John Miley

Who was John Miley?

John Miley was an American Christian theologian in the Methodist tradition who was one of the major Methodist theological voices of the 19th century.

Miley had graduated from Augusta College and, as a Methodist pastor, had held nineteen different pastoral appointments. He served as chair of systematic theology at Drew University in Madison, NJ beginning in 1873, after his brother-in-law, Randolph Sinks Foster, left the seat to become a Bishop.

He was the author of Systematic Theology, a two-volume work which served as a key text for Methodist seminarians for decades. He also authored The Atonement in Christ, in which he demonstrated what he believed were severe Biblical and theological problems with commonly held theories on the doctrine of the atonement such as the punishment view of Calvinism and the moral example view of Pierre Abélard, developing a strong moral government theology which was thoroughly Wesleyan and Arminian, heavily reliant on the work of Hugo Grotius.