“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” (Psalm 119:105 NIV)
The Reformation slogan sola scriptura has power, clarity, and simplicity. Its power counters the authoritarian claims of church, later tradition, and all other competitors to the revealed Word of God. Its clarity shows others we are serious about basing all of our Christian faith and practice on this book of books. Its simplicity allows all Christians to understand the basis on which our claims to truth are made. We sing with understanding, “Jesus loves, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
John Wesley knew this and fully subscribed to the song’s sentiment. When challenged on his most controversial doctrines, he appealed to the Bible as the primary justification for his teachings. In the famous passage from the Preface to his sermons, he calls himself homo unius libri – a man of one book. Forty-one years later, in his sermon “On God's Vineyard,” he uses the phrase again to talk about the beginning of Methodism and its continuing commitment to Scripture:
“From
the very beginning, from the time that four young men united together, each of
them was homo unius libri -- a man of
one book. God taught them all to make His Word a lantern unto their feet, and a
light in all their paths. They had one, and only one rule of judgment with
regard to all their tempers, words, and actions, namely, the oracles of God.
They were one and all determined to be Bible-Christians.
They were continually reproached for this very thing; some terming them in
derision Bible bigots; others, Bible-moths -- feeding, they said, upon
the Bible as moths do upon cloth. And indeed unto this day it is their constant
endeavor to think and speak as the oracles of God.”
Any accurate understanding of Wesley’s view of the Bible must first start here, with a strong statement that Scripture alone is the authority for Christian faith and practice. On this point Wesley is definite. It is the Bible that serves as the final court of appeal.
-- Scott J. Jones in “Wesley and the Quadrilateral: Renewing the Conversation” (1997)
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