Scripture First, Three Ways of Reading It

The quadrilateral is often misread as four equal legs of a table, scripture, tradition, reason and experience each carrying the same weight. That is not the structure Wesley's own writing shows, and it is not how the Methodist tradition has officially stated it. Scripture is primary and, on matters necessary for salvation, sufficient on its own terms; the other three are not rival sources of revelation but the means by which a reader tests whether a given interpretation of scripture is sound. Tradition supplies the church's accumulated reading of scripture across time, a check against any single generation inventing a doctrine scripture was never understood to teach. Reason is the ordinary work of making sense of a text, following its grammar and logic rather than treating it as a set of detached oracles. Experience is the most distinctively Wesleyan addition among the three, the believer's own lived encounter with God's grace, offered as confirmation that a doctrine is not merely correct on paper but true to how God actually deals with people.

Wesley drew on all three in his sermons and letters without ever organizing them into a formal method himself, and he was capable of setting aside a plain historical church tradition, most visibly when he ordained ministers for America without a bishop, on the strength of his own reading of scripture and reasoned argument about necessity.