Granted, thanks for the historical correction.

I like Wesley’s approach to spirituality because it takes cognizance of - if I remember it rightly out of my head - Scripture, the writings of the church fathers (thus implying the use of church history) and experience.

Currently I am reading Wright’s first installment of his NT Theology. His idea of the Scriptures containing (as Andrew points out elsewhere) four of five acts in a play (the fifth needs to be inferred by actors fluent in the first four acts) is quite interesting. It allows for the Scriptures to remain the base, but still for there to be real development in theology. John Polkinghorne argues something similar when he writes

“These New Testament records are as indispensable to Christian theology as are experimental notebooks to science, but by themselves they no more constitute a theory than do the raw observations and preliminary hunches of a laboratory worker at the bench. I believe that it is extremely important to recognise this character of patristic theology as being considered reflection of the experience of Christ and his Church and not a project of unlimited and unearthed metaphysical speculation.” (Belief in God in an age of Science, 1998, p. 38), and:
“…revelation, understood as the historic record of experiences of particular illumination, rather than a guaranteed packet of timeless propositions.” (One World, 1986 p. 77)

Polkinghorne views the development of most of the doctrines found in the Creeds as a extrapolations from the base of Scripture as the church fathers were interacting with the real issues of their time. Important is the idea of extrapolation - the fathers took the “hint” from the Scripture and developed doctrines which were, in their eyes, the logical (or necessary, or both) outcome of the base texts. I am curious to see how these concepts fit - or don’t fit - with the idea of Sola Scriptura. How do you read what the Reformists meant by the dictum?