I figured I'd type this up, since it occasionally comes up in conversation. This is a codification of what I've come to generally agree with, it is not an attempt to start a debate. No such attempts shall be suffered kindly.
Obviously, both Wesley and Calvin have verse support for what they espoused. That's not even up for debate. What is up for the debate is the interpretation of those verses, which I'm sick and tired of debating, but to do that is to miss the point entirely.
I prefer Kierkegaard over Wesley, and Wesley over Calvin.
Soren Kierkegaard was a 19th-century Danish Philosopher. His early life can best be described as unpleasant, and he didn't handle it very well for the most part. However, his treatment of Christianity is brilliant.
What Kierkegaard did for me, when I read his works and innumerable summaries of them, was to remove the tendency to treat Christianty as an academic exercise. That's what Existentialism does for me, most of all. It gets rid of that tendency to have a list of things I "believe" that in no way matches the way I live.
After reading some of his works, I basically threw away the entire concept of "following a human interpretation of the Bible that has been deemed 'official Christian doctrine'", and replaced it with a much simpler idea: "If God exists and I exist, what does that mean for me?"
Anyways, back to Calvin and Wesley: It comes down to the lives of those two men. Whether or not they have verses to support their interpretations is irrelevent, if I'm going to follow a man's teachings, I must follow the man as well. If the man doesn't live out what he taught, then he's a fraud, and his teachings are worthless.
So, when I first ran into Calvinism, I researched the man himself. Here's what I found:
Calvin was French lawyer, broke with the Catholics after experiencing God as something more than a ritual, went on to write a crap-ton of books, and ended up running Geneva when his influence in the Reformation gained him political power. While there, he accused a man (Micheal Servetus) of heresy. Servetus was convicted in absentia.
Here's a direct quote from Calvin about Servetus, c. 1547:
"for if he came, as far as my authority goes, I would not let him leave alive."
In 1553, Servetus showed up in Geneva, attended one of Calvin's sermons, and Calvin had him arrested. Servetus was then burned at the stake, although Calvin tried to show mercy and have him beheaded instead. Yeah, "merciful".
I've held grudges before. I'll even admit to wishing a slow painful death upon someone, and yeah, it lasted longer than that. But hey, I'll also admit that I wasn't walking with God at the time. Calvin kept that hate going while he preached sermons on a near-constant basis.
That's jacked up, yet that's the reality of the situation. He may have been completely right in everything he ever wrote down about the Bible, but when it came down to it, he completely failed to live it out. 1st John has some interesting things to say about people who hate, I'm not in the mood to copy/paste them.
He did have an epic beard, though. I'll give him that.
Now, why Wesley?
John Wesley was born in England and was an Anglican Cleric. During what was essentially a missions trip to Georgia, he had an encounter with some Moravian missionaries. That encounter led him to realize that they had a much more personal relationship with God than he did, and that influenced Methodism to be a much more personal faith than Anglicanism.
He did much of his preaching in the open air, which was revolutionary at the time. The vast majority of the money he made he then gave away to various causes, and was one of the first to speak out against slavery. He approached social issues as something to be influenced towards God, not legislated against sin.
When his friend George Whitfield, a Calvinist that he'd had several arguments with, died in 1770, Wesley said the following:
"There are many doctrines of a less essential nature ... In these we may think and let think; we may 'agree to disagree.' But, meantime, let us hold fast the essentials..."
He coined the phrase "Agree to disagree", by the way.
In short, he lived it. He wasn't perfect, but instead of cooping himself up in a library and writing about what Christianity should be, he went out and lived it to the best of his ability. He didn't just write books about Christ's Love, he attempted to demonstrate it.
I could probably write a book on various doctrinal issues I have with Calvinism, but then I'd be doing exactly what I hate about Bible-thumping anybodies. I'm not writing this to convert people from one denomination to another. I'm writing this as an explanation, which I'll simply summarize like this:
I'm a Wesleyan, not a Calvinist, because Calvin wrote about Christianity but didn't live it, and Wesley lived it.
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