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The Theology of Bishops William Paul Quinn and Daniel Alexander Payne: Faith, Freedom, Education, and the Making of the African Methodist Episcopal Ch
Paperback
Series: The Theology of Bishops William Paul Quinn and Daniel Alexander Payne, Book 1
Biographies GeneralReligious Biographies
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 15 2026
Pages: 410
Weight: 1.09
Height: 1.02 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Faith, Freedom, Education, and the Making of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
Volume I: Foundations: Life, Scripture, and DoctrineWho were the theologians who helped shape the African Methodist Episcopal Church after Richard Allen, and why does their theology still matter?
In The Theology of Bishops William Paul Quinn and Daniel Alexander Payne, Rev. Dr. John Dandridge recovers two towering yet too often underexamined architects of African Methodism and places them where they belong: at the center of the theological, ecclesial, educational, and freedom-seeking tradition of the AME Church.
William Paul Quinn and Daniel Alexander Payne inherited a church born from Black resistance to racial humiliation and helped transform it into a powerful connectional institution. Yet they approached that work through distinctive theological visions. Quinn was the missionary bishop, frontier church planter, defender of ecclesial discipline, and courageous itinerant who carried African Methodism into territories where independent Black religious leadership could be dangerous. Payne was the scholar-bishop, educator, historian, theological reformer, and institution builder who insisted that an educated ministry was essential to the future of Black Christianity.
Read together, their lives and writings reveal complementary dimensions of a distinctly Black Wesleyan theology shaped by Scripture, grace, holiness, freedom, education, mission, discipline, and the struggle for human dignity.
At the interpretive center of this study is their remarkable 1868 exchange in The Christian Recorder concerning the Letter of the Law and the Spirit of the Law. Dr. Dandridge uses this theological conversation as a lens for understanding how two bishops of the same church wrestled with Scripture, discipline, freedom, grace, Christian formation, and the responsibilities facing a newly emancipated people. Rather than reducing Quinn and Payne to theological opponents, he shows how their differences illuminate two necessary dimensions of African Methodist thought.
Volume I: Foundations: Life, Scripture, and Doctrine begins with the birth of African Methodism and follows the lives and ministries of Quinn and Payne before moving into a sustained comparative examination of their theology.
Readers will explore their understandings of Scripture, biblical interpretation, God and divine providence, Christology, the Holy Spirit, salvation, sanctification, Christian perfection, ecclesiology, episcopal leadership, church governance, and mission.
The book also places these nineteenth-century bishops in conversation with the larger Black theological tradition. Questions of slavery, emancipation, racial oppression, education, human agency, institutional independence, holiness, and social transformation are treated not as side issues, but as essential dimensions of the theological world Quinn and Payne inhabited.
This makes Volume I valuable not only for AME clergy and laypeople, but also for seminarians, professors, church historians, pastors, students of African American religion, researchers of Wesleyan theology, and readers interested in the relationship between Christianity, race, freedom, and institution-building in America.
Quinn gave African Methodism the courage of the missionary road and the discipline necessary to build churches under hostile conditions. Payne championed theological education, intellectual formation, institutional development, and a ministry capable of thinking as deeply as it believed.
Volume I is a self-contained study, while Volume II continues the project with education, freedom, worship, legacy, and the complete scholarly apparatus for the two-volume work.
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