Early life Miley was born December 25, 1813 on a farm near
Hamilton,
Butler County,
Ohio. Miley graduated from
Augusta College where he received A.B. in 1834 and an A.M. in 1837. During his college life he was influenced by three professors Joseph Tomlinson, Joseph Trimble, and
Henry Bascom.
Career In 1838, Miley entered the church's ministry through the Ohio Conference. From 1838 to 1852, he served different churches in Ohio. In 1852 he transferred to the
New York East Conference. In 1866 he transferred to the New York Conference. In 1859, the
Ohio Wesleyan University conferred an
honorary Doctor of Divinity degree on him. From 1852 to 1873, he served churches in New York and
Connecticut. As a Methodist pastor, he had held nineteen different pastoral appointments. In 1872, he joined a commission organized by the general conference to develop a code of ecclesiastical law for the Methodist Episcopal Church. Beginning in 1873, he served as chair of
systematic theology at
Drew University in
Madison, NJ, after his brother-in-law,
Randolph Sinks Foster, left the seat to become a bishop. Miley was one of "the Great Five" revered professors who led Drew for decades, along with Henry Anson Buttz, George Crooks,
James Strong, and
Samuel F. Upham. He was the author of
Systematic Theology (1892), a two-volume work which served as a key text for Methodist seminarians for nearly thirty years. He also authored
The Atonement in Christ (1879), in which he demonstrated what he believed were severe Biblical and theological problems with commonly held theories on the
doctrine of the
atonement of Christ such as the
penal substitution and the
moral example.
Theology Miley was a systematic theologian in the
Wesleyan tradition. He had
Arminian soteriological views. He developed a strong
governmental theory of atonement based theology heavily reliant on the work of
Hugo Grotius. Thus, for him, the atonement of Christ is a satisfaction for
sins by
substitution, but not a satisfaction by penal substitution. The atonement of Christ is
universal, but the forgiveness of sins is conditional to the faith. Moreover, the substitution of Christ is in suffering, not in penalty.
Death Miley died December 13, 1895. ==Works==