Sanctifying Theology: At the Intersections of Wesleyan Theology, Dogmatics, and Practice—A Festschrift in Honour of Thomas A. Noble

Sanctification is not merely a "practical" and isolated doctrine but should permeate the whole horizon of theology: dogmatics, ethics, practics, as well as the sciences and the arts. The essays are collected under the twin convictions that theology can be sanctified and sanctifying. The whole of theology is inflected by holiness, and so theology should aim to share in God's sanctifying work. Sanctifying Theology contributes new possibilities in Wesleyan-holiness theology and explores their contribution to various Christian doctrines and contemporary issues. Written in honor of the work of Thomas Arthur Noble, the essays in this book are attentive to the streams of theology that have most influenced him: the fathers, the Wesleys, and the Torrances. Both constructive and exploratory, the topic of the essays cover, among other things, (1) consideration of how Wesleyan-holiness theologies contribute to ecumenical theological discussions, (2) readings of Wesleyan-holiness theology through the lens of the church fathers and the Torrances, and (3) explorations of how these conversations and sources might shape contemporary practical and ethical concerns. The essays work both for the Wesleyan tradition and from the Wesleyan tradition for the church catholic, showing how recent trajectories in Wesleyan-holiness theology might contribute to broader discussions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Oct 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666791303

Book preview

SANCTIFYING THEOLOGY

At the Intersections of Wesleyan Theology, Dogmatics, and Practice

A Festschrift in Honour of Thomas A. Noble

edited by

Jacob Lett

Jonathan M. Platter

SANCTIFYING THEOLOGY

At the Intersections of Wesleyan Theology, Dogmatics, and Practice—A Festschrift in Honour of Thomas A. Noble

Copyright © 2023 Wipf and Stock Publishers. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-6667-9129-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-9128-0

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-9130-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Lett, Jacob, editor. | Platter, Jonathan M., editor.

Title: Sanctifying theology : at the intersections of Wesleyan theology, dogmatics, and practice—a festschrift in honour of Thomas A. Noble / edited by Jacob Lett and Jonathan M. Platter.

Description: Eugene, OR : Pickwick Publications, 2023 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-6667-9129-7 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-6667-9128-0 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-6667-9130-3 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Noble, Thomas A. | Methodism—History. | Methodist Church—Doctrines. | Theology, Doctrinal.

Classification: BX8331.3 .S63 2023 (paperback) | BX8331.3 (ebook)

07/10/23

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Professor Thomas Arthur Noble

PART I: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF WESLEYAN THEOLOGY AND DOGMATICS

Chapter 3: Gestating, Birthing, and Nurturing Grace

Chapter 4: John Wesley and the Person of Christ

Chapter 5: Recapitulating Wesley and Torrance

Chapter 6: Transpositions

Chapter 7: Worship

PART II: AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF ART, ETHICS, AND PRACTICAL THEOLOGY

Chapter 8: John Wesley’s Theology of Worship and a Pendulum

Chapter 9: Incarnation, Creation, and New Creation

Chapter 10: Israel’s Highland Beginnings

Chapter 11: The Resurrection, the Spirit, and the Sanctification of Our Corporate Humanity468

Chapter 12: Pre-Programmed Computer or Free Agent

Chapter 13: Evangelism in the Fourth Century

Chapter 14: Theological Research as Gospel Ministry

CONCLUSION

Chapter 15: Afterword

Contributors

Bibliography

Essays collected in honour of Professor Thomas A. Noble

Acknowledgments

This project began as we, the editors, were completing our doctoral work. Thomas Noble was gradually retiring from his various formal roles and dedicating more and more time to writing his systematics, commissioned by the Church of the Nazarene. We were moved to develop this project out of our sense of gratitude for Prof. Noble’s mentorship and teaching, and in anticipatory gratitude for his theological magnum opus. So, our first word of thanks goes to Tom Noble himself. Thank you for your service to decades of students internationally, and for the generosity with which you welcome us into the shared academic work of cherishing and articulating the gospel.

Second, this project would not have been possible without the enthusiastic and passionate work of the contributors. Their eagerness to contribute, even amidst major transitions, other projects, and the ordinary duties of teaching and ministry, is a testimony to their love of Tom Noble and the pathos for theology that his teaching has cultivated in students and peers.

The list of potential contributors was much longer than the final number of essays presented here. Many who were unable to contribute nonetheless offered encouragement and advice along the way. Thank you especially to Steve Wright. Kent Brower, who wrote the biographical essay (chapter 2), offered us comments and advice at the early stages as we coordinated with contributors, and his suggestions strengthened the final results.

The editors would also like to express our gratitude for the generosity of several persons and institutions for their financial support of this project: to Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, MO, to the Manchester Wesley Research Centre, to Jerome van Kuiken, to Josh McNall, and to Joseph Coleson.

We would like to thank Tim Geddes for editing the footnotes to style and compiling the bibliography. Finally, the editors at Wipf and Stock patiently responded to our novice questions, provided us with support along the way, and graciously extended the deadline as we managed this project while we each made transatlantic moves and adjusted to roles in new institutions.

Three essays have been published previously. We are grateful to the publishers and editors for permission to reproduce the material here:

Josh McNall, The Mosaic of Atonement: An Integrated Approach to Christ’s Work (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2019), 33–40 and 85–90.

Jerome van Kuiken, Transpositions: The Notes of the Church in Trinitarian and Wesleyan Keys, Wesleyan Theological Journal 53 (2019) 79–91.

Jeremy Begbie, A Bold Vision: T. F. Torrance Amidst the Arts, Participatio: Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship 11 (2023).

Abbreviations

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Jonathan M. Platter

On Sanctifying Theology

All theology is lived theology. And what is lived theology if not sanctification—surrendering to the perfecting work of the Spirit? If this is true, then sanctification is not merely a practical and isolated doctrine but might be able to permeate the whole horizon of theology: dogmatics, ethics, practices, and even at the intersections with the sciences and the arts. This volume is titled Sanctifying Theology, and the ambiguity of the present participle (sanctifying) is intentional. These essays are collected under the twin convictions that the whole of theology is inflected by holiness and that theology should aim to share in God’s sanctifying work. Theology can be sanctified and sanctifying.

While the essays collected in this volume range in terms of subject matter and dialogue partners, all of them are performances of sanctifying theology. We hope this shared impulse will prove a worthy tribute to Prof. Thomas A. Noble, in whose honor these essays are collected. As Kent Brower says in chapter 2, Tom Noble’s . . . greatest and most distinctive contribution, however, may be the way he has established a re-envisioned Wesleyan tradition of Christian holiness as an essential part of Christian doctrine.¹ Noble’s work on sanctification, particularly his Holy Trinity, Holy People as well as his contribution to a proposed revision of the Church of the Nazarene’s article of faith on sanctification, has rejected the idea that holiness can be relegated to mere spirituality and that it is only a response to the reality of sin.

Theology strives toward coherence and integration because it is our human attempt to speak well of our one triune Lord. The triune Lord’s work of transforming human persons into vibrant and whole images of God, repetitions (in all their diversity) of the perfection that God simply is (and I take it that this is one way to summarize the doctrine of sanctification),² is at the heart of the work of theology, for theology is our attempt to utter all that we are in faithful service to all that God is. As John Webster suggested:

Without sanctification—without being caught up by God and cleansed for the service of God in the fellowship of the saints—the work of theological reason is profitless. . . . Theology is a work in which holiness is perfected in the fear of God . . . and its end is the sanctifying of God’s holy name.³

If this account of the holiness of theology is on the right track, then the twin convictions above are given further support. But it also suggests some further implications that have shaped the contributions to this book and the shape of the whole. Theology is a working out of holiness in speaking of the one triune Lord’s holiness. It is the unity and integrity of the object of the work of theology that motivates whatever unity and integrity theology itself possesses. This entails that it is not for theology to dictate unity (either in terms of perspective or purview), for the unity of theology does not spring from its own integrity and power. Its unity is elicited from it by God and to be worked out in its activity.

Sanctifying theology is, then, a conversation that should aspire to a wide range of participants and concern an equally wide array of topics. This conversation is the material reality of the fact that theology’s unity is to be worked out and is not a brute given. In this volume, church leaders, missionaries, and theologians from Australia, the UK, and the US have contributed to a conversation that engages dogmatics, practical theology, the arts, and the sciences. We hope that this volume’s conversation, incomplete as it is, makes a faithful contribution to the ongoing work of sanctifying theology, and Wesleyan theology in particular.

Overview of Contents

The essays can be read alone and in whatever order suits the reader’s interests. We have structured the work according to the two directions the essays face: inward to the dogmatic heart of theology and outward to practical, cultural, and broader intellectual domains. Part 1 concerns the intersections of Wesleyan theology and dogmatics, and Part 2 the intersections of art, ethics, and pastoral theology.

In chapter 2, Kent Brower offers a personal sketch of Prof. Noble’s life and career, threading together Noble’s service to church, his teaching, publications, and the awaited publication of his systematic theology. Brower not only provides a portrait of Noble, he also demonstrates specific ways in which this book fits with Noble’s legacy and influence.

Part 1 consists of experiments in Wesleyan dogmatics. In chapter 3, Glen O’Brien reframes Wesleyan systematics through linking the three movements of grace—prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying—with explicitly feminine imagery of gestation, birth, and nurture. Through dialogue with feminist theologians from several Christian traditions, O’Brien finds a rich new starting point for the relational themes that have been so common in Wesleyan theology, suggesting that these feminine images draw our attention to God’s intimate, perhaps even passionate and agonizing, love and care for all creatures. David Rainey turns to christology in chapter 4, dealing simultaneously with architectonic matters of theological method—particularly theological retrieval and interpretation of the creedal tradition—and Wesley’s own understanding of the hypostatic union. While aware of the tendency to downplay Wesley’s systematic and constructive theology, Rainey argues that Wesley self-consciously retrieves and defends Chalcedonian christology, in particular a full two-nature christology in the tradition of Athanasius.

Josh McNall turns in chapter 5 to the work of Christ, in particular to the question of the extent of the atonement. With Wesley, McNall holds to the unlimited extent of the atonement, but he recognizes that this raises questions about universalism. Rather than provide a definitive position on universalism as such, McNall brings Wesley and T. F. Torrance into dialogue to show that there are creative options for affirming unlimited extent without automatically assuming universal redemption. In chapter 6 Jerome Van Kuiken traces Wesley’s transposition of the four classical marks of the church. Van Kuiken carefully weighs the creativity and risks of Wesley’s contextual thinking, suggesting that our own context is sufficiently different to require a new kind of transposition.

Chapter 7 concludes the dogmatic experiments of Part 1 by articulating a theology of worship. Sandra Brower begins with Noble’s integration of atonement and sanctification and adds a third, worship, to argue that worship is the necessary link that mediates the work of Christ with our formation into Christ-likeness. Drawing from Noble’s own interlocutors, especially John McLeod Campbell and the Torrance brothers, Brower introduces James K. A. Smith’s account of the formative power of liturgy to further develop an account of the process of sanctification.

Part 2 shifts from dogmatics to a range of questions that intersect with other disciplines or matters of action. The Part begins with a chapter that turns from the theology of worship to the practical matter of liturgical assessment and reform. Steve Johnson suggests that Wesley carefully moved between liturgical tradition and liturgical innovation; in the process of tracing Wesley’s own approach, Johnson develops a model that could apply to other instances of re-evaluating liturgical practices.

In chapter 9, Jeremy Begbie brings T. F. Torrance into dialogue with the recent movement of theology through the arts. Although Torrance himself did not work very directly with the arts, Begbie mines Torrance’s theology of incarnation, resurrection, and new creation to show the interpretive value this theology has for engaging the arts.

Chapters 10 and 11 engage in theological interpretation of Scripture. Joseph Coleson looks at power, Shalom, and the family-like relations that God cultivates in the Old Testament. Engaging a range of texts and historical-contextual issues, Coleson presents a non-coercive God who seeks non-coercive relation with creatures whose fulfillment should consist in non-coercive Shalom for all creation. Continuing with this theme of corporate renewal and healing, Andy Johnson argues that 1 Cor 15 and John’s Gospel emphasize corporate sanctification by narrating the Spirit’s agency in the resurrection of Christ and, with him, the transformation of our Adamic humanity.

David McEwan wrestles in chapter 12 with current research in the neurosciences to rethink the theological understanding of human freedom. McEwan suggests that Wesley’s understanding of human freedom is not strictly opposed to some of the developments in neuroscience, particularly because Wesley did not defend absolute, autonomous free will. While some strong-determinist views in neuroscience do not seem compatible with the centrality of the transforming work of divine love and relationship, human and divine, McEwan also finds that these Wesleyan emphases can fit very well with softer accounts of human determination, especially those that acknowledge our social and relational dependency.

Part 2 closes with two chapters of practical theology. In chapter 13, Carla Sunberg traces a complex web of evangelical movements during the fourth century, asking whether much of the grassroots and family-based ministry—especially of women and other persons with less social power—might provide new possibilities for how we imagine evangelism today. Jeren Rowell, in chapter 14, develops a pastoral theology of theological research. Rowell too works out this theology through historical narration, this time of key moments of crisis and intellectual transformation in the Church of the Nazarene. He argues that these moments became creative times of growth in no small part because of the way the denomination affirmed and supported the work of higher education and research, which suggests that we would do well to re-affirm these institutions and their work today.

Jacob Lett closes out the volume by sketching some new directions for the theology of sanctification, especially by bringing the early-twentieth-century theologians who have most influenced Noble into dialogue with some recent developments, especially aspects of dramatic theology, represented by figures like Hans Urs von Balthasar and Rowan Williams. While such a sketch cannot claim to provide a new doctrine of holiness that matches the detailed exegetical work of Wesley scholars over the last half-century, it certainly bears witness to the vitality of the doctrine and the fruit it bears for Wesleyan theologians in ongoing ecumenical and constructive dialogue.

1

. See esp. Noble, Holy Trinity, Holy People,

5, 18–20

. In both the monograph and the revised article of faith, the doctrine of atonement is a clear instance of Noble’s conviction about the unity of theology and the way this unity should affect our doctrine of sanctification, cf. Noble, Holy Trinity, Holy People, chapter

6

; and Noble, White Paper on Article X,

4, 16–18, 24

.

2

. Consider the importance of wholeness and imago Dei for William Greathouse’s articulation of sanctification in Wholeness in Christ.

3

. Webster, Holiness,

8, 24, 10

.

CHAPTER TWO

Professor Thomas Arthur Noble

A Personal Appreciation

Kent Brower

One of my earliest recollections of Tom centres on an occasion after a Board of Governors’ meeting when I was a junior lecturer and bursar at British Isles Nazarene College (BINC), as it was then called. The meeting was on a Saturday and it ended fairly late. Tom was staying on campus with us in our flat, so I invited him to relax with me while we watched Match of the Day, the highlights of the day’s matches in the then English Football League Division One. Tom looked at his watch, politely declined my invitation and retired to his room for the night. I discovered then that football was well down his list of interests, although in a delightful irony, his son-in-law used to hold a season ticket at Old Trafford to watch Manchester United!

That event may symbolise our different backgrounds—I came from a rather poor rural farming family in Western Canada that loved sport (provided it wasn’t played on a Sunday!), Tom from a middle-class family in cosmopolitan Glasgow. But despite that shaky start we have had a friendship that has spanned more than forty-five years.

Thomas Arthur Noble is the youngest child of Arthur and Janie Noble who were long-standing members of the Parkhead Church of the Nazarene, the mother church of the denomination in the UK at the heart of urban working-class Glasgow. His maternal grandfather, Thomas Gray, was one of the founding members of Parkhead under the ministry of Revd. Dr. George Sharpe. For many of Tom’s formative years his pastor was the Revd. Dr. Sydney Martin, a model of the kind of biblically-centred preaching that could only come through long hours of reading and thinking. Martin’s own articulate and thoughtful exposition of the Wesleyan Holiness message may well have been instrumental in nourishing and preserving these seedlings in Tom’s first-class mind. Whatever might be the case, Tom flourished in the Parkhead Church and developed his excellent musical talents on piano, cello, and organ. He also honed his leadership skills, serving as President of the local young people’s society, and, of course, participated in the Parkhead Church Choir. If one were to try retrospectively to isolate the strands of influence shaping Tom, Parkhead would have to be included. Parkhead was his home church long after he left Glasgow.

Tom’s secondary and university education began at the independent Hutchison’s Grammar School which prepared him well for this undergraduate study at the University of Glasgow. In Glasgow, Tom received his MA with concentrations in History and Politics in 1969 and his Teaching Certificate from Jordanhill College of Education in 1971. His first post was as a History teacher in Cathkin High School in metropolitan Glasgow (1970–73). Tom’s wife, Elaine, with whom he has four daughters, Janet (Tim), Catherine (Tim), Margaret (John) and Elspeth (Chris), was also a secondary school History teacher. Tom and Elaine celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2021.

Tom’s undergraduate education laid the foundations for his lifelong interest in history and politics. Numerous articles and two book-length publications marking milestones in recent British evangelical history gave expression to his historical interests. To mark the 2006 Centenary of the Church of the Nazarene in the UK he published an accessible volume, Called to be Saints⁴ that collated, assessed and disseminated archival and anecdotal material that would be important for those interested in the denomination’s place in British evangelicalism.

But Tom’s engagement in the church was not confined to the Church of the Nazarene. Tom has long been an integral part of the Tyndale Fellowship, the British evangelical interdenominational group of academics in biblical studies and theology. Notable evangelical scholars from around the world have contributed to the work of Tyndale Fellowship and have benefitted from its excellent resources. Household names of a past generation such as F. F. Bruce, I. H. Marshall, R. T. France, and David Wright laid the foundations for a plethora of more recent scholars such as N. T. Wright, Gerald Bray, Bruce Winter, Nigel Biggar and Peter Oakes who have all been part of the fellowship. It was fitting, then, that in that same year (2006), he published a volume with wider appeal, detailing the first sixty years of the Tyndale Fellowship from its founding in 1944.⁵ Here Tom sets out the origins of this fellowship through the gathering of several prominent evangelicals who saw a need for this kind of group to address the desperate situation of evangelical biblical scholarship in the UK.⁶ Particularly in biblical studies, any profession of faith was thought to render serious study impossible because it compromised the rationalist mantra of objectivity. It is certainly arguable, as Tom suggests, that the Tyndale Fellowship was instrumental in helping evangelical scholarship to survive and ultimately flourish in the UK academy. At British universities in the mid-twentieth century, evangelical biblical scholars were few in number; sixty years later, prominent posts in biblical studies in UK universities were held by scholars who would identify as evangelical, in the British sense of that word.⁷ As Tom points out, and to its credit, during this period the Tyndale Fellowship resisted attempts by some of its members to import the Chicago Declaration on Biblical Inerrancy from its American cousins into its statement of faith. As a long-time Secretary of the Tyndale Fellowship, Tom was part of the resistance to that scholastically-driven biblicism.

A third project that has benefitted from Tom’s interests in history is the collection, preservation and assimilation of archival material from the life of Dr. David Hynd, CBE, an extraordinary Nazarene medical missionary in eSwatini (then Swaziland) in the early 1920s.⁸ Hynd, born in Perth and educated at the University of Glasgow, served in Swaziland almost his entire career. He and his wife Kanema (nee Sharpe) made an immense contribution to the development of primary health care, training nurses and teachers as well as building the first hospital in Swaziland. While denominational folklore has given prominence to the work of Harmon Schmelzenbach, the first Nazarene missionary in Swaziland, Hynd’s remarkable legacy is one of the reasons for the strong presence of the Church of the Nazarene in eSwatini. Although this work has not yet been completed, when it does appear Tom’s own interest in the Christian mission combined with his deep admiration for Hynd will ensure the preservation of this memory. As Tom notes elsewhere, the age of European imperialism was also the age of the greatest advance in Christian mission.⁹ To be sure, the legacy of Christian mission is far from unsullied and the undercurrent of implicit racism is impossible to ignore in all too many instances. This could be a very interesting biography, particularly if it is considered within the wider context of the European Scramble for Africa,¹⁰ and especially British imperialism in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century.

If Tom’s historical interests are clear in the three projects above, the political strand of his education has not directly led to published work. But it is nonetheless an interesting facet of Tom’s identity. Most of Tom’s adult life has been lived outside of Scotland but he is intensely proud of his Scottish heritage—he is Scottish and British, not English! In his writing, he rarely loses an opportunity to identify any residual Scottishness of a thinker. Tom himself would probably be delighted to be identified as, Thomas Noble, the Scottish theologian. And yet, Tom is adamantly opposed to Scottish independence, being an ardent defender of the historic union of Scotland with England and the British parliamentary system of government with its constitutional monarchy. A free-market capitalist of the Adam Smith ilk and a resolute monarchist, Tom might even consider Margaret Thatcher as the second-greatest British Prime Minister (after, of course, Churchill). My conversations with Tom over politics are always lively!

Undoubtedly, the most formative part of Tom’s background—and that which has shaped his whole theological direction—would be his time at New College, Edinburgh. In 1974, Tom accepted a place on the Bachelor of Divinity programme which laid firm foundations for his subsequent theological work, principally through the privilege of sitting under the tutelage of Professor Thomas F Torrance. Those who know the work of Tom Torrance and Tom Noble cannot fail to see the connection. (Indeed, if there were such a thing as a Royal Family of Scottish theologians, it would be the Torrance family, including Professor James B. Torrance of Aberdeen, James’ son, Professor Alan Torrance of St Andrew’s, Professor Iain Torrance, Emeritus President of Princeton Theological Seminary and Revd. Dr. Jamie Walker, Chaplain at St Andrew’s and nephew of Tom Torrance). Following the completion of the Bachelor of Divinity, Tom began his PhD research on "The Deity of the Holy Spirit according to Gregory of Nazianzus" under the supervision of T. F. Torrance but Torrance retired in 1979 before Tom was finished.

The influence was not just the rich theological discourse that swirled around the Torrance family. In much the same fashion as was his mentor, Tom is unapologetically evangelical. Indeed, it was the unswerving commitment to the gospel and the mission of God combined with Torrance’s first-class intellectual rigour that probably inspired Tom, and it was the work of Mildred Bangs Wynkoop that enabled Tom as a Wesleyan to flourish in Edinburgh.¹¹ His description of Torrance’s evangelical commitment as a radically critical attitude towards the secular orthodoxies which have increasingly dominated Western culture since the so-called Enlightenment¹² would also describe Tom. Torrance himself had been a student of Karl Barth who appreciated the immensity and importance of Barth’s thinking at a time when Barth was too often labelled and dismissed as neo-orthodox by many especially in conservative/fundamentalist American evangelical circles. But Torrance made Barth accessible to his students, amongst Torrance’s many legacies.

Like his mentor, Tom has always been a faithful church theologian who has steadfastly refused to separate the academic from the practical and the missional. In one memorable sermon, Tom (who has always been an excellent preacher) stated that the separation of the academic from the spiritual was a trick of the devil. Whether it was as an organist or pianist, a Sunday School teacher, a leader of a Scripture Union beach mission, a church board member, or a preacher, Tom has been an active layperson in the church.

But it is the clarity and breadth of Tom’s theological vision that makes him, in my judgement, one of today’s top theologians within the Wesleyan tradition. At its root, all of Christian theology revolves around the gospel: the apostolic gospel (arising out of Jesus’s gospel of the kingdom) is centred in Christ crucified and risen, but . . . it includes also the Father who sent the Son and the Spirit sent by the Son from the Father. That gospel narrative is the key to understanding the grand biblical narrative of creation, fall and redemption.¹³ Tom’s theology is, therefore, remorselessly Christocentric and Trinitarian. Here again, Tom is deeply influenced by the work of Barth mediated and enhanced by Torrance.¹⁴ Indeed, an evangelical doctrine of atonement that focuses solely on the cross of Christ is deficient. Rather, the doctrine of the atonement must be seamlessly integrated into the doctrines of resurrection and ascension, incarnation and trinity, which goes deeper than that evangelical tradition that he [Torrance] inherited.¹⁵

It is, then, quite deliberate that the first volume in his three-volume Systematic Theology starts with Christology. Entitled The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, it was published in 2023; the remaining two volumes are well underway. For those within the Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, this full-orbed theological discussion will be for the foreseeable future what H. Orton Wiley’s three-volume Christian Theology was for the twentieth century.

This work, however, promises to be more ecumenical than Wiley’s, as it is consistently in dialogue with the Fathers, the magisterial Reformers, and the burgeoning ranks of contemporary evangelical biblical scholarship and theologians.¹⁶ Rather than situating Wesleyan theology as distinct from the broader tradition, Tom’s three-volume theology aims to articulate a Wesleyan theology in the twenty-first century within the broader tradition. His work will set out in carefully argued terms the essence of evangelical theology, stripped of the strictures of Federal Calvinism and the scholasticism that continues to distort some Protestant and Reformed theology. Not surprisingly, his theology will be in regular dialogue with Barth and Torrance, and with deep engagement with Wesley and appreciation for Wesley’s practical divinity¹⁷ as well as serious engagement with respected biblical scholarship. In fact, Tom sees a truly Wesleyan approach to the notion of Christian holiness as a synthesis of evangelical and ancient catholic strands.¹⁸ As a Wesleyan with this breadth of appreciation for the church catholic, Tom wholeheartedly approves of and contributes to a development which is now in place: the critical appreciation and assimilation of Barth’s theology into the Anglo-Saxon evangelical tradition and the re-shaping of evangelical theology in a way that builds critically upon Barth’s insights. In that project, the related but distinct theology of Torrance is of crucial significance.¹⁹

Tom Noble’s own theological work will be a major step in this change. His greatest and most distinctive contribution, however, may be through the way he has established a re-envisioned Wesleyan tradition of Christian holiness as an essential part of Christian doctrine. It is this vision which makes the title of this volume, Sanctifying Theology: At the Intersections of Wesleyan Theology, Dogmatics, and Practice, so apropos. Tom has always been concerned to locate Wesleyan theology firmly within the grand doctrinal framework of the church catholic, rather than seeing the Doctrine of Holiness as a sort of addendum to proper systematic theology.²⁰ God’s call of a holy people is deeply rooted in Scripture and is neither peripheral nor the eccentric domain of holiness people.

That is not to say that Tom does not have strong criticisms of some expressions of the doctrine of holiness that have flourished in the Holiness Movement at both academic and lay levels. For Tom, the oft-repeated Wesleyan Quadrilateral of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience that is thought to undergird Wesleyan theology needs to be re-visited. Tom argues that these have been treated too casually as four equally-important authorities in constructing Wesleyan theology and could lead, in Tom’s view, to implicit abandonment of theological orthodoxy. The tradition, of course, is important, as are experience and reason, but in Tom’s view, Scripture must always hold the primary place: "our doctrine must be articulated in the context of twenty-first century cultures [but] it can only be drawn from Holy Scripture interpreted through the Christian tradition."²¹ Here he will find agreement amongst many of his colleagues in biblical studies, and particularly amongst Wesleyan scholars who read with the grain²² of Scripture as the revelation of the gospel of God in the person and work of Christ. But, of course, debate still continues about the appropriate use of hermeneutical tools and the consequent readings of Scripture.

Another concern centres on the understanding of grace. Tom is concerned that grace has become depersonalized as if it were a thing that could be reified and categorized with an appropriate adjective (common, prevenient, saving, sanctifying,