among us: a shared commitment to be transformed in heart and habit, so that our words, practices, and relationships increasingly reflect the character of Christ in a fractured world.
At PLNU, this means we will resist the culture-war habits that prize victory over virtue. We will refuse tactics that manipulate, exaggerate, or trade in suspicion, choosing the way of Christ instead; speaking truth plainly, listening with humility, and pursuing understanding over triumph. We will seek to be formed not by the combative patterns of our age or the ideologies of our disciplines, but by the gentleness, integrity, and wisdom of the One we follow. One of the clearest places this distortion shows up is in our language.
The War Over Words
One of the clearest expressions of this climate can be seen in the way our language itself has become contested. Words that once carried moral weight now divide us. Patriot. Progressive. Evangelical. Woke. Liberal. Fundamentalist. We often assume we understand one another when we use these words—but increasingly, they obscure more than they clarify. Each began as a word of conviction, a way to name courage, faith, or moral clarity. Yet over time, these words have been hollowed out, repurposed, and weaponized. What once expressed love of country can now imply hostility to outsiders. What once described the pursuit of justice now signals ideological rigidity. “Evangelical,” once simply “bearer of good news,” has become shorthand for a political tribe. “Woke,” born from a cry for awareness and compassion, is now used as an insult. “Liberal” and “Fundamentalist,” both rooted in noble theological intentions, have been reduced to labels of disdain.
We live in a world where words meant to awaken conscience now close hearts, where names once tied to virtue now trigger suspicion. It is not only our vocabulary that has fractured, but also our moral vision of goodness and truth. In today’s world, conviction can calcify into contempt, and certainty can eclipse true moral clarity. As social scientist Arthur Brooks observes, “We don’t disagree anymore, we despise,” a symptom not just of political polarization but of moral exhaustion.6
At its heart, the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition understands holiness not as separation from others, but as life shaped by the character of Christ—truth spoken in love, conviction disciplined by humility, and faith expressed through patient, reconciling presence. In a culture where language is often used to wound or divide, such holiness offers a different witness: one that refuses distortion without surrendering charity, and names truth without forfeiting love.
At PLNU, this means we will resist any use of language, formal or informal, that reduces a sister or brother to a caricature or a label. We will practice a way of seeing one another shaped by the Gospel itself—recognizing each person as made in God’s image and as someone in whom Christ is at work, forming lives marked not by suspicion or contempt, but by grace, truth, and hope.
Another Way: Wesley’s Via Media
This Way of Faithful Tension also shapes how Christian higher education understands time—how we stand between what has been handed down to us and what lies ahead. For a Christian university, the tension is not between clinging to the past and chasing the future, but between faithful remembrance and hopeful anticipation, both held together in Christ, who “holds all things together.” We are called to receive the wisdom of those who have gone before us with gratitude, while also preparing students to engage questions and realities that those earlier generations could not have imagined. Faithful Tension, in this sense, is the Spirit-enabled discipline of holding together the truths God has joined across time, testing every claim—whether inherited or newly proposed—by Christ as revealed in Scripture and confessed by the historic Church.
As President W. Shelburne Brown reminded our community shortly after moving to Point Loma, “Our task in Christian higher education is to take seriously the past and the wisdom it brings, while preparing students to meet the challenges of a changing world. The truth is not static, it is rooted in Christ and revealed in Scripture, but always seeking expression in new questions, new disciplines, and new cultural contexts.”7 This does not mean that truth itself changes, but that the unchanging truth revealed in Christ must be faithfully understood and lived within ever-changing contexts. That’s the posture this essay invites us into, a way of seeing that values both formation and ongoing mission.
Our mission to shape students who think critically, act ethically, and serve others flows directly from this vision of Christian formation—one that integrates head, heart, and hands in faithful discipleship. In a divided world, such formation prepares students not only to seek understanding with intellectual rigor, but also to engage disagreement without contempt, holding conviction together with charity as they follow Christ in every sphere of life. Our calling is not simply to preserve tradition, but to steward it faithfully into the future—to hold fast to the core convictions of the Christian faith while learning how to live and articulate them with charity in a divided world.
John Wesley often spoke of a “middle way,” but not in the sense of compromise or moderation. He used the phrase to describe the scriptural discernment required to hold together the fullness of Christian truth in the face of opposing errors that each affirm only a part. In controversies over faith and works, reason and Spirit, or what Scripture describes as “form and power” (2 Timothy 3:5), Wesley rejected both a lifeless Christianity of outward practice alone and an undisciplined spirituality severed from Scripture and the life of the Church. Wesley consistently rejected extremes—not because virtue lies at a midpoint, but because each extreme represents a distortion of a genuine biblical truth. “The truth lies between the extremes,” he wrote, “not in the middle as to quantity, but as to the whole of whatever is true on either side.”8 Wesley affirmed the full exercise of reason while warning that it must never “usurp what is above its sphere,” (3) and he repeatedly urged believers to “try all things by the written Word,”9 because genuine insight will always harmonize with Scripture’s witness.
This is a demanding vision of truth that resists both oversimplification and easy resolution. Wesley’s “middle way” was not a search for balance for its own sake, but a disciplined posture of Discernment; testing every claim by the authority of Scripture, holding fast to what aligns with Christ, and rejecting the distortions that arise when truths meant to remain together are torn apart. In this sense, Wesley’s middle way can be reframed as what I call the Way of Faithful Tension: the Spirit-enabled work of holding together the truths God has joined while refusing both subtraction from and addition to the Truth revealed in Christ—a pattern deeply rooted in the wisdom of the historic Christian faith.
For Wesley, this was never merely an intellectual exercise. It belonged to what he often called practical divinity—the integration of theological truth with the formation of holy lives. The via media, in this sense, was not pursued for its own sake, but as a way of practicing practical divinity, forming communities capable of faithful discernment and Christlike living amid difficult questions. Wesley’s vision of the Christian life consistently pointed beyond the false clarity of extremes toward what he called “the more excellent way,” a life shaped by holy love and faithful obedience.10
While this essay is unapologetically rooted in the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition and historic Christian Faith that shapes Point Loma Nazarene University, the questions it raises and the hope it holds out are not limited to that tradition or to any one denomination or theological perspective. Whether you share this particular background or not, I believe the Way of Faithful Tension offers something vital for all of us seeking to live wisely and faithfully in a divided world.
Today, the phrase “middle way” is often misunderstood as being reduced to compromise, niceness, or the path of least resistance. Wesley meant something far more demanding. His via media was not a retreat from conviction but a disciplined, Spirit-led practice of testing every claim by Scripture, holding together truths that opposing extremes often pull apart, and resisting both the false clarity of extremes and the comfort of superficial moderation. Over time, this vision has too often been misapplied by using it as a political label, a theological escape hatch, or a call to watered-down faith—but Wesley’s intent was far more radical: a Way of Faithful Tension grounded in the authority of Scripture and sustained by discernment, requiring both the courage to name truth wherever it is found and the humility to set aside what does not align with the written and incarnate Word.
This raises an essential question: what does faithful discernment actually look like in practice?
Wesley repeatedly warned against the danger of mistaking personal conviction or emotion for divine truth and often returned to the apostle’s command to test the spirits. In his sermon “The Nature of Enthusiasm”, where enthusiasm meant claiming divine authority for one’s own impulses or ideas, he wrote:
“He that thinks to guide himself by impulses is properly an enthusiast; for he imagines himself to be guided by the immediate power of God. — Do not hastily ascribe things to God. Do not easily suppose that dreams, voices, impressions, visions, or revelations are from God. They may be from Him; they may be from nature; they may be from the devil. Therefore, ‘believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they be of God.’”9
Wesley’s concern here is not to dismiss spiritual experience, but to ensure it is rightly tested and grounded. For him, enthusiasm was not limited to emotional excess, but described any impulse—religious or intellectual—that claimed the Spirit’s authority while disregarding Scripture’s witness. His warning applies as readily to approaches that treat moral or cultural developments as self-authenticating truth as to forms of spirituality that elevate personal experience above the testing of Scripture. In a cultural moment that often encourages individuals to “live their truth,” Wesleyan scholar Kenneth Collins reminds us, “the self is never the measure of truth. Scripture, reason, and the great tradition serve as correctives to the tendency of the will to baptize its own desires as divine.”11
Wesley’s concern, however, was never confined to only one pole of error. In his own century, he warned as strongly against both the cold, rigid formalism that trusted in correct rational notions alone and against the enthusiasts who trusted their impulses. Both, he believed, severed truth from the fullness of Scriptural faith. Modern distortions arise across the spectrum in similarly varied forms, even if different contexts give rise to different errors.
Discernment, as understood here, is the Spirit’s illumination of truth already revealed in Scripture and confirmed by the witness of the early Church—the light by which the Church learns to see clearly and live faithfully. As the apostle John urges, we are to “try the spirits” (1 John 4:1) and, as Wesley insisted, to bring every claim to the test of Scripture, trusting that genuine inspiration will always harmonize with divine revelation.9,12 Yet discernment concerns not only the accuracy of a claim, but also the spirit in which it is made. Wesleyan-Holiness theology has long emphasized that faithful discernment requires rightly ordered love—what has been called orthokardia, a heart formed in love for God and neighbor—because when the heart is malformed, even claims that appear doctrinally correct can distort the gospel they seek to uphold.
In much of contemporary spirituality, discernment is reduced to attentive listening—treating inner impressions, personal narratives, or emotional resonance as authoritative in themselves. Wesley would have recognized this as a new form of enthusiasm, because it bypasses the testing commanded in 1 John 4:1. That command, addressed to the community of believers, assumes that discernment is not a private act but a shared one, in which claims of spiritual insight are weighed against Scripture and brought into the shared wisdom of the Christian community shaped by Scripture and centered on Jesus Christ. The Spirit may guide believers personally in particular circumstances, but such guidance never stands apart from the authority of Scripture, the character of Christ, or the wisdom of the Christian community. Personal leading directs our steps; Scripture and the Church shape our understanding of truth. When attentive listening replaces testing, ideas that resonate with contemporary culture are treated as if they carry divine authority, and holiness is redefined not as transformation into Christlikeness but as affirmation without transformation. True Christian discernment, in Wesley’s sense, listens with compassion but ultimately weighs every impression, claim, or conviction against the Word of God and the wisdom of the Christian community across time, so that love and truth remain inseparably joined.
This is the orthodox sense in which the term Discernment is used throughout this essay: not as an open-ended discovery of new truth, but as the Spirit-enabled capacity to weigh every claim, impulse, or idea by its conformity to Christ as revealed in Scripture and consensually confessed by the historic Church. True Wesleyan Discernment listens deeply, but it also judges carefully, grounding love in the truth revealed in Jesus Christ—the living Logos in whom all truth coheres—and expressing that truth through lives shaped by his self-giving love.
As Wesley reminded his hearers, Methodism “is not a new religion — it is the old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the primitive Church.”13 In that conviction, discernment is not a quest for innovation but a recovery of the ancient faith, the faith once delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3), lived out afresh in every generation—and this is the work to which we now turn.
Questions for Self-Examination: Practicing Discernment
The Way of Faithful Tension begins not with abstract ideas but with the formation of our own hearts. These questions are offered as an invitation to pause and examine how we, as individuals, are being shaped by the voices around us.
1. What is forming me?
When you feel the impulse to use labels as shortcuts or weapons, pause and ask:
Am I being formed in the likeness of Christ, marked by grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation—or in the patterns of this age, shaped by suspicion, rivalry, and contempt?
2. Whom am I actually seeing?
When a word or position triggers frustration or contempt, pause and ask:
Am I responding to a person made in God’s image, or to a caricature, perhaps one I have created, or one I have uncritically adopted from others?
3. What am I amplifying?
Before sharing an article, argument, social media post, or story, pause and ask:
Does this reflect the truthfulness of Christ, or the tactics of the age? Would I still share it if I knew it could weaken someone’s trust in Christ or His Church?
Questions for Vocational Discernment: Practicing Faithful Tension in Our Work
Faithful Tension is not only a matter of personal formation. It also shapes how we, together, teach, lead, collaborate, and make decisions as a Christian university. The following questions invite us to consider how this way of discernment takes shape in our shared work.
1. How do we discern well together?
In our meetings, classrooms, and decisions, are we creating space for patient listening, shared wisdom, and Spirit-led discernment—or defaulting to speed, certainty, or unexamined assumptions?
2. What kind of community are we forming together—and how is my work contributing to it?
Through my daily work and interactions, am I contributing to a community shaped by trust, humility, and Christlike love—or one shaped by quiet division, defensiveness, or ideological alignment?
Closing
In many ways, this vision returns me to my early years at PLNU, when faculty from different disciplines regularly gathered to wrestle with difficult questions together. Scientists, theologians, and other scholars across the university sought to understand how faith and learning belonged together. Those conversations were not always easy, but they reflected something essential: Christian discernment is not a solitary exercise—but a shared one, formed in the practices and relationships of Christian community. Today, recovering and reimagining that spirit of learning together and pushing through the discomfort of challenging conversations may be one of the most important ways Christian universities can practice the Way of Faithful Tension.
When our language is shaped by fear, rivalry, or ideological loyalty, it does more than distort our speech—it reshapes how we see one another and the world God loves. But what if there’s a way to hold fast to truth without weaponizing it? Not an easier way, but a more faithful one. What if the answer isn’t found in choosing sides, but in walking a harder, more deliberate path—the Way of Faithful Tension, where conviction and charity are held together under the lordship of Christ?
In Part Two, we’ll look to John Wesley, not for easy answers, but for a model of spiritual discernment that holds truth and love together in faithful tension and builds on the notion of the via media introduced above. At a time when the Church in his own century was pulled apart by competing extremes, Wesley demonstrated how Scripture-shaped discernment could recover the wholeness of the Gospel. His legacy offers a framework not only for theology, but for how we live and lead in complex times.
The second and third parts of the series will come successively about a week apart. In the meantime, I’d welcome your thoughts, comments, and questions as a community effort to model dialogue and Faithful Tension.
Endnotes and References
1 John Wesley, “Preface,” in Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), in The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition, vol. 14, ed. Frank Baker (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989).
2 For classic articulations of Scripture’s normative authority within Christian orthodoxy, see Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, I.2–3; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I.1; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I.6–9; John Wesley, “Preface to Sermons on Several Occasions” and Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion; and Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/1. For Catholic and Orthodox accounts of Scripture as received and authoritatively interpreted within the living Tradition of the Church, see Dei Verbum, §§9–10; and John Behr, The Way to Nicaea. On the Church’s historic concern that Christian faith not be subordinated to autonomous reason, private revelation, or cultural consensus, see Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III.1–4; Lesslie Newbigin, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society; and N. T. Wright, Scripture and the Authority of God.
3 John Wesley, The Case of Reason Impartially Considered (1743), in The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition (Nashville: Abingdon Press).
4 James Davison Hunter, To Change the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 103; Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 73; Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 224.
5 John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become Like Him. Do as He Did (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2024), chap. 2.
6 Arthur C. Brooks, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt (New York: HarperOne, 2019).
7 W. Shelburne Brown, remarks to the Point Loma community, c. 1975, quoted in internal university archives.
8 Wesley, Works, Letter to John Smith, June 1745.
9 Wesley, Works, Sermon 37, “The Nature of Enthusiasm.”
10 Wesley, Works, Sermon 89, “The More Excellent Way.”
11 Kenneth J. Collins, The Scripture Way of Salvation: The Heart of John Wesley’s Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997), 119.
12 Wesley, Works, Sermon 43, “The Scripture Way of Salvation.”
13 Wesley, Works, Sermon 132, “On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel.”