Dr. Kerry Fulcher
President, Point Loma Nazarene University
Recap of Part One:
In Part One, we examined how our fractured cultural vocabulary and polarized public discourse shape not only the way we talk, but the way we see one another. We named the culture-war dynamics that train us to react rather than reflect, to win rather than discern, and we acknowledged why followers of Jesus cannot adopt these habits without being formed away from His likeness. Against this backdrop, we turned to our Wesleyan-Holiness heritage as a different way—a way shaped by the ancient Christian faith and by John Wesley’s vision of the via media as a path of Faithful Tension. Wesley’s “middle way” was not compromise but Scriptural Discipline: a way of holding faith and learning together so that Scripture orders intellectual inquiry, reason is enlivened by the Spirit, and academic excellence is pursued as faithful stewardship rather than a competing allegiance. Part One concluded by defining Discernment in this Wesleyan sense: not the discovery of new truth, but the Spirit-enabled capacity to weigh every idea, impulse, or narrative by its conformity to Christ as revealed by Scripture and confessed in the shared creedal wisdom of the Christian tradition. With that foundation in place, we now turn to Part 2 to explore how Wesley practiced this Discernment in his own ministry and why it remains vital for our lives today.
Wesley’s Way of Discernment: Holding Truths Together
Introduction
The phrase via media, or “middle way,” was not new when John Wesley adopted it; but he filled it with distinctly theological meaning. For Wesley, it was never about comfort or compromise—it was about the Spirit-led work of refusing to separate what God had joined together.
- Grace that produces obedience.
- Faith that works through love.
- Scripture interpreted with Spirit-guided reason.
- Holiness of heart and life, both personal and social.
Wesley’s middle way wasn’t a narrow balancing act—it was a call to wholeness. A refusal to fragment the Christian life into isolated truths or disconnected pursuits. It’s that same integrative vision that continues to shape the calling of Christian higher education today.
In this second part, we turn to Wesley’s theological method and the spiritual posture he modeled; a posture that refuses either/or thinking and instead embraces the both/and of Gospel truth. Discernment doesn’t mean giving up conviction—it means learning how to hold conviction without losing love. This is the same Discernment defined earlier; not speculative or endlessly open, but the Spirit-enabled wisdom that tests every claim of truth by its conformity to Christ and Scripture.
From the Via Media to the Way of Faithful Tension
From Anglican compromise to Wesleyan Discernment.
The phrase via media itself predates Wesley. In the sixteenth century, the Church of England described itself as a via media, a middle way between Roman Catholicism on one hand and the radical Protestant Reformation on the other. For Anglicans, this meant a church that retained historic liturgy and sacramental practice while embracing the Protestant emphases on the primacy of Scripture and justification by faith. (14)
This Anglican identity shaped the world that John Wesley inherited in the eighteenth century. As a priest in the Church of England, Wesley absorbed this language. However, he redefined it in spiritual and theological terms rather than institutional ones. What earlier generations described as a “middle way,” Wesley lived as what we might call a Way of Faithful Tension—a life marked by continual discernment, seeking to receive the whole truth of the gospel without distortion. He insisted that faith must bear fruit in works, that grace must lead to obedient love, and that reason must remain attentive to the Spirit, all ordered under the lordship of Christ. As theologian Randy Maddox observes, “Wesley’s theology was not a compromise between opposing positions, but a dynamic balance grounded in God’s gracious initiative and human response.” (15)
For Wesley, this was never innovation; it was retrieval. He described his movement as “the old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the primitive Church,” a re-awakening rather than a reformulation of Christian truth. (13) His discernment sought not to construct new theology but to recover the holy balance and harmony the early believers held.
Wesley’s Faithful Tension of Salvation
Between Legalism and Cheap Grace
Wesley’s understanding of salvation revealed what this kind of discernment looks like in practice. He saw it as a path between two distortions of the Christian life:
- Legalism—the belief that our standing before God depends on strict rule-keeping, in which faith becomes performance, and
- Antinomianism—the belief that grace frees us from any moral responsibility, in which faith becomes permissiveness.
Each side clung to a portion of the truth but distorted it by separating what Scripture holds together. The legalists rightly affirmed the seriousness of sin and the call to holiness, but twisted these into fear-driven self-reliance. The antinomians rightly cherished the wonder of grace and God’s unconditional love, but misused it as license, forgetting that true grace not only forgives but transforms.
Wesley’s via media rejected both extremes. He insisted that salvation is by grace alone through faith, but also that such faith, when genuine, necessarily leads to holiness of heart and life. Justifying grace, he taught, always opens the door to sanctifying grace. In his sermon Justification by Faith, Wesley reminds us that saving faith is not mere assent, but a living disposition of the heart—one that expresses itself in love, obedience, and transformation. (16)
This was discernment in action: not mediating between extremes but embracing the transforming power of the gospel—grace that leads to holiness, forgiveness that opens the path to formation. Wesley taught that true faith always expresses itself in love, and that saving grace inevitably produces a holy life shaped by the Spirit. In this vision, grace is not opposed to growth, but to self-reliance.
As Dallas Willard helpfully reminds us, “Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.” (17) The power that justifies is the same power that sanctifies, and in Wesley’s view, the Christian life is a continual response to that grace, marked not by striving to earn God’s favor but by living in joyful obedience to it.
For a fuller expression of this integration, Wesley also affirmed with Paul that “the law is established through faith” (Romans 3:31). Grace doesn’t abolish the moral vision of Scripture; it makes it possible, showing how justifying grace leads to holy living without lapsing into legalism (18). In this way, Wesley’s theology helps us reject distortion, embrace transformation, and walk the path of holy love.
Holy Scripture and the Guides of Discernment
The Harmony of Intellect and Spirit.
Against these recurring distortions, Wesley’s theological instincts point toward a more faithful path. This same instinct of holding apparent tensions together in faithful, Spirit-guided harmony also shaped his theological practice. For Wesley, Holy Scripture remained the Church’s primary authority and true north for discernment. Yet Scripture was never read in isolation. He interpreted it in conversation with the wisdom of the Church across time and place, engaged it through sanctified reason, and expected its truth to be confirmed through the witness and experience of God’s transforming grace among believers.
Wesley therefore resisted the temptation to absolutize any single faculty of interpretation. Reason was a gift of God, but not a master over revelation. As Wesley himself wrote, “Reason is a precious gift of God— but it cannot produce faith, nor hope, nor love.” (3) The witness and experience of grace testified to the Spirit’s transforming work, but it was never permitted to redefine the truth of the Word or function as an independent authority over it. The wisdom of the Church offered the accumulated consensus wisdom of the faithful across time and place, yet it remained subject to the authority of Scripture.
In this way, Wesley again refused false choices, allowing these gifts to serve together under the ordering authority of the Word as guided by the Holy Spirit. These were not competing authorities but God-given guides for discernment. The wisdom of the Church, sanctified reason, and the witness and experience of grace helped believers discern faithfully what Scripture teaches and how it should be lived.
This posture reflects another expression of the via media: not pitting intellect against faith, or experience against revelation, but allowing each to find its proper place within the life of the church. As PLNU’s own H. Orton Wiley later wrote about the task of Nazarene higher education: “First, there is the Word of Life. Here the standard is the Word of God. It is appealed to, honored, and studied. It is the standard of experience, morale, [and] life.” (19) In the Wesleyan spirit, Scripture does not silence reason or the transforming experience of God’s grace, but orders them, grounding inquiry in divine revelation.
In Wesley’s day, he faced two distortions of this balance. On one side stood Enlightenment rationalism, which sought to confine faith within the limits of human reason. Revelation was tolerated only when it could be explained, and mystery was treated as superstition. Wesley warned that a purely rational religion might defend morality while stripping faith of its living power, reducing Christianity to ethics without encounter. (3, 9)
On the other side stood what many called “enthusiasm,” or religious fanaticism; the belief that private impulses, feelings, or experiences could carry divine authority apart from Scripture or the counsel of the Church. To Wesley, this was equally dangerous because it replaced the testing of spirits with the elevation of emotion or experience. Both distortions, autonomous reason and untested spiritual enthusiasm, grasp genuine truth: reason is indeed God’s gift, and the Spirit truly moves with power. Yet when either claims supremacy, the result is distortion, faith either emptied of fire or inflamed without form. Wesley insisted that only when reason and attentiveness to the Spirit are held together, ordered by Scripture, and illumined by grace do they faithfully bear witness to God’s revelation. Rightly understood, this does not diminish reason, but places it in its proper relationship to faith. As theologian Alister McGrath notes, “Faith is not irrational, it is transrational, it goes beyond reason, not against it.” (20)
The same temptations persist today. Modern secularism inherits the rationalist’s suspicion of revelation, a posture that assumes hidden power dynamics behind every truth claim and often reduces Scripture from divine revelation to a mere product of human politics or psychology. At the same time, certain strands of classical liberal theology have embodied both distortions: on one side, adopting critical rationalism that questions the supernatural, and on the other, elevating moral sentiment or the ideals of cultural progress as revelatory authorities that stand over Scripture rather than under it. This posture tends to reduce Scripture to human aspiration, sidelining its prophetic power and divine authority.
Each, in its own way, shifts authority and our trust away from God and places ultimate trust in the self, whether in autonomous reason that doubts all external authority or in autonomous experience that declares its own authority. In every age, discernment means the same thing: not rejecting reason or experience but testing both by the Word that gives them life. Wesley affirmed this balance when he asked, “Is not the middle way best? Let reason do all that reason can, yet acknowledge it is utterly incapable of giving either faith, or hope, or love.” (3) For Wesley, truth was never found in the triumph of intellect or emotion alone, but in their harmony under the authority of Scripture.
As later interpreters sometimes misunderstood this balance, the via media was wrongly equated with moderation or compromise. Wesley’s middle way, however, was not about finding safety in the center. It was about doing the hard work of Discernment, holding together truths that belong together, and rejecting distortions that arise from their separation.
The Work of Discernment
Separating truth from distortion in a divided world.
In our classrooms and conversations, we often collapse ideas into people. One way to see how this happens is to distinguish between an ism and an ist. An ism names an ideological system or framework—often simplified and defended as a set of competing claims. An ist, by contrast, is the person who inhabits that framework, whose convictions and experiences are often far more complex than the labels used to describe them. Yet in polarized moments we take the most extreme version of a position—the “-ism”...and attach that caricature to the person, the “-ist.” Once that happens, dialogue becomes nearly impossible, because we are no longer engaging our sister or brother but a straw figure of our own making. We label them a “woke liberal” or a “right-wing extremist” and dismiss them as unworthy of dialogue—or worse, as evil.
Sometimes these are idea-based dismissals: socialist, fascist, creationist, evolutionist. Other times, they are character-based attacks: bigot, racist, heretic, snowflake. Both categories of labels can feel very personal, reduce people to caricatures, and short-circuit the work of charity and understanding. These labels become lazy shortcuts that raise defenses and shut down authentic dialogue. They allow us to avoid the hard work of making a genuine case, while also preventing us from seeing the other as a beloved child of God and, thereby, someone we, too, should love.
One clear example of this collapse between the “-ism” and the “-ist” can be seen in debates over creation and evolution. Within the Christian community, the conversation about origins has too often become polarized into competing caricatures. Those who affirm the insights of evolutionary science are sometimes dismissed as “godless evolutionists,” accused of denying God’s creative action or biblical authority. Those who hold to a more literal reading of Genesis are often labeled “anti-science fundamentalists,” as if faith in divine creation were incompatible with intellectual integrity. Both positions contain partial truths, and both carry distortion. The natural world does indeed reveal patterns and processes that science helps us understand, but these discoveries do not erase the confession that “in the beginning, God created.” Likewise, affirming God as Creator does not require rejecting what can be verified through scientific investigation.
The challenge, then, is not choosing between rival “isms” that distort and caricaturize one another. The real work is engaging the “ist” — the person behind the position — with humility and honesty. Faithful tension calls us to hold together truths that ideological camps often pull apart, and we can start this process by seeing and loving the person beyond the label.
In my own teaching, I have seen how these conversations can either divide or deepen our faith, depending on how we approach them. When students learn to listen charitably, ask honest questions, and refuse easy caricatures, the classroom becomes a place of discovery and understanding rather than conflict and division. That spirit of Discernment is reflected in our University Position Statement on Creation and Evolution (2010), which expresses this commitment clearly: we affirm God as Creator, we recognize the authority of Scripture, and we acknowledge that “scientifically verifiable discoveries in the physical and natural sciences contribute to our understanding of the natural world.” (21) We reject both the naturalism that denies divine agency and the dogmatism that refuses to acknowledge legitimate scientific insight. Faithful Tension calls us to live in that space of humility and Discernment, to explore God’s world with both reverence and rigor, confident that all truth is God’s truth, but not all truth claims in our societal and cultural ecosystems are true.
Faithful Tension requires humility and Discernment, the humility to separate the “-ism” from the “-ist,” and the Discernment to test ideas by the light of Christ rather than by cultural, ideological, or disciplinary loyalty. Not all ideas carry equal weight; some are closer to the Gospel or align better with the teaching of Scripture as faithfully interpreted through sound exegesis and the witness of the Church. The goal is not to stand halfway between two poles, but to hold fast to what aligns with Christ and Scripture—and to release what does not. This vision has long shaped our own institutional life. President W. Shelburne Brown reminded the Point Loma faculty in 1975 that every discipline must find its “coordinating philosophy” in Jesus Christ, whose truth orders all learning (22), echoing Wesley’s conviction that revelation through Scripture brings coherence to the whole of knowledge.
Faithful Tensions in Wesley’s Practice
How Discernment Shapes Holy Living.
Wesley’s ministry embodied this discipline of Discernment:
Grace and Works: Salvation is God’s free gift, yet genuine faith necessarily “works by love,” producing obedience and holiness. (16) Grace without obedience becomes license; obedience without grace becomes legalism. Both truths must be held; both distortions rejected. For Wesley, obedience was never a condition of grace, but its consequence, the outward expression of inward renewal.
At PLNU, this means we will never pursue academic rigor or moral excellence in a way that eclipses grace, nor will we preach grace in a way that neglects the holy and ethical life and intellectual humility that flows from it. True formation unites both: grace that transforms not only the heart but also the mind; not only how we live, but how we think, teach, and learn. Our pursuit of truth in the academy, like our pursuit of holiness in life, must remain rooted in the transforming grace of God.
Personal and Social Holiness: “The gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social, no holiness but social holiness.” (23) By social holiness, Wesley did not mean mere social activism or the reduction of the Gospel to political causes. He meant that holiness is formed and sustained within Christian community as believers grow together through prayer, worship, accountability, communion, and acts of mercy. Yet this shared pursuit of holy love was never inward-looking or self-contained. It naturally overflowed into public compassion, leading Wesley and the early Methodists to care for the poor, visit prisoners, open clinics, and advocate for abolition. For Wesley, personal holiness and outward mercy belonged together; to separate them was to lose sight of the fullness of the Gospel. Because the Gospel is all-encompassing in scope, the Spirit’s work of renewal extends from persons to communities and, ultimately, to creation itself (Rom. 8:21; Col. 1:19–20).
For PLNU, this means forming students whose devotion to Christ expresses itself not only in private disciplines but also in a compassionate presence in a hurting world, because holiness and love of neighbor cannot be separated.
Reason and Spirit: Wesley rejected both the cold skepticism of Enlightenment rationalism and the excesses of “enthusiasm” that mistook personal impulses or emotions for the voice of God. He embraced reason as a gift for ordering the mind, and he embraced the Spirit as the One who enlivens the heart. Only together, under Scripture’s authority as it bears witness to Christ, do they reflect the fullness of God’s work. (9) For Wesley, intellect and inspiration were never rivals but partners in the pursuit of truth.
For PLNU, this means we will love both truth and mystery, pursuing rigorous inquiry with intellectual integrity while remembering that reason finds its true flourishing under the authority of Scripture and in the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit.
These examples show the type of integration that gave early Methodism its unique vitality. It was not either/or. It was both/and; rooted in Christ, animated by the Holy Spirit, and expressed in holiness.
Questions for Self-Examination: Practicing Discernment
Wesley believed discernment required continual self-examination. These questions invite us to test our own instincts and assumptions as we seek to hold together the truths Scripture joins.
1. Distinguishing Truth from Its Distortion
When you encounter a strong theological, cultural, or moral claim, whether in a book, a classroom, a sermon, a social media post, a conversation with a loved one, or your own intuition—pause and ask:
Am I holding together the whole truth of Scripture, or am I clinging to one part while neglecting companion truths? Which paired truth (truth and love, grace and obedience, reason and Spirit, personal and social holiness) helps me test whether I’m being shaped by the Gospel or by the preferences of the times?
2. Testing What I Think I Know
When an idea feels compelling, whether because it seems intellectually airtight or emotionally stirring, ask:
Have I “tried the spirits” (1 John 4:1)? Am I willing to allow Holy Scripture, the wisdom of the Church, sanctified reason, and the witness of God’s grace among believers to challenge, refine, or even correct what I think I know?
3. Orienting My Life to True North
As you engage difficult questions—scientific, theological, cultural—ask:
What is functioning as my true north?
Am I allowing Holy Scripture to orient my judgments, while remaining attentive to the Holy Spirit, the wisdom of the Church, sanctified reason, and the witness and experience of God’s grace?
Or am I allowing cultural assumptions, disciplinary loyalties, personal preferences, or unchecked experiences to become the lens through which I read God’s Word?
Questions for Vocational Discernment
1. How do I practice discernment in my discipline?
When I encounter competing ideas, perspectives, or interpretations in my field, am I reducing them to simple categories—or doing the harder work of testing, refining, and holding together what may reflect partial truths in light of Christ and Scripture?
2. What is shaping my judgments?
In my teaching, scholarship, or leadership, am I allowing Scripture and the Spirit to order my reasoning—or am I being subtly shaped by the assumptions, pressures, or narratives of my discipline or the broader culture?
Closing
Wesley recognized that many of the Christian life’s most vital truths—grace and obedience, faith and works, reason and Spirit—had too often been pulled apart or misordered. For him, these were never rival truths to be held in balance but dynamically ordered realities where obedience flows from grace, works are the outworking of faith, and reason is illuminated by the Spirit. Each expresses a dimension of the Gospel’s fullness, and when one is elevated without the other—or disconnected from its source—the result is distortion. Wesley’s genius was not in moderating between extremes, but in discerning how truth finds its proper order and integration in the wholeness of Christ. This vision continues to shape the kind of formation we seek at PLNU.
But theology doesn’t live on paper alone. It takes shape in practice; in the classrooms, the labs, the chapels, and in the community. So how does this Way of Faithful Tension become more than a framework? What does it look like, or what could it look like, in the life of a Christian university like PLNU? In Part Three, we turn to that question directly, exploring how this way of discernment can shape the life, learning, and witness of a Christian university today.
Endnotes and References
1John Wesley, The Case of Reason Impartially Considered (1743), in The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition (Nashville: Abingdon Press).
9Wesley, Works, Sermon 37, “The Nature of Enthusiasm.”
13Wesley, Works, Sermon 132, “On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel.”
14Joseph Hall, Via Media: The Way of Peace (London, 1619); John Henry Newman, The Via Media of the Anglican Church, vols. 1–2 (London: Rivingtons, 1830–1841).
15Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1994).
16Wesley, Works, Sermon 5, “Justification by Faith.”
17Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006), 61.
18Wesley, Works, Sermon 35, “The Law Established Through Faith, II.”
19H. Orton Wiley, “The Heritage of the Church of the Nazarene,” in Educational Heritage of the Church of the Nazarene (Kansas City, MO: Nazarene Publishing House, 1951), 12.
20Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 172.
21Point Loma Nazarene University, “Position Statement on Creation and Evolution,” approved May 15, 2010, Office of the Provost.
22W. Shelburne Brown, “Address to the Faculty,” Point Loma College, September 18, 1975, PLNU Archives.
23Wesley, “Preface,” Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), in Works, vol. 14.