Before the Method
Methodist/Wesleyan Companion — Cosmological Grace Anchor Series — Theology
John Wesley came closer to the Cosmological Grace Anchor’s central claim than any other figure in the Protestant tradition. His doctrine of prevenient grace — the grace that goes before all human response, drawing every person toward the God who made them before any decision has been made — was always pointing in the direction the CGA is pointing. Before the Method honors that achievement as the most significant Protestant approximation of the prior grace before naming where the tradition fell short of its own best instinct.
The wound has three forms. The first is the method becoming the master: the class meeting, the band structure, the accountability practices, the disciplines of the General Rules — all of them built to cooperate with the prevenient grace, all of them capable of becoming the grace itself in the believer’s experience, so that attending to the method and attending to the grace become indistinguishable. The second wound is entire sanctification held just out of reach: the perfection Wesley named as the goal producing in many Methodist believers a lifetime of falling short of what the framework required. The third wound is the UMC fracture, which broke not just an institution but the connection — the specific relational structure around which Methodist life was organized across two centuries.
The booklet shows that the prior grace is more prior than prevenient: not just before human response but before existence itself. Wesley named the grace that goes before. The CGA names the grace that was there before the ages began. Wesley was pointing at the right thing. The prior grace is simply further back than his framework could reach.
Before the Method closes with the fracture and what it means: the connection broke. The prior grace that Wesley’s method was always trying to cooperate with did not break with it. What the method was pointing at is still there.