Mildred Bangs Wynkoop - Theology

Theology

Wynkoop's theology has been described as "relational theology" by Michael Lodahl. Wynkoop's theological agenda was shaped initially by H. Orton Wiley, "America's leading exponent of Arminian theology" (Holiness Today).

Wiley understood that the Nazarenes were oriented to the Protestant Reformation through the Anglican tradition. Stimulated by Wiley, Wynkoop's brother, Carl Bangs, became a world authority on the Dutch reformer James Arminius and Arminianism's spread in England and America. Her interests, however, focused on John Wesley and his relevance for theological life today. (Holiness Today 2005)

In John Wesley: Christian Revolutionary (1970), Wynkoop showed how the Wesleyan tradition's founder held together two strains torn apart by American fundamentalism: personal piety and social compassion. She urged a return to Wesley's classic formulation. She provided an account of her church's basic theology in Foundations of Wesleyan-Arminian Theology(1967).

Six years of missionary service in Taiwan and Japan stimulated Wynkoop's creative thinking on how to best communicate the theology of holiness—a process that resulted in her 1973 magnum opus A Theology of Love, a reinterpretation of the Wesleyan message for her time. Wynkoop was also influenced by the process theology of Daniel Day Williams. In A Theology of Love,

she questioned the terminology of a "second work of grace." She taught sin was not a substance to be eradicated, but a wrong relationship with God. Wynkoop taught the decisive moment of salvation was justification and that believers received the Holy Spirit at that time. She did not connect the baptism of the Spirit with entire sanctification.

Wynkoop advocated:

Ontological trichotomy, a recent revival of Gnostic thought in some Christian circles, undermines a concept of the unity of personality so basically assumed in Hebrew thought. It raises no barriers to-in fact it actually suggests and encourages-a virtual depersonalizing of the self. If man is only the sum of so many entities, he is simply an aggregate of selves, a split personality, a double mind; not a responsible, valid, centralized self. Any pluralistic concept of personality destroys the foundation of biblical holiness which is characterized by love, and which is a wholly personal quality capable of being experienced, truly, only by a unified person. It has always been the most profound conviction of Wesleyanism that the Bible speaks to the moral relationships of men and not about sub-rational, nonpersonal areas of the self. Sin is basically self-separation from God, not in measurable distance but in moral unlikeness and spiritual alienation. Holiness is moral to the core -love to God and man-qualities of the self in relation to the person of God and of men.(Wynkoop, A Theology of Love, 50-51).

Love is the gospel message. Christian love, revealed by God in Christ, is the correction of man's limited, selfish, selective, perverted love. It stands against any human concept of love projected into a theory of God's nature and His way with man. It is precisely this unlimited, impartial, indestructible love that needed to be "revealed" because the best in human love has been limited. The very nature of sin is love's perversion which makes the self the object of its own dedication. Could the dogma of particular election as understood by some theological traditions be the projection of faulty human love into the very nature of God? The gospel was not born in human philosophy but in God's heart revealed in Christ. This Wesley declared. (Wynkoop, A Theology of Love, 18)

Holiness and love are two different words for two different things. In the realm of formal definition each is distinct. They cannot be interchangeably used in any one context. But this is in the realm of words as words. In the realm of existential meaning something of their relatedness begins to come through. But it would be inaccurate to say they are "related." To say holiness and love are not identical but related would imply that they were associated in experience but not vitally and essentially connected in life. It would say that each has an autonomy apart from the other. Somewhat in the sense that a house and a home, a person and a lawyer, an institution and a school can be equated, holiness and love can also be…When holiness and love are put together, the analogy of the two sides of a coin would be closer to the truth. Neither side can be both sides at the same time. Sides are not to be equated, but the obverse side is as essential to its existence as the face. Love is the essential inner character of holiness, and holiness does not exist apart from love. That is how close they are, and in a certain sense they can be said to be the same thing. At least Wesley consistently defined holiness, as well as perfection, as love.(Wynkoop, A Theology of Love, 24).

Wynkoop wrote "an admirable college history in The Trevecca Story, beginning with an analysis of the school's theological roots." (Holiness Today 2005)