Gillespie's work is of tremendous importance in understanding how modernity develops out of late medieval thought -- the development of nominalism -- and how it develops into nihilism by inverting the notion of a absolute omnipotent, infinite, irrational divine will onto the sphere of the human will. As Gillespie notes, "Scholasticism rested on teh assumption that God and the cosmos are essentially rational. Nominalism argued that it contradicts God's divinity to assume that he is subordinate to nation or reason. . . . it also established an omnipotent divine will unrestrained by any rational notion of the good. The nominalist revoution thus fostered a growing doubt about the ground of science and morality in a cosmos ruled by a willful, transrational God" (p. xiii). This provides the context, according to Gillespie, for the thought of Descartes. Descartes reasons from humanity to God (rather than vice versa in high scholasticism) in order to establish a "universally protected space" against an irrational God. Anchoring theology in anthropology arises to protect a realm for human against the voluntaristic God of an arbitrary, omnipotent, absolutely sovereign will. As Gillespie writes, "Nominalism emphasized the supremacy of divine will. Modernity in a variety of ways sought to construct a bulwark against the chaos that this will entailed. Descartes' conceptoni of the self-certainty of consciousness and empiricism's notion of an infinite natural causality helped to constrain the power and scope of divine caprice" (xvii).

Within Romanticism, however, the absolute will becomes transferred from the divine to the transcendental will of the human. Truth becomes the will-to-power. One is not guided by a rationality that originates through participation in the Triune God, but by feelings, intutions that direct the human will beyond rationality through the omnipotence of the human will to control nature. The earlier voluntaristic absolute divine will becomes transferred to sphere of the human. The human becomes the divine via an assertion of the will; nihilism is the secularization of the earlier absolutized divine will, reduced to the human. Whereas in nominalism truth becomes a name for the arbitrary workings of the divine will, in nihilism truth becomes the arbitrary workings of the human will. Thus, according to Gillespie, "nihilism arises in the context of a new revelation of the world as the product not of reason but of will. . . . the solution to nihilism thus lies not in the assertion of the will but in a step back from willing" (p. xxiii). A historical dialectic of the will emerges that moves from the error of an arbitrary divine volunteerism that persons criticize to legitimate its inverse in the assertion of the human will. What was originally perceived as a movement to preserve the dignity of the particular human being, ultimately empties the individual human of its dignity as merely a play of forces of domination and resistance within the never ending sameness of the movement of history.

Of course, Protestant liberalism has its roots deep in the modern and particularly, in certain types of Romanticism. What has interested me is how the movement to theology as anthropology arises as a theological/ethical criticism of a high Calvinism, itself with roots in medieval divine volunteerism. For the high Calvinist, salvation for humans arises within the eternal decrees of God; if God wills, the particular human being may be damned for the glory of God. Salvation is the arbitrary judicial decree of God's will through Jesus's satisfying God's judgment in his death on the cross that creates a legal fiction -- salvation is thorough nominal and irrational.

Dorrien tells this story through the life of William Ellery Channing, the founder of American Unitarianism. To understand Unitarianism, one has to see it as a reaction against and within the Puritan, Calvinistic environment in which it arose in early 19th century New England. According to Dorrien, "liberal Christianity was a corrective to bad religion, which 'tends strongly to pervert the moral faculty, to form a gloomy, forbidding, and servile religion, and to lead men to sustitue censoriousness, bitterness, and persecution, for a tender impartial charity.' Genuine Christianity praises God not because God is overpowering, Channing declared, but because God is the perfection of virtue" (vol. 1, p. 33). Therefore, theology becomes human morality: "The religion of Christ is the way to true holiness, he emphasized, not a doctrine about the abstract debt payment of a God-man. The way of Christ cultivates and is marked by the virtues of 'the spirit of love, charity, meekness, forgiveness, liberality and beneficience'" (p. 35), all virtues of the human will.

Dorrien documents how this initial Unitarianism transmitted in the course of 40 years into a "religion" that becomes emptied of any Christological or Christian content in Romanticism. Inverting the Calvinist arbitrary divine will onto the human to protect the human, "religion" becomes what the individual human will asserts in moving to a "post-Christian univerisal religion." Dorrien argues that "The Unitarian Conference retains its minimal tie to the faith of historic Christianity, but in a way that marginalized faith language of Christ as Lord and Savior. . . . The transcendentalist philosophy of Parker and Emerson became passe, but their implicitly post-Christian religious humanism reconfigured the church of Channing and the Henry Wares. The Unitarian church liberalized enough to become a comfortable hom to a wide continuum of liberal Christian, neo-Christian, and non-Christian ethical humanismst, including the humanist successors of the Free Religious Association" (p. 109). Faith becomes completely separated from reason, a matter of feeling or intuition that grounds the individual human in its finitude amid the Absolute or the Infinite. Human beings are determined solely by their will. Romanticism easily moves into nihilism, though by then, having no ties at all left to the Christian tradition.

If this is so, it is interesting to watch movements within "Wesleyan theology" today. Wesleyans have a habit of legitimating their own particular "brand name" of theology by differentiating it against the arbitrary Divine of Calvinism in its popular manifestations, manifestations anchored deeply in medieval nominalism. What is the "Wesleyan" response? To emphasize human "response-ability" -- to provide a buffer against an arbitrary divine will by inverting it onto the human in an equally arbitrary human will that has the ability to stand against God's will, and thus, to maintain its own dignity and ethical worth. God and humanity's wills are on the same ontological level, interacting, as in process thought, through a give and take in which the human will enacts changes in God who is trying to lure the human will back to God in "relationship". Jesus becomes representative of the proper relationship between human will and divine will that we all can participate as human in relationship with God. The divine will and the human will exist in a zero-sum game of give-and-take as both will share in the same ontologies of will -- a force that holds the divine and the human together in the same continuum of being.

Of course, the divine will ultimately becomes unnecessary as it can be increasingly transferred into the human. Yet severed from transcendence, the infinite divine will becomes eclipsed from the infinite human will. Truth is the will-to-power. Romanticism morphs into nihilism. The modern transforms into its new stage of the post-modern. All that is becomes the play of wills, whether it be in competition between the mysterious "wills" of genes to transmit themselves in the evolutionary process or the continual contest of global capitalism as wills engage for domination and resistance within the marketplace that life is -- and therefore is not. If this scenario is correct, the "Wesleyan" will transform into pious forms of Protestant liberalism (if we are not already there) before it moves into a type of "religious liberalism or spirituality" become it utterly dissolves into a nihilism of the will.

Of course, Wesley himself provides a means to stop the cycle by returning to the high scholastic understanding of God whose will cannot be separated from God's nature as revealed in the Logos, Jesus Christ, by the power of the Spirit. Wesley was no nominalist or divine voluntarist, but a classical Catholic Christian thinker. Wesley lived on the cusp of modernity, but rather than moving forward into a deeper modernity by embracing a theological nominalism, moved back before the nominalists in a return to the sources for a contemporary reembodiment of the faith given to the saints. It is only in the recovery of the Wesley deeply committed to the church catholic that can preserve the "Wesleyans" from intellectual/cultural/social movements embedded within the commitments of late medieval thought and life.