About the Author

J. Russell Frazier (PhD, University of Manchester) has served as a pastor for over twenty years and was a missionary with the Church of the Nazarene for over seven years. He serves as an adjunct professor for Central Christian College and Ohio Christian University.

Reviews

""Frazier provides the most detailed presentation yet of John Fletcher's model of the dispensations of God's saving work, arguing they are an instance of Fletcher's foundational emphasis on God's 'accommodation' of divine revelation to the fallen human condition. An important work for understanding Fletcher, John Wesley, and beyond!"" --Randy L. Maddox, Professor of Wesleyan and Methodist Studies, Duke Divinity School ""Russell Frazier has written an outstanding piece of work on economic Trinitarianism through the irenic theology of John Fletcher. Fletcher, an often neglected and misinterpreted Methodist theologian of the eighteenth century, wrote from a pastoral, panoramic, dialogical perspective, and Russell Frazier has captured Fletcher's thought in this perceptive interpretation designed for a unique theology of reconciliation."" --David Rainey, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Senior Research Fellow, Nazarene Theological College ""Russell Frazier has made a significant contribution in this volume on the thought of John Fletcher. . . . He has rightly shown that Fletcher's theology should not simply be interpreted in the light of later interpreters, who often did not provide a proper balance to Fletcher's ideas. Wesleyan scholarship will in due course of time come to appreciate this research so finely done by Frazier."" --Laurence W. Wood, Professor of Systematic Theology and Wesley Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary "This sophisticated theological treatment of the thought of John Wesley's chosen successor John Fletcher (1729-1785), heavily based on deep research in the vast Fletcher archive in the Methodist Archives & Research Centre at the John Rylands Library, represents an invaluable contribution to existing scholarship. Frazier's in-depth study provides an admirable example of what David Bebbington has recently called the recent 'Evangelical Discovery of History' (though some might call it a 'rediscovery'). Frazier rescues Fletcher from the confines of the traditional Arminian-Calvinist binary by showing how his doctrine of accommodation provided a unifying corrective to both those theological systems. He demonstrates how Fletcher's union of grace and nature provided the foundation for a sophisticated theology of history and was thus an important contribution to both Evangelical and wider religious historiography. More controversially, Frazier rescues Fletcher from what he regards as the narrow categorisations provided by the Wesleyan-Holiness paradigm and tradition which has come to dominate recent interpretations of Fletcher's thought. This is historical theology at its best." -Peter Nockles, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.