Friends, I actually read most of chapter 1 of JWM's dissertation, which is a long haul. (OK, so I speed-read the last part!)
So here are my thoughts and questions.
First, does anybody know what happened to the actual boxed hard copy I saw in the Archives office?
Second, does anybody know whether Wesley Theological Seminary has a hard copy in their JWM archive collection?
Third, can anyone confirm, correct, or elaborate on the story I heard from Marge (I think) about how JWM refused to 'tweak' his dissertation, and thus never got his Ph.D. degree? Or tell us anything else they know about the origin and/or transmission of the manuscript?
I would love to hear about this from LiDonna, Sarah B., Fishel, Lingo, Gilles, Walters, Gene, Beret, Aimee, or any others still alive whose memory goes back as far as CFLC and the early days of EI. And anyone else who may have heard this story from Marge.
Fourth: My own somewhat vague memory is that JWM wrote this at Yale for H. Richard Niebuhr. Is that accurate?
Fifth, how can we date the completion/rejection/abandonment of JWM's dissertation? I would guess that it was while he was teaching at Colgate Rochester as an ABD faculty member. Is there a date on the ms. or some kind of documentation?
Sixth, is there a copyright notice, and if so, who owns the copyright?
Seventh, who added the running page header that says "Chapter one mathews"?
It just doesn't strike me as being part of the original typescript.
Now, for the icing on this cake!
I for one would vote to do all we can to reconstruct and correct the minutae of JWM's dissertation and produce a .pdf that could be widely available. Perhaps as a freely available document on a theological dissertation website. Or perhaps we could reformat the text with added section subheads (you know, they did that to English translations of the Bible! those subheads are not in the original Greek and Hebrew!) and even add a contemporary Forward.
Or even publish it on Amazon!
At age 82 I always contemplate the option of Doing Nothing! So we could just do nothing more with the JWM dissertation.
Plus, at 82 I'm aware of the mantra, 'Just do it now!' Or maybe later will be too late!
Because, starting many years ago, it was not considered exactly missionally relevant. Even by JWM. He just moved on. And perhaps he considered all that effort to complete his Ph.D. a misfire. Or a most unfortunate fire! Or whatever.
But I encourage us to think in terms of this (admittedly bad) analogy: imagine that Picasso doodled a face on a napkin. It's still a Picasso!
(Please let me know if you have any of his napkins.)
So here's what I got from reading (more or less) chapter 1.
We may not actually care very much about how John Wesley used his classical 18th century education and intelligence to understand and describe the human condition in relation to his grasp of the nature of the physical universe and his personal relationship with Ultimate Reality.
But Joe Mathews did.
So if you read his dissertation, what you get is Joe's 20th century theological lens applied to understand Wesley's theological world.
I would venture to add that, IMHO, Mathews has added a significant voice or POV to Wesley scholarship, getting inside Wesley's construction of intimate human reality by placing Wesley's words in the context of his functioning intellectual universe of Western scholarship (from Hume to Descartes to Aquinas, etc.).
Mathews is charting Wesley's understanding of epistemology (including his perception of divine activity in human experience) and his theological anthropology.
It's Mathews' reading of Wesley's theological formulation of his personal process of his deepening, transformative experience of 'sanctification'.
And, of course, it sounds more like Mathews' existentialist theological lingo than Wesley's 18th century theological formulations.
For example, "the naked givenness of the impression" just doesn't sound like it was plucked from a Wesley sermon!
In a nutshell, Mathews is 'decoding' Wesley for twentieth century scholarly readers. (Who else reads Wesley's sermons? I ask. Raise your hands, please! I thought so.)
Maybe that's why it didn't pass muster with HRNiebuhr!
Anyway, enough blah-blah-blah.
I vote for resurrecting this hidden/undiscovered gem for the few remaining authentic Wesley scholars to chew on. And/or spit up.
Any others of us are welcome to join in the fun by charting it.
Marshall
