Nine thousand poems; 27,000 stanzas; 180,000 lines. The output of Charles Wesley was prodigious. It was, in fact, three times the total output of William Wordsworth, one of England’s most prolific poets. Had Wesley written poetry every day, he would have written ten lines per day for fifty years.

Charles could write poetry for any occasion. When his wife Sally was entering upon the rigours of childbirth, he wrote a poem for her, one which she could use as a prayer:

Who so near the birth hast brought,
(Since I on Thee rely)
Tell me, Saviour, wilt thou not
Thy farther help supply?
Whisper to my list’ning soul
Wilt thou not my strength renew,
Nature’s fears and pangs control,
And bring thy handmaid through?

At the funeral of George Whitefield (considered to be the finest preacher of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Awakening) he praised his departed friend in a poem 536 lines long!

While Wesley’s poetry chiefly concerned the themes of the gospel message, he tried to enter imaginatively into the stresses of all manner of people. Today we can read his poetry about wives and widows, coalminers and criminals, high school students, and soldiers who remained loyal to the British crown during the American War of Independence.

Susanna, mother of the Wesleys, was the twenty-fifth (and last!) child of a well-known Puritan preacher. She in turn had nineteen children herself, John being the fifteenth and Charles the eighteenth. Both boys were academically gifted, both eventually studied at Oxford, and both were ordained to the Anglican priesthood.

After a period of frustration, rejection, and self-doubt as missionaries in Georgia, John and Charles returned to England. Kezia, their youngest sister, told them she had come to believe and to understand that God could perform a work of transforming grace in the human heart. Believers were granted new standing before God, a new nature, new outlook, new motivation and new affections. Charles proved it all for himself on May 21, 1738. He wrote in his journal. “By degrees the Spirit of God chased away the darkness of my unbelief. I found myself convinced. . . . I saw that by faith I stood.” His experience resulted in the writing of a hymn which Christians still sing:

And can it be that I should gain
An interest in the Saviour k blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain ?
For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! how can it be
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

Three days later, his older brother came to the same conviction and experience: “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins … and saved me from the law of sin and death.” The spark which ignited Methodism had been struck.

In no time, the conflagration was spreading everywhere. Together with Whitefield (the third strand in their “threefold cord”), the Wesleys soon found that hostile church officials had barred them from pulpits. They moved out-of-doors, where they were free to announce the Good News to people who were as unacquainted with the Bread of Life as they were hungry for it. Crowds of up to 25,000 gathered regularly to hear them.

While both John and Charles were gifted at preaching and hymnwriting, Charles was especially noted for his genius at Christian song. Yet there was more than genius here. Charles had been prepared for his music-ministry by nine years of studying classics at Oxford, particularly the work of the ancient Greek and Latin poets. Most importantly, his whole-souled encounter with his Lord had issued in such passion and depth as to fuse and focus all gifts and graces, talents and training.

Brother John thought highly of Charles’ work: “Here is no doggerel, no botches, nothing to patch up a rhyme, no feeble expletives. Here are … the purity, the strength, and the elegance of the English language.”

John was in Newcastle when he learned of the death of Charles. The next Sunday, as he was conducting worship, the congregation sang one of Charles’ earliest hymn-lines: “My company before is gone, And I am left alone with Thee. . . .” John unravelled. He staggered back into the pulpit, weeping profusely. The congregation waited for him, and he recovered enough to finish the service.

The hymns of Charles Wesley breathe the man’s life in God. It was rich; so rich, in fact, that later Methodists were sometimes reluctant to sing many of his hymns, as their experience of God was not his. Whereas God’s grace and truth had moved Charles profoundly and had found stirring expression in his hymns, the same hymns struck some of his descendants as mere literary exaggeration.

His descendants were wrong. There was no exaggeration. He who wrote, “Love divine, all loves excelling,” wrote that hymn and many others only because he had been taken up into a reality infinitely greater than even he could express.

 

“Children, as soon as I am released sing a psalm of praise to God”, whispered the seventy-three year old mother of the Wesleys minutes before she died. Five of her children were present. She had had nineteen, ten of whom had survived infancy. The most famous would be John (fifteenth) and Charles (eighteenth). A large family was nothing new to her. The day she was baptized her father had written a friend that Susanna was the most recent of “twenty-four or a quarter of a hundred, I am not sure which”. (The latter estimate was correct.)

Susanna’s spiritual and intellectual formation was rich. Her father was a learned puritan clergyman whose home welcomed a stream of puritan preachers, scholars and writers, among whom were Thomas Manton (his Works comprised twenty-two volumes) and John Owen, the ablest theologian among the puritans and at one time the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University.

In 1662 The Act of Uniformity decreed that all clergy must conform to all beliefs and practices of the Church of England. Two thousand refused, and were expelled from pulpit, parsonage and university during “The Great Expulsion”. John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim’s Progress) was imprisoned. Others scrabbled to feed their dependents, teaching school or preaching clandestinely whenever and wherever they emerged from hiding.

Little wonder that Susanna horrified her parents when she was only twelve as she announced that she was returning to the Church of England! (Subsequently she wrote down her reasons for doing this, but her documents were destroyed in the Epworth rectory fire of 1709, the blaze in which six-year old John narrowly escaped perishing with his mother’s papers.)

One year later at her sister’s wedding she met nineteen-year old Samuel Wesley. He too was moving from Dissent back to the Church of England even though his father had been fatally mistreated during The Great Ejection. (His father had died at forty-two during his fourth imprisonment.) In 1688 Samuel and Susanna were married. The marriage was troublous. Samuel, chronically in debt, kept his family in financial hardship; in addition he fancied himself a poet and scholar, deflecting time and energy and preoccupation to entirely forgettable poetry and a Latin commentary on the book of Job which consumed twenty-five years. Not surprisingly Susanna wrote, “I think we are not likely to live happily together”.

One day Samuel noticed that Susanna did not say “Amen” to his prayers for the king. When asked to explain herself Susanna replied, “He (i.e., William of Orange) is no king; he is but a prince”. Susanna supported British royal descent; the Dutchman was an interloper. “If we are going to have two kings in this house then we shall have two beds”, fumed Samuel as he departed for London. Susanna insisted she would apologize if it could be shown where she was wrong; but to “apologize” insincerely for mere expedience would be a lie and therefore sin. An archbishop agreed that Samuel’s absence was a violation of his marriage vows (by now they had had fourteen children). Five months later Samuel returned home; the night he and Susanna were reconciled John was conceived.

Cherishing the rich puritan heritage of academic excellence Susanna set up a school in her home. Classes were held six hours per day, six days per week. “It is almost incredible what a child may be taught in a quarter of a year by a vigorous application “, commented Susanna, “…all could read better in that time than most women can do as long as they live”. The curriculum consisted both of academic subjects and of Christian instruction. The spiritual formation of her children was undertaken through her weekly private conversations with them all: “On Monday I talk with Molly, on Tuesday with Hetty, …on Thursday with Jacky (as she always called John).

Judging the sermons of Samuel’s assistant to be vacuous Susanna decided that whenever her husband was out of the pulpit the assistant’s feeble pronouncements should be supplemented by more nourishing fare. Whereupon she took it upon herself to read from a book of sermons to villagers who spilled out of her home on Sunday afternoons. (As a woman in the Church of England Susanna was not allowed to “preach”; nonetheless authorities deemed reading someone else’s sermon aloud in public to be acceptable!) Years later when John hesitated at allowing a layman to preach Susanna wrote, “That fellow is as much called as you are”.

Her influence upon John and Charles, and through them upon worldwide Methodists, is incalculable. While Methodism came to display its characteristic spirit, its unique style (outdoor preaching to huge crowds of the unchurched, for instance), and its special emphases (not least its conviction that God could do something about sin beyond forgiving it) Susanna was the conduit for the puritan riches which so largely formed the substance of Methodism. Like Deborah of old she was “a mother in Israel” (Judges 5:7) as she bequeathed to her sons and their heirs the wealth for which her foreparents had suffered unspeakably: the necessity for doctrine as a provisional statement of the truth of God, vigorously disciplined discipleship, the believer’s assurance of fellowship with Christ, intense concern for evangelism and pastoral care, veneration of the sovereignty of grace, insistence on “faith working through love”.

A few years before she died she had written John, “I have long since chosen him [i.e., God] for my only good, my all…”. The Holy One of Israel who had kept Deborah and Rachel, Ruth and Naomi, Elizabeth and Mary, Lydia and the unnamed woman who was a “mother” to the apostle Paul (Romans 16:13) proved sufficient to keep her as well.

Her remains are buried in the same cemetery as those of her puritan foreparents: John Bunyan, John Owen, and Isaac Watts.

 

He had been ordained for more than a decade when it happened. Sitting in an evening service one Sunday, following his return to England after a disastrous spell as a missionary in Georgia, he listened to someone reading from the preface to Luther’s commentary on Romans. The most notable event in eighteenth-century English history was only seconds away: “About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. 1 felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” It was May 24, 1738.

Immediately the dominant theme in the thirty-five year old’s ministry became justification by faith: sinners are justified or set right with God as in faith they trust the pardoning mercy God graciously presses upon them. Gone were his preoccupations with moralism (the notion that we can put ourselves right with God through moral achievement) and mysticism (the notion that we have a natural capacity to ascend to a God who remains forever vague). He would know for the rest of his life that the God who is apprehended in the face of Jesus Christ had condescended to him and done for him precisely what he could never have done for himself. His earlier zeal for holy living he retained; only now the motive for it was gratitude for mercy given instead of recognition for superiority attained.

The results among the people who heard him were electrifying. Thousands who had swung between self-exalting pride and self-rejecting despair now had assurance of their new life as children of God. However, those who objected to the manner in which Wesley held up the need for Spirit-wrought birth made no secret of their derision. The Duchess of Buckingham complained that Methodist doctrines (they were really Anglican!) were “most repulsive…… It is monstrous,” she continued, “to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth.”

Ecclesiastical officialdom, as nasty as it was spiritually inert, lost no time harassing Wesley. Pulpits were closed to him. Driven out-of-doors, he decided to become “the more vile” (as he had always considered what he was about to do) and began “field-preaching.” Together with his friend George Whitefield, a fellow Oxford graduate, Wesley was soon “declaring the glad tidings of salvation” and “spreading scriptural holiness” to throngs numbering in the thousands, people who had never been found in church.

Again the bureaucracy moved to stop him. Magistrates were instructed to hound him even as mobs were incited to beat him. Yet the physically diminutive man stood his ground. “Always look a mob in the face,” he instructed his growing band of preachers. Usually the mobs dispersed; the scars on Wesley’s face were reminders of the ones that hadn’t.

Always an evangelist first of all, Wesley nevertheless attended to the sick, the dying, the imprisoned, the forgotten. He managed to author and edit hundreds of books, write hymns, collect and publish those of his brother Charles, and translate from the German those of Paul Gerhardt. He also wrote grammar textbooks for English, French, Greek, Hebrew and Latin, plus a history of the world.

Faced with the ravages of eighteenth-century poverty (worsened by the Industrial Revolution just under way) he spent himself tirelessly on behalf of the socially submerged. In 1746 he established the first free pharmacy in London. Haunted especially by the plight of widows, he reconditioned two small homes for them. Outraged that his people were denied access to banks, he scraped together fifty pounds and began assisting those who needed small amounts of investment capital. (One fellow established a bookselling business which eventually became the largest in England.)

It is impossible to exaggerate the hardships Wesley sustained: 250,000 miles on horseback, 40,000 sermons preached without amplification, 22 crossings of the Irish Sea, exposure to inclement weather, hostility from those with vested interests, life-long conflict from those who disdained his vehement rejection of predestination and his equally vehement insistence on godliness.

Wesley persisted in telling his people that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it: they could know victory. As his people stepped forward out of filth, hopelessness, self-contempt, alcoholic delirium, debt and disgrace he insisted that there was no limit to the work of grace which God longed to effect in them. When the established church accused him of fanaticism he met them head-on: since they prayed the line from the prayerbook every day, “. . . that we may perfectly love thee. . . .” they must believe it themselves or else be manifestly insincere. There were no grounds for pronouncing his people fanatics.

But no grounds were needed. When a bishop slandered those whose temporal fortunes and eternal destiny had been transformed, Wesley replied with an irony both trenchant and tragic: “But all is fair toward a Methodist.” Yet he harboured no ill-will. Discovering that the cowardly bishop who had refused to name himself was from Exeter Cathedral, Wesley worshipped there in 1762, commenting, “I was well-pleased to partake of the Lord’s Supper with my old opponent, Bishop Lavington. 0 may we sit down together in the Kingdom of our Father.” Fifteen days later Lavington was dead.

Wesley was to live another thirty-one years. When an old man, he spent four consecutive winter days begging, ankle-deep in slush, to raise two hundred pounds for his beloved poor.

In 1789, aged eighty-six, he returned to Falmouth, Cornwall. The streets were lined. Forty years earlier mobs there had abused him. Now he was overwhelmed at the affection that greeted him. “High and low now lined the street,,” he wrote, “from one end of the town to the other, out of stark love and kindness, gaping and staring as if the king were going by.”

He was not the king. He was a very great ambassador.

 

WESLEY, ON THE 300^TH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS BIRTH

 

1] How it all ends has everything to do with what “it” is now.   Wesley’s eschatology of love had everything to do with his understanding of the Christian life. Christian existence, he insisted, is a life of self-forgetful love for God and neighbour as Christ’s people abandon themselves to serve those — God no less than neighbour — who suffer atrociously, are customarily forsaken, and too often are near-friendless.

Eschatologies approach the “end” from different angles. Roman Catholic eschatology traditionally emphasizes sight: we are going to see God in a beatific vision that renders all fuzziness precisely focussed. In Roman Catholic liturgy the gospel is primarily seen rather than heard. The Roman Catholic Church has never lacked those whose visions of Jesus have quickened them to risk everything in a grand venture with him.

Presbyterian (i.e., Reformed) eschatology emphasizes knowledge: while we know but in part throughout our earthly sojourn, we shall know God in a way that dispels all doubt and remedies all ignorance.   In Reformed liturgy the gospel is primarily heard. The Reformed tradition’s emphasis on the revealed knowledge of God, on faith born of hearing the Word, will come to a climax in an apprehension of God that fully satisfies humankind’s hunger to know even as the knowledge never satiates.

While upholding the truth of both seeing God and knowing God, Wesley insisted that our vision of God and our knowledge of God would be gathered up and crowned in our love for God as finally we were “lost in wonder, love and praise.” Whereas Luther had cherished above all Romans and Galatians because they spoke explicitly of justification by faith, and Calvin had cherished Hebrews because it declared the finished earthly work of Christ as atoning One as well as his ongoing eternal work as intercessor and mediator, Wesley relished both yet cherished 1^st John above all just because it tolled relentlessly the love wherewith God loves us and the love whereby we must love one another.

In his famous tract, “The Almost Christian” (actually it’s about nominal Christians rather than about those “almost persuaded”), Wesley explores what unbelievers lack specifically when they are said to lack faith generally. When he turns to expound what characterizes believers, the reader expects him to say right off that believers are marked chiefly by faith; i.e., faith in God. Instead he says immediately that believers are those who love God.

Needless to say Wesley agreed with the whole church that faith marks the “faithful”; faith binds us to Jesus Christ. Yet Wesley was always leery of those who seem to “have the form of faith but deny the power of it (2^nd Timothy 3:5). He had seen too many who claimed to serve God (as it were) and obey God without ever loving God. For this reason he insisted that there is no faith in God without a simultaneous love for God, and equally no love for God without faith in God.

“No love without faith.” Faith is a matter of trusting the provision God has made in the cross for sinners who can never extricate themselves from the peril into which their rebellion against God has plunged them. If ever we think we can love God apart from faith, apart from owning the mercy-wrought provision that alone meets our most desperate need for pardon, then we don’t know who we are. For in fact we are defiled, helpless, hopeless, condemned. At the same time it’s obvious we don’t know who God is; namely, the righteous judge whose judgement can’t be set aside or sloughed off. What’s more, if we think we can love God apart from admitting our predicament and seizing God’s provision, then we naively think we relate to God on the strength of our natural capacity to give and receive love, thereby overcoming all estrangement and bridging all abysses. Forgotten, of course, is the fact that our alienation from God arises from his judgement upon us, not to mention the fact that humankind’s heart, in the wake of the Fall, is hostile to God.

“No faith without love.” All around him in Eighteenth Century England Wesley saw serious, sincere people who unreservedly endorsed creedal correctness even as no warmth had ever thawed their icy heart or unlocked their frozen lives. Such faith (so-called) Wesley relegated to mere “beliefism”, the condition of those who combined theoretical theism with practical atheism. Thinking themselves the beneficiaries of God’s favour because they “believed the right things”, they were inwardly untouched. They were quick to say they trusted God’s provision for them, yet in failing to love God they exemplified an attitude we display frequently in everyday life: we trust the work or talent of many for whom we feel nothing.

For Wesley, faith in God and love for God penetrated, implied and interpreted each other. His eschatology of love stressed that while faith would give way to sight, and hope to hope’s fulfilment, love would give way to nothing — except more love, for ever and ever.

 

2] Of all the misunderstandings that falsify Wesley and his spiritual descendants none is more defamatory and damaging than the assumption that the Methodist tradition doesn’t think. While it is readily acknowledged that the Lutheran, Reformed, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox families within the church catholic think and have always thought, Methodism merely emotes. “The Presbyterians had scholarship; the Methodists had religion”, an elderly United Church clergyman said as he discussed the two principal strands that formed our denomination. By “religion” he meant sentimental fervour devoid of academic rigour.

Wesley exposes this as a lie. Having insisted that his lay preachers study five hours per day, he certainly did no less himself. Wesley read comfortably in more languages than Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Butler or Kant. He authored grammar textbooks in seven of the eight foreign languages that he knew. On the three-month trip to the New World he taught himself German, and thereafter preached to German refugees in Ireland , becoming as well the principal translator of Paul Gerhardt, German Lutheranism’s finest hymnwriter. In Georgia he came upon a Spanish-speaking Jewish colony from Portugal , and taught himself Spanish so as to converse with them. Finding some Italian settlers who had no priest, he conducted worship from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, reading it silently in English while simultaneously speaking it aloud in Italian.

Eager to describe himself as homo unius libri (“a man of one book”), he insisted this meant that Scripture was normative, not that it alone was authoritative. The mere suggestion that preachers need read only one book he deplored as narrow, ignorant and foolish. Such “rank enthusiasm” (“enthusiasm” squares exactly with “fanaticism” today), he reminded those who failed to grasp that reading only the Bible guaranteed misreading it, placed them “above St. Paul”, for at least he wanted books. (2^nd Timothy 4:13). Those who complained of having “no taste for reading” he rebuked on the spot: “Contract a taste for it by use, or return to your trade” — and watched more than a few preachers move back to farm, shop or mine.

Wesley’s Journal shows us an 85-year old man reading logic on four successive mornings — no surprise since he wrote a textbook on logic and deemed the study of logic second only to the study of Scripture in the formation of ministers.

His reading was as broad as it was deep. No area of intellectual endeavour escaped him. All his life he kept abreast of contemporary explorations in natural science. Schooled in classical philosophy while at Oxford University , he probed the empiricist philosophy of John Locke, a star in the Enlightenment firmament. Aware that history is a theatre both of God’s activity and of the Church’s response, he sophisticated himself in the study of history to the point of writing a World History. While many today would smile at the aptness of the title, Primitive Physic, he was obsessed with relieving distress wherever he found it, and therefore had to acquaint himself with the latest in pharmaceutics and pharmacology. In a pre-analgesic era his trademark cure for headache may have helped some: “Pour upon the palm of the hand a little brandy and a zest of lemon, and hold it to the forehead.” In an age that had just discovered electricity and sought applications for it everywhere, Wesley insisted on “electrifying” those whose depression wasn’t the result of setback but rather appeared out of nowhere and alighted for no reason. Such protracted, persistent, psychotic depression he sought to relieve through his “electrical machine”, a crude device for supplying Electro-Convulsive Therapy. (Wesley placed an electrode on either side of the of the patient’s head, and then cranked a handle as static electricity shocked sufferers more jarringly the faster he turned it.) Perceptively he had recognized that this non-situational depression was rooted neither in defective faith nor in demonic possession. His advance here was liberating.

All his life Wesley eschewed mental laziness as he eschewed little else. Sleeping no more than six hours per night and arising each morning at four, he spent the freshest hours of the day expanding his mind, expecting all Methodists, but preachers especially, to follow him. To this end he brought together fifty books in his Christian Library, regarding them essential to the intellectual formation of his people. Methodism loves God with the mind.

 

3] After may 24^th May 1738, when he “felt my heart strangely warmed” in the course of hearing Luther’s Commentary on Romans read at worship, he knew that justification by faith is the beginning and the stable basis of the Christian life. Unhesitatingly he announced that where justification (free forgiveness of sins, rooted in God’s mercy, without consideration for human merit) isn’t upheld, the Church doesn’t exist. In 1766 he was still declaring, “I believe justification by faith alone as much as I believe there is a God.” His coolness toward Quakers continued in that for decades he hadn’t found “ten Quakers whose experience went so far as justification.”

Undeniably Wesley was Protestant. He regarded the Church of England as thoroughly Protestant, rooted as it was in such English Reformers as Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer. Cranmer, the consummate Anglican liturgist, remained especially dear to him in that he always looked upon Cranmer’s Prayerbook as the finest devotional aid in Christendom. The Protestant conviction concerning Scripture — it is the “un-normed norm” of Christian understanding and conduct, tradition remaining a subordinate norm — he endorsed without interruption.

At the same time he never doubted that tradition is a norm, and is therefore never to be taken lightly. He insisted that his generation were not the first Christians, that Church tradition was a storehouse of wisdom from which sorely pressed and perplexed Christians could draw. Unquestionably the fire of the Eighteenth Century Revival blessed thousands; left-handedly it also precipitated problems that Wesley knew had appeared at several points in the Church’s turbulent history. Wesley always knew that a church which disdains tradition (i.e., Christian memory) resembles a sailing ship without a keel. The ship’s keel is below the waterline, not readily visible, and frequently encrusted with unsightly accretions. Still, the great weight of the ballast in the ship’s keel keeps the vessel from capsizing when unforeseen squalls howl suddenly upon it. Without a keel, moreover, a ship can only be driven before the prevailing wind. With a keel, on the other hand, the boat can sail across the wind or even against it. Wesley knew that his movement, opposed by magistrates, merchants, and ecclesiastical officialdom, had to be able to use unfavourable winds if it was going to make headway.

In light of his appreciation of tradition he was without the acidulated anti-Catholicism found in too many Protestants. When Samuel, his brother Charles’ son, became a Roman Catholic, Wesley wrote Samuel’s brother and reminded him that Samuel had merely “changed opinion and mode of worship” while remaining no less Christian. Always quick to exploit whatever providence had brought before him, Wesley then challenged Samuel’s brother, Charles jr., as well as the other members of the family: “Whether you are Protestants or Baptists (sic), neither he nor you can ever enter into glory unless you…perfect holiness in the fear of God. I am, dear Charles, your affectionate uncle.”

In the same spirit Wesley bridged the theological orientation he had inherited from the West to that of the East. Whereas the Western Church , both Reformed and Roman, had understood original sin, for instance, largely in terms of a massive original guilt that was somehow transmitted to posterity, the Eastern Church had understood it characteristically as the introduction of death, inward corruption, and loss of the Holy Spirit. And whereas the West had highlighted the aspect of transaction in the work of Christ (what was done outside of us for our sake), the East had always acknowledged transaction while underscoring transformation: all that’s been done outside us has been done for the sake what needs to be done inside us. It was the latter emphasis that quickly became and continued to be the throbbing “bass note” of Wesley’s theology and spirituality.

Because of his capacity to “bridge” what would otherwise remain a fissure in Christ’s body, Wesley remains the figure in the Protestant orbit who can “dance” with virtually anyone in the Christian family. Appreciating the East (especially the Eastern Fathers, whose luminary, Athanasius, Wesley always preferred to the West’s Augustine), he also included in his Christian Library eight works by Roman Catholic mystics from the Counter Reformation. While the Sixteenth Century Reformers had denied fasting as a means of grace (Zwingli, the leader of the Reformation in Zurich , had eaten sausages in Lent to publicize his disavowal of fasting), Wesley unambiguously declared it to be a means of grace, fasting weekly himself and urging his people to follow him.

The man whose “The world is my parish” was no exaggeration exemplified a theology as wide as the world he knew God to love and as deep as the sin he knew God to redeem.

 

4] Glad to identify himself with the wider Church, Wesley characteristically acquainted his people to “holiness of heart and life.” Always suspicious of a Christian understanding of forgiveness that relieved people of sin’s guilt but left them in its grip, he judiciously matched “relief” with “release.” The habituated (all sin is addictive) could know deliverance.

The habituation was not imagined. By 1750 England ‘s annual per capita (children included) consumption of gin stood at 2.2 gallons. Intoxicated children, even children with delerium tremens, were a common sight. The infant death rate, already high on account of disease, skyrocketed on account of neglect. Of the 2,000 houses in St. Giles, London , 506 were gin shops. The sign in shop windows read

Drunk: one shilling
Dead drunk: two shillings
Free straw

— the latter feature a “perk” for those who didn’t want to sleep in someone else’s vomit.

Parliament often foreshortened its debates “because the honourable members were too drunk to continue the affairs of state.” Gambling took down rich and poor alike. The degeneration accompanying all of this need not be detailed. Its dimensions are sufficiently attested in one advertisement, ” Champagne , Dice, Music, or your Neighbour’s Spouse.” Wesley knew something more than forgiveness was needed. It was his conviction, and soon his people’s experience, that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it.

“Holiness of heart and life”, then, was yet another of the balances that Wesley maintained judiciously.   Holiness of heart is release from inner evil tempers or dispositions (one of which Wesley spoke of repeatedly, “resentment at an affront.”) Holiness of life is release from evil conduct as believers, now freed, “do the truth.”   Both are needed. Holiness of Holiness of life alone (as it were) is no more than self-serving legalism or moralism wherein a reputation is gained that isn’t deserved. Holiness of heart alone (as it were) is self-indulgent religious romanticism.

The Puritans of the preceding century had convinced Wesley that holiness or sanctity was God’s ultimate purpose for God’s people. Yet while he gained enormously from the Puritan insistence on sanctity, the work of renewal that privileges believers, Wesley felt that the Puritans had undervalued the work of the Spirit in a God-wrought deliverance, and had arbitrarily narrowed the extent of deliverance in this life. In Wesley’s era all Christians agreed that “without holiness no one shall see the Lord.” (Hebrew 12:14 ) All Christians similarly agreed that Christ’s people would be delivered “in the instant of death.” Since Christ’s people are going to be delivered in the moment of transition, Wesley contended, why not a milli-second before? Why not a month before? Why not now? To say that we are not going to be delivered until the “instant” is to impose limits on God’s willingness or desire to release people; it is to say we must continue in sin; it is to deploy shabby excuses and undercut human responsibility.

Agreeing with the Puritans, however, that God’s commands are all “covered promises”, and noticing that the root command in Scripture is “You shall be holy; for I the Lord your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2), Wesley discerned that the “uncovered” promise of God was the unblemished, perfected holiness of God’s people. Such a deliverance was the grand, overarching promise that gathered up and guaranteed the fulfilment of all other promises. For this reason Wesley was fond of saying that all of Scripture was “one grand promise”: a salvation that remedied all the ravages of the Fall and rendered God’s people resplendent.

Unlike many of his successors, Wesley renounced all efforts at “driving” people in this direction, insisting that the promise of the gospel had to be announced in the spirit of the gospel. In other words, people were always to be drawn.   God’s promise had to be heard not as threat, not even as announcement, but always as winsome, attractive, comely. This “Christian Perfection” (found in every family of the Church except the Reformational) is anything but a neurotic perfectionism that leaves people worse off than ever. It is, said Wesley, nothing less than perfection in love as people forgot their self-preoccupation as a consequence of living in and losing themselves in the two luminosities that now filled the horizon of their lives: the immensity of God’s love and the immediacy of their neighbour’s need.

Of course criticisms can be put forward here or there concerning Wesley’s articulation of the doctrine. The truth is, however, that without deliverance now — known, enjoyed, commended to others — Wesleyanism would have been stillborn.

 

5] Wesley’s efforts on behalf of disadvantaged people are almost the stuff of legend, so very remarkable are they. His heart had broken at the spectacle of poor people won to the Methodist movement, neither church nor state having addressed their plight.   Poor people, he knew, are more frequently ill and more wretchedly ill than the socially advantaged, even as their poverty ensures less access to treatment. Quickly Wesley gathered to himself a surgeon and an “apothecary.” He paid for their services by scrounging money wherever he could. In the first five months of his program his apothecary distributed drugs to 500 people. The drugs alone cost 40 pounds. He raised all the money himself. By 1746 he had established London ‘s first free pharmacy. (Again, it should be noted that he was always eager to use the most recent developments in science and medicine.)

Distressed at the predicament of aged widows, most of whom had survived amidst scarcity while their husbands were alive only to stare at the spectre now of death by starvation, exposure, or loneliness, he purchased houses for these women and refurbished them. (“We fitted them up so as to be warm and clean.”) “Would the widows who had to live in them feel themselves demeaned as charity cases, much beneath the social position of their benefactor? Every time he was in their neighbourhood he ate from their table and ate the same food. He also informed his preachers that if they wanted to avoid dismissal they should be found doing as much.

When bankers refused to lend money to sobered, industrious Methodists who now wanted to start up small businesses, Wesley scrabbled 50 pounds and dispensed small loans. In no time those who had borrowed were able to lend money to his “bank” so that the next wave could be helped. In the first year he helped 250 people make a fresh financial start.

Well-educated himself, and aware that education admits people to a world otherwise forever inaccessible, Wesley developed the Kingswood School . Educating the children of coal miners and straitened Methodist preachers in its earliest years, it operates to this day.

Yet in all of this it mustn’t be thought that Wesley’s zeal for social amelioration came from the British radicals’ rant for societal dismantling. The “levellers,” left-wing extremists rooted in the preceding century, had never persuaded Wesley, a life-long Tory, that their agenda was sound.   Instead the Kingdom of God — present, operative, crying out to be lent visibility — was the corrective lens through which Wesley saw the creation transfigured as “new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” (2^nd Peter 3:13) Societal dismantling, he knew, ultimately benefited no one as chaos overtook the stability needed for social existence of any kind. At the same time, the doggerel —

The rich man (sic) at his castle,
The poor man at his gate;
God made them high and lowly
And ordered their estate —

 

Wesley knew to be a parody of God’s providence, and a huge impediment to that redistribution without which socio-economic differences expand and harden into cruel disparities.

Never quick to blame “them” for those inequities that were also iniquities (he at least knew the difference), he preferred to urge his people, “Earn all you can; save all you can; give all you can” — and did as much himself. When he drew 30 pounds per year as an Anglican clergyman, he lived on 28 and gave away two. When book royalties boosted his income to 120 pounds, he lived on 28 and gave away 92. He never understood hoarding. While he agreed that the scriptural text pronounced the love of money to be the root of all evil, he maintained that no one could hang on to superfluous cash without coming to love it — and perpetrate the evil it guaranteed.

In all of this he was aware that it’s always difficult to help without degrading those helped. Wanting to assist poor women by means of something less than “cold charity,” he purchased yards of fine black cloth with which, as the custom was, to cover church windows on the occasion of his funeral. Then he informed his assistants that they were to have the cloth sewn into elegant dresses and given to women who would otherwise never be able to afford a good outfit.
It must never be thought that Wesley mere directed others or made social pronouncements. He paid the price himself. See him at age 81. He has been trudging from door to door for four consecutive days, begging money.           It is wintertime, and as he tells us himself, his feet have been immersed from morning to night in ice-cold slush. He stops begging at the end of the fourth day inasmuch as he has been overtaken by what he calls a “violent flux.” (Today we should say “uncontrollable diarrhoea.”) Only his own sickness stops him “wasting” himself for those needier still. Love is a spendthrift.

 

6] Small group nurture was the heart of the Methodist movement. While Wesley is imaginatively (yet correctly) associated with huge outdoor gatherings yet he spoke far more frequently to smaller congregations in parish churches, in fact his genius had most to do the smallest gatherings that provided the setting for mutual confrontation, correction and encouragement.

The “Society”, the largest grouping, consisted of all the Methodists in a city or town or village. The “Class”, consisting of a dozen people, was a geographically ordered as people were gathered into “twelves” in light of their physical proximity to each other. The “Band” was the smallest of all.

Because the classes were ordered only by geography, they were the most comprehensive. Here mothers and miners met each other, shopkeers and soldiers, the learned and the unlettered, spiritual neo-nate and mature saint, young and old, prominent and penurious.

Each class met once per week under the supervision of the “Leader.” The only condition for membership was “‘a desire to flee from the wrath to come, and to be saved from their sins’. But wherever this is really fixed in the soul it will be shown by its fruits.”

The first fruit was “doing no harm, and avoiding evil of every kind. Here Wesley included what anyone would expect; e.g., “the taking of the name of God in vain.” He also included what no one would expect; e.g., the using of many words in buying or selling.” (He was aware the more garrulously people speak in the course of conducting business, the more their speech is a smokescreen that cloaks deception.) Also included were “softness, and needless self-indulgence.”

The second fruit was “doing good”; e.g., feeding the hungry, clothing the ill-clad, visiting the sick and imprisoned. Not to be overlooked, however, was the Methodists’ “submitting to bear the reproach of Christ, to be as the filth and offscouring of the world.”

The third fruit was “attending upon all the ordinances of God”; e.g., public worship, private prayer, and fasting (every Friday.)

The bands differed significantly from the classes. The former were smaller, consisting of only four or five people organized according to occupation (there were bands for sailors, for seamstresses, for labourers); or organized according to desperate need (for alcoholics, for gamblers, for “whoremongers”.) The bands had to be gender-segregated in light of the laser-like probing and the frank confession essential to them. For the purpose of the band was to “Confess your faults to one another, and pray for one another that you may be healed.” (James 5:16) The “Rules” of the bands, drawn up on Christmas Day, 1738, suggest a self-disclosure that couldn’t be cloaked. E.g.,

Rule #7: “Do you desire to be told of all your faults, and that plain and home?”
Rule #9: “Consider! Do you desire we should tell you whatsoever we think, whatsoever we fear, whatsoever we hear, concerning you?”
Rule #11: “Is it your desire and design to be on this and all other occasions entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart, without exception, without disguise, and without reserve?

And then there was the question that Wesley insisted be put to every band-member at every meeting: “Have you nothing you desire to keep secret?”

The confrontation was severe. Yet Wesley knew that love worthy of the name has to be severe, or else it is nothing more than a polite indulgence which finally profits no one.

 

7] While public worship was essential to the spiritual health of his people, Wesley, unlike most evangelists, insisted especially on Holy Communion. It was nothing less than God’s command. Therefore, all who neglected it were disobedient (“no piety.”) It was also God’s provision in the wake of huge human need. Then all who neglected it were foolish (“no wisdom.”) When some people complained that they weren’t “worthy”, Wesley told them that Christ’s mercy eclipsed all considerations of merit. When others returned from the communion rail complaining that they didn’t feel any different, he was quick with five “benefits”:

-we are strengthened “insensibly”;
-we are made more fit for the service of God;
-we are made more constant in the service of God;
-we are kept from backsliding;
-we are spared many temptations.

Unquestionably for Wesley, to receive Holy Communion was to receive Christ himself.

 

The small man (5’4″, 120 pounds) had feet of clay. All his life he lacked self-knowledge, particularly in his relations with women. He was autocratic. Often he irked his brother Charles. When he was provoked he could spew sarcasm. Still, he was wonderfully used of God. He was living proof of Luther’s dictum: “God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.” In fair days and foul he never ceased having a heart as big as a house for sinning, suffering, sorrowing humankind.

Wesley was evidence of two miracles: the first, that someone with his social and educational superiority could communicate with the disadvantaged. The second miracle, the greater one, of course, was that he wanted to.

V. Shepherd

(published in TOUCHSTONE September 2004)         

 

CHARLES WESLEY     1707-1788

          

Part I: The Life of Charles Wesley

The output of Charles Wesley is prodigious: 9000 poems; 27,000 stanzas; 180,000 lines. Charles wrote three times as much as William Wordsworth, one of England ‘s most prolific poets. While Charles didn’t write poetry every day, his output averages out to ten lines of poetry every day for fifty years.

Was he sane? In Henry Rack’s recent biography of John Wesley, Charles is described as “seeming[ly] almost a manic-depressive personality.”[1] Had Charles suffered from bi-polar affective disorder (i.e., alternated between psychotic states of floridness and near-immobility) he would never have been able to accomplish what he did as itinerant evangelist and spokesperson for the Methodist movement. On the other hand, mood swings that are non-psychotic yet more extreme than those of most people are labelled today as “cyclothymiac.” While psychiatric speculation can never be confirmed, from Charles’ correspondence and journals it appears incontrovertible that he suffered more than most in this regard. Poets routinely do. Today he would strike us as eccentric to say the least. He wore his winter clothing throughout the year, even in the hottest summer weather. Whenever poetic inspiration fell on him he became preoccupied to the point of semi-derangement. Seemingly unaware of where he was or what was in front of him, he would walk into a table or chair or desk, stumbling, lurching, crashing, not helped at all by his extreme short-sightedness. He would stride into a room, oblivious of the fact that a conversation had been underway before he invaded, and begin firing questions at those present, these people now startled at the apparent rudeness and effrontery of the man whose lack of social perception allowed him to continue interrogating people who couldn’t reply and who weren’t answerable to him in any case. Not waiting for their response, he would pour out aloud the poetry that was taking shape in his head, then turn on his heel and walk out. If he happened to be on horseback when lines fell into place in his head, he would ride to the home of an acquaintance, hammer on the door and cry, “Pen and ink! Pen and ink!” The poetry safely written down, he excused himself and went on his way.

Charles could write poetry for any occasion. When his wife was about to enter upon the rigours of childbirth, for instance (made even more rigorous in the Eighteenth Century on account of the primitive state of obstetrics), he wrote a poem for her which she could use as a prayer:

Who so near the birth hast brought,

(Since I on Thee rely)

Tell me, Saviour, wilt thou not

Thy farther help supply?

Whisper to my list’ning soul,

Wilt thou not my strength renew,

Nature’s fears and pangs control,

And bring thy handmaid through?

At the funeral of George Whitefield, the Anglican evangelist who was a much more dramatic preacher than either John or Charles Wesley, Charles praised his departed friend in a poem 536 lines long. While his poetry concerned chiefly the themes of the gospel message, he also tried, as imaginatively as he could, to empathize with all sorts of people in their manifold stresses and strains and griefs. For this reason he has left us poetry about wives and widows, coalminers and criminals, high school students and highwaymen, saints and soldiers, particularly soldiers who were loyal to the crown of England during the American War of Independence.

Charles was born in 1707, the 18th of 19 children, eleven of whom survived the ravages of childhood disease. He gained his eccentricity from both his mother and his father. When his mother, Susannah Annesley, was only 13 years-old she defied her father, a learned Puritan minister, and informed the family that she was becoming an Anglican. The Anglican Church, the state-church, had persecuted Puritan Dissenters for decades, frequently making martyrs out of men who wanted only to preach the gospel according to their conscience. The thirteen year-old voiced no reason for her decision; she was content to tell her hurt and horrified parents that she was convinced of the soundness of her position and had inscribed it in her diary. (Years later her diary disappeared in the house-fire that nearly carried her off with her husband and children. Therefore no one knows to this day what reasons she had advanced.) Susannah was unyielding. When she married, several years later, her father wasn’t allowed to officiate, since no non-Anglican minister could preside at a service of the state-church. Her father was crushed at his being excluded.

The father of Charles, Samuel Wesley, was eccentric too. Fancying himself a poet, he published a book of entirely forgettable verse. The title of his book of poems was simply Maggots. The single illustration adorning the book was a drawing of Samuel himself with a large maggot sitting on his forehead. The poems are unusual: “The Grunting of a Hog”; “A Box like an Egg”; and, perhaps the most unusual, “The Tame Snake in a Box of Bran”.

Samuel and Susannah married, eventually having nineteen children. John was the fifteenth, Charles the eighteenth. (Ann, named after the British monarch, was the last of that generation.)

Both boys possessed awesome academic talent. When he was still a teenager Charles competed in what was known as a “Challenge,” a scholarly joust wherein one fellow tried to stymie another on any of a hundred subtle questions concerning Greek grammar. The competition began early in the morning and continued until nine at night, three or four nights a week, for eight weeks. Much was at stake, since the winner would be named a “King’s Scholar” and guaranteed entrance to Oxford or Cambridge University . Charles triumphed and moved on to Oxford .

Following his ordination to the Anglican priesthood Charles ministered in Georgia for six months where he proved himself to be a most obnoxious clergyman: prickly, opinionated, self-righteous, condescending, prying. Upon his return to England he rejoined his sister Kezia, the youngest of the nineteen Wesley children. Kezia’s adolescent frivolity had infuriated Charles earlier, for Kezia used snuff, the Eighteenth Century equivalent of marijuana. Her frivolity behind her now in her new-found maturity, Kezia told Charles she believed that God could and did work a work of grace in the human heart. Believers, she said, were granted new standing before God, a new nature, new outlook, new motivation, new affections. Then on 21st May, 1738 , Kezia’s conviction and experience of the truth became his. Charles wrote in his journal, “…by degrees [the Spirit of God] chased away the darkness of my unbelief. I found myself convinced…. I saw that by faith I stood.”[2] Whereupon he wrote a hymn that Christians continue to find a ready vehicle of their own experience of grace:

And can it be that I should gain

An interest in the Saviour’s blood?

Died he for me, who caused his pain?

For me, who him to death pursued?

Amazing love! how can it be

That thou, my God, should’st die for me?

Three days later John came to the same awareness. Methodism was born. In the meantime their friend George Whitefield (unlike the Wesleys, George Whitefield had not been born to the privileged clergy class but rather was the illegitimate child of an English barmaid); Whitefield, an Anglican priest like the Wesleys, had been expelled from Anglican pulpits. Like John the Baptist, Whitefield never left any doubt as to where he stood. “I am persuaded”, he wrote, “that the generality of preachers talk of an unknown and an unfelt Christ. The reason why congregations have been so dead is because they have had dead men preaching to them. How can dead men beget living children?”[3] Soon Whitefield was joined by the Wesleys in outdoor preaching, where they addressed crowds of up to 25,000.

In 1740 Charles visited Wales for the first time. On the whole the Welsh people loved him. In Cardiff , however, he had his first taste of violence (although by no means his last.) An aristocrat who heard him was incensed at being told that moral rectitude was no substitute for clinging in faith to the sin-bearing Christ. Angrily he demanded that Charles recant. Charles refused and replied to him, “You cannot endure sound doctrine…you are a rebel against God, and must bow your stiff neck to him before you can be forgiven.” Whereupon the angry man assaulted Charles with his cane. A melee developed, in the course of which a Mrs. Phipps was struck as well. Her name will never be forgotten only because of her proximity to the assault on Charles – as Pilate is immortalized on account of his proximity to the Crucifixion.

Not only was Charles a forceful evangelist, he was a diligent pastor. Like any good pastor, he spent much time at deathbeds. His journal entry of 4th March, 1741 , reads, “I saw my dear friend again, in great bodily weakness but strong in the Lord…. I spoke with her physician who said, ‘She has no dread upon her spirits…I never met such people as yours.’” In the same year he buried a young woman, Rachel Peacock, and subsequently wrote, “At the sight of her coffin my soul was moved within me and struggled as a bird to break the cage. Some relief I found in tears, but still was so overpowered that unless God had abated the vehemence of my desires, I could have had no utterance. The whole congregation partook with me of the blessedness of mourning.”

When Charles was 39 years old he married Sarah Gwynne, daughter of Marmaduke Gwynne, a Welsh magistrate. Sarah, known to everyone as “Sally”, was 20. Before she married him she told him he had to take better care of himself physically. To this end she urged him to stop getting up every morning at four and to sleep in until six; to stop sleeping on boards and begin sleeping in a bed; and lastly, if she was going to marry him he would have to take off his clothes when he slept. Extraordinarily beautiful, Sarah sat for several portrait painters. She had been married for only two years when smallpox overtook her. She lingered near death for days. Her eighteen month old son, “Jacky,” succumbed. Sarah regained her health even as her face, hideously disfigured now, was more than many people could bear to look at. When someone who hadn’t seen her since her illness blurted to Charles that his wife’s appearance was repulsive, Charles commented, “I find her beautiful.” Theirs was a marriage of storybook romance. Ultimately eight children were born to them, five of whom died in infancy or early childhood. Two sons, Samuel and Charles II, would distinguish themselves as musical performers and composers. (Samuel Sebastian Wesley, the best-known of the musical Wesleys, has tunes in every denomination’s hymnal. In addition he wrote twenty oratorios.)

Yet not everyone among the Wesley brothers and sisters had a marriage like theirs. Mehetabel or “Hetty”, the favourite sister of both John and Charles, was intelligent, vivacious, wonderfully gifted as a poet and sensitive to a degree that only her two dear brothers appeared to grasp.[4] When Hetty was 25 years-old a suitor called on her several times. Her father, Samuel, disapproved of the suitor and told him not to come back. Samuel reinforced his decree by sending Hetty to a wealthy family where she worked as an unpaid drudge. She had been wounded by her father’s heavy-handedness, was desperately lonely, and lacked utterly the intellectual company she craved. She wrote John vowing that she would never return home. She was home in less than a year, five months pregnant. Her father, heavy-handed still and enraged now as well, forced her to marry Mr. William Wright, a coarse, insensitive fellow as unlike Hetty as any man could be, and habitually drunk as well. Her baby died before it was a year old. A second infant died, and then a third. Hetty was crushed. Her grief found expression in her poem, “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of its Birth”:

Tender softness, infant mild,

Perfect, purest, brightest child!

Transient lustre, beauteous clay,

Smiling wonder of a day!

Ere the last convulsive start

Rend thy unresisting heart,

Ere the long-enduring swoon

Weigh thy precious eyelids down,

Oh, regard a mother’s moan!

Anguish deeper than thy own!

Fairest eyes, whose dawning light

Late with rapture blessed my sight,

Ere your orbs extinguished be,

Bend their trembling beams on me.

Drooping sweetness, verdant flow’r,

Blooming, with’ring in an hour,

Ere thy gentle breast sustains

Latest, fiercest, vital pains,

Hear a suppliant! Let me be

Partner in thy destiny![5]

John was irate at his father’s callousness and preached a sermon, “Showing Charity to Repentant Sinners.” The sermon excoriated father Samuel and was meant to acquaint him with his cruelty. The older man remained unaffected, however, his heart hardened against his daughter forever.

When Hetty fell mortally ill while still a young woman, Charles attended her. “I prayed by my sister”, he wrote, “a gracious, trembling soul; a bruised reed which the Lord will not break.” The day Hetty died John was absent in London . Charles conducted the funeral service for his favourite sister, preaching on Isaiah 60:19, “The Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended.’ That night he wrote in his journal, “I followed her to a quiet grave, and I wept with them that wept.”

While Charles had no dispute with his sisters, he had several with John. They disagreed sharply over the matter of lay-preachers. As Methodism gathered more and more people it found itself without sufficient preachers. While John and Charles were Anglican priests and intended being nothing else, relatively few Anglican clergy sided with the Methodists, knowing that to do so would render them suspect to Anglican officialdom. As a result, the Methodist movement had to use more and more lay-preachers. These lay-preachers were zealous, sincere men whose dedication entailed enormous personal sacrifice but who lacked formal academic training. Oxford-educated himself, John had insisted that they study five hours each day. His mandate here was unrealistic in view of their lack of academic formation and even lack of time. Admittedly, their theological under-exposure tended to foster doctrinal imprecision, this in turn occasionally giving rise to preaching that Charles found to be full of sound and fury yet signifying little. Concerning one such lay-preacher, Michael Fenwick, Charles wrote,

Such a preacher I have never heard, and hope I never shall again. It         was beyond description. I cannot say he preached false doctrine, or true, or any doctrine at all, but pure, unmixed nonsense. Not one sentence did he utter that could do the least good to any one soul.[6]

John, however, insisted that Methodism couldn’t survive without lay-preachers and sharply rebuked Charles for his fussiness. (In this regard John was vindicated conclusively. Methodism wouldn’t have survived its first flowering without lay preachers whose sacrifice was nothing less than exemplary. While the British Crown guaranteed Anglican clergy an annual income of thirty pounds, lay preachers – John was careful never to call them “clergy” or “ministers” and thereby violate not only canon law but even the law of the land – were paid only fifteen pounds per year.) Charles was forced to tolerate the preachers whose utterance frequently grated on him.

The doctrine of Christian perfection, however, remained the area of sharpest contention between the brothers. John insisted, in conformity with the tradition of the church catholic, that there was no limit to the scope of God’s delivering his people from sin’s guilt and grip in this life[7]. To deny that God could “break every fetter” now was to condemn the habituated to life-long bondage, offering them only the faint comfort of release in articulo mortis. While always reading the word “perfection” as “single-minded” – the meaning it had in the King James Version of the bible, John never thought it to mean “flawless” or “faultless.” Charles riposted that Eighteenth Century people invariably heard “perfection” as “faultless.” Charles found “perfection” unhelpful; worse, disastrous, spawning as it did (he maintained) unrealistic self-estimation and insufferable spiritual pride, only to be followed by unforeseen vulnerability and embarrassing collapse. John thought Charles held out too little for people struggling with sin’s addiction; Charles thought John held out too much. Charles reiterated that if by “perfection” John meant something less than what others generally understood, he should stop using the term. John insisted that the term was scriptural.[8]  Mordant pen in hand, Charles scripted some of his sharpest exchanges with his brother:

If perfect I myself profess,

My own profession I disprove:

The purest saint that lives below

Doth his own sanctity disclaim,

The wisest owns, I nothing know,

The holiest cries, I nothing am.[9]

 

Sharper still, perhaps is his

Longer than all should forward press,

Should see the summit with his eyes,

Impatient for his own success

BE PERFECT NOW, the preacher cries!

He ruins by his headlong haste,

The wheat is choak’d with tares oer’run,

And Satan lays the lunacy and waste.[10]

 

By 1756 Charles no longer had the stamina for an itinerant ministry on horseback . He was 49 years old, had spent years being rain-soaked, frozen, poorly-fed and assaulted by angry mobs. He gave up the travelling ministry and established residence in Bristol , preaching there and in London regularly.[11]

By 1780 Charles was 73. Confusion had overtaken him. Poetry no longer leapt to his mind. When he preached now he paused at length between phrases, trying to recall what he wanted to say. In frustration he would thump his chest with both hands while mumbling incoherently. Then, tired, he would lean on the pulpit with both elbows. If he wanted more time he had the congregation sing a hymn; and if more time still, another hymn.

He lived another eight years. John was in Newcastle when he learned of the death of his brother. Next Sunday John was conducting worship, entirely composed, when the congregation happened to sing one of Charles’s earliest hymns. When the congregation came to the words

My company before is gone

And I am left alone with Thee

John unravelled. He staggered back into the pulpit chair, weeping profusely. The congregation waited for him, and he recovered enough to finish the service.

Sarah, Charles’s widow, moved to London and lived there with her daughter and son. She died in 1822 at the age of 96.

 

Part II: The Art of Charles Wesley[12]

To be sure, Charles Wesley was a genius, yet “genius” wasn’t the only ingredient in his poetic mastery. His classical education and his unrelenting assiduity were equally important.

Charles left home for high school when he was eleven years old. On Monday mornings the lower form boys wrote an English prose précis of the sermon they had heard the day before; the middle form boys wrote a Latin prose précis; the upper form boys, a Latin verse précis. (Is there a high school student in Canada today who could write a Latin verse précis of last Sunday’s sermon?)

After high school Charles moved on to Oxford University where he studied Latin and Greek for nine years, with concentration in Latin poetry. By age thirty he had written hundreds of poems, even though he had not yet penned any of the hymns that would issue from his spiritual awakening. When the awakening did occur, immersing him in a new world, it was so huge an event that Charles likened it to the creation of the cosmos. Certainly he had read aright the Greek text of 2^nd Corinthians 5:17: the man or woman renewed in Christ lives in a new creation.  He compared the brooding of the Spirit over him to the brooding of the Spirit over the primeval chaos when the Spirit first brought the world into being:

Long o’er my formless soul

The dreary waves did roll;

Void I lay and sunk in night.

Thou, the overshadowing Dove,

Call’dst the chaos into light,

Badst me be, and live, and love.

All poets read other poets and are thereby informed by the poets they read. Charles was no exception. He read chiefly Shakespeare, Milton, Herbert, Dryden, Pope, Prior and Young. (Prior’s poem, “Solomon”, is 100 pages long, and Charles expected his daughter, Sally, to memorize all of it.) Yet none of the poets he read had anything like the influence on him of scripture. Subsequently his hymn-poems became conduits whereby the Methodist people were steeped in scripture as they hummed tunes in the course of their daily affairs. Generally Charles embedded one scripture text at least in each hymn line:

With glorious clouds encompassed round                         Ex. 24:16, 17; Ps. 97:2; Ez. 10:4

Whom angels dimly see,                                                 Isaiah 6:2

Will the Unsearchable be found,                                      Job11:7; 23:3,8,9; 1 Tim. 6:16

Of God appear to me?                                                    Isa. 59:2; Hab.1:13; 1 Cor.15:8

 

Come, then, and to my soul reveal                                  Dan. 2:22

The heights and depths of grace,                                     Eph. 3:18

The wounds which all my sorrows heal                           Isa. 53:4-5; 1 Pet. 2:24

That dear disfigured face.                                               Isa. 52:14; 53:2[13]

 

While Charles’s themes came from scripture, his poetic vocabulary was entirely his own, a fine blend of English words from Latin roots and English words from Anglo-Saxon roots. His basic vocabulary was Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxon words are largely monosyllabic; e.g., “hit”, “wind”, “swept”, “thrust”. They are more vigorous than Latin words and have greater impact. English words derived from Latin, on the other hand, tend to be polysyllabic. They suggest not action but contemplation. They are capable of greater precision of thought.

Those aramanthine bowers

Inalienably made ours.

(Aramanthine means “never-fading.”) Charles was especially fond of Latinisms ending in -able, -ible, -ably and -ibly. Note his Christmas hymn on the Incarnation:

Our God contracted to a span,

Incomprehensibly made man.

In this vein we should note his hymn, “O Thou who camest from above”:

There let it for thy glory burn

With inextinguishable blaze.

(It might be noted in passing that William Tyndale, the master of early-modern Saxon vocabulary, never used Latinate polysyllabic words, always preferring the force of monosyllables; e.g., “My sin is more than I can bear.”) If today we find Wesley’s vocabulary difficult to understand in places because strange to us, we should know that his vocabulary is the most modern of all 18th century poets.

 

By dint of his 9-year immersion in classical poetry Charles absorbed thoroughly the poetic conventions used so very tellingly by the classical poets.

(i) Some of the rhetorical devices CW used.

Anaphora: repeating the same word at the beginning of consecutive phrases or sentences. E.g. (with respect to God’s grace),

Enough for all, enough for each,

Enough for evermore.

Anadiplosis: beginning a stanza with the theme (re-stated, but not reproduced word-for-word) of the last line of the preceding stanza. E.g., in “Jesus, lover of my soul”,

stanza 3, last line: “Thou art full of truth and grace.”

stanza 4, first line: “Plenteous grace with thee is found.”

And again, e.g., in “And can it be that I should gain”

stanza 1, last line: “That thou, my God, should’st die for me!”

stanza 2, first line: “‘Tis mystery all: th’immortal dies.”

Epanadiplosis: beginning and ending a line (“book-ending” the line) with the same word:

E.g., “Come, desire of nations, come.”

Epizeuxis: repeating a word or phrase within a line.

E.g., “Who for me, for me hast died.”

(The foregoing four devices are forms of repetition used to lend emphasis, continuity or cohesion.)

Aposiopesis: the speaker comes to a complete halt in mid-stanza.

E.g., “What shall I say?”

Oxymoron: inherent self-contradiction.

E.g., “I want a calmly-fervent zeal.”

Parison: an even balance in the expressions or words of a sentence.

E.g., “The good die young;

The bad live long.”

(Wesley used many more rhetorical devices as well.)

 

(ii) Some examples of CW’s vocabulary. (He liked to retain or recover literal meanings.)

expressed: shaped by a strong blow (as from a die)

illustrate: illuminate

secure: free from care

tremendous: terrifying

virtue: manliness or power (Latin: vis, power; vir, man)

pompous: dignified (but not ostentatious)

 

(iii) Some of the figures of speech CW used.

Metaphor: an implied comparison between two things.

E.g., “He laid his glory by,

He wrapped him in our clay.”

Synecdoche: one aspect of a person represents the whole of the person.

E.g., “The mournful, broken hearts rejoice.”

Antonomasia: a proper name is used as a general epithet.

E.g., “Come, all ye Magdalens in lust.”

Hypotyposis: lively description.

E.g., “See! He lifts his hands!

See! He shews the prints of love!”

Hyperbole: exaggerated language used to express the inexpressible.

E.g., “I rode on the sky

(Freely justified I!)

Nor envied Elijah his seat;

My soul mounted higher

In a chariot of fire,

And the moon it was under my feet.”

(Here CW was speaking of his experience of that grace which had pardoned him. (“Freely justified I!”)

(iv) Metre   (/ = accented syllable; ‘ = unaccented syllable.

iambic               ‘/

trochaic             /’

anapestic           ”/

dactylic             /”

spondaic           //

CW wrote chiefly in iambic metre. Isaac Watts did too.

E.g.,     “And then shall we for ever live

At this poor dying rate?

Our love so faint, so cold to Thee,

And thine to us so great!” ( Watts )

( Watts wrote 1000 poems, of which only 22 were in trochaic and 5 in anapestic.)

While CW preferred iambic, he also wrote significantly in trochaic and anapestic, sometimes combining them: iambic-anapestic (e.g., “Nor envied Elijah his seat”) or iambic-trochaic (e.g., “Jesus! the name that charms our fears’ – trochaic-iambic.) He rarely wrote in dactylic (unlike Longfellow’s Evangeline: “This is the forest primeval”, or even “ Hickory dickory dock.”) While most poets can work well in one metre only, CW could write superbly in any.

(v) Stanza Form

CW wrote many fine hymns in 4-line stanzas, the 1st and 3rd lines having 8 feet (syllables), and the 2nd and 4th lines 6.

E.g., “Jesus, united by thy grace,

And each to each endeared,

With confidence we seek thy face

And know our prayer is heard.”

He preferred 6 lines with 8 feet (8.8.8.8.8.8.)

E.g., “Then let us sit beneath the cross,

And gladly catch the healing stream,

All things for him account but loss,

And give up all our hearts to him;

Of nothing think or speak beside,

‘My Lord, my Love is crucified.’”

(Note the rhyme scheme here: ABABCC)

His next favourite stanza form was 8.8.6.8.8.6. (‘romance metre”)

E.g., “If pure, essential love thou art,

Thy nature into every heart,

Thy loving self inspire;

Bid all our simple souls be one,

United in a bond unknown,

Baptized with heavenly fire.” (AABCCB)

(vi) Endings

Lines that end in an unaccented syllable are said to possess feminine rhyme: (“Love divine, all loves excelling”); lines ending in an accented syllable, masculine (“O what shall I do my Saviour to praise?”). Masculine rhymes were thought to be “stronger”, imparting greater emphasis. CW wrote 300 hymns in feminine rhymes, 8700 in masculine.

 

 

While the native genius and the formal training of Charles Wesley were important ingredients in his hymn writing, they weren’t the most important. What counted above all was his life in God, in particular his experience of the Crucified. Repeatedly in his Journal Charles summarized his ministerial endeavour and its Spirit-authored fruit, “She received the atonement.” His hymns sing pre-eminently about the cross. Despite his 9000 published poems, the depth and wonder and force of his immersion in God is finally inexpressible. His matchless words,

Depth of mercy, can there be

Mercy still reserved for me?

point us to the heart of One before whom all of us (Charles too) are ultimately wordless.

Victor Shepherd     June 2004

 

 

[1]Rack, H.; Reasonable Enthusiast, p.252(Nashville: Abingdon, 1992.)

[2]Wesley, Charles, Journal, May 21^st, 1738 ; quoted in Dallimore, A.,; A Heart Set Free: The Life of Charles Wesley, p.61 (Westchester: Crossway Books, 1988.)

[3] The quotations in the following paragraphs are found in the work cited above.

[4]The eldest brother, Samuel Wesley, never sided with the Eighteenth Century Awakening. He was ordained to the Anglican ministry, became headmaster of a boys’ school, and established a poetry journal. John and Charles appear to have had little to do with him.

[5]Wright, M.; “To an Infant Expiring the Second Day of its Birth”; quoted in Lonsdale, R., ed.; The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse, pp. 165-6 (Oxford, OUP, 1984.)

[6]Quoted in Dallimore, op.cit., p.189.

[7]The exception, John Wesley never tired of pointing out, was found in the churches of the Reformation: they abhorred all discussion of “perfection” as “fanatical.” John never denied the danger of fanaticism; at the same time, he knew that the Eastern Church and the Roman Catholic Church in the west held out to their people a sanctity that could be realized in this life.     While unquestionably a Protestant and therefore belonging to the west, he always found the Reformation churches deficient in this regard.

[8]For a detailed discussion of this point see Shepherd, V.; “’Can You Conceive Anything More Amiable Than This?’ A Note on Wesley’s Challenge Concerning Christian Perfection”; Papers of the Canadian Methodist Historical Society, 1997-1998,pp.18-43; ed. Semple, N.; (Toronto: CMHS, 1998)

[9]Tyson, J,; op.cit., p.389.

[10] Tyson, J,’ op.cit., p.387

[11]When Charles was ready to dismount his animal appears to have been ready to have him do so: Charles had ridden the same mare for fifteen years.

[12]For what follows I am largely indebted to Baker, F.; Charles Wesley’s Verse (London: Epworth Press, 1964.)

[13] See Hildebrandt, F., and Beckerlegge, O., eds.; The Works of John Wesley Vol. 7, “A Collection of Hymns for the Use of The People Called Methodists”, pp.730-731; (Nashville: Abingdon, 1983.)

John Wesley (1703-1791): Features of his Spirituality  

 

[1] “If we are going to have two kings then we are going to have two beds,” Samuel Annesley fumed in anger at his wife’s intransigence. He had “heard” her silence when she ought to have voiced her “Amen” at his suppertime prayer for King William. “He is no king; he is but a prince,” Susannah said of William of Orange, the Dutchman now married to Mary. Feted for his military prowess at the Battle of the Boyne (July 12, 1690), William had defeated James II, thereby ensuring the ” Orange ” or Protestant colour of Britain and its far-flung empire. Susannah, however, remained a “Non-Juror” who refused to swear loyalty to a foreign interloper.

Connubially deprived now, the woman who had already had fourteen children petitioned the Archbishop of York, complaining that her husband had reneged on his marriage vow. The archbishop declined to adjudicate the dispute. Meanwhile her husband, absent from the home for months on account of his attendance in London at Convocation, the highest court of the Church of England, returned home. They reconciled. John was conceived that night.

John’s brother, Charles, was to be the eighteenth. One more daughter would complete the family. (Susannah had been the last of twenty-five, all born to Dr Samuel Annesley, a Puritan minister whose spacious London living room accommodated weekly meetings of ministers where everyone profited from Annesley’s acclaimed sophistication in philosophy and theology.)

John and Charles would eventually become household names throughout the English-speaking world. John would dominate the theological, ecclesiastical and social landscape of the Eighteenth Century. Charles, possessed of consummate poetical gifts in a family where everyone could write poetry, would become not only the most able hymnwriter in English, but because of this, the vehicle whereby the truth and reality of the gospel migrated from head to heart to hands — in fact right into the bloodstream of the Methodist people. For as preaching quickened faith in hearers throughout the Evangelical Awakening, hymnody became the means whereby those who now loved Christ “with love undying” (Eph. 6:24) found themselves humming unforgettable tunes whose scripture-laden words seeped so very deeply into them as to effervesce for the rest of their lives.

All of this, however, came within a hair’s breadth of not happening at all. A fire in the Wesley family rectory, 1709, found the six-year-old “Jacky” (his mother’s lifelong endearment for him) standing alone on a second storey balcony as the structure cracked and tottered. A human pyramid fetched him to safety. Thereafter “a brand plucked from the burning” (Zech. 3:2) embedded itself in Methodist lore.

As a result of this deliverance Susannah deemed John to be appointed to a special work. Home-schooling all her children (at least from age three to six), she took particular pains with John, finding him precocious in a family where she expected all children to be reading by four. At eleven he left home for Charterhouse School , beginning each day with the breakfast nourishment of bread, cheese and beer. (Susannah had always brewed the family’s supply.)

At Oxford University John landed in an environment that was socially privileged, academically indifferent and blissfully frivolous. Deploring the shallowness and silliness, he and a handful of serious scholars formed a group that mockers quickly labelled the “Holy Club.” It survived their contempt, and in fact was marked by many profundities.

For instance, the group zealously consumed the classics, the classics being a carryover from Renaissance humanism. It cherished the Church Fathers, Christian thinkers from the close of the apostolic era to the early middle Ages whose writing was second only to scripture in the theological and devotional formation of the church. “Christian Antiquity,” as Wesley spoke of Patristics, could be mined at this time at Oxford since the university was in the twilight of exemplary Patristic scholarship.

The group was equally ardent at recovering the liturgy of the Church of England. Throughout his life John would recognize and honour other “modes of worship,” as he called them, but would never abate in esteeming the Book of Common Prayer as the finest in Christendom and its liturgy as without peer. Whereas attendance at Holy Communion had declined until three times per year only (Christmas, Easter and Pentecost) was most common, Wesley and his friends insisted on a minimum of weekly Eucharist. (Over his life he would average 4.5 times per week.) Their recovery of the eucharistic dimension of worship, together with their zeal for the Fathers, was evident in Wesley’s insistence that not wine only but wine and water be used. The latter point, in ” High Church ” worship, was an effectual reminder of the blood and water that had flowed from the Redeemer’s side in God’s recovery of the creation.

Lest their “Holy Club” become self-absorbed, the students visited the poor, attended the sick, and befriended the imprisoned. (Prisons at this time were one large room, its floor straw-covered and its “toilets” a bucket or two. They housed men and women together, young and old, deranged and perverse, social victim and hardened criminal. Years later it was the Methodists who campaigned to reform prisons, insisting on the segregation of male and female convicts in order to protect the latter against sexual molestation.)

Upon graduating from Oxford , and following both ordination and several years’ university teaching, Wesley departed England for the New World . Ostensibly he was going as a clergyman to the colonies in Georgia and a missionary to First Peoples. In fact he was pursuing a spiritual quest wherein he hoped to satisfy a nameless ache and longing within himself. Disembarking after the months-long voyage, he remained haunted by the spiritual certitude he had witnessed among the Moravian Christians on board, even amidst North Atlantic storms that saw Germans composed and the English panicked.

In Georgia he showed himself obnoxious: inflexible, autocratic, unreasonable, insensitive. Knowing that the infant mortality rate was fifty per cent, he insisted nonetheless on immersing day-old babies. Yet the non-credibility he earned through his rigidity was slight compared to the opprobrium that deluged him following his mishandling of the Sophia Hopkey matter. Attracted to the eighteen year old woman (Wesley was now thirty-four) Wesley was first frustrated then angry and finally vindictive when she resisted his amorous approaches. Soon she was engaged to another man, Mr. Williamson. Wesley’s judgement eroded in proportion to his swelling decompensation. Helpless and hapless now, he “retaliated” by withholding Holy Communion from Sophia at Sunday worship. Since such withholding was a means of disciplining a serious offender, according to Anglicanism, Wesley had in effect publicly announced that the young woman was guilty of an offence without specifying it. He didn’t have to. What would any congregation surmise to be the “offence” that a marriageable woman had committed?   Williamson, outraged that his fiancée had been slandered by innuendo, mobilized the politically powerful to convene a Grand Jury, The Jury indicted Wesley. He boarded the next ship for England in order to escape a lawsuit. His spiritual quest was no more frustrated than everything else in his life.

And then on Sunday evening, May 24^th, 1738, the disconsolate man stepped into a Moravian service in London . Someone was reading from the preface to Luther’s commentary on Romans. As the Wittenberger’s words fell on Wesley ears, the Word resounded in his heart.

About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sin, even mine, and had saved me from the law of sin and death.[1]

 

If he now trusted Christ, what had he been trusting? For thirteen years, following a religious “turn” in 1725, Wesley had relied on a not-uncommon compend of mysticism and moralism.

The mysticism he would hereafter execrate was non-Christological; it substituted psycho-religious inner cultivation for faith in God’s provision, provision and faith alike given to us; it denied the depravity of the human heart, content to speak of a less-than-disastrous deprivation or deficit; it advanced absorption of the human into God instead of communion with God; it grounded one’s standing with God on an internal works-righteousness rather than on the foundation of justification by faith; it spoke of Jesus Christ as ethical and spiritual exemplar but not as the sole, sufficient Saviour.

The moralism he now rejected was the ever-enervating attempt at gaining favour with God by pleading one’s “obedience” (naively misunderstood, of course,) as meriting such favour.

The Aldersgate Street episode was the turning point in Wesley’s life and ministry. He never looked back. The difference in his self-understanding, his theology, his work and his approach to people is undeniable.

Earlier, in agreement with so very many of the mystics, Wesley had regarded humanly wrought humility as the basis of one’s life in Christ. Now he exalted faith, faith forged by Jesus Christ, the object and author of faith, as this One surged over people solely in his longing to bless them. (Never denying faith to be a human event and activity, following Aldersgate Wesley consistently denied it to be a human creation. In his sermon “Salvation by Faith” — the first in his Sermons On Several Occasions — Wesley writes, “Of yourselves cometh neither your faith nor your salvation…. That ye believe is one instance of his grace; that believing, ye are saved, another.”[2]) Freed from the self-righteousness that the mystic/moralist had recently espoused, Wesley saw, in agreement with the Sixteenth Century Reformers, that Christ (alone) is our righteousness just because he (alone) is the rightly-related covenant keeper who now defines those who are “clothed” with him by faith. Undeterred in his insistence on the rigour of the Christian life, he nonetheless made the seemingly small but actually huge shift from moralism as conformity to a code to the believing person’s grateful, from-the-heart obedience to the Person whose Spirit infused and inspired it all. In the same way he changed from inward-looking self-assessment to outward-looking evangelism. And of course his self-preoccupation with religious performance (and putative superiority) gave way to self-forgetfulness in the service of others.

While some Methodists have recently entertained protracted discussion over the nature, scope and significance of “Aldersgate,” on balance the event appears to be a watershed. Prior to it he was a seeker; after it he knew himself found. Prior to it had had no objection to the semi-Pelagianism that marked Eighteenth Century Anglican soteriology; after it he endorsed the Reformation insistence that faith is a knowledge of God that arises as grace alone includes us in God’s self-knowing. Prior to it he evinced little interest in evangelism; after it he travelled 250,000 miles on horseback to visit good news upon those who either hadn’t heard or hadn’t responded.

Perhaps the most telling evidence of Aldersgate’s watershed concerns the place he gave to justification by faith. Prior to 1738 he regularly speaks of humility as our bond with Christ where the Reformation speaks of faith. After Aldersgate, however, he never departs from the material principle of the Reformation. Justification by faith is “the very foundation of our Church [i.e., Anglican]…and indeed the fundamental [doctrine] of the Reformed Churches.”[3]) Always suspicious of the Society of Friends for what he perceived to be their waffling on this issue, he writes, “I have not known ten Quakers in my life whose experience went so far as justification.”[4] Indeed, where justification isn’t upheld, the church doesn’t exist.[5]   Wesley believed in justification by faith from the day of his conversion. “I believe justification by faith alone as much as I believe there is a God…. I have never varied from it, no, not an hair’s breadth from 1738 to this day.” (1766)

 

Wesley’s emphasis here was “book-ended” by the doctrines of original sin and sanctification. These three were non-negotiable. Without them the “faith once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3) would be unrecognizable. Always eschewing the theologically novel as heretical (for Wesley the theologically sound had to be locatable in both scripture and Patristics), he upheld the “Vincentian Canon:” quod creditur ubi, semper, ab omnibus. What has been believed by all Christians at all times and in all places remains the irreducible core of the faith. Whereas society in any era tends to be soft on central issues but inflexible on the peripheral, Wesley’s approach to Christian understanding and life, like that of apostles before him, was opposite: unyielding at the centre while accommodating on the periphery.

Original sin he regarded as glaringly undeniable. His single largest tract explored it from every angle and adduced evidence for it that rendered indisputable the church catholic’s profundity in maintaining that the root human predicament is its control centre now gone awry. Wesley maintained that while he was “but a hair’s breadth from Mr. Calvin” on several issues (e.g., predestination and the atonement as formal cause rather than instrumental cause of justification,) concerning the doctrine of Total Depravity there wasn’t so much as a hair’s breadth. Wesley’s laconic pronouncement here was that those who upheld the doctrine of Total Depravity might be Christians, while those who didn’t most certainly weren’t.[6] To deny the fact, nature and reach of original son, he maintained, would render all Christian doctrine incoherent.[7] Wesley knew that when the doctrine of the Fall is compromised then the human condition — deep-dyed sinnership, a systemic infection like blood poisoning which warps everything about us and of which we cannot rid ourselves — is denied. The human condition in turn is reduced to a bland if not benign human situation where people fancy themselves limitlessly plastic, able to re-mould themselves however misshapen they might appear at present, thereby remedying whatever might seem unsightly in the light of social convention.

In one sermon alone Wesley brings forward five words that attest his conviction here. First is “supine,” without exertion or energy. Next is “indolent,” culpable sloth. The third is “stupid.” Here he has in mind the Eighteenth Century understanding of the adjective arising from “stupor,” abysmal unawareness of the fact that sin has eroded reason’s integrity (without, of course, eroding the structure of reason, apart from which the sinner would no longer be human,) even as reason lends itself to endless rationalization. The fourth is “insensible [of his real condition”], for the worst consequence of humankind’s sinnership is its blindness to its condition (and hence the impossibility of any repentance except that born of grace.) What the “natural” person can do, then, in the wake of the Fall is merely perpetuate its rebellion against God and perpetrate its self-destruction. “Full of disease” rounds out Wesley’s diagnosis on page one of one sermon alone.[8] Everywhere in his work “disease” implies not only pathology but putrefaction; the human condition is not only a sickness-unto-death but repugnantly so as God finds sin nothing less than loathsome.

Justification by faith, the middle item between the two “book-ends,” restored believers to God’s favour. After Aldersgate Wesley always regarded justification by faith as the inception of the Christian life and the stable basis for it. He agreed with Calvin, “Justification is the hinge on which religion turns”[9] and with Loescher, “Justification is the article on which the church stands or falls.”[10]

Still, Wesley’s overwhelming emphasis falls on sanctification or holiness or “perfection.” Tirelessly he insisted that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it; namely, God could deliver people from its power. Justification relieved people of sin’s guilt; sanctification released them from sin’s grip. Wesley knew that justification or forgiveness, undeniably glorious, would be little more than a counsel of despair, leaving people pardoned yet imprisoned, unless a grace-wrought, faith-affirmed sanctification or new birth released them from the habituations that haunted them in light of sin’s characteristic addictiveness.

Sanctification or holiness, then, was their possession (albeit not their property) just because they “clothed” themselves by faith with the Ruler whose rightful reign broke the power of the “usurper”[11] who held them in thrall.

While the Protestant Reformation had contended for relief, Wesley took this up and contended for release. Without deliverance from sin’s grip Methodism would have appeared stillborn as degraded people despaired. Wesley’s gospel galloped ahead not (merely) because it told imprisoned people they had been pardoned; more to the point, it opened prison doors and told them they now could and must walk out and never look back. His gospel introduced people to a future under God and in God, such a future alone being genuine, all other “futures” remaining no more than a disguised repetition of a dreary past.

In all of this it must be remembered that Wesley, an English Protestant and therefore undeniably a son of the Western Church, positioned himself as a westerner more attuned to the Eastern Church than anyone else in Christendom.

Wesley had come to know the Eastern Church through his reading of Patristics, always preferring the East to the West. The West’s giants had been Ambrose, Jerome, Gregory the Great, and the favourite of both Thomas Aquinas and the Protestant Reformers, Augustine of Hippo. The East’s notables had been Basil the Great, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Athanasisus (the thinker whose gospel-preserving homoousion — the Father and the Son are of the same nature not merely similar nature– Karl Barth would later pronounce as the most important theological assertion since the apostles.)

Always upholding the doctrine of original sin, as was seen above, Wesley nevertheless distances himself from the West’s characteristic emphasis on original guilt and its transmission to posterity (thanks to Augustine.) He prefers the East’s emphasis on original sin as the introduction of death and corruption, together with the loss of the Spirit’s immediate presence.[12] Wesley maintains that Augustine’s insistence on original guilt and its transmission has fostered fruitless dispute as to how such transmission occurs (not to mention the unfruitful Augustinian disdain for sex), the preoccupation here obscuring what is much more soteriologically and evangelically significant for Wesley; namely, the innermost spiritual distortion that gives rise to outermost disfigurement.

While the West, especially since the Reformation, had accented juridical concerns in the work of Christ for us, left-handedly giving rise to internecine disputes over the doctrine of justification, the Reformational and Roman Catholic Churches of the West had had virtually no disagreement over the doctrine of sanctification, content to subordinate it to their concern for the former. In the relation, then, of transaction and transformation, the churches of the West had massively highlighted transaction (What Christ has done extra nos, pro nobis, “outside us, for us”) while admitting transformation (what Christ must do in nobis, “within us.”) The churches of the East had always maintained the opposite: transaction exists for the sake of transformation, every aspect and activity of grace subserving God’s ultimate purpose for God’s people: their appointment to stand before God restored to that glory in which they were created, now relieved of the tarnish and defacements that the Fall had brought even as the Fall had never been able to efface the splendour. Sanctification, Wesley insisted everywhere, was nothing more and nothing less than the restoration of God’s image. Here Wesley continues to be the figure who singularly bridges East and West ecclesially, the one Christian thinker whose work can be the substance of conversations that may yet lead to the healing of the East/West fissure of 1054.

Still reflecting the spirit of the East Wesley remained suspicious of all talk about a “state of grace.” For centuries the church had spoken of believers as those who were living in a “state of grace,” to which state they were admitted either by baptism or by the implementation of a decree of election, depending on one’s place on the theological spectrum. Wesley objected to “state of grace” in that it exudes the mechanical rather than the personal, grace being the possession (but never the property) of believers as they continue to embrace the One who has first embraced them. Furthermore, “state of grace” suggested the static, when the Christian life is inherently dynamic. As Protestant Scholasticism ascended after the Reformation and displaced the Reformation’s characteristic emphasis on Christology, intellectual apprehension of doctrine became the mark of Christian existence instead of that “heart seizure” at the hands of the One to whom doctrine points and of whom it speaks. The result was that “formalism” which Wesley came to execrate as the polar opposite of “fanaticism” or “enthusiasm.” While the latter was a mindless subjectivism that disdained truth in favour of emotional self-indulgence, the former was an intellectual abstraction that re-shuffled mental furniture and forfeited the concreteness of person-with-Person encounter.

This is not to say that Wesley was indifferent to doctrine. Indifference to doctrine merely advertised those were “of a muddy understanding” because their “mind was all in a mist.”[13] Exalting neither mist nor mud, Wesley insisted on the place of doctrine but not its pre-eminence. The latter belonged to the One who filled the horizon of Wesley’s life, reflected in his comments on his preaching at day’s end, “I offered them Christ.”

When early-day Methodists sang, “Moment by moments I’m kept in his grace,” their understanding of “moment” was never spasmodic or episodic or spastic or fitful or ephemeral.   Wesley had simply schooled them in the fact that grace’s self-giving was a boon for which they could only stammer their gratitude even as they knew that grace was the gracious presence of Jesus Christ rather than something which they could domesticate or control, let alone trade on or trifle with. Wesley always knew that where faith is concerned the reality isn’t a doctrine of faith or the vocabulary of faith or the concept of faith; the reality is relationship. The relationship was not at risk. Believers were kept by the power of God, not having to rely on their own resources to remain bound to Jesus Christ. At the same time, since the relationship could erode as surely as any marriage can, faith ever remained a future-oriented venture that precluded cavalier or self-serving indulgence.

Yet there remained one issue, money, where Wesley was utterly out of step with the rising affluence the Industrial Revolution had brought Britain , even out of step with his own people. Wesley remained stymied by the seemingly built-in, self-destructive mechanism of the gospel. It was the gospel that brought dissolute people to faith. Newly sobered, chaste and industrious, they earned an adequate income, misspent none of it, and invariably saved much of it. Soon their swelling monetary fortunes facilitated social elevation. Their social elevation moved them into the orbit of people whose preoccupation was anything but the gospel and the mission inherent in the gospel. As their social position rose their spiritual ardour fell. The gospel alone had moved them beyond dissolution and disgrace. And now it was their “improved” living that left their zeal for social preferment intact but drained it away for the gospel alone.

Wesley concluded that only as the Methodist people adopted something closely allied to the Roman Catholic notion of “evangelical poverty” could they spare themselves that spiritual unravelling that wouldn’t even stop short of outright apostasy. Unlike so many others who maintained that how money was used determined whether it was a spiritual threat, Wesley insisted it was the fact that money was retained. Soon his three-fold “Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can” became a household aphorism among his people — even as he concluded sadly that many of his people were commendably good at the first two and lamentably deficient concerning the last.

Still, he pressed ahead, ceaselessly warning his people of their spiritual vulnerability in this regard. He told his people that money was the talent that “contains all other talents.”[14] (Does not what we do with our money gather up and express what we have done with our education or our natural talents by which we have acquired our money?) It is the temptation that fosters and foments all other temptations. It is the snare, “a steel trap that crushes the bones.” It is the poison whose lethal toxicity kills our discipleship.

To hoard money rendered the hoarder “vain,” for who possesses more than most without feeling superior and therein becoming prideful? To be sure Wesley’s people, now grace-equipped to avoid gluttony and drunkenness, would invariably succumb to that “elegant epicureanism” which, he insisted, “…does not immediately disorder the stomach, nor (sensibly, at least) impair the understanding.” Wesley knew, however, that it disordered one’s heart and vitiated one’s understanding. For the erstwhile gluttonous drunkard, now savouring the dainties of the coffeehouse echelon, cherished his inclusion among the socially enviable more than his inclusion in “the household of faith.” (Gal. 6:10)

Wesley’s perception was remarkable. For he correctedly noted that as we become more affluent we acquire self-importance. In turn we become more easily affronted, supersensitivity being related to snobbishness. The more prone we are to being affronted, he noted with aching heart, the more prone we are to revenge.

Wesley was aware, in his tracing of spiritual decline, that increasing affluence spelled decreasing zeal for “works of mercy.” He reminded his people that when they were newly quickened and recovering from horrific habituations they had never hesitated to head out, at any hour and in any weather, to bring the relief and release of the gospel to fellow-sufferers whose pain they knew only too well. Now, however, in their new-found frippery they didn’t want to inconvenience themselves, especially in inclement weather. “What hinders?”, cried the seventy-eight year old man bitingly in the wake of forty years’ frustration on this issue, “Do you fear spoiling your silken coat?”[15] The caustic irony, meant to burn its way into his readers, was that it was the gospel that had ultimately brought them a silken coat when they had had no coat of any sort. Protecting it now threatened them with ultimate spiritual loss, for “Gold hath steeled your hearts.”[16] Spiritual vitality (including self-forgetful service of others) and hoarded money were mutually exclusive. Only “…give all you can” would keep faith throbbing.

Even before the Aldersgate awakening of 1738 he had taken to heart his oft-repeated text, “…that holiness without which no one will see the Lord.” (Hebrews 12:14) According to him holiness or “Christian perfection” wasn’t neurotic perfectionism or fussy trivialism; it was simply love, self-forgetful love of God and neighbour. Such self-forgetful love of God and neighbour was God’s fulfilment of God’s earlier promise, “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy.” (Leviticus 19:2) While justification, he had always insisted, gave us the right to heaven, holiness alone made us fit for heaven. Right and fitness were not the same. A ticket to a symphony concert gives us the right to attend, but only our musical ear makes us fit to attend. (Plainly apart from fitness, right would issue in torment.) Everything Wesley had proposed and proved concerning the Christian life pertained to spiritual fitness. He knew there was nothing arbitrary about Christ’s promise that only the pure in heart will see God. For Wesley was aware that only the pure in heart want to, their aspiration being qualification enough.

 

[1] Wesley, The Works of John Wesley [Bicentennial Edition], Vol. 18, pp. 249-250; ( Nashville : Abingdon, 1988. Italics his.) (The Works of John Wesley is hereinafter cited as WJW.)

[2] Wesley, WJW, Vol.1, p. 126.

[3] Wesley, WJW , Vol. 4, p.395. Plainly Wesley understood justification by faith to be the fundamental doctrine of the Church of England (Anglican), and he understood said church to be “Reformed.”

[4] Letter, 1780; The Works of John Wesley, Vol. X [ed., Jackson , 1872]; ( Grand Rapids , Zondervan, n.d.)

[5] Minutes, 1745; John Rylands University Library of Manchester .

[6] “Allow this, and you are so far a Christian.     Deny it , and you are but an heathen still.”     WJW, Vol. 2. p.184.

[7] Wesley makes this point repeatedly in his tract, “The Doctrine of Original Sin, according to Scripture, Reason, and Experience,” The Works of John Wesley, Vol. IX, [ed., Jackson , 1872]; ( Grand Rapids , Zondervan, n.d.)

[8] Wesley, WJW, Vol. 3, p. 142.

[9] Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.11.1 (J.T. McNeil, ed.; F.L. Battles, transl.; Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1960.)

[10] Valentius Loescher (1673-1749), “Timotheus Venius”, quoted in First Things R.J. Neuhaus, ed., August/September, 1995, p.80. (New York: 1995)

[11] Wesley, WJW, Vol. 1, p. 331.

[12] Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace, p.66 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994.)

[13] Wesley, WJW, Vol. 2, p. 93.

[14] For the source of quotations in the next several paragraphs see WJW, “The Use of Money” (Vol.2) and “The Danger of Riches” (Vol. 3.)

[15] Wesley, WJW, Vol. 3, p. 244.

IN THE HIGH COURT OF NEW ZEALAND
AUCKLAND REGISTRY

                                                            CP NO. 183/SW01

BETWEEN     VILIAMI ‘AKAU’OLA

First Plaintiff

AND                VILIAMI PALU

Second Plaintiff

AND               THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFERENCE OF THE METHODIST CHURCH OF NEW ZEALAND

First Defendant

AND               THE BOARD OF ADMINISTRATION OF THE METHODIST CHURCH OF NEW ZEALAND INCORPORATED

Second Defendant

AND                REVEREND PESETI TUKUTAU

Third Defendant

 

 

OPINION OF VICTOR SHEPHERD

 

 

VALLANT HOOKER & PARTNERS
Barristers & Solicitors
Ponsonby, Auckland

Solicitor Acting: R J Hooker
PO Box 47 088; DX CP30015, Ponsonby
Ph:   (09) 360 0321
Fax: (09) 3609291

l:\docman\docbase\shepherd.opinion.doc

I, VICTOR SHEPHERD state:-

1. I was instructed by Counsel for the plaintiffs in these proceedings to provide expert testimony to the court on one of the issues before the Court namely whether  a decision by the conference of the New Zealand Methodist church to admit a person into full connexion as a minister  a person who was a practising homosexual is to alter or change the doctrines of the Methodist Church of New Zealand as found in the standard sermons of John Wesley and his notes on the New Testament. For the reasons set out in this opinion I conclude that the decision of the New Zealand Conference is to change or alter doctrine.
2. I was provided with the following passages of the Laws and Regulations of the New Zealand Methodist Church :-

“AUTHORITY
1.1       The Conference is the governing body of the Methodist Church of New Zealand and has vested in it final authority on all matters of the
Church.  Its decisions are accordingly final and binding on both Ministry
and Laity.

1.2       Notwithstanding the provisions of Sections 5-1.1  Conference shall have no power:-
(a)        To revoke, alter or change any doctrines of the Church as
contained in the Standard Sermons of John Wesley and his notes on the New Testament, nor to establish any new doctrine contrary thereto;
(b)       To revoke “The General Rules of the Societies”;
(c)       To make such changes in the discipline as to do away with the
itinerancy of the Ministry;
(d)        To do away with the right of trial and appeal of Members and
Ministers of the Church;”

Property
3.2(h) Seeing that the property in the Parish is not used for
any purpose forbidden by the Laws if the Church or for any purposes,
entertainments or amusements which conflict with the purpose for which the Church was called into being, or contrary to what is contained in the Standard Sermons of John Wesley and his Notes on the New Testament.”

 

  BACKGROUND & EXPERTISE

  3.    I currently occupy the Donald N. and Kathleen G. Bastian Chair of Wesley Studies, Tyndale Seminary, Toronto . It is the only Chair of Wesley Studies in Canada . At Tyndale Seminary I am also Professor of Historical Theology. I am also Adjunct Professor, Toronto School of Theology, University of Toronto . I attach my full curriculum vitae. I have been accepted by a Court in Canada as an expert witness on the doctrines of the Methodist Church found in the writings of John Wesley.

 

REFERENCES

4. In formulating my opinion it is necessary to have regard to the following notes sermons and writings of John Wesley:-

ROMANS 1:26-28

Therefore God gave them up with vile affections; for even their women changed their natural use to that which is against nature: (27)And likewise also men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust toward each other, men with men working filthiness, and receiving in themselves the just recompense of their error. (28)And as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them up to an undiscerning mind, to do the things which were not expedient: Filled with all injustice, fornication…….

Wesley comments on Romans 1:26 , “Therefore God gave them up to vile affections—To which the heathen Romans were then abandoned to the last degree; even the emperors themselves.”

Here Wesley is plainly referring to the well-attested fact that several Roman emperors behaved sexually in a way that was not exclusively heterosexual (if at all). Their behaviour was known and noted among Christians in that Christians were notorious for an understanding of human sexuality that repudiated any and all sexual expressions except marital intercourse. Wesley mentions women as well as men, since any non-marital (and therefore non-heterosexual intercourse) was understood throughout the Church as falling outside what God has ordained as proper sexual expression and therefore pertaining to the human good. Note that Wesley speaks of same-gender genital intimacy as “vile” and an instance of “filthiness”(27).

Wesley comments on 1:27 , “Receiving the just recompense of their error—Their idolatry: being punished with that unnatural lust, which was as horrible a dishonour of the body, as their idolatry was to God.”

“Unnatural lust” plainly refers to same-gender sexual craving, and Wesley maintains that it dishonours the body (implying that it thereby dishonours the Creator of that body) and as such dishonours god. Here he associates idolatry with “men with men working filthiness”. “Working” indicates what these men do. In calling it “error” he does not mean that it is non-culpable or a trifle or an inadvertence.

Wesley comments on Romans 1:28 , “God gave them up to an undiscerning mind (treated of, ver.32)to things not expedient–Even the vilest abominations: treated of, ver.20-31.”

Then Wesley continues, in his exposition of 29-31, to list “Every vice contrary to justice”. He mentions fornication first. “Fornication here includes every species of uncleanness.” Plainly the “vile affections”(26) and “that which is against nature”(26) and “men…burned in their lust toward each other, men with men working filthiness” is gathered up in “uncleanness”.

Romans 1:28 he discusses in his comment on Romans 1:32 , “But have pleasure in those that practise them — This is the greatest wickedness. A man may be hurried by his passions to do the things he hates. But he that has pleasure in those that do evil, loves wickedness for wickedness’ sake; and hereby he encourages them in sin, and heaps the guilt of others upon his own head.”

Here Wesley, with pastoral wisdom and sensitivity, distinguishes between the unguarded person whose surge of desire overtakes him in the very thing he knows he should hate and the person who finds pleasure in others who do evil, loves the wickedness itself, thereby encourages perpetrators in their wickedness, and brings the guilt of others upon himself. To be sure, Wesley is not restricting the application of his comment to “uncleanness”, but he certainly includes such “uncleanness”.

– – – –

In his Sermons Wesley amplifies Romans 1:26, wherein same-gender genital intimacy is referred to, “The will…was now seized by legions of vile affections”. [4:298]

ROMANS 2:14

For when the Gentiles, who have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these not having the law, are a law to themselves;

Wesley comments, “Do by nature–That is, without an outward rule; though this also, strictly speaking, is by preventing [i.e., prevenient, anticipatory] grace. The things contained in the law–The ten commandments being only the substance of the law of nature….”

By “Being only the substance of the law of nature” Wesley means “not less than the substance of the law of nature.” (For Wesley’s understanding of relation of the ten commandments to Jesus Christ, see V.Shepherd’s document below.) Wesley is aware that the ten commandments explicitly forbid adultery. He insists too (see V.Shepherd) that the ten commands are but the “heads” of the law of God; i.e., the commandment forbidding adultery comprehends all of the Old Testament precepts pertaining to sexual behaviour, including those that forbid homosexual genital intimacy. (E.g., “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Leviticus 18:22 RSV) Wesley’s understanding of the ten commandments as but the “heads” of the law or God precludes any suggestion that adultery is forbidden but homosexual intimacy is not.

In his comment on Romans 1:28 Wesley speaks of any and all “uncleanness” as “vilest abominations.” He cannot be understood to endorse or even permit homosexual behaviour.

ROMANS 2:16

In the day when God will judge the secretes of men by Christ Jesus, according to my gospel.

Wesley comments, “According to my gospel–According to the tenor of that gospel which is committed to my care. The gospel also is a law.”

His lattermost remark, “The gospel also is a law”, is crucial. The gospel is the good news of salvation, and as such exercises no less a claim upon people than the explicit claims of the law. Since the gospel aims at saving humankind from every kind of uncleanness, the gospel has the same force here as the promulgation of the law. Accordingly, all references to “gospel” or “Jesus Christ” in the Wesley corpus carry with them the implicit claim that all beneficiaries of the gospel (i.e., all who make a profession of Christian faith) repudiate all expressions of “uncleanness”.

1^ST CORINTHIANS 6:9

Know ye not that the unjust shall not inherit the kingdom of God ? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolators, nor adulterers, nor the effeminate, nor Sodomites.

Here Wesley explicitly mentions sodomy as disqualification for the kingdom of God . To be sure, he reads “effeminate” idiosyncratically as those who “live in any easy, indolent way, taking up no cross, enduring no hardship”. His point is that these latter people are no less disqualified than “idolators and Sodomites”.

He comments on this verse, “But why are these good-natured, harmless people ranked with idolators and Sodomites? To teach us that we are never secure from the greatest sins, till we guard against those which are thought least; nor indeed till we think no sin is little since every one is a step towards hell.”

Evidently he intends here the following: [1] all self-indulgence is sin; [2] only vigilance against lesser sin will safeguard us against the “greatest sins”; [3] every sin is a road whose destination is hell.

Notwithstanding his idiosyncratic reading of “effeminate” he states [1] sodomy is sin, and (among) the “greatest”; [2] lesser and greater alike, undiscerned, unrepented of, unrepudiated will issue in eternal loss.

1^ST CORINTHIANS 6:11

And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.

Wesley comments, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed from those gross evils; and inwardly sanctified, not before, but in consequence of, your being justified in the name, that is, by the merits of the Lord Jesus, through which your sins are forgiven; and by the Spirit of our God, by whom ye are thus washed and sanctified.”

Wesley includes adultery and sodomy as “gross evils”. He emphasises, “not before, but in consequence of”, the fact that the cleansing of the sodomite Corinthians presupposes and in fact is intrinsically related to their having been justified (for Wesley, this means pardoned or forgiven). Pardon, of course, always presupposes guilt; forgiveness always presupposes relief from merited condemnation. The person who is pardoned has already been pronounced guilty. In his “through which your sins are forgiven” Wesley obviously includes sodomy as sin.

– – – –

In his Sermons Wesley amplifies 1^st Corinthians 6:9, “And we know that not only fornicators and adulterers, but even the ‘soft and effeminate’, the delicate followers of a self-denying master, ‘shall have no part in the kingdom of Christ and of God’.” [3:150]

Elsewhere in the Sermons Wesley, again amplifying the biblical text mentioned above, faults the abuse of “the imputed righteousness of Christ” wherein someone who stands indicted by the catena of sins in 1^st Cor. 6:9 claims the righteousness of Christ “as a over for his unrighteousness. We have known this done a thousand times. Such a person “…replies with all assurance, ‘…I pretend to no righteousness of my own: Christ is my righteousness”…. “And thus though a man be as far from the practice as from the tempers [Wesley characteristically uses this word to mean “dispositions’] of a Christian, though he neither has the mind which was in Christ nor in any respect walks as he walks…”. Again, Wesley regards all non-heterosexual expression to be inconsistent with Christian discipleship (“walk”). [1:462]

In speaking of life-change effected in the Corinthians through gospel as they repudiated their former behaviour, Wesley comments in the Sermons, “So the Corinthians were. ‘Ye are washed,’ says the Apostle, ‘ye are sanctified:’ namely cleansed from ‘fornication, idolatry, drunkenness’, and all other outward sin.” Wesley regards what the Corinthians had been about to be sin. [1:326]

1^ST TIMOTHY 1:8-10

(8)We know the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; (9)Knowing this , that the law doth no lie against a righteous man; but against the lawless and disobedient, against the ungodly and sinners, the unholy and profane, against killers of their fathers or their mothers, against murderers, (11)Against whoremongers, sodomites, men-stealers, liars, perjured person, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to wholesome doctrine.

In his comment Wesley says nothing about “whoremongers” and “sodomites”, in his taste to denounce the practice of slavery (“men-stealers”). Still, his comment on verse 8 is noteworthy: “We grant the whole Mosaic law is good, answers excellent purposes, if a man use it in a proper manner. The ceremonial is good, as it points to Christ; and the moral law is holy, just and good, and of admirable use to convince unbelievers, and to guide believers in all holiness.” It is to be noted here that [1] the moral law includes the prohibition against sodomy; [2] sodomy is a sign of unbelief; [3] since sodomy is a contradiction of holiness, those aspiring to holiness repudiate it by using the law lawfully. (1:8)

In his comment on 1^st Timothy 1:9 Wesley says, “The law doth not lie against a righteous man, (doth not strike or condemn him,)but against the lawless and disobedient — They who despise the authority of the Lawgiver, violate the first commandment, which is the foundation of the law, the ground of all obedience. Against the ungodly and sinners, who break the second commandment, worshipping idols, instead of the true God. The unholy and profane¸ who break the third commandment by taking his name in vain.” Wesley includes sodomy in the “lawless and disobedient”, and he goes on to show that the perpetrators mentioned in 1:10 violate the first three commandments. Sodomy is an instance of lawlessness, disobedience, ungodliness, unholiness and profanity.

In his comment on 1^st Timothy 1:11 he insists that the gospel, so far from voiding the law, establishes it. In other words, anyone who claims to be a beneficiary of the gospel (i.e., a Christian) is thereby pledged to uphold the law.

JUDE 7

Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them, which in the same manner with these gave themselves over to fornication, and went after strange flesh, are set forth for an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire.

Wesley comments on Jude 7, “The cities who gave themselves over to fornication — The word here means, unnatural lusts: are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire — The vengeance which they suffered is a type of eternal fire.” “Fornication” means “unnatural lust”. What this denotes is not in doubt in light of his comment on Romans 1. (See above.) The vengeance the cities suffered they suffered inasmuch as God avenged himself; i.e., judgement was rendered and enacted. Prefatory to all of this is Wesley’s comment on Jude 6: “…eternal displeasure toward the same work of his hands…because he ever loveth righteousness and hateth iniquity.”

2^ND PETER 2:7-10

And delivered righteous Lot , grieved with the filthy behaviour of the wicked…them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness.

Wesley translates the Greek word “aselgeia” as “filthy behaviour. Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament puts forward “sensuality”, “indecency”, “vice”. The same Greek word is used in several places, together with similar descriptors: e.g., “uncleanness and wantonness” (Romans 13:13 , Wesley’s translation), “uncleanness, and fornication and lasciviousness” (2^nd Corinthians 12:21 , Wesley), and “adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness” (Galatians 5:19 , Wesley).

– – – –

In Galatians 5:19 Wesley uses “aselgeia” again, and adds in the Sermons concerning this text, “‘They who are of Christ’…abstain from all the works of the flesh: from ‘adultery and fornication’; from ‘uncleanness and lasciviousness’;…from every design, and word, and work to which the corruption of nature leads.” [1:236]

Still amplifying Galatians 5:19 Wesley adds, “It is by him [the Spirit] they are delivered from anger and pride, from all vile and inordinate affections.” Wesley’s use of “vile” here denotes every expression of sexual “uncleanness”.

In his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount Wesley refers to Galatians 5:19 and therein speaks of the Christian, “This is only the outside of that religion which he insatiably hungers after…the being ‘purified as he is pure’ — this is the righteousness he thirsts after.”

REVELATION 22:11,14,15

He that is unrighteous, let him be unrighteous still; and he that is filthy, let him be filthy still….Happy are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in by the gates into the city. Without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and every one that loveth and maketh a lie.

Wesley speaks of “dogs” as “fierce and rapacious men, even as the term is widely taken, following Old Testament precedent, to mean “homosexual”. It is to be noted that the people spoken of in 22:15 are denied access to the tree of life and are not admitted to the city [the new Jerusalem].

EPHESIANS 4:19

Who being past feeling, have given themselves up to lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness.

Here Wesley translates “aselgeia” as “lasciviousness” and “akatharsia” as “uncleanness”. Elsewhere in his New Testament Notes Wesley deems “uncleanness” to include sodomy.

 

THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS AS WESLEY’S CURE FOR ANTINOMIAN AND MORALIST ALIKE

See “Appendix 2”

5. IT should be noted that Wesley dreaded antinomianism (the notion that the moral law had been relaxed for Christians) as he dreaded little else. His denunciation of antinomianism and his caution to Methodists concerning it are found in his Works passim. One particular instance of his concern here is illustrated by his three sermons printed consecutively in his Fifty-two Standard Sermons (numbers 34,35, 36):-

            The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law,

            The Law Established through Faith, I,

            The Law Established through Faith, II.

Note his insistence in the lattermost tract, “`We establish the law’…when we so preach faith in Christ as not to supersede but produce holiness: to produce all manner of holiness, negative and positive, of the heart and of the life.”(p.38, Volume 2, Wesley’s Works.) It should be noted too that Wesley everywhere regarded “enthusiasm” (the elevation of experience above scripture) as the godless parent of its godless offspring, antinomianism. It is no surprise, then, to see him follow his three sermons on the Law of God with The Nature of Enthusiasm.

It should be noted in this regard that John Wesley explicitly condemned homosexual behaviour in his longest tract, The Doctrine of Original Sin (1757). The “pederasty” of which he spoke includes homosexual sodomy between adult males as well, more specifically, that between adult and juvenile males. In his Notes on the New Testament (one of the standards of Methodism) Wesley comments on the reference to homosexual behaviour in Romans 1:26-27, “Receiving the just recompense of their error — Their idolatry, being punished with that unnatural lust, which was as horrible a dishonour to the body, as their idolatry was to God.” Concerning the “base fellows” of Judges 19:16-30, men who were bent on homosexual indulgence, Wesley, following the English text of the Authorized (King James) Version of the bible, speaks of “sons of belial”, and adds, “Children of the devil, wicked and licentious men.” With respect to Jude 7, “Even as Sodom and Gomorrah , and the cities about them, which in the same manner with these gave themselves over to fornication…” (“the surrounding cities, which likewise acted immorally and indulged in unnatural lust…” RSV), Wesley comments on “fornication”: “The word here means unnatural lusts: are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire — That is, the vengeance which they suffered is an example or a type of eternal fire.” The passage from the “Holiness Code” of Leviticus (“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination” — Lev. 18:22 ) Wesley addresses by referring the reader to his comments on Romans 1:26 -27. He does as much with a similar passage in Lev. 20:13. He plainly thought that a point he had made unambivalently once he could make thereafter by referring the reader to it without the bother of rewriting it.   Several points need to be made here:- =

(i)              While Wesley says relatively little about homosexual behaviour, scripture as a whole says only enough to remind readers of what everyone is supposed to know: homosexual behaviour is an abomination to God and is to be shunned by men and women. (Jesus nowhere comments on spouse-abuse. No one would conclude, given the silence of Jesus on this matter, that he was in favour of it. Everything that Jesus says in the course of his earthly ministry militates against it. In other words, the explicit teaching of Jesus himself, together with his endorsement of the wisdom of Israel (he said he came not to abolish the law and the prophets [the Old Testament] but to fulfil them), provides the context that interprets not only what Jesus says but what he does not bother to mention in that it is indisputable. It cannot be imagined that in the primitive Christian communities a spouse-abuser could expect to be exonerated on the grounds that his Lord had not explicitly forbidden it.);

(ii)             In Wesley’s era it would not be contested that homosexual behaviour was immoral, even perverse, falling outside what God pronounces “good”, and therefore to be eschewed;

(iii)            Wesley’s civility and good taste (deemed desirable in an Oxford-educated, 18th century Anglican clergyman) would prevent him from amplifying a matter in which he knew everyone in the church catholic to agree with him in any case;

(iv)            There is nothing in Wesley’s theology or hymns or correspondence that suggests he approved in the slightest or regarded as permissible same-gender genital contact;

(v)             As someone ordained in the Church of England (and as someone whose Holy Orders were neither revoked nor surrendered), and as someone who always insisted that the theology, liturgy and governance of the Church of England were the finest to be found in Christendom, Wesley would unquestionably have rejected as a candidate for ordination or as a leader in local congregations anyone who engaged in homosexual behaviour;

Wesley’s laconic comment must be heard: “I allow no other rule, whether of faith or practice, than the Holy Scriptures.” (Wesley, Works, Vol. XIX, p.73).

 

DATED at Auckland this                 day of                                     2002.

 

……………………………………….

VICTOR SHEPHERD

 

(delivered at the Romans Conference, University of Toronto, May 2002)

The Epistle to the Romans As Wesley’s Cure for Antinomian and Moralist Alike

Victor Shepherd

In his Notes on the New Testament Wesley mentions, in his introduction to Romans, that when Paul is writing to churches that he has planted or visited he exemplifies a “familiarity” with them that is either “loving or sharp” depending on their deportment.[1] When he writes to congregations that he has never seen, on the other hand, he “proposes the pure, unmixed gospel in a more general manner.”[2] Plainly Wesley’s sustained exposition of the law of God, a major motif in Romans and a crucial ingredient in the gospel, pertains to the “pure, unmixed gospel.” For Wesley, then, the gospel includes the law, and Romans singularly identifies and amplifies this inclusion.

In order to grasp Wesley’s understanding of gospel and law and the manner of their relationship, however, we must look chiefly not to the Notes but to his Sermons on Several Occasions. Admittedly, Wesley’s single, sustained exposition of Romans is found in his Notes on the New Testament[3]. However the entire exposition here uses only forty-four pages, half of which merely reproduce the English text, leaving but twenty-two pages to probe the sixteen chapters of Paul’s major work. Wesley’s texts for his three major tracts on the law of God are Romans 7:12 and 3:31 : “Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good”, as well as “Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid! Yea, we establish the law.”[4] Wesley’s exposition of Romans 3:31 in the Sermons requires twenty-four pages of text, while his comment in the Notes is concluded in two lines. Similarly he uses nineteen pages in the Sermons to expound Romans 7:12, but only twenty-six words in the Notes.   Obviously his New Testament Notes are not a major source of his thought concerning the epistle.

Then will ransacking the Romans references throughout the Sermons yield, albeit compositely, Wesley’s convictions concerning this epistle? I submit that it won’t, for at least two reasons. While there are scores of references to Romans in the Sermons, there are only twice as many as there are references to 1^st John, one of the briefest New Testament epistles. (This fact alone informs us that Romans doesn’t occupy the place in Wesley that it occupied, for instance, in the Sixteenth Century Protestant Reformers.) Secondly, despite the profusion of references to Romans, many of these references are deployed not exegetically but rather illustratively; i.e., they are adduced to illustrate or support a theological point that Wesley is making apart from the Romans text. In short, ransacking the references to Romans in the Sermons will yield not the singularity of Wesley’s approach to this epistle but rather the singularity of his theology as a whole.

Still, his insistence that the gospel is the substance of the law, together with his insistence that the law is indispensable for the Christian life; his tenacity here is generated by his understanding that two texts in particular (Romans 7:12 and 3:31) go a long way in comprehending the totality of the gospel.

 

The work of Martin Luther was instrumental in the spiritual awakening of both John and Charles Wesley. Faith in the saving person and work of Jesus Christ was born in Charles as he read Luther’s Commentary on Galatians (21^st May 1738), and in John three days later as John heard read the preface to Luther’s Commentary on Romans. Thereupon both men repudiated and forsook the blend of moralism and mysticism they had theretofore regarded as faith. They never looked back from their new understanding and conviction; namely, that Christians are distinguished from unbelievers not by humility, for instance (John had insisted in his pre-Aldersgate sermon, “The Circumcision of the Heart”, that humility gives us “a title” us to the praise of God[5]), but by that faith which grace alone quickens and which embraces Jesus Christ, its author and object. Believers cannot take any credit for faith’s commencement or its continuation. Reflecting Calvin’s “What can a dead man do to attain life?”[6] Wesley adds, “Of yourselves cometh neither your faith nor your salvation. ‘It is the gift of God,’ the free, undeserved gift — the faith through which ye are saved, as well as the salvation which he of his own good pleasure, his mere favour, annexes thereto. That ye believe is one instance of his grace; that believing, ye are saved, another.”[7]

Initially claiming Luther as an ally, Wesley subsequently thought that the German Reformer’s understanding of the relation of law and gospel fostered a cavalier attitude to the specific, concrete obedience that gospel-quickened people are to render God. Thereafter Wesley insisted on the most delicate balance between faith alone and holy living, without thereby turning the former into a pretext for antinomianism (in this having “faith alone” cut the nerve of faith) or turning the latter into moralism (in this depriving “holy living” of the holy.)

The line here, like all the lines in both theology and discipleship, is finer than a hair and harder than diamond. Never cavilling that “the imputed righteousness of Christ” was synonymous with justification, Wesley was dubious when he heard eighteenth century Calvinists speak of sanctification as “the imputed obedience of Christ,”[8] regarding “imputed obedience” as dangerous to Christian integrity if not simply self-contradictory. At the same time he denied any claim to “inherent righteousness”, the notion that whatever righteousness believers possess in themselves, however slight, is the ground of their justification. He knew that confused Christians could correctly recognize and repudiate an outer “works righteousness” (we are deemed righteous on account of what we do) and in the same instant endorse an inner “works righteousness” wherein we are deemed righteous on account of a (so-called) godly disposition. In the “stillness controversy” that threatened the nascent Methodist movement, Moravian dissidents maintained that those who lacked assurance of faith were to gain it by remaining “still” in a deliberate inertia wherein they did nothing, attending upon neither Scripture nor sermon nor sacrament nor service. In other words, they disdained both the ordinances of God and the concrete obedience that distinguishes genuine faith (in Jesus Christ) from mere “beliefism.” Concerning these people Charles Wesley wrote, “They speak largely and well against expecting to be accepted of God for our virtuous actions; and then teach that we are to be accepted for our virtuous habits or tempers. Still the ground of acceptance is placed in ourselves…. Neither our own inward nor outward righteousness is the ground of our justification.”[9]

Wesley saw that his people had to be led to see that the law is to be affirmed not as a moral code (such notions he labelled “heathen”) but rather as an implicate of Jesus Christ and therefore of faith in Christ. Neglect of the law would entail antinomianism, and antinomianism would collapse faith. (Wesley, unlike the Calvinists around him in the Church of England, always maintained that believers could “make shipwreck of faith.”) As early as 17^th November 1739 his Journal reads

I left Bristol , and on Saturday came to London . The first person I met with there was one whom I had left strong in faith and zealous of good works. But now she told me Mr. Molther had fully convinced her that she ‘never had any faith at all‘, and had advised her, till she received faith, ‘to be still, ceasing from outward works’, which she had accordingly done and did not doubt but in a short time she should find the advantage of it.

In the evening Mr. Bray also was highly commending ‘the being still before the Lord’. He likewise spoke largely of ‘the great danger that attended the doing of outward works’….”[10]

 

The “stillness” controversy, of course, was one aspect of a twofold problem with respect to the relation of law to faith, the two aspects of the problem belonging to “enthusiasts” and “formalists” in turn. Wesley customarily described those with a defective attitude to the gospel as “enthusiasts” who elevated their experience or opinion above Scripture, while “formalists” were those who claimed to be possessed of saving faith but possessed only a theological ideation. Antinomians clearly belonged among the enthusiasts, and moralists among the formalists. Wesley knew from the outset of the awakening that he would have to address both parties.

While Wesley continued to preach and teach with respect to the dangers of the misuse of the law, he didn’t pen a tract on the topic until 1750. From 1748 to 1750, however, he had published thirteen sermons, “Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount.” He subsequently insisted that the aim of these thirteen was “to assert and prove every branch of gospel obedience as indispensably necessary to gospel salvation.”[11] Now he reckoned it necessary to develop an argument on the relation of law and gospel as a sequel lest the latter suggest either antinomianism to those who thought gospel and faith to eclipse the law or moralism to those who thought the law to be a code against which people measured themselves and preened themselves, aided and abetted in this by the dominant Arian Christology and semi-Pelagian soteriology of Eighteenth Century Anglicanism.

Wesley wrote the three tracts, “The Original, Nature, Properties and Use of the Law”, “The Law Established through Faith (I)”, and “The Law Established through Faith (II)” in the way Luther had written his “occasional” theology; namely, tracts produced to provide immediate assistance for people whom the gospel had brought to faith and whose discipleship was threatened by theological distortions that claimed to reflect “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) but in fact contradicted it, and contradicted it so as to imperil those whom the Wesleyan movement’s evangelism had “brought to the birth” and thereby nullify a grace-wrought testimony through ensuing disgrace. Wesley knew precisely what was at stake here: nothing less than the spiritual well-being of the Methodist converts, the public reputation of the Societies, and the future of the movement. Antinomianism would derail the movement through outer degradation; moralism would derail it as surely through inner enervation.

While Wesley would certainly have preached and taught on these matters between 1738 and 1750, there is no record that the three homilies were ever preached. He wrote the three to be printed, distributed and read.

 

Without thinking himself at all overstated, Luther had maintained that theologians are defined by their ability to distinguish between law and gospel.[12] Wesley begins his exposition with a statement similarly global: “Perhaps there are few subjects within the whole compass of religion so little understood as this.”[13] Immediately he highlights the nature of the misunderstanding: readers of the Romans epistle assume that the apostle’s reference to the law pertains either to the Jewish law or the old Roman law. As Gentiles they dismiss the law inasmuch as they aren’t Jewish; as moderns they dismiss it inasmuch as they aren’t ancients.

The Mosaic law “inflamed” sin, “showed” sin, but couldn’t remedy sin, and therefore bore fruit unto death as it incited believers to an obedience they couldn’t attain.[14] Believers (i.e., Christians) are wedded to the “body of Christ” (i.e., to Christ himself), and this law is expected to be fruitful unto life. Believers, wedded to Christ, are delivered from “that whole moral as well as ceremonial economy”[15], since Christ’s death has slain this economy and it subsequently has as little claim upon believers as a dead marriage-partner has upon the survivor. The result is that believers are to serve “him who died for us and rose again;”[16] i.e., believers are to serve Jesus Christ as present, living person. Implicitly he is asserting the Mosaic economy to be the Torah abstracted from the gospel, from Christ himself; explicitly he evinces his (mis)understanding when he states that the service believers render the living person of Jesus Christ “in a new spiritual dispensation” is contrasted with the “bare outward service” rendered the Mosaic economy.[17] While the Mosaic dispensation has been set aside, the law as such hasn’t been and can’t be, just because (as will be made plain later) Jesus Christ is the substance of the law. In this regard Wesley’s understanding and Calvin’s are identical.

 

 

“Moral” Law

Like the Magisterial Reformers before him, Wesley first identifies the moral law as that law which antedates Moses[18]; antedates, in fact, the creation of the terrestrial world, but not the creation as such, since the “morning stars” of the creation were angelic intelligences with a capacity to know God.[19] These angelic intelligences were created with understanding to discern truth from falsehood and goodness from evil, and “as necessary result of this, with liberty, a capacity of choosing the one and refusing the other.”[20]

Several matters call for comment here. While Wesley’s vocabulary might suggest he is adopting the moralism he eschews, it must be understood that liberty isn’t that freedom wherewith only Jesus Christ can set us free. Liberty is the pre-fallen creature’s uncoerced response to the truth and reality and goodness of God. In mentioning “liberty” Wesley wishes to emphasize that these intelligences are agents, not automatons, and neither an aspect of God nor an emanation from God. Their uncoerced affirmation of God is essential to them as creatures. Freedom, to be distinguished from liberty, will be the Christ-wrought capacity to obey Jesus Christ as believers, now redeemed and reconciled, find restored in them that imago Dei that the Fall has defaced. In the second place Wesley maintains that the end of “moral” law, for these unfallen intelligences, is knowing God. Then plainly “moral” isn’t the word he wants in his discussion of “moral law.” In the third place, moral law is that by which these creatures could serve God and therein find their service “rewardable in itself.”[21] The service of God (by means of the “moral” law) is such a delight, a fulfilment, that it is inconceivable because inherently inappropriate that “something” be granted as the law’s reward. In other words, the moral law (plainly mis-named) is that by which the living God invites creatures to know him and enjoy him. Their knowledge of God, indistinguishable from their service of God (here the force of law is retained) is inherently the reward of God. In saying that the law which gave these intelligences is “a complete model of all truth so far as was intelligible to a finite being”[22] Wesley is plainly borrowing from his coming pronouncements concerning Jesus Christ as the substance of the law.

When God created humankind he gave it the same law, inscribed on humankind’s heart as on angels’, “to the intent that it might never be far off, never hard to be understood; but always at hand, and always shining with clear light….”[23] While the law was “well-nigh” (i.e., almost) effaced in the Fall, it was never obliterated. Undeniably, then, the law of God inscribed on the heart is identical with the imago Dei in Wesley’s understanding. In the wake of the Fall the imago is defaced but never effaced, or else the sinner wouldn’t be human. For exactly the same reason Wesley maintains that the inscribed law can’t be obliterated. Law as the imago Dei is the irreducible, indefeasible humanness in which we are created, regardless of the extent to which we contradict it as fallen creatures.

Then Wesley adds that through the reconciliation which God fashioned “through the Son of his love” God “in some measure re-inscribed the law on the heart of his dark, sinful creature.”[24] “In some measure” indicates that Wesley doesn’t want to predicate of the atonement as such what the church catholic reserves for incorporation in Christ; namely, that the imago Dei is restored only as we “put on” Christ through faith, as he is “formed” in us. On the other hand, Wesley insists on a Christological determination of that work of God whereby God gives up on no one, abandons no one, but rather re-asserts his blessing and claim. The “re-inscription” of the law, effected through the atonement, is of course a work of Christ. Wesley isn’t speaking here of the person united to Christ in faith; he’s insisting, nevertheless, that in the act of God extra nos, pro nobis, but not yet in nobis, there has been re-engraved that which the Fall had well-nigh effaced. The question can always be asked, “If ‘well-nigh’ means “not entirely’, then is re-inscription necessary?” Wesley would argue, in sound theological fashion, that we ought always to argue from actuality to necessity (i.e., God’s act forestalls all speculation as to its necessity.) Re-inscription, then, is the claim of Jesus Christ specifically, the reassertion of his ownership in the reclamation of the sinner. The re-inscription effected through the atonement means that what is re-inscribed (the law) is nothing less than the claim of the Son who has come to fallen creatures as Salvager. This action of the Salvager upon all humankind entails the following:

[1] His claim, while admittedly authoritative (or else his claim is hollow), is never authoritarian, authoritarianism meaning here the assertion of a demand which is arbitrary since the demander isn’t entitled to it, and compliance with which demand is therefore coerced. Instead, because the claim is one with God’s mercy (“the Son of God’s love”) rather than extraneous to that mercy and unrelated to it, the claim is an implicate of this mercy and therefore not alien to the fallen creature.

[2] This claim pertains to the essence of humankind’s humanness. To be human is to be made by the Son for the Son, and, in the wake of the Fall, to be cherished by the Son, sought by him, and reconfirmed as the one upon whom the Son’s mercy-wrought ownership is restated.

[3] The grace that is God’s action and provision in his Son is also that grace now at work preveniently in all people everywhere, preparing them for the day when their hearing the gospel of grace resonates within them on account of the grace with which they are graced now unknowingly. In other words, while I am not aware that Wesley ever speaks formally of Jesus Christ as the substance of prevenient grace, plainly “the Son of his love” is this as he forges himself within all men and women everywhere, apart from which the explicit declaration of the gospel would be pointless. While Wesley agrees entirely with the Magisterial Reformers in their understanding of “total depravity”[25], and therefore agrees that in the wake of the Fall humankind is dead of itself coram Deo, he insists that all fallen people are beneficiaries of that re-inscription which is nothing less and nothing other than the action of the crucified upon them.

[4] A corollary of the foregoing is the truth that no human is God-forsaken. God’s act of reconciliation, the heart of which is the Son’s utter and actual forsakenness at the hands of the Father, means that for the Son’s sake no one is God-forsaken now or can be.

[5] Since only by grace can grace be discerned, and since only by grace can anyone respond to grace, then the action of the Son in the cross is an instance of a visitation of God’s grace vouchsafed to all humankind apart from which fallen people would be neither response-able nor response-ible. In a word, apart from the re-inscription of the law (the substance of which the is the atonement wrought in the Son), fallen humankind would find the gospel of grace inherently incomprehensible.

[6] Since the re-inscription of the law arises from the cross, the crown and climax of God’s work, and presupposes Incarnation and atonement, the (so-called) natural law is never merely natural but is always graced, such grace always being constitutive of humankind. This grace, it must be noted, is not an outer structure whose inner content is human achievement. Wesley bears no resemblance to Gabriel Biel and other mediaeval scholastics akin to Biel . This grace, rather, means that those who hear the gospel do not add to or bring to the proclamation of the gospel a “faith” which is their self-fashioned “contribution” (as it were.) Faith ever remains God’s gift.[26] At the same time, the gift has to be exercised; faith is always a human affirmation and activity or else it isn’t a human who responds. Here Wesley is strong where the Magisterial Reformers were weak in their insufficient recognition that faith, even as God’s gift, must ever be a human activity. Wesley’s understanding of re-inscription (i.e., tantamount to prevenient grace) means that what God wills for people (faith in Jesus Christ) God must also will in them, or else faith is a human invention; at the same time, what God wills in them God must will in them not so as to coerce them but rather so as to have them now will for themselves in a genuinely human act what he has already willed for them and in them — or else they simply haven’t responded.

The so-called natural law is thoroughly Christological.

 

Notwithstanding the discussion just concluded Wesley maintains that humankind’s flight from God finds God choosing a “peculiar people” (Genesis 6:12 ) “to whom he gave a more perfect knowledge of his law.”[27] What is the force of “more perfect?” Does Wesley mean here a psycho-religious intensity — i.e., Israel ‘s awareness of the law of God is extraordinarily vivid? Or does he mean not increased vividness but rather greater subtlety and specificity concerning the details of the law? He indicates that he has neither in mind in view of the fact that the Ten Commandments are but the “heads” of the law, the law being much more extensive than the heads. Moreover, these “heads” were given to Israel because the people were “slow of understanding;” i.e., they lacked familiarity with subtle details. I submit he means a deeper understanding of God’s self-sacrificing love for his people. Since it is the Son’s sacrifice that re-inscribes the law, a “more perfect” knowledge of the law must pertain to that sacrifice willed and enacted by the Godhead in concert on behalf of sinners. In virtue of God’s election Israel is made aware of God’s self-sacrificing love (albeit by anticipation of the death of the Nazarene.) Gentiles, on the other hand, who are taught the Ten Commandments, have only the “heads” of the law.

Wesley’s conclusion to his discussion in this part of his tract — “And thus it is that the law of God made known to them that know not God” — may appear to contradict the argument I have advanced. After all, if they know the law of God without knowing God, what do they know? A moral code? They know something other than a moral code, however, for “moral code” operates in the orbit of an ethic rooted in metaphysics; Wesley’s insistence that they are aware of a claim upon them operates in the orbit of the presence and power of the living God. In short, they are aware of a claim upon them without knowing precisely who has claimed them. For this reason, says Wesley, their knowing the law of God “does not suffice.”[28] Why not? He adds, “They cannot by this means comprehend the height and length and breadth thereof.”[29] Thereof? Of what? Obviously of the law. Yet the indisputable reference to Ephesians 3:18 speaks of Christ’s love for us. Wesley’s next sentence, “Plainly God alone can reveal this by his Spirit”[30] grants readers a greater glimpse of what he has in mind as he renders “this” explicit by quoting Jeremiah 31:31-33, where God promises to write the law on the hearts of his people. It can only be concluded that for Wesley the law of God written on the heart and the love of Christ are identical.

Earlier Wesley had said that knowing the law of God doesn’t suffice. It is evident now that what doesn’t suffice is that love of Christ which is pro nobis but not yet in nobis in the absence of faith. As Jesus Christ is embraced in faith the love of Christ takes root in us; as this occurs the law of God comes to be written on the heart. Plainly Jesus Christ, the gospel, and the substance of the law are the same.

 

The Nature of the Law

Having discussed the “original” of the law at length, and having hinted many times over at the nature of the law in its Christological substance, Wesley now discusses the nature of the law in terms that permit no other interpretation than that Christ is Torah incarnate.

The law is “an incorruptible picture of the high and holy One that inhabiteth eternity.”[31] Here, it must be noted, “picture” doesn’t mean “illustration only” in the sense that a picture of an object isn’t the object itself. The language Wesley uses throughout his discussion of the nature of the law indicates that by “picture” he means exactly what Calvin means by “mirror.” Mirror, for Calvin, is never mirror only or mirror-image only in the sense that the reflection lacks the ontic status of what is reflected. When Calvin says that Jesus Christ mirrors the Father or the Son mirrors our election, he means that Jesus Christ is our effectual election, is the electing God electing us, and this truth and reality is both operative and known to be operative in Christ alone. “Mirror” for Calvin never implies that “image” lacks substance. For Calvin the purpose of the mirror is to render substance accessible and knowable.

In the same vein “picture” for Wesley is the effectual presence of substance. This is evident when he speaks in the same paragraph of the law as “the face of God unveiled.”[32] Admittedly, in his homily on the law Wesley doesn’t link explicitly the law as the face of God unveiled with 2^nd Corinthians 4:3-6 (where Jesus Christ is spoken of in this manner.) Still, in his New Testament Notes on 2^nd Corinthians 4 he does, and his exegetical comments are as profound as they are subtle. In commenting on “But if our gospel also is veiled” Wesley adds parenthetically, “As well as the law of Moses”, and then goes on to say, “The gospel is clear, open and simple, except to the wilfully blind and unbelievers…[the gospel itself] has no veil upon it”[33], and by implication, neither has the law of Moses. Wesley avers that there was a veil on the face of Moses, while the law of Moses is as transparent as the gospel of Christ. Lest anyone think the foregoing comment strained Wesley underlines it in his discussion of 2^nd Corinthians 4:6. Here he states that the glory of God (which shines in the face of Christ) is God’s glorious love and God’s glorious image, and the face of Christ reflects this glory “more resplendently than the face of Moses.”[34] Once again, however, “more” is predicated of the face of Christ compared to the face of Moses, but not compared to the law of Moses. In his Notes Wesley points out by way of illustration that God is not merely the author of light but is light itself[35], and this light shines in the face of Christ; i.e., God manifests himself in the face of Christ.

To recapitulate: Wesley says that the law is the face of God unveiled. Paul says Jesus Christ is this. For Wesley, Jesus Christ is plainly the substance of the law.

My interpretation of Wesley here is supported by his remark (still in the same paragraph of his homily) that the law is “God manifested to his creatures as they are able to bear it.”[36] Wesley’s unqualified assertion here must be allowed its full weight: the law isn’t a message from God or truth of God but is rather God himself disclosing himself; i.e., God is both the author and object of revelation, and all of this in such a manner as to preserve us, as Wesley once again echoes John Calvin’s ubiquitous notion that God “accommodates” himself to us finite, frail creatures lest his glorious self-disclosure annihilate us.[37] Wesley then adds with limpid simplicity, “[The law] is the heart of God disclosed to man”[38], when the heart of God, in light of the Incarnation, can only be the gospel. Temporarily puzzling, then, is Wesley’s comment, “Yea, in some sense we may apply to the law what the Apostle says of his [i.e., God’s] Son — it is the ‘streaming forth’ or the outbeaming ‘of his glory’, the express image of his person.”[39] Does “in some sense” mean that Wesley is now retracting what he has stated concerning the relationship of the law to Christ? Bewilderment vanishes, however, with Wesley’s commentary on Hebrews 1:3. Here he declares without qualification that glory is “the nature of God revealed in its brightness”[40]; i.e., the law can only be God’s nature shining compellingly. Concerning Hebrews’ “the express image of his [God’s] person” Wesley adds, “Whatever the Father is, is exhibited in the Son.”[41] Insisting in his commentary that “person” and “substance” are synonyms, Wesley states that the Son as express image of God’s person means that the Son is possessed of “the unchangeable perpetuity of divine life and power.”[42]

Clearly Wesley is predicating of the law what has been predicated of the Son. This is possible only if the Son is the substance of the law. Then what does he mean by his caution, “in some sense”? He gives no indication. In light of his understanding of the relation of law to God and to the gospel, it appears he hesitated with the same hesitation that dogged Calvin before him; viz., if gospel and law are identical in essence, wherein do they differ? Calvin resorted to such expressions as “less clear”, “more brightly”, etc.[43] Wesley reflects Calvin’s vocabulary in the speaking of the law as “these faint pictures to shadow out the deep things of God.”[44]

Still expounding the first of his three homilies on the law (Romans 7:12), Wesley circles back to 2^nd Corinthians 4:3-6, referring once again to the “unveiled face” of God, albeit this time through a seemingly circuitous reference to Cicero. Cicero had said, “If virtue could assume such a shape as that we could behold her with our eyes, what wonderful love she would excite in us.”[45] Wesley immediately adds, “It is done already. The law of God is all virtues in one, in such a shape as to be beheld with open face by all those whose eyes God hath enlightened.”[46] His summary comment here is “What is the law except divine virtue and wisdom assuming a visible form?”[47] Does “virtue” take Wesley back to the moralism he seeks to avoid? It might if “virtue” were to be understood in a classical sense. The context of Wesley’s reference to Cicero , however, makes it plain that “virtue” here with respect to the law is the claim of God. And the claim of God, whose unveiled face is seen in the Son, reinterprets all such expressions as “virtue.” Additionally, lying behind the Ciceronian reference to “virtue” is Wesley’s insistence on the substantial identity of Christ and the law. His point in the reference to Cicero (virtue, once beheld, quickens love in the beholder) is amplified in his 1745 tract, A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Part II. Here he speaks of God’s opening the eyes of our understanding, only to add that the immediate consequence of such “seeing” is loving God.[48] And we can’t love God, he continues, without “a tender love to the whole of human kind.”[49] The law of God, then, is “virtue” only in the sense that the law grants us understanding of the nature of God in such wise that our understanding unfailingly gives rise to love for God and neighbour. The (perhaps dubious) reference to Cicero , then, merely highlights Wesley’s insistence that to “see” the law (i.e., understand it) is invariably to love it; better, love him whose face and heart the law is. Wesley’s Christological understanding of the law contradicts any putative moralism, however dangerous it may have been for him to adduce a reference to Cicero when Eighteenth Century Anglicanism was only too ready to think of law in terms of moralism.

Wesley knows that no language is adequate to the wonder, glory and magnificence of the law, aware as he is of the “shortness, even impropriety, there is in these and all other human expressions.”[50] Still, he resorts to them just because they are the only expressions humans have. Therefore he circles around the law again, approaching it now from a different angle of vision, declaring it to be “supreme, unchangeable reason; it is unalterable rectitude; it is the everlasting fitness of all things are or ever were created.” It must be noted once more that by “unchangeable reason” and “everlasting fitness” Wesley is not departing from Christology and migrating towards moralism. As early as 1733 in The Circumcision of the Heart he deplored all attempts at “grounding religion in ‘the eternal fitness of things’, or ‘the intrinsic excellence of virtue’, and the beauty of actions flowing from it — on the reasons, as they term them, of good and evil, and the relations of beings to each other.”[51] Wesley denounces all efforts at grounding “religion” in moralism of any sort, even moralism supplemented by rationalism and aesthetics, all such moralism aiming at a righteousness other than that which believers receive through faith in Christ. It must be noted that Wesley penned even this criticism before the Aldersgate episode of 1738, after which he never failed to declare justification by faith.

If, then, the foregoing is what Wesley can’t mean by “unchanging reason” and “everlasting fitness”, what does he mean? It appears that “reason” has to be understood as “logos”, where “logos” means “word, reason, rationality, intelligibility.” The logos of God is unchangeable in that God is unchangeable. The logos of God is the outer expression of God’s “innerness”, now imprinted indelibly on creaturely actuality in its entirety. In other words, since the Son of God is the logos of God, and since the Son of God and the law of God are substantially identical, then the law of God is the logos of God now rendered Incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.

And the “fitness of all things?” Wesley appears to have in mind here the “fitting-ness” of all things in the sense of Colossians 1:17: “In him [i.e., Christ] all things hold together.” In his commentary on this text Wesley writes, “And by him all things consist — the original expression not only implies that he sustains all things in being, but more directly, All things were and are compacted in him, into one system. He is the cement and support of the universe. And is he less than the supreme God?”[52]

In fact Wesley’s Notes on Colossians 1:15-18 predicate of Christ what his homilies on the law predicate of the law; e.g., “the glorious pre-eminence of Christ over the highest angels” means that Christ is “begotten before every creature; subsisting before all worlds, before all time, from all eternity.”[53] This is precisely how he spoke of the law in the early part of his homily.   Now in the same homily Wesley brings forward a concatenation of English expressions even as, regrettably, he doesn’t supply the Greek he has in mind. He describes the law as “a copy of the eternal mind”, “a transcript of the divine nature”, “the fairest offspring of the everlasting Father”, the brightest efflux of his eternal wisdom, and “the visible beauty of the most high.”[54]

Once again, then, while some expressions Wesley uses concerning the law might be read, at first sight, as turning obedience to Christ into moralism, “first sight” can never be “last word:” Wesley’s anti-moralistic rigour remains undiluted.

In his final comment on the nature of the law Wesley says that the angels delight in the law and marvel at it, as will “every wise believer, every well-instructed child of God upon earth.”[55] Surely angels and humans, recognizing the Christoform nature of the law, marvel at it because it is the God-authored vehicle of God himself; they delight in it because God himself is their consummate blessing. It is little wonder Wesley pronounces the law “ever blessed”[56], “ever” denying any suggesting that the law of God might be provisional only, to be honoured in one era but not in another. “Ever” suggests instead “eternal”, pertaining to the Godhead itself.

 

The Properties of the Law

A: Holy

Having discussed the nature of God’s law Wesley attends to its properties, first among which, following Romans 7:12 , the text of his homily, the law is holy; even “…internally and essentially holy.”[57] By “internally” Wesley intends “inherently.”[58] Since God alone is inherently holy, Wesley understands the law of God to be God himself in his inherent holiness, fostering in his people the holiness he purposes for them. When the law is “transcribed”[59] into “life” and into “the soul”, the result is the “pure, clean, unpolluted worship of God”, when by “worship” Wesley characteristically has in mind a godliness that is the sanctification of all of life.[60]

Wesley maintains that the law must be holy, otherwise “it could not be the immediate offspring, and much less the express resemblance of God, who is essential holiness.”[61] This statement is rich. Plainly the law can be holy only because it is substantially identical with the God who is essentially holy. To forfend any suggestion of subordinationism or even Arianism, Wesley maintains that the law isn’t merely the immediate offspring of God (allowing the interpretation “made not begotten”) but is rather the “express resemblance.” Again, without citing either the Scripture passage or the Greek word he has in mind, he evidently means “eikon”, identity not similarity. The law as holy is the “eikon” or image of God who is essentially holy; i.e., the law isn’t merely functionally holy, an instrument or tool that God deploys to effect holiness (of some sort) in his people. (“Of some sort” must be added, since only if the law is one with the God who is essentially holy is God-in-his-holiness forging holiness in his people by means of the law.) Since the law is essentially holy, Wesley reminds us, it is blasphemous to speak of it as sin or the cause of sin, even though the law, upon meeting sin, exposes sin.[62]

 

B: Just

The law is also just: “It renders all their due. It prescribes exactly what is right, precisely what ought to be done, said or thought, both with regard to the author of our being, with regard to ourselves, and with regard to every creature which he has made. It is adapted in all respects to the nature of things, of the whole universe and every individual. It is suited to all the circumstances of each, and to all their mutual relations, whether such as have exited from the beginning, or such as commenced in any following period. It is exactly agreeable to the fitness of things, whether essential or accidental. It clashes with none of these in any degree, nor is ever unconnected with them. If the word be taken in that sense, there is nothing arbitrary in the law of God: although still the whole and every part thereof is totally dependent on his will, so that ‘Thy will be done’ is the supreme universal law in earth and heaven.”[63]

Many aspects of this extended passage invite comment.

[a] God’s law is equated with God’s will, and God’s will is God himself in the act of willing.[64]

[b] God’s law is his intention for every aspect of the creation.

[c] The law pertains to the creature as created or the creature as found, to the creature as intended or the creature as instantiated, in the wake of the distortions of the Fall and the complexities of world-occurrence.

[d] The law befits “exactly” all things, whether essential or accidental; i.e., the law of God comprehends the totality of the creaturely order: original, fallen, essential, accidental. There is nothing, no one, no situation, development or circumstance that is law-exempt. The ground of this, of course, is that there is nothing that hasn’t been made through the Son for the Son.

[e] The law cannot clash with “any of these” for the same reason that it cannot be unconnected with them: the “connection” and the “fit” are rooted in the fact that the law, characterized by God’s essence, cannot be the contradiction of anything that has been made but can only be its “whence,” its “whither,” its fulfillment, its blessing.

[f] There is nothing arbitrary in the law of God. (i) There couldn’t be, since the law is the “transcript” or “efflux” of God. (ii) No one can repudiate the law on the ground that the law is arbitrary and therein a surd element whose imposition on humankind renders human existence ultimately absurd. If the law were arbitrary it would never subserve the human good but would at best be “unconnected” with that good and at worst contradict it.

Wesley underlines once more that all things, together with their “essential relations to each other”, are the work of God’s hands; and for this reason there arises the “fitness” of all things. The law as “the immutable rule of right and wrong” depends on this “fitness.”[65] All of this — the nature of all that exists, its interconnectedness or “fitted-ness”, occurs through the will of God, by which they “‘are and were created.'”[66] With this last statement Wesley has adduced Revelation 4:11. While he doesn’t amplify the Scriptural text, he plainly has it in mind. Revelation 4:11 states that by God’s will there has been created all that exists. The immediate context of the passage informs us that the seer looks into heaven and sees the throne and the exalted Lord Jesus seated upon the throne. Lightning, voices and peals of thunder issue from the throne — a reminder of Sinai, and an especially pointed reminder that the throne of God is essentially related to the promulgation of the law at Sinai, even as the Trisagion of the worshipper recognizes in God the holiness that characterizes God, throne and law. [67] And of course Revelation 11:15 insists that the one seated on the throne is none other than Christ, for to him there has passed sovereignty over the world.   The antinomians, then, are without excuse: the law can no more cease to be good than can God. In the same way, antinomians who claim to have embraced Christ yet disdain the law have embraced only a chimera.

If the antinomians are self-contradicted, what about the moralists? Wesley immediately adds, “…it may be granted…that in every particular case God wills this or this (suppose that men should honour their parents) because it is right, agreeable to the fitness of things, to the relation wherein they stand.”[68] In other words, the law of God comprehends all of creaturely existence in its multidimensionality and its interconnectedness. Obviously the law can’t be a moral code, notwithstanding the reference to the Fifth Commandment, since no code comprehends what Wesley says the law comprehends. The law comprehends what it does in that the substance of the law is Christ, through whom and for whom all things have been made and in whom all things hold together or “fit.”

C: Good

Not only is the law holy and just, it is also good, and good in that it flows from the goodness of God, which goodness inclined God “to impart that divine copy of himself to the holy angels.”[69] Here Wesley reinforces his point against the antinomians, that the law is good because a “copy” of God, only to strengthen the case for the law by adding that God’s motive in supplying the law was his “tender love” in manifesting his will “afresh to fallen man.”[70] In fact, Wesley insists, love alone moved God to publish the law in the wake of the Fall, to send prophets to declare the self-same law to the sin-hardened, and finally to send the only-begotten Son to “confirm every jot and tittle” of the law with a view to writing it in the hearts of all his children; and all of this with the eschatological result that the Son can deliver his “mediatorial function” to the Father.[71] Plainly Wesley sees the promulgation of the law comprehended in the one-and-only Mediator himself; i.e., the law is the Mediator claiming those whom he has visited and acted for in light of his “tender love.”   Not surprisingly, then, Wesley climaxes the accolades he heaps upon the law (e.g., “sweeter than honey in the honeycomb”) with “mild and kind” and “wherein are hid all the treasures of divine knowledge and love.”[72] “Mild and kind” points unambiguously to Matthew 11:29-30 where Jesus insists that his yoke (a common metaphor for the Torah in the Old Testament) is “easy” and “light” just because he himself is gentle. The second reference is Colossians 2:3, a passage in which Paul refers to Christ alone. For Wesley, then, “law” and “Jesus Christ” imply each other.

The enthusiast-antinomians think they can be the beneficiaries of Christ while disdaining the law. The formalist-moralists, on the other hand, think they can benefit from the law while disdaining Christ. Both are wrong, and wrong not because the antinomians lack morals while the moralists lack religion. Morals added to antinominans and religion added to moralists would still leave both sunk alike in unbelief and condemnation. Both groups fail to understand that the law is good in itself because it is God-authored and Son (substance)-informed, and that it effects good (i.e., godliness) in those who honour it. Failing here, they fail to understand that a fruit of the law in believers is that righteousness of which Isaiah 32:17 (“And the effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust for ever” RSV) speaks. Their ignorance is only highlighted when Wesley, eschewing both antinomianism and moralism, maintains that righteousness isn’t merely an effect of the law (this might lend itself to a moralistic misinterpretation); rather, “the law itself is righteousness”, even as he glories in the truth that Christ alone is ever our righteousness.[73]

 

Conclusion

Many New Testament exegetes have maintained that “Christ our righteousness” is the central theme of Romans, while others have insisted chapters 9-11 are the pivot of the epistle, and with it the relation of Torah to Jesus Christ. Wesley would spend little time adjudicating this issue. For in the introduction to Romans found in his New Testament Notes Wesley maintains that in the Romans epistle in particular Paul “labours…to produce in those to whom he writes a deep sense of the excellency of the gospel, and [labours] to engage them to act suitably to it.”[74] Wesley’s exposition of the constellation of gospel, law, Christ, righteousness, faith; his exposition in the Sermons supports what he insists in the Notes is Paul’s intention in Romans; viz., a magnification of the beauty, attractiveness, winsomeness of the gospel, and therein of believers’ self-abandonment to its claim upon them, which of course is nothing other than their self-abandonment to the one who is their life, their comfort, and their eternal blessing.

 

[1]Wesley, Notes on the New Testament (Wakefield, William Nicholson and Sons, 1872); p. 355. (Hereafter cited as NT Notes.)

[2] op.cit

[3] loc.cit.

[4] Wesley, The Works of John Wesley (Bicentennial Edition): Nashville , Abingdon, 1984. Volume 2, pp. 4,20.23. Hereinafter cited as WJW 2:4,20,23

[5] WJW 1:409

[6] Calvin, Commentary John 11:26

[7] WJW 1:126.

[8] see Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology (Nashville, Abingdon, 1994) chapt. 7.

[9] Charles Wesley, “Preface” to Hymns and Sacred Poems, 1739.     Quoted in Tyson, J.; Charles Wesley: A Reader; Oxford , Oxford University Press, 1989.

[10] WJW 19:119.

[11] Letter, Nov. 17, 1759 (emphasis his). WJW 1:466

[12] see Gerhard Ebeling, Luther: An Introduction to his Thought (London, Collins, 1994) 111.

[13] WJW 2:4

[14] Wesley’s understanding of the logic of Torah is now recognized as highly questionable.

[15] WJW 2:5

[16] ibid.

[17] ibid. Wesley failed to see that the Torah never enjoins “bare outward service.”

[18] J.T. McNeill, “Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers”, Journal of Religion, #26 (1946), 168-82.

[19] WJW 2:6

[20] ibid.

[21] ibid.

[22] WJW 2:6.

[23] WJW 2:7.

[24] ibid.

[25] WJW 1:118.

[26] WJW 1:126.

[27] WJW 2:7.

[28] WJW 2:8.

[29] ibid.

[30] ibid.

[31] WJW 2:9.

[32] ibid.

[33] NT Notes, 2^nd Cor. 4:3-6.

[34] ibid.

[35] ibid.

[36] WJW 2:9.

[37] see Battles, F.L., “God was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity” in Interpreting John Calvin (Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 1996.)

[38] WJW 2:9.

[39] ibid.

[40] NT Notes Hebrews 1:3

[41] ibid.

[42] ibid.

[43] See Shepherd, Victor A.; The Nature and Function of Faith in the Theology of John Calvin, pp. 129-178. (Mercer University Press, Macon, 1983.)

[44] WJW 2:10.

[45] WJW 2:9.

[46] ibid.

[47] ibid.

[48] WJW 11:269.

[49] ibid.

[50] WJW 2:10.

[51] WJW 1:410 (emphasis his.)

[52] NT Notes Colossians 1:17.

[53] op.cit., Colossians 1:15.

[54] WJW 2:10. Note here the similarity with respect to the reference in Cicero , where Wesley discussed the force of “beauty” and “visible.”

[55] WJW 2:10.

[56] ibid. (emphasis mine.)

[57] WJW 2:11

[58] See footnote # 30, WJW 2:11 where the editor comments on this meaning throughout all the editions of this homily in Wesley’s lifetime.

[59] See above where Wesley speaks of the law as “transcript.”

[60] WJW 2:11.

[61] ibid.

[62] ibid.

[63] WJW 2:12 (emphasis his.)

[64] “The will of God is God himself.”     WJW 2:13.

[65] WJW 2:13.

[66] ibid.

[67] See G.B. Caird, The Revelation of St John the Divine (A. and C. Black Limited, London, 1966.)

[68] WJW 2:13.

[69] ibid.

[70] ibid.

[71] WJW 2:14.

[72] ibid.

[73] WJW 2:14.

[74] NT Notes, 355.

The following paper was given at the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies, Oxford, UK, 1997.

“Can You Find Anything More Amiable Than This?  Anything More Desirable?”

A Note On Wesley’s Challenge Concerning Christian Perfection:  

Victor A. Shepherd

 

I: Background

Wesley’s misgivings concerning the Lutherans’ simul totus peccator simul totus iustus (believer are at the same time both totally sinful and totally justified) are a major feature in the background to his exposition of Christian perfection. As is so often the case, what is safe in the hands of the original articulator is safe in the hands of no one else. The Lutherans insisted that the alternative to totus…totus was partim…partim; we are partly sinful and partly justified, justified to the extent that we are not sinful. This was the position of the Council of Trent, 1545-1563. If partim had been accepted the Lutherans would have asked, “Which part of us is justified, and which sinful?” They knew there is no aspect, area, dimension or deed of believers’ lives for which they are spared having to plead God’s pardon. Two hundred years later, however, Wesley felt that the Lutherans’ totus simul implied (i) resignation with respect to one’s residual sinfulness, (ii) complacency in it, (iii) capitulation to it amounting to licence. Wesley was suspicious of a totus simul that could be regarded as a vehicle of antinomianism for the spiritually slack and a counsel of despair for the spiritually serious.

Wesley’s insistence on the simultaneity of sola fide (by faith alone) and holy living is yet another prominent feature of the background to his understanding of Christian perfection. Sola fide, standing alone, had always precipitated a cavalier attitude toward godliness, the reduction of faith to doctrinal apprehension, and the jettisoning of the rigours of discipleship (e.g., crossbearing.) Paradoxically, “faith alone” cut the nerve of faith. On the other hand, holy living, standing alone, had always precipitated moralism: rigorous conformity to a code devoid of the holy and devoid of life, with faith reduced to a compend of ethical striving, pelagianism, and a shallow view of the Fall that settled for deprivation while eschewing depravity. In sola fide and holy living, however, Wesley believed that what God had joined together no one should put asunder. Aspects of the foregoing “marriage” are found in the four principal tracts related to his fullest statement, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1765-1777).

For Wesley salvation is the restoration of the defaced image of God. It is the destiny of believers to be “wholly transformed into the image of him that created  us.”(1:351)  Perfection is this transformation. In Christian Perfection (1741), his earliest tract on the subject, Wesley maintains that we must speak of the notion, since scripture is not silent on the matter, and we must not be found silent where scripture  speaks.(2:99)  Here Wesley carefully denies that Christian perfection implies freedom from error or from poor judgement or from “the infirmities of our creatureliness” (i.e., freedom from the limitations of our finitude).

Wesley denies as well that such perfection, synonymous with holiness, precludes “continual increase.”(2:104) Even the “perfect” continue to grow in grace! Lefthandedly he indicates the reason for his tenacity in speaking of Christian perfection: if we set limits a priori to the scope of God’s grace in subduing our sinfulness in this life, a defect he thought he saw in the Reformed and Lutheran traditions, then we are making allowances for sin. To say that God does not deliver us from all sinning in this life is to say that we must continue to sin.(2:112) But to say this is to deploy shabby excuses and undercut human responsibility. Here Wesley has in mind such thinkers as John Gill, a contemporary whose hyper-Calvinism Wesley deplored not least because it appeared to render God the author of sin. Wesley insists that we are freed not only from sins that are publicly observable (our deeds) but also “from evil thoughts and tempers” (on account of the heart’s no longer being evil), as well as from “all the reasonings of pride and unbelief against the declarations, promises or gifts of God.”(2:117) Believers should expect to be freed from all the qualifications the spiritually unexpectant invoke to condition the declarations, promises and gifts of God. Freed from the impediment of unexpectancy, believers find the aforementioned fulfilled in them. In support of his notion here Wesley quotes Charles’ hymn-line, “Calmly to thee my soul looks up,/and waits thy promises to prove.”(2:122) One such promise is the declaration that “No one born of God commits sin.”(1 John 3:9) The exegetical commonplace — that the force of the text is that no one born of God “wilfully” or “habitually” commits sin — he dismisses curtly without any discussion of the syntactical subtleties in the Greek text.(2:107) Finding no little support still in 1 John for his notion of perfection, Wesley moves on to 1 John 1:9: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” He reads “cleanses” not as “pardons” but as “purges”. “Cleanse”, he insists, cannot be reduced to “justifies”; “cleanse us from all unrighteousness does not appose “will forgive us our sins.”(2:120)

As the debate between Reformed/Lutheran and Methodist convictions unfolded, Wesley sought to curb what he regarded as the overstatement of people such as Thomas Maxfield; viz., that Christians are rendered incapable of sin — with the result that antinomianism appeared yet now could not be named “sin”. Wesley wanted to repudiate that shallow view of sin which could only victimize those who held it, without suggesting there existed any sin beyond God’s triumph.

In On Sin in Believers (1763) Wesley maintains “`That there is no sin in believers’ is quite new in the church. Such a notion was never heard of for 1700 years, never till it was discovered by Count Zinzendorf. I do not remember to have seen the least intimation of it in either ancient or modern writers, unless perhaps in some of the wild, ranting antinomians.”(1:324) Forbearing to say that his 1741 statement itself must have been an overstatement, Wesley invokes the “testimony of antiquity” (patristics) in support of his contention that believers have an “evil nature.”(1:317) Plainly he does not want to say categorically that believers are sinless. The believer can be “a new creature and an old creature at once.”(1:325) Such a person is “partly renewed”(1:326); by grace he may yet become not only “truly” but also “entirely” renewed(1:326), being “delivered from the guilt and power of sin but not from the being of sin.”(1:328) Wesley’s statement here is more nuanced than that of 1741, distinguishing as it does between the power of sin and the being of sin, even though he does not amplify the distinction. While never denying the Reformers’ understanding of justification by faith, and never denying its place in the inception of the Christian life, Wesley consistently emphasizes the actuality of the regeneration and sanctification of the justified person. When he writes, “We allow that the state of a justified person is inexpressibly great”(1:320), the reader expects him to expand on the greatness of justification; instead he speaks immediately of the blessings of  sanctification.  Wesley typically has “sanctification” stand for “justification plus sanctification”; i.e., for the whole of the Christian life. Here he reverses Luther’s “shorthand.” Plainly the doctrine of sanctification is as luminous and illuminating for Wesley as justification was for Luther. It stands at the centre of and is the organizing principle for his theology; every aspect of the Christian economy converges upon it and radiates from it.

The sin from which sanctification delivers us is both inward and outward. Outward sin is manifestly behavioral; inward is the attitudes and proclivities of the depraved heart. Pride, anger, self-will are Wesley’s unholy trinity that he mentions throughout his work. Resentment — one such temper — is a near-universal yet not insignificant instance of inward sin. “Resentment at an affront is sin”, Wesley unselfconsciously confesses, “and I have been guilty of this a thousand times.”(1:331) Believers have a heightened awareness both of the specific sins that dog them and of the sin whose “being” riddles them and all that they do — even as their heightened awareness does not collapse their assurance. In other words, heightened awareness of one’s depravity does not diminish, let alone overturn, the witness of the Spirit concerning one’s standing in grace.

In On Sin in Believers, written twenty-two years after Christian Perfection, and written after much scrutiny of both the blessings and the “enthusiasms” of the revival, Wesley adduces four arguments to support his contention concerning sin in believers. Any affirmation of believers’ sinlessness (i) contradicts scripture, (ii) contradicts the experience of God’s people, (iii) is new-fangled and therefore merely a human invention (novelty in doctrine being, for Wesley, heresy by definition), (iv) has deleterious consequences. The peril of the perfection imputed to Zinzendorf was that it “cuts off all watching against our evil nature.”(1:328)) Yet while the being of sin remains, grace dethrones sin so that “the usurper…grows weaker and weaker.”(1:331) If relentless vigilance concerning sin is a sign of faith, so is the horror with which believers react when rationalization whispers to them that sin may be indulged.(1:332)

Four years later Wesley penned The Repentance of Believers (1767). He begins his tract by reminding readers of the repentance that pertains to the commencement of faith and discipleship: a conviction of utter sinfulness (our very being is sin-vitiated) and guiltiness (we can plead nothing to extenuate our condemnation) and helplessness (we are unable to remedy or rectify ourselves in any way).(1:335) Then Wesley speaks of the ongoing repentance of believers that is as essential to their growth in grace as initial repentance was to their entering the kingdom. If spiritual rigour is relaxed even for a moment, such crudities as lust and non-crudities as inordinate affections will recrudesce — along with love of praise and fear of dispraise.(1:339) All of these together will ensure that the work of grace within believers is undone.

We must note here Wesley’s emphasis on singlemindedness. Either we fear God and therefore nothing else or we do not fear God and therefore everything else. With the insight of the wise spiritual director, Wesley notes that spiritual peril attends even our obedience to God, since obedience may become the occasion of sin-fuelled superiority or self-congratulation — all of this on account of the depraved nature we continue to have.(1:342) Believers, after all, are “but in part `crucified to the world’, since the evil root remains in their heart.”(1:339)

Then Wesley abruptly makes the pronouncement with which the Wesleyan tradition has been more or less identified: inbred sin is destroyed as God grants to believers what they could never bestow on themselves and for which they could only wait upon God’s good pleasure. Despite our utmost spiritual attentiveness and discipline “we cannot wholly cleanse either our hearts or our hands. Most sure we cannot, till it shall please our Lord to speak to our hearts again, to `speak the second time, “Be clean.”‘”(1:346) Despite his insistence that such cleansing is by faith and not by those self-purgations that the mystics prized, Wesley’s insertion here is startling in view of everything he has insisted on to this point in order to support his contention that inbred sin is just that. After justification, however, he maintains that believers, now aware of even deeper recesses of their depravity (“the inbred monster’s face”), are to repent of these — and believe the promise of God here too — this time not merely for the pardon of sin but for all cleansing, by which Wesley means eradication of indwelling sin.(1:348) The result is nothing less than entire sanctification.(1:351)

In the penultimate paragraph of his tract Wesley quotes a hymn-stanza of Charles’ that begins, “Break off the yoke of inbred sin” yet concludes “Till I am wholly lost in thee!”(1:351) In his ultimate paragraph Wesley again quotes his brother, the stanza beginning, “I sin in every breath I draw” and goes on to say, “But still the Fountain open stands,/Washes my feet, my heart, my hands”, only to conclude, “Till I am perfected in love.”(1:352) In the final section of this paper the force of these two quotations — “wholly lost in Thee” and “perfected in love — will be expanded and put forward as what Wesley intends in his sometimes convoluted exposition of Christian perfection.

Forty-three years after Christian Perfection Wesley added On Perfection (1784). Here he qualified perfection further as he insisted that no one, regardless of the degree of sanctification, is ever beyond needing the intercession of the merit of Christ. No one is sinless. In view of our proclivity to transgress, our “innumerable violations of the Adamic as well as the angelic law, …every living man needs the blood of the atonement or he could not stand before God.”(3:73-74) In this tract Wesley now states unambiguously that “This is the sum of Christian perfection: it is all comprised in that one word, love.” Christians are mandated to love God and neighbour; “`on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets’: these contain the whole of Christian perfection.”(3:74) Furthermore, the command to be holy is identical to the command to love: “perfection is another name for universal holiness — inward and outward righteousness — holiness of life arising from holiness of heart.”(3:75)

Adopting the Puritan tenet that all the commands of God are but “covered promises”, Wesley maintains that God’s commanding his people to be holy is but God’s guaranteeing that they will be holy. “The command here is equivalent to a promise, and gives us full reason to expect that he will work in us what he requires of us.”(3:77)

In view of all that Wesley has said so far there must be probed the nature of that sin from which believers may be wholly saved now. Wesley’s well-known definition is “a voluntary transgression of a known law.” He vehemently insists that he has nowhere said we are delivered in this life from sin in any wider or deeper sense of the word. Moreover, “this is the sense wherein the word `sin’ is over and over taken in scripture.”(3:79) It is sin in this sense that is to be “rooted out”.(3:79) And it is sin in this sense that Wesley has in mind when he wearily, if not somewhat sarcastically, says to those who continue to oppose his doctrine of perfection with their simul…totus, “so we will allow sin, a little sin, to remain in us till death”(3:79) — only to deny this explosively, expostulating that the little that is tolerated will invariably be the beachhead wherefrom a fresh invasion of sin vanquishes us!(3:80)

Addressing objections to all of the foregoing, Wesley adds, “What rational objection can you have to loving the Lord your God with all your heart?”(3:83) — only to pose the same question again — “Why should you be averse to universal holiness — the same thing by another name?…the being inwardly conformed to the whole image of God, or an outward behaviour in every point suited to that conformity? Can you conceive anything more amiable than this? Anything more desirable?”(3:84) Not surprisingly Wesley poses the question a third time: “Can anything be more desirable than this entire self-dedication to him [God]?” (3:85) Plainly he is implying here that entire sanctification is entire dedication of oneself to God. The question has an edge to it when he puts it the fourth time: “Do you then love sin that you are so unwilling to part with it?…In God’s name, why are you so fond of sin?”(3:86)

The constellation of the foregoing expressions yields a rich understanding: holiness, love of God and neighbour, conformity to the will and image of God and behaviour appropriate to this conformity, whole-soulled self-dedication to God that entails disavowal of sin and desire to part with it. These were the pearls of Methodism that ought not to be cast before the unappreciative. For this reason such holiness should be taught only to those who are “pressing forward…always by way of promise, always drawing rather than  driving.”  Wesley’s grasp of a grace-wrought, faith-facilitated, self-offering to God that bleaches sin’s allure and breaks sin’s grip estops any suggestion that perfection is pelagian moralism, at the same time that it highlights the dynamic of the doctrine. Furthermore, holiness as constellated by Wesley’s nuanced affirmations and questions comports with the aspiration and conviction of the church catholic — his definition of sin excepted.

It is therefore all the more surprising to find in On Patience (1784) an exhortation to a perfection that amounts to utter sinlessness: “wholly delivered from every evil word, from every sinful thought; yea, from every evil desire, passion, temper, from all inbred corruption, from all remains of the carnal mind, from the whole body of sin.”(3:179) If this is not sinless perfection, then what would sin-free perfection be? Such sanctification “is to be received by plain, simple faith.”(3:178) Candidates for it are to “believe…that he [God] is not only able, but willing to do it now!”(3:179) Having interviewed 652 testifiers to this experience, Wesley concluded, “as all change was wrought in a moment — I cannot but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an instantaneous work.”(3:178)

Wesley, it will be recalled, believed the Continental Reformers to have made their peace too readily with the arrears of sin. Having settled into the simul…totus they offered, thought Wesley, little more than confirmation in one’s residual sin for those who were not upset by it and despair for those who were. Even the English Puritan tradition, so dear to Wesley (32 of the 50 books in his Christian Library were by Puritan divines), conceded too much to the “arrears”. While Puritanism amplified sanctification enormously in terms of the “third use of the law”, a notion the Puritans acquired from Melanchthon through Calvin, the third use being Christ’s claim upon the obedience of believers whereby he conforms them to himself, Wesley thought that Puritanism held out too little concerning deliverance from the grip of sin upon people and by the same token too little of present restitution of its disfigurement. He was convinced that God could do more now, even as believers should wait on God for it and delight in it.

II: Plain Account

The more that Wesley insisted God longed to do in his people, it must be repeated, was not the divine crowning of a more zealous moral endeavour. This much is evident from the formative thinkers who preceded Wesley and whose work Wesley cherished. Jeremy Taylor (Rules and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Dying) had stressed believers’ intentional resolution to lifelong purity of heart; believers must dedicate themselves singlemindedly, wholly, to God. Thomas a Kempis (The Imitation of Christ) similarly stressed “simplicity of intention” (singlemindedness) that was also a purity of affection: one loves but one thing. William Law (Christian Perfection, A Serious Call to the Devout and Holy Life) insisted that all must be yielded to  God.

It is important for us to be aware of Wesley’s reading in this regard, for our familiarity with it will be a major factor in our interpretation of his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777).

The following are major aspects of Plain Account.

[1] Scripture points to discipleship as “a uniform following of Christ, an entire inward and outward conformity to our master.”(PA  6)   This inward and outward conformity is a matter of loving God with our utmost ardour: “the one perfect good shall be your ultimate end.”(PA 7) Not forbidden to love all else, we none the less love all things for God’s sake. In this we are to have a “pure intention of heart” and a “steadfast regard to [God’s] glory.”(PA 8)

[2] In loving God whole-heartedly we recognize that God orders all things for our good.(PA 12)

[3] We are to love our neighbours, only to find that we can love even our enemy, since love banishes evil tempers.(PA 12)

[4] We eschew “laying up treasures on earth”, since wealth is as spiritually deleterious as adultery.(PA 14)

[5] We are not freed from temptation; nevertheless, some temptations, at least, lose their fascination, “flying about” us but no longer “troubling” us.(PA 23)

[6] While justification gives us the right to heaven, holiness renders us fit for heaven.(PA  31)

[7] All sanctification admits of growth; even the perfect grow in grace, in the knowledge of Christ, and in the love and image of God after their entire sanctification.(PA 33)

[8] The perfect continue to need Christ’s atoning intercession.(PA 43)

[9] Perfection is not a state but a relationship: “Christ does not give life to the soul separate from, but in and with, Himself.”(PA 44)

[10] Perfection is a theological/spiritual category and is not to be understood as a psychological category. The mind may be distressed, sorrowful, perplexed, in pain, while “the heart cleaves to God by perfect love, and the will is wholly resigned to him.”(PA 49)

[11] Those dedicated to holiness must ever guard against pride, enthusiasm (“pride’s daughter”) and antinomianism. Here Wesley speaks of enthusiasm as expecting the end without the means, as well as disesteeming reason, knowledge, wisdom, or thinking oneself invulnerable to temptation. Wesley everywhere abhors antinomianism: while holiness is certainly more than ethical rigour it is never less.(PA 88)

[12] Affliction is the best aid in fostering growth in the perfect.(PA 98)

[13] God’s perfecting us vindicates God’s promises to us.(PA 31)

[14] The testimony of the Spirit is essential to our awareness that we are love-filled. Merely feeling that we are is not adequate. The sanctified “have as clear an inward witness that I am fully renewed, as that I am fully justified.”(PA 52,56,57)

Critical Comments

[1] Wesley’s lattermost point is problematic. Justification, by definition, admits of no degrees. The forensic model precludes partial condemnation or partial acquittal. Sanctification, however, is not “all or nothing.” A plethora of scriptural injunctions urge us to keep on growing, to remove impediments to growth, to pray daily for forgiveness (this can only mean that believers sin daily), to acknowledge we are “unprofitable servants”, to own our Lord’s lefthanded assessment of his most intimate followers — “If you then, evil as you are…”. Furthermore, it would seem that “fully renewed” must ultimately mean to be sinless with respect to the “being” of sin and therefore to be beyond needing the intercession of the atonement.

[2] Wesley’s working definition of sin, adopted for the purposes of discussing perfection, “a voluntary transgression of a known law”, appears inadequate. To be sure, Wesley used “voluntary” and “known” so that believers could be encouraged by manifest victory over sin. At the same time, problems arise with respect to “known” when the human heart has limitless capacity to forget what it doesn’t want to remember or know, when scripture characteristically insists that ignorance of God is culpable, and when the force of general revelation (e.g., Romans 1) is to render humankind “without excuse”.

Problems arise too concerning Wesley’s use of “voluntary”. In the Continental and English Reformers “voluntary” meant “pertaining to the will” (voluntas), and “will” referred to one’s capacity to act; voluntary never meant conscious, deliberate, or premeditated — as Wesley means  here.  To transgress, according to the Reformers, is to transgress “voluntarily”, since transgression presupposes will. Pleading that one did not intend to do what one has done nor to sin in what one has done underestimates sin, presupposing as it does an undervaluing of the biblical witness to the complexity, subtlety and scope of the heart. However profoundly perfection may be expounded with respect to sin in Wesley’s sense of “voluntary”, too much remains unsaid for that corruption which is none the less culpable for its being involuntary. All of this is puzzling in view of the fact that Wesley insists throughout his work that by total depravity he means nothing less than the Reformers meant. He insisted that on the matter of total depravity he was not even a “hair’s breadth” from John  Calvin!

[3] Wesley is aware of the contradiction in his discussion of voluntary transgression, since in insisting that the perfect still need the atonement for their mistakes, where “mistake” means non-intentional sin in believers, he admits that all such mistakes are a transgression of the law of God, and therefore sin in the absolute sense of the word. Moreover, by referring to deep-dyed depravity in believers as “mistake” Wesley is fostering spiritual naiveness, shallowness and self-victimization in his readers.

[4] Wesley’s concluding, on the basis of interviewing several hundred people, from 1759 to 1762, that perfection is virtually instantaneous(4:178), poses many questions. Has Wesley here elevated experience above scripture? (Has he here displayed that “enthusiasm” he characteristically deplores?) Why has he atypically adduced something that contradicts his insistence everywhere that scripture is the unnormed norm for Christian understanding?

[5] While Wesley was careful, in his discussion on faith, to uphold faith as dynamic rather than static, and while he maintained that perfection was received in faith and was not a state, the tenor of much of his discussion of sanctification suggests a state (e.g., the testimony of the Spirit that one is fully renewed.) In On Patience Wesley maintains that unqualified humility is one feature of entire sanctification.(3:176) Since self-forgetfulness is the essence of humility (self-disparagement being but a form of self-preoccupation), the believer requires the testimony of the Spirit that he is utterly humble. There appears to be a problem here, and it may betoken a problematic aspect of Wesley’s doctrine of Christian Perfection as a whole.

[6] Wesley disagrees vehemently with those who hold that the texts in 1 John (so dear to Wesley in his insistence that no a priori limit be placed on God’s renewing his people in love) refer to the fact that believers no longer sin habitually or sin characteristically. (“No one born of God commits sin…”. 1 John 3:9) Yet exegetes maintain that the apostle’s selection of verb tenses is crucial: the present indicative and infinitive (rather than the aorist) support the understanding not that the Christian never sins (this notion is contradicted elsewhere in the epistle) but that sin doesn’t characterize the Christian (Christ’s righteousness does), and while Christians may be overtaken by sin, they do not sin “habitually.” Wesley scorned this expression. Again, it is surprising to see him dismiss a point in Greek syntax when his Greek testament was never out of his hand.

Strengths In Wesley’s Exposition

[1] Wesley’s discussion of “inordinate affections” (seen to be such only in the light of our “ordinate” love for God) points in the direction of what he was always struggling to say throughout his conversations on the doctrine dearest to him; namely, to love God above all else is ipso facto to order rightly those subordinate loves (which our love for God never negates). In loving God whole-heartedly we abandon ourselves to God’s will for us. Wesley knows that a massive work of grace is needed to free us from that self-preoccupation or inordinate self-love which otherwise inhibits us from loving God and neighbour self-forgetfully. To say the same thing differently, the singular work of grace that frees us to love God and neighbour unselfconsciously frees us from addiction to self.

While Wesley does not use “self-forgetful” the word suggests itself repeatedly. Love that calculates, assesses risks, evaluates outcomes is no love at all. “Entire” is entirely appropriate when Wesley means that we are turned out of ourselves and our self-absorption, because turned toward God and neighbour in a self-abandonment that is impervious to slights, setbacks, barbs, or apparent ineffectiveness. In all of this believers discover what Thomas Chalmers called “the expulsive power of a new affection” as self-forgetful love exorcises the leech-like evil tempers that otherwise leave us anaemic, self-absorbed, useless and ugly. “Perfection in love” (owning “the one perfect good” as one’s “ultimate end”) leaves us singleminded and therefore non-fragmented. The key to integration is neither a psychological technique (modern) nor a religious technique (pre-modern) but rather the whole-soulled, self-oblivious, otherward-looking love.

[2] Wesley’s linking affluence with spiritual declension is entirely biblical — and entirely unacceptable to the church today. Jesus maintains that we serve — and give ourselves to — either God or mammon. These two are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. Either our hand is open because giving or clenched because grasping. Wesley was dismayed, enraged, frantic, even contemptuous and derisory at the spectacle of Christians who preferred pennies to love-wrought, love-directed  perfection-in-love.

[3] While we are never freed from all temptation, and while the temptation to pride lurks everywhere, Wesley encouraged believers who were struggling with temptation to the point of spiritual exhaustion and therefore to the point of capitulation; he credibly pointed them to the relief that God’s sanctifying grace afforded. In short, they could be released from effectual temptation. If Wesley hadn’t proffered this much, the earliest Methodist communities would have lasted no longer than an Alcoholics Anonymous group in which no one ever becomes “contentedly sober.” Because grace denatured effectual temptation, God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it. While will and affection remain distinct they are none the less intimately related. Wesley was aware that we will most readily what we love (whether for good or ill.) We can always will, and do, what we don’t love, which is popularly described as “by force of will” — an expression suggesting someone who is grim, tense, taut, about to falter if relaxed for a moment. The experience of Alcoholics Anonymous comes to mind once again. The alcoholic who is contentedly sober can continue to will his sobriety in that he profits from “the expulsive power of a new affection.” The “dry drunk”, on the other hand, is someone whom AA members recognize by virtue of their own experience as chemically sober yet with the tempers or disposition of the not-yet-sober, agitated rather than contented, and therefore someone who always appears strained, racked, self-wrenched. Wesley inadvertently indicates as much in a discussion having nothing to do with Christian Perfection when he insists that grace renders affections “more vigorous” and therein “assists” the  will.(2:489)

Perhaps Wesley’s most perceptive discussion of this point is found in On Patience. The believer, qua believer, is justified and sanctified and therefore indisputably holy. Yet the believer’s holiness remains “mixed”; that is, such a person’s humility is genuine but not unadulterated with pride.(3:176) The new affection, “being filled with love”, integrates all his passions, with the result that “all his passions flow in a continued stream, with an even tenor to God.”(3:176) To the extent that there is “no mixture of contrary affections” the believer’s holiness is no longer mixed. By the same work of grace his will is now “wholly melted down into the will of God.”(3:176) In other words, will and affect are no longer a contrary mixture. The integration of the affections together with the integration of affect and will, are the fruit of the grace-wrought, faith-appropriated restoration of the imago dei to its integrity. Rejoicing in a new affection that assisted the will was one of the glories of early-day Methodism.

[4] Wesley is oceans deeper than contemporary Christendom when he puts his finger on the difference between our right to eternal blessedness (justification) and our fitness for it  (holiness).  Wesley makes this point again when he comments, “There is a difference between one that is perfect and one that is perfected. The one is fitted for the races; the other, ready to receive the prize.”(Notes, Phil.  3:12)  Holiness, it seems, has too often been discussed narrowly in terms of intra-psychic elevation (an experience) or in terms of moral reinvigoration (an achievement). Wesley more profoundly discusses it in terms of God. “Holy”, in the Hebrew bible, is that which characterizes God as uniquely God.) Wesley knows that the sanctifying work of grace is God himself forging himself within us as he forms us and fits us for the unimaginable intensity of utmost intimacy with him. C.S. Lewis has remarked, “It is safe to say that only the pure in heart shall see God; only the pure in heart will ever want to.” This is Wesley’s point exactly. In his discussion of Christian perfection, Wesley amplifies the truth that the all-consuming fixation of the Christian’s life is God.

[5] Wesley is hauntingly profound when he comments that affliction is the best aid to spiritual growth. (Compare C.H. Spurgeon: “Affliction is the best book in a minister’s  library.”)  Wesley knew that the Son of God, Son though he was, “learned obedience through what he suffered”. (Hebrews 5:8) Affliction visits itself on Christians just because they are Christians, even as it visited itself on their Lord on account of who he is. There is nothing in Wesley of the North American “Prosperity Gospel”. We must recall Wesley’s dictum that prosperity is a spiritual threat more dangerous than adultery, even as we recall his dismay at those whose new-found affluence (the product of discipleship, Wesley noted with perplexity) had blunted their zeal and their sacrifice. Even the perfect need affliction in order to grow; even the perfect will not be spared it. We should note here that Wesley insisted that his preachers continue to announce the “good news” of perfection, even as he insisted that the same preachers read Jonathan Edwards’ The Life and Diary of David Brainerd lest Methodist preachers come to think that their hardship-riddled lives were actually hard!

While Wesley never speaks of growth-spurts, surely the moment of entire sanctification is such a spurt, admitting as it does of subsequent growth. By extension I wish to suggest that a fruitful elaboration of Wesley’s thought concerns not one growth-spurt but any number of them as believers are brought to a crisis. Wesley has spoken of that moment in believers’ lives when they become aware as never before of inbred sin, of the deeper depredations of their depravity. At this juncture they either seek and await that work of grace which deals with their residual corruption, or they make their peace with their now-evident shoddy discipleship, eventually, perhaps, to sink all the way back down into unbelief.

For a long time I have thought that under God believers are repeatedly exposed, at critical moments in their Christian development, to a startling apprehension of their inbred corruption and/or an undeniable acquaintance with new dimensions and directions of God’s will for them. At this moment believers are faced with that crisis of which Wesley spoke. At this moment we either repent of and repudiate the “monster’s face” that has newly loomed before us; at this moment we either embrace and abandon ourselves to the will of God for us or we make our peace with a limping discipleship — eventually, perhaps, to find that it does not even limp. (Wesley would have said, “inevitably to find….”) Either God’s will is welcomed without reserve or Christian existence at any level shrivels — for to arrogate to ourselves the prerogative of limiting our obedience is to strangle faith. Wesley is helpful in his articulation of such a crisis. But why restrict it to one such crisis? The fact that discipleship is marked by many such crises serves to remind us that faith is always dynamic, never static.

[6] Wesley knew thoroughly the Eastern or Greek tradition of patristics. Therefore he would have appreciated the difference between the Greek teleios and the Latin perfectus. Perfectus, an unnuanced word, has the force of faultless, of not admitting further development. It is a term used of things rather than of persons.

Teleios, on the other hand, is highly nuanced, as its different translations into English indicate; e.g., “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect…” (Phil. 3:12 RSV), “Let those of us who are mature be thus minded…” (Phil. 3:15 RSV) “Perfect” and “mature” translate teleios within three verses! Teleios is a term more characteristically used of persons, and used specifically of persons in light of their function. In classical Greek it can mean “full-grown” (as opposed to underdeveloped), “mature in mind” (as opposed to someone learning the rudiments of a subject) or “qualified” (as opposed to someone lacking expertise). Wesley nowhere thoroughly exploits the lexicon with respect to teleios. At the same time he frequently says enough to indicate that perfectus is not what he has in  mind.

[7] Yet there is a dimension of Wesley’s understanding of perfection that appears to have been undervalued in the discussions concerning perfection: mysticism. While the mystical element has been  acknowledged,  mysticism appears not to have been considered as the essence of it. Wesley characteristically speaks of both inward and outward holiness, yet always with the understanding that inward holiness (the work of grace upon our “tempers” or dispositions) is the ground of all outward holiness. While many assessments of Wesley’s doctrine of perfection probe the theological adequacy and consistency of his argument concerning outward holiness, virtually none seems to consider gospel-facilitated and gospel-normed mysticism as the essence of inward holiness. Wesley left-handedly indicates his elemental conviction here in On God’s Vineyard (1787), written ten years after Plain Account.   This tract states briefly Wesley’s persuasion concerning God’s raising up Methodism for its unique witness in the church catholic, as well as Methodism’s trifling with its birthright. In it Wesley elaborates the essence of Methodism and insists that Methodists are “as tenacious of inward holiness as any mystic, and of outward as any Pharisee.”(3:507) The logic of this statement, it seems to me, is the heart of Wesley’s doctrine. A subsequent, closer reading of Plain Account brought to my attention the nature of the hymns, written by brother Charles, which John Wesley brings forward to support or illustrate the points he is endeavouring to make in his Plain Account: they support not a notion of sinlessness, especially as this came to be understood in nineteenth century holiness movements, but a mysticism that is always and everywhere Christ-normed. Before he quotes any hymns in this tract, however, Wesley speaks of our subordinating all to our love for God, adding, “Other sacrifices from us He would not; but the living sacrifice of the heart hath He chosen.” The last point points immediately to mystics who preceded Wesley such as Pascal or Theresa D’Avila. They spoke like this when a startlingly intense, intimate admittance to God had been vouchsafed to them and their vocabulary, so far from being adequate to it, could only stammer before it. Within a page or two of “Let it [i.e., sacrifice] be continually offered up to God, through Christ, in flames of holy love” (the lattermost expression being common to the mystics) Wesley is quoting hymn-lines whose mystical overtone is undeniable:

Till all my hallow’d soul be Thine;
Plunged in the Godhead’s deepest sea,
And lost in Thine immensity.(PA 10)

“All”, “plunged”, “deepest”, “sea”, “lost”, “immensity”: in the space of three lines Wesley co-opts repeatedly the oceanic imagery that the mystics relied on to point to, but never adequately describe, let alone explain — what they knew themselves through an experience of God beyond telling.

Alerted now, I perused the remainder of Plain Account, only to find the following:

A rest where pure enjoyment reigns,
And Thou art loved alone.(PA 26)

    Let all I am in Thee be lost;
Let all be lost in God.(PA 27)

    Fulfil, fulfil my large desires,
Large as infinity,

    Give, give me all my soul requires,
All, all that is in Thee.(PA 33)

                 …full with everlasting joy;
Thy beatific face display,

Thy presence is the perfect day. (PA 39)

The beatific vision, so very foreign to Protestants, is much-valued by Roman Catholic mystics.

Thy soul break out in strong desire,
Thy perfect bliss to prove;
Thy longing heart be all on fire
To be dissolved in love. (PA 54)

“Bliss”, “longing”, “all on fire”, “dissolved”; this is how the mystics customarily speak. We must note too the paradoxes in mystical testimony as language finally breaks down in apparent self-contradiction before the unspeakable mystery of God:

        And sink me to perfection’s  height.

[8] Wesley’s insistence on the simultaneity of the inward and the outward prevents the mystical from fleeing the distresses of this world. The mystical is always earthly-concrete, while the earthly is always eschatologically transfigured. The Christian who is lost or dissolved in God is the same person who campaigns with Wesley for schools, pharmacies, credit unions, and the healing advanced by such as Primitive Remedies.

III: The Mystical In Wesley’s “Perfection”

In his Journal entry of 15 June 1741, Wesley deplored the inadequacies of Luther’s Commentary on Galatians. Now Wesley said he was “utterly ashamed” of his erstwhile appreciation of the book — not least because Luther “is deeply tinctured with mysticism throughout, and hence often fundamentally wrong.”(19:200,201)   Earlier still (Journal, 25 January 1738) Wesley wrote, “all the other enemies of Christianity are triflers — the mystics are the most dangerous of its enemies. They stab it in the vitals, and its most serious professors are most likely to fall by them. May I praise him who hath snatched me out of this fire likewise, by warning all others that it is set on fire of hell.”(18:213)

Note in the foregoing how Wesley’s negative conclusion contrasts with his positive beginning: “I grew acquainted with the mystic writers, whose noble descriptions of union with God and internal religion made everything else appear mean, flat and insipid.” What was his objection? “But, in truth, they made good works appear so too; yea, and faith itself, and what not? These gave me an entire new view of religion — nothing like any I had before. But, alas! it was nothing like that religion which Christ and his apostles lived and taught.”(18:213) Traditional mysticism is a-Christological, and therefore, according to a son of the Magisterial Reformation, not Christian at  all.

Despite the foregoing I am convinced that a mystical dimension is to be found in Wesley’s groping after adequate theological expression where he and the mystics knew language to be forever inadequate: an acquaintance with God so intimate and intense, exquisite and abysmal that the heart apprehends what the head fails to comprehend or communicate. One thinks of the hymn-line of Albert Orsborn, “The mind cannot show what the heart longs to  know.”  When the heart moves from longing to know to knowing, the head still cannot “show” it. With respect to this aspect of the economy of faith Wesley consistently exhibited traits of mystical gold even as he continued to denounce mystical dross. We should not lose sight of the fact that eight of the fifty volumes in his Christian Library, which library he expected all Methodists to read, were written by Roman Catholic mystics of the Counter Reformation. To be sure Wesley edited these extensively, never hesitating to excise passages that he felt would point vulnerable pilgrims in the wrong direction. Still, in editing them, he most certainly recommended them. He published the Christian Library between 1749 and 1757, and included in it extracts from Macarius, Fenelon, Pascal, Brother Lawrence, D’Avila, Lopez, Bourignon, and Molina.

Then why did he speak so harshly of mysticism? What was the dross he repudiated?

[1] Mysticism spoke characteristically of union with God where it should have spoken of communion with God. Any suggestion that the creature is absorbed into the deity, the creature losing its essence as creaturely and taking on the essence of the divine, is to be abhorred as  unbiblical.  (Needless to say, it could always be argued that the mystics did not mean this either, even though they might be criticized for inaccurate and infelicitous articulation.

[2] Mysticism undervalued original sin. The mystics were then too close to regarding faith, or at least the capacity for faith or the desire for faith, as a natural human  possibility.

[3] Mysticism said much about the “dark night of the soul”, the spiritual desolation that Christians undergo as God withdraws himself from them. Wesley maintained characteristically that the “dark night” occurred on account of sin: “the most usual cause of inward darkness is sin of one kind or  another.”(2:208)  Sin alone beclouds believers’ sense of God’s presence. Here Wesley appears one-sided. While sin does as much, scripture speaks frequently of God’s withdrawing himself, as it were, hiding himself in order to discipline his people or refine or strengthen them.

[4] Mysticism, with its “Spirit-immediacy” (i.e., underemphasis on the Mediator), was always in danger of combining such immediacy with works-righteousness. Wesley looked askance at what he regarded as the mystics’ pitfall, always emphasizing for himself the biblical and Reformation affirmation of justification by faith.

[5] Mysticism tended to speak too little of the  atonement.   The mystics, concerned as they were with indescribable intimacy with God, had apparently overlooked the fact that sinners cannot be united with the holy God at all unless God acts in his unique freedom and grace to make himself and his estranged creation at one.

Despite the dross of the mystics, Wesley plainly cherished their gold.

[1] Their all-consuming preoccupation with God. For the mystics God is not a hobby, not an experiment, not an add-on in life, not the object of speculation. However abstract their work may appear to others, the mystics testify of God as concrete and of spiritual experience as real as sense-experience. God is their environment as surely as water is the environment of fish. For the most part it is not so much that mystics are aware of living in God as that they cannot understand not living in God — unless the dark night appears with a torment that is foreign to the spiritually shallow. In view of the mystics’ being lost in God, it is not surprising that their writing reflects the passion of God impassioning them. (See Pascal’s, “Not the God of the philosophers but of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob…. Fire! Fire! Fire!” Compare this with the Wesleyan hymns, quoted in Plain Account, that speak of “flames”, etc.)

[2] Their heart-experience. While Wesley resolutely resisted enthusiasm (the elevation of experience above scripture), always wanting Methodism to avoid even the hint of fanaticism, he also opposed formalism in equal measure. Formalism was the spiritual inertia of orthodox sterility. Formalism’s doctrinal articulation of Truth was unexceptionable at the same time that its evidence of transformation at the hands of the Spirit of Truth was unavailable. The mystics knew that while theological correctness is necessary, it is never sufficient: a doctrine-stocked head does not guarantee a Spirit-infused heart. Academic sophistication is categorically different from spiritual intimacy. Wesley maintained we are to be so close to God, “so nigh as to be one spirit with him. And this is true perfection.”(Notes, Heb. 7:19)

Here Wesley was surely reflecting the mystical element in the experience of God vouchsafed to many biblical personages. How else can we speak of Elijah’s experience of earthquake, wind, fire, and finally the still, small  voice?  How else of Elisha’s “entire” desire of a double portion of Elijah’s spirit? Not even Ezekiel’s vocabulary can do justice to Ezekiel’s Spirit-fired psychedelic drama! What besides mystical could be said of Isaiah’s prostration in the temple amidst smoking pillars and shouting seraphim and red-hot coals searing his lips (even as other worshippers yawned, wondering when the service was going to end)? Is it not natural for “such an intercourse between God and the soul”(11:53) to end in the orgasmic?

And then there is the apostle Paul. He matter-of-factly tells us he was “caught up to the third heaven…and this man heard things that cannot be told, which no one may utter.” The third heaven was an ancient way of speaking of the most intimate, most intense, most vivid presence of God. Three years before he was caught up to the third heaven he had been crumbled at the hand of God on his way to Damascus. In addition Paul had had a vision of the man from Macedonia who had pleaded with Paul to go there with the gospel. In addition to the Macedonian episode Paul had fallen into a trance while praying in the Jerusalem temple, and while in the trance had been told to get out of Jerusalem.

Two crucial points must be made here. (i) Paul never makes his mystical encounters the substance of his preaching. He expounds only “the word of the cross.” (ii) He never undervalues, denies, or dismisses such encounters. They were immensely important to him. Apart from the Damascus road encounter he would still be harassing followers of the Way! Had he regarded his “may not be uttered” engagements with God as insignificant, he would have avoided referring to them. Obviously he thought his readers should hear of them.

I am convinced that Wesley’s perfection has close affinities with the foregoing. The doctrine is one thing (and not difficult to criticize, since Wesley often inelegantly and inconsistently attempts to utter “what may not be uttered”); different and distinct is the experience of whole-soulled, self-oblivious, horizon-filling, heart-drenching love. An encounter with God that cuts one loose from the clutches, but not the claim, of the earth; the Spirit-filled aspiration to move so deeply into the heart of God as not to think of finding one’s way back out; the intimacy and immediacy and intensity of beholding the deepest hues of one’s depravity and the pardon of God’s sin-bleaching love as one is ravished by the flames of a love that scorches and saves in the same instant; to be taken out of oneself (the classical meaning of “ecstasy” — ek stasis); to find one’s integration as a by-product of a contemplation that eclipses anxieties about integration, frustration, material deprivation, bodily hardship; to be apprehended by the incomprehensible in such wise as to live where doctrine is but the crystallized exhaust fumes of that explosive fire which cremates “this body of death”; this is what Wesley is pointing to at the same time that, like Paul, he never substitutes it for “the word of the cross.”

[3] Their concern for spiritual discipline. “Methodist” was originally an epithet, but not an undeserved epithet. Spiritual discipline was a major concern of Wesley’s both before and after Aldersgate. Conversion, it must be remembered, redirects one’s personality; it does not turn one into a disparate personality (surely a sign of psychosis.) Wesley repudiated vehemently the Moravian practice of stillness. Relentless immersion in scripture, prayer, fasting, frequent attendance at the eucharist, accountability to others through the meetings of class and band, sacrificial service on behalf of the needy; all such rigours were essential to spiritual vigour.

[4] Their self-renunciation. Wesley admired the mystics in this regard. For years he remained perplexed as to why Methodists began with spiritual ardour only to suspire in a spiritual somnolence from which they needed to be awakened. He could only conclude that the gospel generated a discipleship which, because not yet sin-free, repudiated one expression of depravity, vulgarity, only to accommodate another: spiritual indifference born of refinement. As people came to faith, with its attendant sobriety, industry and thrift, their economic fortunes rose. Simultaneously their affluence caused their ardour, and therefore their self-renunciation, to abate. Their swelling savings account meant social superiority, which in turn accustomed them to a life of relative ease. Wesley, nearly frantic now, penned tract after  tract.  No matter; his newly-affluent people were no longer willing to endure cold, heat, hardship, persecution, deprivation, all of which they had embraced cheerfully when poor. The mystics modelled a self-renunciation for Wesley that he continued to covet for his people.

[5] Their aspiration to holy living. While Wesley was undoubtedly a son of the Reformation (after Aldersgate he always insisted on the primacy of justification by faith), there were aspects of the eastern church that he preferred to the western (both Roman and Reformed). One such aspect was the east’s characteristic understanding of salvation therapeutically rather than  juridically.  Simply put, the eastern church characteristically emphasizes transformation rather than transaction. While Roman and Reformed traditions underline the work of Christ in terms of transaction, without, of course, denying transformation, Wesley preferred to underline transformation, without, of course, denying  transaction.  Paramount for Wesley was the difference Jesus Christ effects in his people. This motif is found everywhere in Wesley’s works. In his The Duty of Constant Communion he warns readers against those who claim to know themselves pardoned of the guilt of sin while not yet delivered from the power of sin. It is our deliverance, he insists, that confirms our pardon!  (3:429)

In addition, Wesley saw around him the wreckage of antinomianism, and never failed to distance himself from it. He anathematized lawlessness, utter lack of restraint, indifference to God’s claim upon our obedience. Holy living was the sign of a holy people, and a conscientiously, intentionally holy people was the reason God had raised up the Methodists, he believed. The doctrine of sanctification was “the grand deposit” that God had entrusted with Methodism.

All of the foregoing is gathered up in the mystics’ aspiration to perfection, that singleminded pursuit of self-forgetful love of God and humankind. With his Anglican insistence on “that we may perfectly love Thee”, Wesley, in typical Anglican fashion, highlighted so many strengths of the church catholic: the Patristic note of entire sanctification, the Magisterial Reformation’s insistence on the “hinge” of  justification  as well as its equally strong insistence on the distinction between justification and  sanctification,  the Radical Reformation’s urgency concerning detachment from material distractions, the Puritans’ esteem of the Law lest sin be reduced to the merely regrettable, the mystics’ recognition of the place of extra-material renunciation, with all of this comprehended in “the fundamental doctrine of the Church, namely, salvation by faith.”(11:82)

To be sure, brothers John and Charles disagreed on what should be denoted by “perfection.” John felt Charles pitched it so high as to render it unattainable. Charles insisted that a perfection that was less than perfectus was no perfection at  all.  John, on the other hand, knew that believers would continue to hunger for deliverance from this or that sin only if they knew there was deliverance from any sin. And since it was not the prerogative of Christians to set limits to the incursion and efficacy of grace in this life, then why not deliverance from all sin? Charles, disgusted at the overstatements of those whose zeal submerged wisdom, could only bemoan “our darkest ignorance of pride” and decry,

Believe delusion’s ranting sons,
And all the work is done at  once.

John, however, saw that either Methodism risked what Charles deplored or Methodism settled for that fecklessness which had already appeared in those fellowships whose complacency allowed them an offhand accommodation of simul…totus.

Needless to say critics were soon pointing out some of the less elegant aspects of John Wesley’s exposition of Christian perfection. When his Anglican superiors accused him of importing a novelty into Anglicanism, not understanding how much he hated theological novelty, he asked them, “Why do you fault me? This morning you prayed the Collect for Holy Communion from the Anglican Prayerbook:

Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open,
all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid;
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration
of Thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love Thee and
worthily magnify Thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord.

When you prayed it,” asked Wesley, “did you mean it?”

Do we? Is there “anything more amiable than this? anything more desirable?”

1997

Appendix

In his recent book, Responsible Grace, Randy Maddox states that Wesley doesn’t use “`will’ to designate the human faculty of rational self-determination…rather, he equated the will with the affections.” In the context of Wesley’s hamartiology, Maddox speaks of “will — i.e., our affectional nature”, and later again, of “Wesley’s identification of `’will’ and `affection’.” Since the nature of the will (the precise meaning of “voluntary”) appears to be one of the more problematic aspects of Wesley’s understanding of perfection, the relation of affect to will should be probed.

In The Image of God (1730) Wesley speaks of the Edenic “endowment” of understanding, and comments, “this comprehensive understanding was the least part of that image of God wherein man was originally made. Far greater and nobler was his second endowment, namely, a will equally perfect. It could not but be perfect while it followed the dictates of such an understanding. His affections were rational, even and regular.” (4:294) Here Wesley appears to uphold the traditional distinctions among will, affect and understanding.

In his subsequent The Wisdom of Winning Souls (1731), Wesley stipulates that in seeking the conversion of someone we must first “strengthen his understanding”, then move on to “regulating the affections.” The head must be enlightened and the heart cleansed. “Otherwise, the disorder of the will again disorders the understanding, and perverseness of affection will cause an equal perverseness of judgment.” (4:313) Again it appears that Wesley does not equate the will with the affections, even as Wesley does regard them as internally related: the impairment of any one of will, affect and understanding entails the impairment of the others.

Fifty years later, in The End of Christ’s Coming (1781), Wesley speaks again of humankind’s endowment: “he was endued also with a will, with various affections (which are only the will exerting itself in various ways) that he might love, desire and delight in that which is good; otherwise his understanding had been to no purpose.” (2:474) Here Wesley speaks of affection in terms of will (not vice versa) yet without equating will and affection. In the same tract Wesley speaks of “liberty”, without which “both the will and the understanding would have been useless. Indeed without liberty man had been so far from being a free agent that he could have been no agent at all.” (2:475) Here Wesley mentions “will” in the conventional sense of “the capacity to act.”

Months later Wesley penned On the Fall of Man (1782). Here he reiterates the fact that humankind was “endued with understanding, with a will, including various affections, and with liberty, a power of using them in a right or wrong manner, of choosing good or evil. Otherwise neither his understanding nor his will would have been to any purpose.”(2:409) Once more Wesley speaks of understanding, will and affections without identifying any one in terms of another.

Opposing the notion that God acts irresistibly on humans, as God acted in fashioning the material creation, Wesley writes in The General Spread of the Gospel (1783), “He [i.e., the human creature] would no longer be a moral agent any more than the sun or the wind, as he would no longer be endued with liberty, a power of choosing or self-determination.”(2:489) In On the Fall of Man, by “liberty” Wesley had meant the condition of exercising power, he now includes the power of choosing or self-determination. He can even use “liberty” as virtually synonymous with “will”; e.g., “…the understanding, the affections, and the liberty are essential to a moral agent.”(2:489)

 

This paper first appeared in Theological Digest & Outlook (Burlington) in July of 1995

JOHN WESLEY
and
THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT

Abingdon Press’s 35-volume annotated edition of Wesley’s Works (14 of which have been completed) begins with four volumes of sermons. Yet as soon as newly interested readers open Volume I of Sermons On Several Occasions they know that the form of these “sermons” has to differ from the form of Wesley’s marketplace utterances. The crowds of thousands who heard Wesley preach included many who were minimally literate, more than a few who were not even that, and scarcely anyone who possessed Wesley’s sophistication in theology, philosophy and literature. The published sermons, on the other hand, are replete with references that presuppose no little erudition. In addition the published sermons are devoid of the illustrations and the rhetorical devices that preachers employ to retain the attention of those unaccustomed to the relatively abstract medium of an oral address lacking the advantage of repeated examination. Plainly the form of the printed sermon is better suited to discussion in the classroom or perusal in the study.

In fact for the most part the sermons are the unillustrated distillate of Wesley’s daily pronouncements; unillustrated, that is, compared to the sort of preaching necessary to attract and hold throngs. The sermons, then, were essentially tracts written for people who needed a compendium of the doctrines which underlay the Revival. In addition the sermons attempted to defuse the hostile attacks of those who misunderstood Wesley and his movement, falsely accusing them of theological dilution, social destabilization, psychological exploitation, and even sedition.

While the sermons were not preached verbatim as they appear in Wesley’s Works, they were yet “preached” inasmuch as Wesley’s ceaseless itinerating found him constantly expanding, illustrating, repeating and subtly reshaping them. (According to his Journal, for instance, he preached on Ephesians 2:8 — “For by grace you have been saved through faith” — no fewer than 60 times.)

There is another sense in which some sermons were “preached”: the theological substance of the sermon was found in Wesley’s public proclamation while the sermon itself was never preached on any one occasion. In other words the sermon was made public only in written form, even though its content leavened Wesley’s oral pronouncements on assorted topics. The two sermons, “The Witness of the Spirit (I and II)” belong to this latter category. Today we should simply designate them essays.

As is evident from even a casual reading of the Works, Wesley had to contend on several fronts throughout his ministry. One front was the Scylla/Charybdis of “formality” and “enthusiasm”. Formalism was an intellectual frigidity that confined itself to doctrinal refinement (or speculation) without impact on life. Enthusiasm (which Wesley defined as the elevation of experience above scripture) was a superheated emotionalism that disdained doctrine only to gush and gurgle in a mindless sentimentality devoid of morality and a religious romanticism devoid of righteousness. Head and heart were always to complement one another.

Wesley refers to these two pitfalls in his Preface as he states once again the purpose of his work:

And herein it is more especially my desire, first to guard those who are just setting their faces toward heaven…from formality, from mere outside religion, which has almost driven heart-religion [Wesley’s Journal entry of 2nd August, 1771, speaks of heart-religion as “righteousness and joy in the Holy Ghost … the gate of it, justification … the life of God in the soul of man.”] out of the world; and secondly, to warn those who know the religion of the heart  … lest at any time they make void the law through faith, and so fall back into the snare of the devil.

When Christians of Methodist conviction spoke of the witness of the Spirit they were instantly accused of an enthusiasm amounting to fanaticism. Wesley, however, steadfastly refused to be stampeded. He knew that the indefensible vagaries found in those who valued heat above light did not discredit the gospel-quickened faith of those who cherished St.Paul’s legacy: God’s children are permitted and privileged to know themselves such. Wesley steadfastly maintained that the witness of God’s Spirit, assuring believers of their standing in Christ, had everything to do with their salvation, their comfort, their holiness (and therefore their temporal and eternal happiness, since he consistently linked holiness and happiness — “None but the holy are finally happy”); everything as well to do with an undeviating discipleship that eschews both formalism and fanaticism; everything to do, for preachers especially, with urgency and zeal in the fulfilment of their vocation.

Wesley always regarded the Sermons On Several Occasions as his major theological statement. At the same time the major statement never precluded many minor. He supplemented the Sermons with other treatises as situations arose, in the unfolding of the 18th century Evangelical Revival, that required additional comment. (One thinks immediately of A Plain Account of Christian Perfection [1777] bracketed by two sermons, “Christian Perfection [1741] and “On Perfection” [1784]. Rather oddly, then, the Sermons On Several Occasions were considerably less “occasional” than the supplementary materials, the sermons functioning as the theological primer of Wesleyan Methodism. At the same time they were a theological grid that provided the interpretative framework needed to prevent Methodist Christians — and preachers especially — from suffering doctrinal disorientation. (In this regard the Sermons functioned much as Calvin’s Institutes had in the 16th century Reformation in Geneva, even as Calvin continued to write occasional pieces in response to crises.)

 

 

THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT

“… it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spiritthat we are children of God.”

(Romans 8:16)

The inclusion of the “The Witness of the Spirit” (I&II) in SOSO indicates the place Wesley gave to assurance in his understanding of the Christian life. For several years his critics had insisted that the Revival merely fanned the “enthusiasm” that the 18th Century Enlightenment despised. While the same critics regarded assurance as merely one more aspect of the despicable, Wesley himself insisted that the spiritually needy who looked to the gospel yet were devoid of assurance had therein had their everyday anxiety exacerbated by a peculiarly religious anxiety. At the same time he admitted that those who prattled cavalierly of assurance even as they undervalued the specificity of gospel-truth plainly were enthusiasts and merited being exposed as such. He wanted to help his people along the fine line between the two distortions. He knew that failure to identify and walk the fine line would leave his people meandering and flip-flopping.

In the first paragraph of Part I Wesley identifies the pitfall of subjectivism. “How many have mistaken the voice of their own imagination” for the witness of God’s Spirit, only to assume they were children of God when in fact they continued to behave in conformity to their actual father, the evil one! This lack of self-perception (born of presumption) is “truly and properly” enthusiasm. As lack of self-perception is protracted it sets like concrete. In addition to their initial mistake the enthusiasts confuse their vehemence and impetuosity and intractability with obedience to the command of God to “contend for the faith.” (Jude 3)

In view of the widespread abuse of such a “witness” Wesley concedes that nervous observers might wish to dismiss the contemporary application of the doctrine, relegating the “testimony” to those extraordinary gifts that were said to cease with the close of the apostolic age. His reading of scripture, however, does not permit this facile evasion — even though he will have to spend the rest of his life disowning the distortions surrounding this one theological conviction. Wesley could never deny that the “testimony of the Spirit” looms large in scripture, “a truth revealed therein not once only, not obscurely, not incidentally, but frequently, and that in express terms … as denoting one of the peculiar privileges of the children of God.”

In discussing the relation of the Spirit’s testimony to our spirit’s, Wesley carefully avoids collapsing one into the other. The text (not to mention the corroborating experience of believers) speaks of both the testimony of God’s Spirit and the testimony of ours concerning our adoption.

With respect to the testimony of our spirit Wesley maintains that scripture is unambiguous. It states repeatedly, for instance, that the children of God keep the commandments of God (1 John 2:5) even as they love fellow-children of God (1 John 3:14). Upon examining themselves believers conclude that they do keep the commandments of God and love fellow-Christians, and therefore rightly conclude that they are indeed God’s children. Wesley admits that “this is no other than rational evidence: the ‘witness of our spirit’, our reason or understanding.”

If self-doubt besets believers and they ask themselves how they know whether they truly love fellow-Christians or keep God’s commandments, Wesley attempts to succour them by resorting to an intuitionist epistemology, as valid in the realm of Christian existence as it is in the realm of sense-experience.

How does it appear that to you that you are alive? And that you are now in ease and not in pain? Are you not immediately conscious of it? By the same immediate consciousness you will know if your soul is alive to God; if you are saved from the pain of proud wrath …. By the same means you cannot but perceive if you love, rejoice, and delight in God.   …. Your conscience informs you from day to day if you do not take the name of God within your lips unless with seriousness and devotion, with reason and godly fear…”

The foregoing is the testimony of our spirit. “It is a consciousness of having received, in and by the Spirit of adoption, the tempers mentioned in the Word of God as belonging to his adopted children.”

Plainly, the testimony of our spirit is an inference-following-reflection. Self-examination concerning our conformity to the command of God leaves our conscience unaroused; we conclude that the Spirit of God has effected such transmutation within us as to give rise to those marks that constrain us to thank God for his self-evidencing work of grace.

Admittedly, Wesley is placing no little emphasis on the assumption that self-examination yields self-perception. He did not deny the submerged currents of sin in humankind, as his unqualified endorsement of the 16th century Reformers’ doctrines of Original Sin and Total Depravity attests. At the same time, he always insisted on holding out hope for those discouraged by the submerged currents (which, sorry to say, are never merely submerged). He knew that hope, in order to be biblical hope and not natural wishful thinking, had to be grounded in the actuality of deliverance. Throughout his ministry Wesley reminded his people that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it. (According to Wesley, deliverance from the power of sin was confirmation that one had been pardoned from the guilt of sin.) The blaspheming substance-abuser, now possessed of God-fearing sobriety and social usefulness, could legitimately conclude that by the grace of God he was a child of God.

Having discussed briefly the testimony of our spirit so as to distinguish it from the testimony of God’s Spirit, Wesley proceeds to consider the latter.

Wesley knows he is probing mystery in this matter. Mystery, according to the author of this paper, is not something bizarre or Hallowe’enish or occultish. Mystery is an everyday phenomenon (e.g., being in love) that is therefore ordinary or commonplace even as it is profound. It is inexpressibly profound; no vocabulary can do justice to it. Mystery may be described but never explained, let alone explained away. Mystery may be pointed to, commended, urged upon others, above all experienced. Yet before it language can finally only stammer. Definition and explanation are impossible; description is inadequate, description being the inarticulate attempt at having others undergo the same experience even as everyone recognizes the poverty of the words which have to be employed.

Wesley knows there are unfathomably mysterious depths to our encounter with God that leave our speech halting. The fact of the Spirit’s testimony does not leave Wesley tongue-tied at all; yet when he attempts to describe the how of it he first cautions us, “It is hard to find words in the language of men to explain ‘the deep things of God’. Indeed there are none that will adequately express what the children of God experience.” Nonetheless, since the alternative to semi-functional articulation is non-communication born of silence, Wesley steps forward. His initial assertion is unambiguous.

The testimony of the Spirit is an inward impression on the soul whereby the Spirit of God directly ‘witnesses to my spirit that I am a child of God’; that Jesus Christ hath loved me and given himself for me; that all my sins are blotted out, and I, even I, am reconciled to God.

The substance of the Spirit’s testimony is readily understood: believers have been reconciled to God through the love of that God who sacrificed himself in his Son, with the result that their condemnation is rescinded. The “how” of the Spirit’s testimony, says Wesley, requires much greater explication even as adequate explanation is finally impossible.

In his initial statement Wesley’s use of “inward impression on the soul” and “directly” indicates clearly where the Spirit’s testimony differs from our spirit’s. Whereas the latter is inference-following-reflection, the former is entirely non-inferential — at the same time as it is necessarily related to the gospel. The testimony of the Spirit is an idiogenic “mediated immediacy”. The immediacy of the Spirit is not the immediacy that Kierkegaard rightly denounced. (“Immediacy is paganism”, since immediacy disdains the particularity and historicity of the Incarnate one, whereas the immediacy of the Spirit is always “mediated” through the gospel.) At the same time, the testimony of the Spirit is not a conclusion drawn from premises. It is that “stamp” of the Spirit who presses and impresses himself upon us in such wise that he authenticates himself, and does so indisputably. In other words, the self-authentication of the Spirit is necessary (there being nothing outside of God that is able to authenticate him) and sufficient (there being nothing outside of God that is needed to authenticate him).

Next Wesley is careful to remind us that while he discussed the testimony of our spirit before that of God’s Spirit, in fact the latter precedes the former. “We must be holy of heart and holy in life before we can be conscious that we are so…. But we must love God before we can be holy at all; this being the root of all holiness. Now we cannot love till we know he loves us…. And we cannot know his pardoning love till his Spirit witnesses to our spirit.”

Several matters invite comment here. Wesley’s “know” is plainly more than “have correct information about”. He refers here not to the “head-knowledge” of an intellectual (doctrinal) apprehension of the meaning of “God is love”, but rather to “heart-knowledge”, the “inward impression on the soul”, the innermost conviction and assurance that the theological assertion concerning God’s love adequately describes the reality of the cosmocrator’s benevolent seizure of me.

The subtlety of Wesley’s dialectic in this discussion is profound. While the testimony of God’s Spirit plainly has to do with the “heartfelt-ness” of immediacy, Wesley judiciously directs believers away from themselves, away from a preoccupation with introspection. Evidently he fears fostering an introspection amounting to obsession; an obsession wherein believers think they can discern the testimony of God’s Spirit by ransacking themselves. First we must love God; we are directed away from ourselves to God, only then to find that God so honours our looking to him as to vouchsafe to us the assurance that he has pardoned us. In other words, reality always precedes apprehension of reality. At the same time, it is the nature of this reality (God) to forge within humankind an apprehension of the reality. The logical priority of the Spirit (i.e., the logical priority of God) does not entail divine remoteness. In fact the proximity (proximity of such a degree as to generate an “impression on the soul”) of God simultaneously facilitates the categories for apprehending the selfsame proximity. It is not the case that an impression is made on the soul even as beneficiaries of it are left puzzled as to its nature, origin and meaning. (Much as primitive people might be aware of the phenomena of a thunderstorm yet remain ignorant as to its origin and significance.) Wesley has carefully distinguished the transcendence of God from the testimony of God’s Spirit, and these in turn from a projection or fantasy that would leave him defenceless against the charge of enthusiasm.

The logical order of his discussion is inviolable: we must be reconciled to God through becoming the recipients of God’s pardon before we can be conscious of this.

So very concerned is Wesley to minimize misunderstanding on this matter that he looks at the topic now from this angle, now from another, much as a gemmologist observes scintillations reflecting off a precious stone as the stone is viewed from several different angles. Succinctly he comments, “It is he [i.e., the Holy Spirit] that not only worketh in us every manner of thing that is good, but also shines upon his own work, and clearly shows what he has wrought.” God enlightens us as to what God is doing in us. Were God to effect his salvific work in us and not enlighten us concerning this work within us, Wesley reminds us, we should then be left without awareness of “the things which are freely given to us of God” (1 Corinthians 2:12), and to this extent the testimony of our spirit would be enfeebled, in fact rendered impossible. Because God illumines us with respect to his work within us through the testimony of his Spirit, we are never left (i) wondering incessantly whether we are “in the boat” with Jesus or have missed it, (ii) attempting to impart an ersatz “assurance” by means of “enthusiasm”. The testimony of God’s Spirit, in concert with the testimony of our spirit, obviates both anguished insecurity and groundless bravado.

Once again Wesley turns the gem over in his hand. Anticipating a query from someone who is afflicted with doubt concerning her adoption, Wesley reverts to his intuitionist epistemology. When, in the normal course of our lives, we delight in something creaturely that pleases us, the immediacy of our delight is as much assurance as we need (or can have) as to the actuality of our delight. (In the same way, he adds, someone in pain needs no argument to persuade her she is in pain. To love God, delight in God, rejoice in God is to know incontrovertibly that one loves, delights, and rejoices. And to know that God is the author and object of all this is to know that one is a child of God.

Then, in his sermon, “The Witness of the Spirit”, Wesley advances for our consideration what seems only a redundant instance of his oft-illustrated assertion, “A Christian…has as full an assurance [of his being a child of God] as he has that the scriptures are of God” — when in fact he has reached back into Calvin’s doctrine of scripture and borrowed its logic concerning the work of the Spirit. In a pregnant passage much cherished throughout the Reformed tradition Calvin writes, “…scripture exhibits fully as clear evidence of its own truth as white and black things do of their colour, or sweet and bitter things do of their taste.” (Institutes, 1.7.2) Just as scripture needs no external authentication of its truth, so believers need no external authentication of their standing in Christ. Calvin’s point is this: to the extent that the Spirit is used of God to bind us to Jesus Christ (i.e., to the extent that the Spirit authenticates Jesus Christ and our inclusion in him), the Spirit by that fact also authenticates the means by which our Lord and we became fused. Wesley’s point is that as the gospel-truth concerning the Spirit’s witness is promulgated, the Spirit confirms the adoption of believers so as to leave them no doubt concerning the truth that is now “impressed” upon their heart. Since God alone authenticates himself to believers (the 16th century Reformers were fond of saying, “God is the only fit witness to himself”), the demand for the criteria of such authentication Wesley pronounces an “idle demand”.

Wesley concludes his overview of the Spirit’s testimony by reminding readers that the mystery surrounding this unique work of the Spirit precludes definition and explication.

The manner how the divine testimony is manifested to the heart I do not take upon myself to explain…. But the fact we know: namely, that the Spirit of God does give a believer such a testimony of his adoption that while it is present to the soul he can no more doubt the reality of his sonship than he can doubt the shining of the sun while he stands in the full blaze of his (sic) glory.

In Part II of “The Witness of the Spirit” Wesley amplifies this point, arguing that the moment Paul heard the voice of God on the Damascus road he knew it to be such, even though the apostle himself could never have proposed criteria by which to deem any one “voice” to be the voice of God. Wesley simply states, “But how he knew this who is able to explain?”. In the same way, when God speaks forgiveness to believers of any era they know themselves pardoned beyond refutation or extrinsic confirmation.

Yet lest any “enthusiast” claim hallucination or any other species of subjectivism to be the word of God Wesley carefully distinguishes once more between the joint testimony (of Spirit and spirit) and presumption or delusion. The unrepentant sinner, upon hearing of this “privilege of true Christians,…is prone to work himself up into a persuasion that he is already possessed” of it. Nonetheless, scripture consistently points out that conviction of sin always precedes assurance of pardon. Drawing on his experience as spiritual director, Wesley notes that humility is one concomitant of the testimony of the Spirit, while the presumptuous invariably exalt themselves. In the same vein the presumptuous are cavalier concerning the commandments of God, especially the command enjoining self-denial or cross-bearing, the presumptuous loftily announcing that they have “…found an easier path to heaven.” Moreover, those who have deluded themselves in the matter of the Spirit’s testimony undervalue scripture’s insistence on the joint testimony; their “discipleship” fails to display the fruits of the Spirit. In any case the vehemence of the self-deluded’s expostulations does not obviate the veridicality of the Spirit’s work in others, just “as a madman’s imagining himself a king does not prove that there are no real kings.”

Calvin had said that when even the children of God look into their own heart what they find there is enough to horrify them; they find pathetically little evidence of their renewal at God’s hand. Is Calvin correct? Is Wesley naive where the Genevan may have been realistic? In Part II, written in the light of 20 years’ pondering Part I and 20 years’ evaluating the spiritual condition of the Methodist people, Wesley concurs with Calvin’s assessment. There are episodes in the Christian’s life when the residues of sin becloud the testimony of our spirit. At such times only divine testimony can attest that we are a child of God in the face of our inner whisperings to the contrary. For this reason Wesley now states as a spiritual director of greater maturity, “…we contend that the direct witness may shine clear, even while the indirect one is under a cloud.” (It is noteworthy that while Calvin doesn’t use the vocabulary of “the testimony of our spirit” he does recognize the effect of believers’ residual sin upon their assurance of their standing in Christ. In his commentaries on Hebrews 10:22 and 2 Corinthians 1:21 Calvin speaks of the subordinate assurance of faith that the love engendered in believers lends them. However, Calvin strictly understands such assurance — born of the fact that the “good tree” is now producing “good fruit” — to be subordinate. It can never be the ground of assurance. Love is defective even in believers, he reminds us in his commentary on 1 John 4:13, and the good deeds of even believers ever remain sin-tainted.) Commensurate with his greater maturity Wesley shifts his emphasis so as to link the testimony of the Spirit explicitly to justification: assurance chiefly confirms believers in their forgiveness at God’s hand and their acceptance with God despite the arrears of their sin. Indeed, since we cannot believe ourselves justified, on account of our lingering proclivity to sin, apart from the witness of the Spirit, to deny the testimony is “in effect to deny justification by faith.” This, of course, Wesley will never do, thoroughgoing son of the Reformation that he is. As if to remind his readers of his confessional standing he borrows the vocabulary of this 17th century Puritan forebears: the Spirit attests the “imputation” of Christ’s righteousness.

Even so, episodes of the sort mentioned above do not last forever. The clouds that becloud the indirect witness part, and Wesley returns to his characteristic insistence that the testimony which assures believers is finally a joint testimony as the fruits of the Spirit appear, however slenderly, in Christ’s people.

 

For as long as breath remained in him Wesley rejoiced that “this great evangelical truth has been recovered, which had been for many years wellnigh lost and forgotten.”

Who had recovered it? And who has been mandated to safeguard it? Wesley’s conviction here was ironfast.

It more clearly concerns the Methodists, so called, clearly to understand, explain, and defend this doctrine, because it is one grand part of the testimony which God has given them to bear to all mankind.

The mandate has never been revoked.

 

Victor A. Shepherd

 

This paper first appeared in Theological Digest & Outlook (Burlington) in January of 1995.

On Honouring A Foreparent In Faith: John Wesley And “The Duty Of Constant Communion” Luke 22: 19                   1 Corinthians 11:27 -29   The fifth of the Ten Commandments tells us that we are to honour our father and mother in order that our days may be long in the land that the Lord our God gives us. Most immediately we are to honour our biological father and mother, those who begat us and bore us and gave us life, and whose wisdom, faithfulness and encouragement helped us past pitfallswhen we were less than mature. Lutheran Christians ever since Martin himself have believed that God intends a wider application of the fifth commandment.         Lutherans have always believed that “Honour your father and mother” also means “Honour all — however long dead — whose wisdom, faithfulness and encouragement now assist you, inspire you, make you wise; in short, honour all whose wisdom, faithfulness and encouragement continue to help you past pitfalls in your discipleship since your faith isn’t yet mature.” If our Lutheran friends are correct, then we obey the fifth commandment as we honour our foreparents in faith. One such foreparent of all Christians is John Wesley.         He can help us past many pitfalls that surround us and concerning which we need help, since our faith is less than mature.         Today we are going to honour him by taking to heart his convictions concerning Holy Communion.   In 1787, when Wesley was 84 years old, he wrote a tract called, “The Duty of Constant Communion”.         His 1787 tract was a re-write of the tract he had penned 55 years earlier in 1732. “Five and fifty years ago”, he tells us in that English style which is archaic in the 21st Century, “Five and fifty years ago the following discourse was written for the use of my pupils at Oxford … I then used more words than I do now.         But I thank God I have not yet seen cause to alter my sentiments in any point which is therein delivered.”         (He means that what he believed in 1732 he still believed in 1787.) Immediately Wesley says that while he isn’t surprised at people who don’t fear God being indifferent to Holy Communion, he finds it incomprehensible that many who do fear God are infrequently found at the Lord’s table.         When he asked these people why they shied away from Holy Communion they quoted Paul’s word in 1st Corinthians 11:27: “Whoever…eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”         In Wesley’s era God-fearing people were absenting themselves from Holy Communion inasmuch as they regarded themselves unworthy and didn’t want to bring the judgement of God upon them. It still happens. On the first communion Sunday of my first pastoral charge I stepped into the sanctuary to begin worship only to find that the congregation had segregated itself, some worshippers sitting on one side of the sanctuary, other worshippers on the other side.         I asked what this meant and was told that on communion Sundays the congregation divided itself into those deeming themselves worthy and those unworthy. I was appalled, and immediately had everyone sit together.         Whatever Paul meant by “eating and drinking unworthily” he didn’t mean that. Let us be sure we understand something crucial.         God is free; God is sovereign; therefore God can meet us anywhere at any time in any manner through any means.         Nevertheless, he has promised that he will invariably meet – unfailingly meet us – through scripture, sermon and sacrament.         In other words, while we may be overtaken by God at any time by any means (surprised by God, that is) we know that we shall find God for sure, every time, at scripture, sermon and sacrament.         Therefore we must never absent ourselves from these.         When well-intentioned yet misguided people told Wesley they absented themselves from Holy Communion lest they endanger themselves through partaking “unworthily”, he told them they were endangering themselves far more by not partaking at all.         And then he told them why they were at spiritual risk for not partaking at all.   I: — In the first place, Wesley reminded them, it is the Lord’s command that we come to his table.         “Do this in remembrance of me.         Do it.”         It’s an imperative, not a suggestion.         Jesus Christ commands us to come to his table.         It is therefore the obligation of everyone who believes in him to obey him and come. Not to come is simply to defy and disdain the one we call “Lord”.         But to call Christ “Lord” is to obey him, at least to want to obey him, to be eager to obey him. How can we call upon him as Lord, admit that he who is Lord is also our Justifier, yet continue to regard ourselves as unworthy?         More to the point, he hasn’t commanded us to come if first we deem ourselves worthy; he has simply commanded us to come. Then Wesley adds a footnote.         On the eve of his death Jesus told his followers that he wouldn’t call them servants, since a servant merely obeys without being admitted intimately to the mind and heart of the servant’s master. Rather because he himself, continued Jesus, because he has drawn his followers most intimately into his mind and heart he calls them servants no longer but friends. (John 15:15) “Now”, says Wesley, “if our Lord draws us so intimately into his mind and heart as to call us friends, surely we can’t turn down his final request. What friend turns down his dying friend’s final request?” There is another point, not made by Wesley, yet too important for us not to mention. In the ancient world the word “friend” was rich with several meanings.         In Israel “friend” had a special meaning; it meant “best man” at a wedding. In Rome “friend” had a special meaning too; it meant “someone intensely loyal to Caesar”. No one can imagine the best man at a wedding failing to do what the bridegroom has asked him to do. No one can imagine a Roman soldier publicly declaring his utmost loyalty to Caesar and then publicly refusing to do what Caesar asks of him. “Absent ourselves from Holy Communion, for any reason?” Wesley asks; “Don’t we know what the word ‘friend’ means?”   II: — In the second place, says Wesley, Holy Communion is more than just God’s command; it is also God’s provision for our spiritual need.         To be sure, Christians are sinners who have come to faith and repentance through the incursion of God’s Spirit.         Yes, we have passed from death to life, from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom, from guilt to acquittal, from shame to glory.         Nevertheless, sin still dogs us.         Our glory isn’t without some tarnish; our freedom isn’t without niggling habituation. Yes, we live in the light of him who is light; still, that darkness which our Lord has overcome hasn’t yet been wholly overcome in us.         Or as Martin Luther used to say, “In putting on Christ in faith we have also put on the new man (woman); the old man is therefore put to death; but the stinker doesn’t die quietly.”         In other words, however strong our faith, in fact it is weak.         However mature our discipleship, we have not yet graduated.         However resilient we think we are in the company of our Lord, we are yet frail and fragile and faltering.         Therefore we can’t afford to pass up any provision God has made for us in our need of greater deliverance.         For this reason Wesley speaks of Holy Communion as “a mercy of God to man.” Quoting Psalm 145:9 (“God’s mercy is over all his works”) Wesley reminds us that however God deals with us — whether gently or roughly, whether starkly or subtly, whether suddenly or slowly — whatever God does to us and with us he does ultimately just because he is for us.         Therefore everything God does to us and with us is finally an expression of God’s mercy. In light of this, who is so foolish as to absent herself from the most dramatic representation of that mercy, Holy Communion? Wesley never hesitated to be blunt.         Because partaking of the Lord’s Supper is a command of God, he said, to spurn it is to announce that we have no piety; and because partaking of the Lord’s Supper is a mercy of God, to spurn it is to announce that we have no wisdom. Piety, Wesley had learned from John Calvin, is the love of God and the fear of God. To be without piety is therefore ultimately to be insensitive to God.         To be without wisdom is simply to be fools. Fools? Yes, says Wesley as he develops a theme that runs like a thread through all his writings. The theme is this: none but the holy are finally happy.         He insists tirelessly that God has fashioned us for happiness.         Not for superficial jollity or frivolity or sentimentality, but certainly for deep-down contentment, joy, happiness.         Let’s not forget that the Greek word MAKARIOS, rendered “blessed” in most English translations of the beatitudes (“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled”, etc.); the Greek word MAKARIOS also means “happy” (in both ancient Greek and modern Greek).         Of course. How could we ever be blessed — by God himself — and finally be miserable? To be sure, there is no end to the pleasure we can find in nature; no end to the pleasure we can find in culture; no end to the pleasure we can find in our own bodiliness and our intellectual life.         Nonetheless, there is one delight that all of this can’t give us: our “enjoyment” of God, in Wesley’s words.         Wesley insists there is one throbbing pleasure that God’s children know and unbelievers can’t know: “delight in God”. Now, says the indefatigable man himself, only as we are holy are we profoundly happy. Yet we can’t render ourselves holy. Holy Communion is one of God’s provisions to render us holy.         To absent ourselves from it is to cut ourselves off from that blessedness which is our greatest happiness.   III: — In Wesley’s day (the 1700s) as in our day people put forward a variety of reasons as to why they don’t or even shouldn’t come to the Lord’s Supper. We need not suspect these people of insincerity; the reasons they put forward aren’t excuses offered lamely. Those who absent themselves from the Lord’s Supper are sincere, says Wesley — and they are sincerely wrong. One reason put forward. “I have sinned, and therefore I am not fit to communicate.”         Wesley said this was nothing short of ridiculous, however well intentioned. While sin is a violation of the command of God, we don’t atone for violating the command of God by violating another command (to communicate).         Nobody atones for the sin of theft by committing the sin of murder. If we have sinned (better, since we sin) there is all the more reason for betaking ourselves to Holy Communion where we shall find — for sure — in the words of Wesley, “the forgiveness of our past sins” and “the present strengthening and refreshing of our souls.” Another reason put forward for not attending Holy Communion.         “I can’t live up to the promise made in the communion service to remain Christ’s true follower.”         Wesley agrees: none of us can live up to the promise.         At the same time, he tells us, none of us lives up to any of the promises we make anywhere in life. But this is no excuse for not making a promise.         Do we refuse to get married (with the promise marriage entails) on the grounds that we are never going to be the perfect spouse? Another reason put forward. “Frequent partaking of the Lord’s Supper will diminish our reverence for the sacrament.” “What if it did?” says Wesley; “Would this render null and void the command of God?” Needless to say, it is Wesley’s conviction that frequent communion, so far from diminishing our reverence for the sacrament, will only increase it. Another reason advanced for not coming to the Lord’s Table.         “I have come so very many times already, and I don’t feel I have benefited in any way.” Here Wesley replies in two instalments. In the first place, the issue that can’t be dodged, he repeats yet again, is the command of God. God insists that we honour him and his will for us by bringing ourselves and whatever faith we have to that table where we can meet him for sure.         In the second place, we have benefited from regular attendance at the Lord’s Supper regardless of how much or how little we may feel.         Even when we feel nothing, says Wesley, we are being “strengthened, made more fit for the service of God, and more constant in it.” What’s more, he continues, not only have we benefited where we feel we haven’t, but also the day comes when feeling catches up to fact; what has been real in our hearts, albeit hidden in our hearts, is now manifested within our hearts so as to leave us without complaint concerning feeling. The most telling objection to frequent communion came from those who trembled before Paul’s word in 1st Corinthians 11.         “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.” What is the unworthiness that Paul has in mind?         It isn’t an extraordinary, inner, personal unworthiness.         Then what is it? The clue to it is given two verses later.         “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body – i.e., the body of Christ, the congregation – eats and drinks judgement upon himself.” We must recall the situation in Corinth . The congregation there was a mess. Party-factions were fragmenting the congregation. One man was involved in open incest and no one seemed to care.         Parishioners preferred religious “glitz” to spiritual profundity. Boasting had supplanted cross-bearing. Within the congregation there flourished bitterness, lovelessness, self-exaltation, superficiality and sleaze.         Paul said it had to end. The Corinthians had lost sight of the fact that the congregation is Christ’s body. Currently the body in Corinth appeared hideous. Anyone who came to the Lord’s Supper without discerning this, said Paul, was in a sorry state herself. In other words, when we come to Holy Communion we must understand that because the congregation is Christ’s body, we must be determined to ensure that it exhibits itself as Christ’s body, lest the watching world pour contempt upon him who is the head of the body, Christ Jesus himself. To eat and drink worthily is simply to come to the Lord’s Supper determined to live together as a congregation so as to bring honour to the congregation’s Lord. Therefore let all who have resolved to do this never absent themselves from the service. It is only fitting that we let John Wesley himself have the last word. When he has finished telling us why we must come to Holy Communion, and come constantly; when he has finished replying to the well-intentioned but groundless reasons that people advance for not coming, he then concludes his tract, “If any who have hitherto neglected [Holy Communion] on any of these pretences will lay these things to heart, they will, by the grace of God, come to a better mind, and never more forsake their own mercies.”  Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                      May 2007

OF REASON, THE GOSPEL AND CATHOLICITY

Convocation Address
Roberts Wesleyan College
September, 1995

I: Reason

To know John Wesley is to know how nervous he was at the appearance of “enthusiasm” (or even at the mention of it). Enthusiasm, he insisted, was a form of fanaticism born of elevating experience above scripture. He denounced it and ever sought to distance himself from it. Warning his people against it in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection he unhesitatingly labelled it “a daughter of pride”. “Give no place to a heated imagination”, he added immediately. (We must be sure to underline “heated” since Wesley’s appreciation of poetry would never find him disdaining imagination or the imaginative as such). He insisted on discernment with respect to “dreams, voices, impressions, visions, revelations”, for while they could be from God, they could also be from nature or even from the devil.

In the same Plain Account paragraph Wesley insisted we are equally at risk if we “despise or lightly esteem reason, knowledge or human learning.” If “enthusiasm” (fanaticism) was by definition the elevation of experience above scripture, then “enthusiasm” was by extension the undervaluing of reason. “I advise you never to use the words `wisdom’, `reason’, or `knowledge’ by way of reproach. On the contrary, pray that you yourself may abound in them more and more. If you mean…false reasoning, say so; and throw away the chaff but not the wheat.” (Wesley was characteristically intolerant of anything that appeared to be an instance of “false reasoning”. In 1788, when he was 85 years old, his diary tells us he read logic on four consecutive mornings.) Words like “reason”, “rational”, “learned”, “knowledgeable” must never be used pejoratively, must never even be lightly esteemed. Such words must be used only to compliment, extol, praise; only, in short, to denote genuine accomplishment and merit.

Wesley knew that Christians delight to hear and heed the command of God. And the command to love God with the mind is just that: a command. Unnecessary ignorance is not God-honouring; neither is cavalier stupidity nor the obscurantism born of intellectual laziness nor the silly notion that reason has to be suppressed in order to make room for faith. In a tract, “The Case of Reason Impartially Considered”, Wesley denounced any and all who disparage reason: “Never more declaim in that wild, loose, ranting manner against this precious gift of God. Acknowledge `the candle of the Lord’, which he hath fixed in our souls for excellent purposes.”

We should remember that no Christian, and no Christian educational institution, is permitted to undervalue reason in view of the fact that the Incarnation is the foundation of all things Christian. When the fourth gospel affirms that the Word became flesh, the word it uses for “Word”, logos, also means rationality or intelligibility. The gospel-writer tells us that the entire creation has been fashioned through the Word, through the logos. Since the Word is God, the inner principle of God’s own mind, the logos, has been imprinted indelibly on the creation.

Science is possible only because there is a correlation between patterns intrinsic to the scientist’s mind and intelligible patterns in the physical world. Otherwise put, science is possible only because there is a correlation between the structure of human thought and the structure of the physical world, when the logos of God is the origin of this correlation. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and a Christian, writes, “The Word is God’s agent in creation, impressing his rationality upon the world. That same Word is also the light of men (sic), giving us access thereby to the rationality that is in the world.” Polkinghorne’s statement is illustrated by the fact that when mathematicians and physicists have compared notes, they have seen that the relations purely within human thinking (mathematics) reflect the pattern and structures in nature that scientific investigation (physics) uncovers. In other words, there is a correlation between the rationality of human thinking and the rationality imprinted indelibly in nature. Of course! All things — the creation, as well as the mind of the scientist investigating the creation — have been made through the logos, through that Word become flesh in Jesus Christ.

No Christian, and no Christian educational institution, then, can “lightly esteem” reason and celebrate the obscurantism deemed “realistic” in some academic quarters today.

At the same time when Wesley rightly insisted on the place of reason in the economy of grace he was not countenancing rationalism. Christians are always to be rational, never rationalistic.

While reason is the “handmaid” of faith, rationalism is a philosophy that by its nature precludes faith. Rationalism assumes that ultimate reality is accessible to reason; i.e., reason gains admission to reality and apprehends it. This assumption renders revelation superfluous; more to the point, it renders revelation a non-category, since reason is adequate to grasp the totality of reality and reason alone can. In other words, there is nothing that needs to be revealed and nothing that can be. Here reason is no longer a servant of faith but rather that which similarly renders faith a non-category. (In short, the gospel reveals the essence of humankind to be spirit, while reason subserves spirit; rationalism, on the other hand, assumes the essence of humankind to be reason, while spirit is a non-category. Wesley unhesitatingly insisted that what reason could grasp was related to what spirit knew as “painted fire” was related to fire itself.)

Rationalism assumes, in the second place, that reason is unimpaired. Yet Freud showed how reason is prone to become rationalization; i.e., the logic of the reasoning process perdures while reason(ing) subserves a motive of which the reasoner is entirely unaware. Marx showed us as much in the sphere of economics. So have contemporary sociologists of knowledge with their focus on the place of the reasoner’s social location. And before all of this so did the pastoral counsel of patristic writers. And so did the apostle Paul with his insistence on fallen humankind’s proclivity for “futile thinking”, futile, that is, with respect to its capacity for apprehending the truth of God and the truth of the human condition before God. Reason, together with the rest of the creation, has not been spared the ravages of the Fall. Reason needs the corrective of the gospel.

 

II: The Gospel

As was noted earlier, to speak of reason as fallen is not to say that reason is now illogical (if it were, reason would not be fallen reason so much as non-existent); it is rather to know that reason has a Fall-induced bias to rationalization. G.K. Chesterton remarked that mad people are not those who have lost their reason; mad people are those who have lost everything except their reason. “Everything” includes the gospel.

Where the gospel is “lost” (as it were) human reasoning no longer reflects the truth of ultimate reality; spiritual psychosis has set in. Since psychosis, by definition, is the loss of reality-testing, spiritual psychosis is the loss of testing with respect to ultimate reality: God, his truth, our inclusion in it. Then the gospel is necessary lest rational people are left with nothing more than reason! To say the same thing differently grace (grace-wrought faith) restores reason to reason’s integrity. Grace frees reason from reason’s diverse bondages to self-interest in the diverse contexts of race, class, money, gender, etc. To put it most concisely, the gospel releases reason from reason’s captivity to idolatry. The Christian educational institution has a witness here to render the world of education. This witness must never be blunted or hidden or minimized.

While we are speaking of the role of the Christian educational institution with respect to the world of learning I should like to make a plea for the richest humanism that has been part of higher education ever since the Renaissance. For centuries humanism was seen as an enemy of faith. It is an enemy of faith if humanism (that is, cultural riches and all that generates them) claims for itself humankind’s ultimate trust, love and hope. At the same time, cultural riches — not to be rejected, according to 1 Timothy 4 — are to be received with thanksgiving. In the same vein the book of Revelation maintains that the kings of the earth are going to bring their glory into the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:24).

Ever since the 18th century Enlightenment the glories of humanism have been regarded as somewhat less glorious. Humanism’s glories were diminished yet again by turn-of-the-century thinkers such as Freud and Marx. These men maintained that statements put forward as truth-claims are not that at all but rather are mere reflections of one’s psychological need to posit a benign world or of one’s need to defend one’s economic privilege. Perhaps the most telling tarnish arose through the philosophical postulate of positivism; namely, that the meaning of a statement was given by the process of verifying it (falsifying it) empirically. Any statement that could not be verified (falsified) empirically was deemed cognitively meaningless. Assertions arising from the humanities — e.g., ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics — were pronounced cognitively meaningless (because non-empirically testable), and then by extension simply meaningless. The acids of a positivistic outlook appeared to corrode the splendours of humanism yet again. I am persuaded that the church, through the church’s educational institutions, has a major role to play in restoring the glories of the very humanism that has, in a different era, postured itself as a rival to the faith of the church.

We do well to remember that even as 16th century Reformation thinkers and Renaissance thinkers came to see that they were in different orbits with respect to the human condition and the necessity, nature and means of the ultimate good, the giants of the Magisterial Reformation were educated first as humanists (the sole exception being Martin Luther). We do well to remember that the clergy of that era who were not trained first as humanists were able to operate acceptably as ecclesiastical functionaries but were unable to generate any leadership for church or society.

In a word, a Christian college knows that unless reason is upheld and venerated God is not honoured; a Christian college knows too that if reason alone is upheld then reason is deprived of that gospel which alone frees reason for reason’s integrity. And a Christian college has peculiar responsibility for preserving the humanities from the reductionisms and obscurantisms currently deemed “realistic” in some areas of academia.

“I offered them Christ”, Wesley says over and over in summing up his daily ministry. The Christian college too must “offer them — the academic disciplines — Christ” as a crucial aspect of its mandate.

 

III: Catholicity

Lastly, I should like to refer to Wesley’s theological catholicity in urging a catholicity of education.

While Wesley was a lifelong Anglican (and never wanted to be anything else) he cherished the theological riches of the church catholic. As an Anglican he was informed immediately by the Anglican formularies: the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Edwardian Homilies. At the same time he was steeped in the literature of the Puritans. His love of the Puritans, however, did not impede his finding his eucharistic doctrine largely in the work of an Anglo-Catholic. And his appreciation of the latter never prevented him from positioning himself “but a hair’s breadth” from John Calvin with respect to justification. It would seem a huge distance from Calvin and Calvin’s emphasis on Reformed doctrine to Roman Catholic mystics of the counter-reformation, yet Wesley adopted eight Roman Catholic counter-reformation mystics for his Christian Library, the collection of readings he expected all Methodists to peruse. A child of the Western church, he nonetheless esteemed the Eastern. A child of modernity to the extent that he experimented with electro-convulsive treatments for severe depression, he yet knew Christian antiquity (Patristics) thoroughly. Always insisting on the need to expound Christian truth in the context of the thought-forms and social setting of his own era, he nevertheless judged novelty in theology to be heresy (as if the prophets and apostles could ever be improved upon!).

This is not to say that he was uncritical with respect to the tradition of the church catholic. Far from it. Yet he recognized its wisdom, balance, depth, and riches even as the unnormed norm of the gospel impelled him to assess it. (In the same way he was a lifelong monarchist; his being such, however, did not render him an uncritical devotee of all things royal. Concerning Queen Elizabeth I he wrote with no little discrimination, “As just and merciful as Nero and as good a Christian as Mahomet.”)

Today I am urging a comparable catholicity of learning; a catholicity of space (the literature of Latin America, philosophy from Germany, jazz from the U.S.A.), as well as a catholicity of time (C.S. Lewis pointed out that for every two modern books we read, we should read at least one from the mediaeval and ancient eras lest we come to think that the questions modernity poses are the only questions, or are even questions at all.)

Students can begin to appreciate all of this now; and if they do, they will find themselves profiting from it — and more importantly, relishing it and delighting in it long after their formal education is concluded.

I am not decrying specialization. Specialization is essential, both the specialization that selects an academic discipline for concentration as well as the intra-disciplinary specialization that focuses on a particular aspect. In an era of superficiality and mediocrity, no one can decry the specialization needed for academic and vocational sophistication, let alone mastery.

In all of this I remain grateful for those whose catholicity of learning has moved me and inspired me and encouraged me. Among such people I recall two exceedingly able American poets, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, the former an insurance company executive and the latter a physician to the dispossessed in slum-areas of New Jersey. We should aim at nothing less for ourselves.

Since a Christian college is called to attest the truth that in Jesus Christ “all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17), its sons and daughters ought never to reduce the scope of “all things”.

 

In 1734 John Wesley penned a tract, “The One Thing Needful”, in which he stated a theme that he would repeat tirelessly for the rest of his life: the one thing needful is “the renewal of our fallen nature”. The tract is a sustained insistence upon the necessity “to re-exchange the image of Satan for the image of God, bondage for freedom, sickness for health”. In the tract Wesley asserts that learning is “the fairest of the fruits of the earth.” His assertion here must be given its full weight, especially in view of those unlearned commentators who continue to think that the Wesleyan tradition undervalues learning.

Yet in the light of that Kingdom which cannot be shaken Wesley is correct in rating learning, “the fairest of the fruits of the earth”, as penultimate. While it “may sometimes be conducive to” the one thing needful, it is not the one thing needful itself. This lattermost will always be humankind’s re-creation at God’s hand.

The Christian college will ever acknowledge that the height of learning, while gloriously high (and deservedly so), is yet dwarfed by the fathomless depth of God’s grace.

Victor A. Shepherd
September 1995

 

This paper first appeared in Theological Digest & Outlook (Burlington) in January of 1994.

 

NEITHER MIST NOR MUD

In the summer of 1976 I was visiting professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland. A nearly-retired clergyman who had been in Newfoundland all his life commented on Newfoundland churchmanship of yesteryear: “The Presbyterians had scholarship, while we Methodists had religion”. The disjunction he spoke of is non-biblical, since, for one, God is to be worshipped with the mind, and for another, to worship one-knows-not-what is simply to worship an idol. I cannot comment on turn-of-the-century Methodism in Newfoundland. But I can tell you what Wesley’s reaction would have been if such a disjunction had been attributed to him: he would have considered himself falsified, even maligned.

There is no doubt concerning the theological dilution of the largest Methodist body which formed the larger part of The United Church of Canada in 1925; i.e., no doubt concerning the doctrinal flaccidity of this branch of the Wesleyan family. As I have sought to find out why and how the largest segment of the Wesleyan family in Canada could unravel theologically so very badly I have heard countless references to Wesley’s sermon, “Catholic Spirit”. It is often suggested to me that Methodism is characteristically theologically indifferent, even suggested that Wesley himself was — as “Catholic Spirit” is referred to (but not quoted unless quoted out of context) again and again.

The truth is Wesley himself knew that doctrine has to do with the truth of God; that doctrine is essential to the soundness of anyone’s faith and essential to the soundness of the church. Then what of his sermon, “Catholic Spirit”? Did he lapse momentarily in this one sermon and unwittingly sow the seeds of the very distortion which has haunted at least the larger North American bodies which bear his name?

In fact Wesley never jettisoned — or thought could be jettisoned — what he held to be the core, the essentials, of the Christian faith. At the same time, to be sure, he deplored what he deemed to be unnecessary quarrelling among Christians. For instance, while he remained enormously indebted to Puritan thinkers of the preceding century, he thought Puritan disputants themselves unnecessarily contentious. Wesley stood opposed in equal measure to dogmatism with respect to non-essentials and indifference with respect to essentials. Then does his “Catholic Spirit” atypically support the cavalierness to the substance of the faith which the sponsors of the chair I am to occupy rightly resist as surely as other denominations with a Wesleyan root have not resisted?

The text for “Catholic Spirit” is 2 Kings 10:15 (KJV). “And when he [Jehu] was departed thence, he lighted on Jehonadab the son of Rechab coming to meet him. And he saluted him and said, ‘Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? And Jehonadab answered, It is. [Jehu said], If it be, give me thine hand.” We know that Wesley preached on this text on November 23, 1740; September 8, 1749; and November 3, 1749. Likely he preached on it on other occasions as well. The sermon was first published in 1750, then republished in 1755 and 1770. Evidently Wesley deemed its subject-matter important. The latter two editions were graced by the addition of Charles’s forty-two line hymn, “Catholic Love”, one stanza of which is

Weary of all this wordy strife,
These notions, forms, and modes and names,
To Thee, the Way, the Truth, the Life,
Whose love my simple heart inflames,
Divinely taught, at last I fly,
With thee and thine to live and die.

Then did Charles support the notion that any attempt at doctrinal precision is but “wordy strife”? In order to answer this question we must probe the sermon itself.

Wesley’s first point is that “love is due to all mankind” — including, he is careful to add, those who curse us and hate us. Yet there is a “peculiar love” which we owe fellow-believers. All Christians know this and approve it; and just as surely all Christians fail here. Wesley adduces “two grand general hindrances”; Christians “…can’t all think alike, and in consequence of this…they can’t all walk alike”. He admits that differences in opinions or modes of worship may prevent “entire external union”; but “need it prevent union in affection?….May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?”

As he ponders the text Wesley notes that it “naturally divides itself into two parts”: Jehu’s question to Jehonadab, and Jehu’s welcome to Jehonadab following the latter’s positive reply. Wesley immediately notes that Jehu’s question concerns Jehonadab’s heart, not Jehonadab’s opinion. And to be sure Jehonadab had opinions unusual in Israel, impressing as he did upon his children and grandchildren the Rechabite vow which eschewed wine, and forswearing the security of farms and homes for the landlessness and tents of nomads. Jehu, for his part, so far from being offended or contemptuous, was content to “think and let think” — and a good thing too, says Wesley, since as we “see in part” (1 Cor. 13:12) we shall not all see things alike. Then he adds a comment which all Wesleyans (indeed all Christians) must note carefully. Our not all seeing things alike is a consequence of “the present weakness and shortness of human understanding”, to be redressed only in the eschaton. Our not all seeing things alike with respect to opinion is not the consequence of that darkened, foolish mind which is a predicate of human depravity. Culpable ignorance of God, on the other hand — always to be distinguished from differences of opinion — is the product of the darkened mind of the depraved, as Wesley acknowledges throughout his works.

Concerning opinion Wesley mentions modes of worship. Some Christians are convinced of the virtues of the Anglican Prayer Book while others are convinced of the virtues of the Free Church tradition. We “think and let think”. However, he adds immediately, a churchless Christian is a contradiction in terms. One is a Christian only as one worships with fellow-Christians in a particular congregation. Plainly the mode of worship is of the order of opinion, while corporate worship is of the order of essential.

Jehu’s question, “Is thine heart right…?” has to do not with opinions but with essentials. What are they, or at least some of them?

The first, according to Wesley, is, “Is thy heart right with God? Dost thou believe his being, and his perfections? His eternity, immensity, wisdom, power; his justice, mercy and truth?….Hast thou a divine evidence, a supernatural conviction, of the things of God?” Obviously our belief in God’s attributes and activity does not concern opinions but essentials; and just as obviously Wesley is careful to balance the objective and the subjective, head and heart. Judiciously he avoids identifying Christian experience (“Hast thou …a supernatural conviction…?”) with mere doctrinal assent; and just as judiciously he avoids identifying Christian experience with normless subjectivism.

The next aspect in Wesley’s delineation of what it means to have one’s heart right is, “Dost thou believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, ‘God over all…’?” The doctrine of the Incarnation is bedrock-essential. Nothing less than the most elemental apostolic confession, “Jesus is Lord”, will do. There is no suggestion in Wesley of a crypto-Arianism or crypto-unitarianism. And then once again there is that careful balance, typical of Wesley, between objective truth and the believing subject’s appropriation of the person of him whose truth it is: “Dost thou know ‘Jesus Christ and him crucified’?….Is he ‘formed in thy heart by faith’?” Then Wesley adds what he, a son of the Reformation, will always insist on; namely, justification by faith. “Having absolutely disclaimed all thy own works, thy own righteousness, hast thou ‘submitted thyself unto the righteousness of God’, ‘which is by faith in Christ Jesus’?” And lest those rendered righteous (i.e., rightly related to God) by faith think that anything but lifelong struggle and discipline await them Wesley comments, “And art thou through him [Jesus Christ] fighting the good fight of faith, and laying hold of eternal life?” Justification by faith is non-negotiable, as is vigorous, rigorous discipleship.

Next Wesley discusses matters which force his readers to search their hearts, as he sounds like a spiritual director, having inherited the seventeenth century Puritan tradition of spiritual direction. Puritanism abounded in those who were especially adept at helping others discern the movement of grace within them and helping them discern and deal with impediments to this movement. Here Wesley is brief and blunt: “Dost thou seek all thy happiness in him [God] alone?….Has the love of God cast the love of the world out of thy soul?” And then he zeroes in: we must love God for no other reason than God is who God is. We are not to love God instrumentally (that is, because we need something from God); neither are we to love God primarily to avoid the perils of judgement. “Art thou more afraid of displeasing God than either of death or of hell?” — otherwise, Wesley knows, our fear is still an excrescence of that self-preoccupation from which we need to be delivered.

Lastly he asks, “Do you ‘love your enemies’?”

The foregoing has nothing to do with opinion, everything to do with essentials. Therefore, says Wesley, he will extend his hand to anyone whose heart is right in the sense of what has been outlined above.

It remains for him to tell us what it means to give one’s hand to another. It does not mean that the two shaking hands will hold the same opinion. Nevertheless, it will mean that they genuinely love each other. Lest such “love” be nothing more than sentimental rhetoric Wesley pleads, “Love me with a very tender affection…as a friend that is closer than a brother.” In case we still fail to understand him Wesley amplifies this: “Love me with a love…that is patient if I am ignorant and out of the way, bearing and not increasing my burden…”. And if you, a believer, find me, a believer too, sinning, says Wesley, love me so as to recognize that I sinned “in sudden stress of temptation”.

To give one’s hand to another, Wesley informs us briefly, is always to pray for one another and to encourage one another in love and good works.

Then what does Wesley say a catholic spirit is not?

It is not “speculative latitudinarianism”. Christians are not indifferent to opinion. The baptist is as sincere, convinced, in fact, in espousing believer’s baptism as the paedobaptist is in espousing the understanding associated with this practice. Since a catholic spirit is not even indifference to opinion, how unthinkable that it could ever be indifference to the essentials of the faith! “A man of truly catholic spirit…is fixed as the sun in his judgement concerning the main branches of Christian doctrine.” Those who boast of possessing a catholic spirit “only because you are of a muddy understanding; because your mind is all in a mist”; those people, Wesley insists, don’t even know what spirit they are of! To sit loose to the substance of the faith is simply to display a mind of mist and mud. These self-deluded people think they “are got into the very spirit of Christ” when in fact they are “nearer the spirit of anti-Christ.” Wesley’s assertion here must be allowed its full weight: theological indifference reflects the spirit of anti-Christ.

In the second place a catholic spirit is not “practical latitudinarianism”. Here Wesley repeats his earlier insistence concerning public worship and “the manner of performing it”, as well as his insistence that all Christians must be intimately bound to a congregation which is so dear to us that each of us “regards it as his own household”.

Wesley’s last admonition to us in his sermon, “Catholic Spirit”, is for us to remember that the true catholic spirit is manifested in the daily exercise of catholic love, until that day when faith gives way to sight and we behold that love which God is. Until such time, Wesley advises, “…keep an even pace, rooted in the faith once delivered to the saints [for him there could never be any other root] and grounded in love, in true, catholic love, till thou art swallowed up in love for ever and ever.”

If any doubt remains as to Wesley’s doctrinal orthodoxy and the spiritual rigour required by, because first facilitated by, the One whose truth doctrine apprehends, such doubt is dispelled by one reading of Wesley’s sermons. Not all one hundred and fifty-one need be perused; consulting the first four will suffice. They are “Salvation By Faith”, “The Almost Christian”, “Awake, Thou That Sleepest”, and “Scriptural Christianity”.

The first, “Salvation By Faith” (1738), Wesley delivered at Oxford University following his Aldersgate awakening, when he flew his evangelical colours. Here he declared himself one with the sixteenth century Reformers.

The second sermon, “The Almost Christian” (1741), isn’t so much about those who are about to enter the kingdom (or about not to enter to it) as it is about the disparity between nominal Christianity and genuine faith in a living Lord. This was not a new theme in British Christendom, the Puritan divines before Wesley having expounded it many times. Still, here Wesley publicly declared himself one with the seventeenth century Puritans. When Wesley was about to preach this sermon (also at Oxford) he was told that Oxford’s theological hostility would find his address without credibility. “I know that”, he had replied, “however, I am to deliver my own soul, whether they will hear or whether they will forbear.”

The third sermon, “Awake, Thou That Sleepest” (1742), was actually written by Charles and endorsed without qualification by John; it too is a throbbing evangelical statement.

The fourth, “Scriptural Christianity” (1744), Wesley delivered on August 24, the anniversary of two dreadful persecutions visited on people of gospel-conviction: the St.Bartholomew’s Day massacre in Paris (1572) and the Great Ejection in England (1662) in which both Wesley’s grandfathers suffered cruelly. By this time Wesley knew the price to be paid for adhering to that faith attested by apostles, church fathers and reformers. In his journal he wrote on August 24, 1744, “I preached, I suppose, for the last time at St.Mary’s [Oxford]. Be it so. I am now clear of the blood of these men. I have fully delivered my own soul”.

And yet it is still heard in some areas of the contemporary church that Wesley had a shallow view of human depravity, that his view of Total Depravity was less “total” than that of the reformers. This is not true. In his sermon, “Salvation By Faith”, Wesley insists that humankind’s “heart is altogether corrupt and abominable”, that salvation is always and everywhere “an unspeakable gift”. “Of yourselves”, he continues in the same article, “cometh neither your faith nor your salvation…. that ye believe is one instance of grace; that believing, ye are saved, another.” Two hundred plus years earlier John Calvin had spoken of faith as an “empty vessel”, meaning that our faith does not contribute to the substance of our salvation, and therefore we cannot boast that we have, however slightly, saved ourselves. In the same vein Wesley writes, “…faith is…a full reliance on the blood of Christ, a trust in the merits of his life, death and resurrection, a recumbency upon him as our atonement and our life…”. Then he adds, “…in consequence hereof a closing with him and cleaving to him as our ‘wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption…’.” His citing 1 Corinthians 1:30 here is surely telling, since this text was Calvin’s favourite! Wesley did not have a diminished understanding of human helplessness before God; he was not less profound than his reformation predecessors. In a pithy aphorism reflecting the style of Puritan thinkers dearer to him than even most Methodists grasp, he comments tersely, “…none can trust the merits of Christ till he has utterly renounced his own.”

Wesley had no truck with a gospel-less Pelagianism or a Christ-less Arianism or a Trinity-less unitarianism; neither did he have any truck with that for which he is blamed often, a degenerate Arminianism. His theology was as soundly apostolic as his spirit was truly catholic.

On behalf of all who have supported the Chair of Wesley Studies at Ontario Theological Seminary, and on behalf of the same people who have supported my appointment to it, I want only to hold up before students, and through them before the wider church, John Benjamin Wesley himself, in order that they and I, learning together from him, might ever reflect the same passion for the apostolic confession of Jesus Christ and the same catholic spirit which renders our faith ever that faith which works through love. (Galatians 5:6)

 

F I N I S

 

Victor A. Shepherd
Chair, Wesley Studies
Ontario Theological Seminary

26 September 1993

 

This paper first appeared in Papers of the Canadian Methodist Historical Society,
Volume 9, pp.91-107, (Toronto, Canadian Methodist Society Historical Society, 1993)

From New Connexion Methodist
to William Booth

 

Victor A. Shepherd

I: From John Wesley To The Methodist New Connexion

Wesley himself had anticipated a connexional crisis in Methodism. In 1766, twenty-five years before his death, he became aware of a demand for

a free conference; that is, a meeting of the preachers, wherein all things shall be determined by most votes…. It is possible, after my death, something of this kind may take place. But not while I live. To me the preachers have engaged themselves to submit, and to ‘serve me as sons in the gospel’ . . . To me the people in general will submit. But they will not yet submit to any other.¹

Wesley may have been prepared to have his death dispel his autocracy and forestall any one else’s; but only his death would do it. He had no intention whatever of sharing his authority with others within the Methodist precincts. As discerning as he was totalitarian, however, he unerringly forecast a rent in the seamless garment of the movement. In fact he foresaw three groups forming. (i) Up to one-quarter of the Methodists (he meant Methodist preachers) would attempt to “procure preferment in the Church” ² – that is, the Church of England, the established church. Presumably these would be those who had grown weary of being looked upon as second-class citizens, marred by “enthusiasm” and social inferiority. This group was farthest removed from the New Connexion. (ii) Other preachers would become congregationalists and secure pastorates in this milieu. While Wesley did not specify who would constitute this second group, I imagine that they were those ministers who, having taken Wesley at his word- “There is but a hair’s breadth between me and Calvin” – and who, aware too of the modified Puritanism which remained in Wesley, decided to move closer to a Christian body which was self-consciously informed by Calvin and Calvin’s Puritan heirs. (iii) The third group, the largest, would remain steadfast at the centre of the Methodist ambit, and would continue to preach Methodist doctrine and uphold Methodist discipline.

Wesley, concerned as to what kind of leadership might replace his autocracy, appointed the One Hundred Preachers as heirs to his authority. This arrangement was facilitated by means of the Deed of Declaration of 1784. To be sure, the company of One Hundred were to exercise a benign and benevolent dictatorship:

I beseech you, by the mercies of God, that you never… assume superiority over your brethren; but let all things go on… exactly in the same manner as when I was with you…. do all things with a single eye, as 1 have done from the beginning, without prejudice or partiality.³

Government was to be exclusively in the hands of preachers, men, currently Wesley’s assistants, whom he felt he could trust to maintain the ethos he had imparted.

Those Methodists who did not want an institutional rupture with the Church of England were aware that such matters as the administration of sacraments had to be settled in conformity with Anglican tradition. Wesley, it must be remembered, insisted to the last that he was an Anglican priest. Quickly it was asked if only those preachers whom Wesley himself had ordained were permitted, and this would scarcely have satisfied the Anglican hierarchy, since Wesley was not a bishop, or if all itinerant preachers were allowed. By 1795 it was agreed that anyone authorized by the Methodist Conference could, while each society was to determine who would administer the sacraments. This decision, along with the decision to allow Methodist services of worship during the hours of Anglican worship, effected a de facto separation from the established church.

A comparably vexatious matter pertained to the role of the laity in church government about which Wesley had written

As long as 1 live the people shall have no share in choosing either
stewards or leaders among the Methodists. We have not and never
had any such custom. We are not republicans. and never intend to be. It would be better for those who are so minded to go quietly away.⁴

At least fifty people immediately upon Wesley’s death in 1791, so far from going quietly away, decided to make a noise. They proposed startling changes for church government, among which were: class members were to choose their own leaders, society members were to choose society stewards, preachers could admit a member to or expel a member from a society only with the consent of a majority of that society, and itinerant preachers could be assigned their duties only by stewards at the quarterly meeting.

In the meantime the company of One Hundred Preachers, the collective successor to Wesley himself, had circulated a letter reminding the Methodists that the One Hundred were the sole rulers of the movement. In no time disputes over lay jurisdiction abounded. For instance, in 1792 a Methodist preacher, having administered the Lord’s Supper, found that church trustees (lay persons who in this particular case wanted Methodism to identify with the established church) barred him from preaching in other chapels on the circuit. Did lay persons have the right to circumscribe the ministry of someone who had been ordained by Conference? If so, then lay control was operative.

The controversy appeared to come to a head quickly with Alexander Kilham, a preacher whom Wesley had accepted in 1785. Kilham, not unlike many Methodist preachers, identified himself not with the Anglican supporters among the Methodists but with those who favoured affiliation with Dissenters. A Dissenter replete with the courage of his convictions, Kilham announced that collaboration with the Church of England was evidence of the world’s infestation of the Christian’s mind and heart. In the face of his Anglican-leaning fellows, Kilham circulated a letter arguing that many Methodists did not receive Holy Communion inasmuch as they could not receive it conscientiously from ungodly clergy in the midst of ungodly communicants. Kilham insisted that all Methodists were de facto Dissenters. And since Methodist preachers were every bit as qualified as other Dissenting ministers, why not have them administer the sacraments instead of referring their people to an Anglican priest? In a second pamphlet Kilham replied to those who had rebutted him tartly.

At the following Conference, dominated, of course, by preachers, Kilham was strongly censured and his pamphlet condemned. Despite Kilham’s praise of John Wesley, he was accused of defamation. Nonetheless, a motion to expel him was defeated.

In a third pamphlet Kilham argued that every circuit or district should be represented at Conference by a delegate of its own choice – the incipient democratization of church government. A fourth pamphlet followed, signed ‘Martin Luther’. Clearly Kilham was telling whoever would listen that he regarded the administrative structures of Methodism as little better than papal tyranny. The fifth pamphlet Kilham delivered to Conference in person. It argued that scripture was normative even in administrative matters. Here the Calvinist influence is unmistakable, transmitted through Puritans and Dissenters, and exemplified for Kilham by the Scots Presbyterians whom he came to cherish when he was Methodist minister in Aberdeen and in whose denomination he saw lay representation in the church courts.

Kilham’s magnum opus was not long coming: The Progress of Liberty Among the People Called Methodists.⁵ It was a plea for freedom of conscience. In it he wrote, “is it not amazingly strange that any sect or party should refuse to give to their brethren what the laws of our country so cheerfully allow?⁶ This document detailed matters which he claimed were supported by scripture; for instance, members should determine their own class leaders, the circuit meeting should approve any preacher proposed for the itinerary, circuits should appoint lay delegates to district meetings, district meetings should appoint lay delegates to the Conference of Preachers where these lay delegates, along with preachers, would have jurisdiction over both spiritual and temporal affairs.

Opposition was swift and sure and severe: London preachers urged Newcastle District to put Kilham on trial. The district in turn deferred trying him until Conference met. Kilham went to ecclesiastical trial in Wesley’s Chapel, London, in 1796. When he requested a copy of the charges, his request was denied. Conference expelled him in July, 1796, having tried him without formally charging him. Subsequently he asked if he might be allowed to preach as a layman. A few Methodist ministers were assigned to meet with him for the purpose of assessing his suitability. The meeting occurred. He was asked to recant and to refrain from further criticism of any sort. He refused, and his excommunication was sealed. A biographer later wrote of him,” it is impossible not to conclude that the sentence of expulsion was unmerited, and that he was not treated with either charity or justice by the Conference”.⁷ Everything that Kilham had suffered to see implemented Conference then turned down.

In August, 1797, three other preachers, William Thom, Stephen Eversfield, and Alexander Cummin, left the Conference and met with Kilham to form “The New Itinerary”, renamed eventually “The Methodist New Connexion” [MNC]. In this latter body, administrative responsibilities were shared jointly by clergy and laypersons. Five per cent of the Methodists joined. Their representative statement at the second Conference of the MNC merits perusal.

It was not from an affectation of singularity that determined us to proceed in supporting the rights and liberties of the people…. It was a conviction arising from scripture that all the members of Christ’s body are one; and that the various officers of it should act by the general approbation and appointment of the people.⁸

Kilham laboured indefatigably on behalf of the MNC, and died in 1798 at the age of thirty-six. He had spent himself to overturn Methodism’s exclusion of lay jurisdiction, concerning which a highly-placed Methodist official had written, ‘We have the most perfect aristocracy existing perhaps on God’s earth. The people have no power; we have the whole in the fullest sense which can be conceived.”⁹

The MNC grew very slowly. After ten years it had only thirty-five ministers, eighty-four chapels, and 7,202 members. Since mainstream Methodism was firmly ensconced in the more densely populated areas of Britain, the MNC attempted to move into sparser regions. Indeed, so sparsely populated were they that it was difficult to generate a congregation. The MNC ministers were paid a pittance, while the physical demands on them were overwhelming. Not surprisingly, then, almost fifty per cent of MNC ministers who were admitted in the first seventeen years of the denomination resigned after an average service of only six years. Moreover, it came to light that trust deeds did not permit chapels to be transferred from the Wesleyan body to the MNC. Litigation ensued frequently, as unpleasant as it could only be. Members were often politically suspect, thought to be possessed of convictions similar to those of revolutionaries in France and anarchists in Britain. After fifty years it had 19,289 members (including 3,201 in Canada). The name of one of its members, however, was destined to be heard around the world.

 

II: From The Methodist New Connexion To William Booth

William Booth (1829-1912) was first a minister among the Wesleyan Reformers.¹⁰ His people cherished him and pressed him to remain in their communion. Catherine Mumford, later his wife, urged him to join the MNC inasmuch as this off-shoot was better organized, in her opinion, (Booth himself regarded the Wesleyan Reformers as organizationally chaotic) was more widely distributed, and hence afforded a wider sphere of service, albeit chiefly in the urban areas of heavily-industrialized north England.¹¹ Ironically, of course, so far from providing a larger sphere of service Booth was soon to find the MNC so cramped as to be a strait-jacket.

From the inception of his theological training, Booth’s heart ached for the wretched of soot-corroded England whom he saw, as Wesley had seen before him, when most church leaders saw no one at all. In his diary he wrote that he felt “much sympathy for the poor, neglected inhabitants of Wapping [an area of east London] and its neighbourhood as I walked down the filthy streets and beheld the wickedness and idleness of its people”.¹²

Booth’s ability was as great as his compassion. While MNC ministers were generally granted permission to marry only after four years’ probation, Booth’s exceptional gifts won him permission to marry Catherine after only one year. Like wild-fire, the reputation of the spellbinder-preacher spread throughout England. Invitations to preach deluged him. The MNC knew by now that Booth was a star in its firmament. Nevertheless, the denomination remained ambivalent about him. On the one hand he had given the MNC household familiarity; on the other hand several denominational authorities disapproved of his methods. By now the MNC, along with the parent Methodist body, had been granted the social respectability so long denied, while with respectability came spiritual vacuity. Early in his ministry MNC authorities had rebuked Booth for welcoming so-called riff-raff to worship. He had been told that they could attend worship if they entered and left by the rear door of the chapel, and, once inside, remained behind the pulpit platform where they could not be seen. Booth was a dramatic preacher, intense to the point of being uncomprehending when he found other preachers dawdling over a second cup of tea while millions lived in temporal squalor and faced eternal ruin. Yet millions venerated him. When he left the island of Guernsey in 1854 following a preaching mission, countless people lined the pier to bid him adieu. His popularity did nothing to endear him to denominational hierarchs who regarded his theology and his presentation as deficient in taste.

Booth himself was aware that dross could be alloyed with precious metal. When he beheld the distress of the people who streamed to the communion rail, weeping and crying out, he wrote to Catherine, “Amidst all this I could not help but reason, Is it right? Is this the best way?”¹³ Yet he remained convinced that it was a way, a way through which he witnessed the transformation of those who had languished in a spiritual wasteland and the deliverance of those who had been enslaved in a manner which social historians have described hauntingly.

At the same time Booth knew that popularity as such did not betoken spiritual depth. God alone could render fruitful the work of even the most gifted servant; of himself, the preacher could generate nothing. “My present popularity almost frightens me”, he wrote Catherine, “I am alarmed as to the maintaining of it. I mean the carrying out of the work of God. Yesterday morning was a perfect failure. But God can, and I firmly believe God will, work.”¹⁴ Booth knew too that popularity is the most dangerous threat to any preacher. What would be gained if the world gathered at his feet if he, meanwhile, had forfeited himself before God? To Catherine he wrote once more, “My soul pants for something deeper, realler, more hallowed in my soul’s experience. If I fail it will be here.”¹⁵ Discerning in his awareness that other ministers were devoid of zeal for the gospel, Booth was prescient in recognizing that his own zeal would immerse him in trouble with fellow clergy. On his twenty-sixth birthday he wrote Catherine, “I cannot but be surprised at the want of any aspiring emotion so apparent in many of our ministers; they are nothing and seem content. 1 deplore this, yet if I was like them I should be very much happier.”¹⁶

Institutional wisdom outweighed clergy resentment and antipathy sufficiently to let the Annual Conference of the MNC free Booth of circuit fetters in London and appoint him to widerranging evangelistic work. It was felt that Booth might even lend a tonic to those circuits whose anaemia had heretofore been incurable.

This is not to say that Booth’s ego swelled in proportion to the crowds who hung on him. On the contrary he had moments when he was riddled with self-doubt. At such times he doubted the sincerity of many who had newly made profession of faith; he doubted his vocation; he wondered if anything lasting would come of his work. Telling Catherine of a woman who had claimed to be the beneficiary of the Saviour’s mercy only to be found, a day or two later, stumbling further into the darkness, he wrote, “I find so few who seem to me to live Christianity. Who is there?”¹⁷ At the nadir of his self-doubt he considered abandoning his evangelistic work in order to seek a position in commerce, however slender, that would feed him, his wife and their family adequately. He concluded that he lacked the friends and influence needed to land him a “secretaryship” or similar position.

Booth’s occasional self-doubt, however, was nothing compare to the hostility of the MNC. Institutional nastiness now varied directly with the crowds who turned out at his services and the penitents who responded to the gospel-invitation he articulated. Everything about him was denounced. The towns and cities where he had announced the bad news of God’s judgement and the good news of God’s mercy and patience hungered to have him return. The denomination did not shut him down at first, not wishing to incur adverse publicity, but neither did it allow him to proceed unopposed.

Many clergy-colleagues bitterly resented Booth’s notoriety. They had no idea what his ministry was costing him and his family: long periods away from home, energy-depletions which left him exhausted, next-to-no money, no fixed address as the family moved frequently in and out of shabby lodgings, and a wife whose health, never robust, was now chronically sub-standard even as she struggled to speak in public while sustaining numerous pregnancies.

Booth was careful to submit to denominational oversight inasmuch as he reported duly to superiors whenever they wanted to query him on matters pertaining to his ministry. Nevertheless, in 1857 denominational authorities decided to curtail him. At the Annual Conference he was told that his days as itinerant evangelist were over; he was being reassigned to circuit work. To his parents-in-law he wrote,

For some time I have been aware that a party was forming against me. Now it has developed itself and its purpose. It has attacked and defeated my friends, and my evangelistic mission is to come to an immediate conclusion. On Saturday, after a debate of five hours, in which 1 am informed the bitterest spirit was manifested against me, it was decided by 44 to 40 that I be appointed to a circuit. The chief opponents to my continuance in my present course are ministers…. I care not so much for myself…. My concern is for the Connexion – my deep regret is for the spirit this makes manifest, and the base ingratitude it displays.”¹⁸

A perceptive and sympathetic layman, not infected with the clergy’s rabies theologorum, wrote to Booth,

I believe that as far as the preachers have power, they will close the New Connexion pulpits against you. Human nature is the same in every Conference, whether Episcopalian, Wesleyan, New Connexion,Primitive [ie, Primitive Methodist] or Quaker. And the only way for men such as you to escape the mental rack and handcuffs is to take out a licence to hawk Salvation from the great Magistrate above, and absolutely refuse to have any other master.”¹⁹

The Booths were appointed to Brighouse, a grimy, industrial town, and were accommodated in the worst part of it. Catherine quickly added up the spiritual emptiness of their superintendent, “a sombre, funereal kind of being, utterly incapable of cooperating with Mr. Booth in his ardent views and plans for the salvation of the people”.²⁰ William, saddened and disappointed at the treatment accorded him by denominational authorities who seemed unable to grasp what impelled him, fervently wished to be “independent of all conclaves, councils, synods and conferences”.²¹

This is not to say that Booth had no supporters among the ministers. A few brave men courted denominational sanctions in standing by someone institutionally regarded as an ineradicable irritant. Indeed, following his ordination in 1858 (Booth had been the focus of undisguised denominational outrage before he was even ordained!) he wrote of the event,

I was surprised to find so large a number of revival friends at the Conference. John Ridgeway, William Mills, William Cooke, Turnock and many others are anxious on the question of my reappointment to evangelistic work. Birmingham, Truro, Halifax (my own circuit), Chester, Hawarden, and Macclesficid have presented memorials praying Conference to reinstate me in my former position. The discussion had not come on when the business closed last night. ²²

Booth and others had known that the controversy surrounding him would be a major item on the Conference agenda. The reader can only be struck by the administrative conjuring; the most controversial item in the denomination managed not to get to the floor!

A compromise was suggested at the Conference meeting of 1861. Booth insisted that his vocation could not endure it. The president of Conference, Henry Lofts, decided to settle Booth’s future in a private meeting to which only delegates were admitted. He ordered that the chapel gallery be closed immediately. Catherine, seated there, saw at once what Crofts was going to do. Leaping to her feet she cried, “Never!” “Close the doors!”, the enraged president of Conference fumed.²³ William bowed to the president chairing the meeting and walked to the narthex, where he met Catherine at the foot of the gallery stairs. They embraced each other and together departed from the denomination which had frustrated and harassed them for years.

Almost at once he was invited to conduct a short series of meetings in Cornwall. The “short” series continued for eighteen months, during which both William and Catherine preached night after night to the fishermen and townspeople who had rowed and walked miles to attend. The Methodist New Connexion failed to understand that it needed Booth desperately, while he had no need of it at all.

Denominational authorities were glad to see him go. The ferment his ministry fostered inconvenienced bureaucrats. Little wonder that one of Booth’s several biographers wrote of the institutional hounding of someone the world will never forget, “Officialdom exists in a system; officialdom has its own dignity to consider; officialdom is mediocrity in purple.”²⁴

In his letter of resignation Booth was content to leave his exoneration in the hands of God.

Looking at the past, God is my witness how earnestly and disinterestedly 1 have endeavoured to serve the Connexion, and knowing that the future will most convincingly and emphatically either vindicate or condemn my present action, I am content to await its verdict.²⁵

No one pretends that the future condemned his action.

III: Retention And Repudiation

Most significantly Booth retained what he believed to be the substance of Wesley’s theology. In 1885 a Methodist writer, Hugh Price Hughes, interviewed Booth for an article in The Methodist Times. “Have you any special advice for us Methodists?”, Hughes asked the now-famous Booth. The latter’s reply was swift and simple: “Follow John Wesley, glorious John Wesley”.²⁶ Wesley, it must be remembered, looked upon the doctrine of sanctification as “the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists.”²⁷ The doctrine, and, Wesley would have reminded us, the reality of which the doctrine spoke, was characteristically substantive of the Methodist movement, the principle of cohesion of all that it believed and did. William Booth and his followers continued to emphasize sanctification, or renewal by God’s Spirit through faith. While Wesley and Booth did not disagree with the sixteenth-century Reformers’ understanding of total depravity (“Allow this”, said Wesley of total depravity, “and you are so far a Christian; deny it, and you are but a heathen still.”²⁸) as well as the transaction wrought in the atonement. They both considered the Reformed tradition to have undervalued ‘transformation’; they were convinced that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it.

This is not to say that everything in Booth’s understanding of sanctification and holiness can be found explicitly in Wesley. In fact for years I have felt that The Salvation Army’s understanding of sanctification lies closer to that of John Fletcher, a Methodist thinker whom Wesley knew and loved, than precisely to that of Wesley himself. Nevertheless, the spirit of Wesley’s doctrine is the spirit of Booth’s. Nowhere, as far as I know, has Booth spoken a critical word about Wesley.

Again, this does not mean that Booth shared Wesley’s theological sophistication. Wesley was steeped in Patristics; Booth would not have known Athanasius from Ambrose. Wesley was Oxford University trained and multi-lingual; Booth left school early in order to apprentice to a pawnbroker. Wesley was schooled in the Reformers and drank deeply of the Puritan wisdom lodged in his grandfather and his wife’s grandfather as well; Booth merely insisted that the doctrine of double predestination was an abomination. Nevertheless the ethos of Wesleyanism, particularly the vision of such thoroughgoing transformation as to set no limits to the efficacy of God’s grace, Booth believed himself to have retained in his work and witness. One might say that while Booth possessed relatively little of that theological erudition which saturated Wesley, he profited much from the explicit theology which Wesley breathed into his followers.

Another Wesleyan aspect which Booth retained had to do with the unchurched. When the MNC forbade Booth to be an itinerant evangelist and instead appointed him to circuit work, he did not find himself preaching to an empty church. Wherever he preached the sanctuary overflowed — often more than a thousand attempted to hear him. The problem for him was not that no one came to church; the problem was that those who came were the Sunday congregation! Repeatedly he asked himself one question: “Why am I here with this crowded chapel of people who want to hear the message? Why am I not outside bringing the message of God to those who don’t want to hear it?²⁹ Before Booth, Wesley had taken up outdoor preaching when he was startled at its effectiveness with George Whitefield. Since Whitefield, a spirit-quenching superiority had settled upon the MNC; it felt that such an endeavour decidedly lacked that taste preferred by those with social aspirations. For this reason Booth also rented buildings to which came hordes of people who would never have attended a conventional place of worship.

When Wesley had commanded the gospel at mineheads, in factories and in the marketplace to those who would otherwise never have heard it, it was a miracle that he could communicate with people who were light-years removed from him in terms of formal education; it was surely a greater miracle that he wanted to. (An equal miracle, albeit remote from Booth’s passion, was found in George Whitefield; the bastard son of an English barmaid communicated effectively with England’s social elites!) Like Wesley, Booth was extraordinarily gifted at speaking compellingly to those whom the church customarily slighted.

Another retention has to do with hymnody. Virtually everyone in Wesley’s family was gifted poetically, his younger brother, Charles, outshining them all. Charles, it must be remembered, wrote three times as much poetry as William Wordsworth. Booth was similarly gifted, as were several others in his family, especially his son, Herbert. Booth’s hymns are idiosyncratically marked by images of vastness.

boundless salvation, deep ocean of love,
fullness of mercy Christ brought from above.
The whole world redeeming, so rich and so free,
Now flowing for all men, come roll over me.

Perhaps the best evidence of Booth’s retention of Wesley is found in The Salvation Army’s hymnbook: the genius of Charles Wesley has been preserved.

Booth’s repudiations of the Methodist New Connexion abound. He repudiated entirely the MNC’s characteristic sharing of church government with lay people. While no Christian leader to his time had used lay people as effectively as Booth, he refused to share authority with them. Modelling his organization on the military and naval mindset of the British empire in the Victorian era, Booth insisted that the distinction between clergy (“officers”) and lay people remain ironfast. In this regard he repudiated the MNC but retained the autocracy of Wesley himself! Booth had become exasperated with the ponderous, cumbersome stodginess of lay committees and subcommittees which debate and defer only to delay or defeat the deployment of the one thing which the Spirit is urging for needy people. When asked why The Salvation Army had so few committees Booth replied laconically, “If there had been committee meetings in the days of Moses the children of Israel would never have got across the Red Sea.” (It is only fair to add that Booth’s totalitarianism was the source of major grief and disruption relatively quickly; several of his relatives departed, unable to endure a dictatorship with whose edicts they disagreed.) In Booth’s defense it should be stated that upon leaving the MNC and forming The Christian Mission he was saddled with a committee of thirty-four which met only once a year. In view of the rapidity with which Booth added up what had to be done and the speed with which he himself wanted to move in doing it, and in view of the formative decisions which have to be made quickly in the birth of a new movement, the committee of thirty-four was hopelessly inefficient. George Scott Railton, an early and ardent supporter of Booth, himself fed up with procedural labyrinths, turned to Booth and said, “You tell us what to do and we shall do it.”³⁰ While Wesley was alive he and he alone ruled Methodism; when Elijah’s mantle fell on Booth (Booth thought), Booth liked the fit. Here Booth repudiated everything Kilham and his colleagues had suffered to effect in the New Connexion.

Booth, it must be remembered, insisted initially that he did not want to found a sect. He wanted only to form an evangelistic agency for those for whom (namely, all of us) the hands of the clock registered two minutes to twelve. All authority is given to military officers in combat inasmuch any other arrangement will only guarantee the destruction of those in danger. For Booth waging war was more than a metaphor, waging war was literal truth.

Another aspect of Methodism which Booth repudiated was its non-deployment of women preachers. In the course of Sunday worship during their sojourn in Brighouse, Catherine arose from her seat and walked slowly down the aisle towards her husband. He assumed that his wife was ill and needed assistance. Instead she ascended the pulpit stairs, stood beside her husband, and announced that she had come forward to make public confession of sin. “I have been disobeying God”, she blurted as she unfolded her resistance to her vocation to preach.³¹ Booth, aware that this was a vocation, and aware too that it was anathema in the churches of his era, yet also knew that vocations must be confirmed and sealed. He informed the congregation that Catherine would preach that evening. In no time she enthralled crowds, and in no time MNC authorities disapproved. Catherine was adamant:

I have searched the Word of God through and through. I have tried to deal honestly with every passage on the subject…. I solemnly assert that the more 1 think and read on the subject, the more satisfied I become of the true and scriptural character of my views … what endears the Christian religion to my heart is what it has done, and is destined to do, for my own sex.³²

She preached until she died at age sixty-one. The daughter of a clergyman and better educated than her husband, schooled in philosophy, literature and history, she was transparently possessed of compassion for addicted men and women, many of whom were illiterate. Not content to address these people, she fearlessly walked indescribable streets where desperate human beings lived in near-savagery. Subsequently she wrote,

I remember in one case finding a poor women lying on a heap of rags. She had just given birth to twins, and there was nobody of any sort to wait upon her…. By her side was a crust of bread and a small lump of lard…. The babies I washed in a broken pie-dish, the nearest approach to a tub that 1 could find. And the gratitude of those large eyes, that gazed upon me from that wan and shrunken face, can never fade from my memory.³³

For years William Booth quipped, “Some of my best men are women”. Among his officers he never hesitated to promote women over men. (This tradition continues. The current leader of The Salvation Army is a woman, Eva Burrows.)

A third area where Booth distanced himself from his precursors concerns the sacraments. He never forbade his people to partake of the sacraments, and in fact continued to administer them himself for several years after leaving the MNC. In his preoccupation with evangelism, however, he noticed increasingly that people put their confidence in the sacrament itself, rather in that reality (namely Jesus Christ) to which the sacrament pointed and which can be received only in faith. Convinced that we are born in sin, are not heirs of the kingdom of heaven, and urgently need a new standing before God (forgiveness) and a new nature as well (regeneration), Booth regarded any notion of sacramental efficacy as superstitious (because untrue) and dangerous (because deceptive). The water of baptism does not cleanse anyone of original sin; the rite of baptism does not alter the child before God. Since baptism, for Booth, was symbolic, his people could submit to it if they felt that doing so strengthened their faith; they could also, Quaker-like, decline it. Ever on the lookout for religious formalism devoid of spiritual reality, Booth suspected any churchly activity which diminished one’s awareness of the need of conversion. There is but one genuine baptism, he insisted, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. There is but one genuine communion, faith-communion with Jesus Christ. Here, of course, Booth repudiated Wesley utterly. As an Anglican priest, Wesley not only had insisted that Methodists be faithful in their attendance at Holy Communion; Wesley had even said that the Lord’s Supper was a converting sacrament, as well as a confirming one.

The sixteenth-century Reformers had said that the sacraments were God-ordained primarily to strengthen weak faith. Booth maintained that they could strengthen weak faith for those who thought they could; increasingly, however, he came to feel that more often than not the sacraments, or at least the public’s quasimagical view of the sacraments, obscured the need for faith, and to this extent could be spiritually deleterious. Oddly enough, when in 1882 The Salvation Army still administered the sacraments, a magazine article noted that for the first time in the history of the church, Holy Communion had been administered by women.³⁴ At an Exeter Hall meeting in 1889, Booth said characteristically, “Neither water, sacraments, church services nor Salvation Army methods will save you without a living, inward change of heart and a living, active faith and communion with God.”³⁵

In any discussion of Booth’s repudiations it is natural to look for formal theological disagreement since so many denominational splits are rooted in doctrinal differences. It is all the more surprising, then, to realize that with one exception (the role of the laity in church government) Booth never distanced himself doctrinally from the MNC. The cleavage lay, rather, in ethos. While Booth and the MNC used the same vocabulary and subscribed to the same doctrine, he felt the denomination now upheld the ‘salvation’ of the newly-respectable, whereas he saw all of humankind facing the same judge, meriting the same condemnation, standing together on the brink of eternal loss. His passion for evangelism was commensurate with his conviction of human peril. In addition, while MNC authorities opted to do nothing for those deemed not to be “our sort of people”, Booth’s heart was broken by the material bleakness, degradation and dehumanization which was largely the part of the masses whose lives were governed by the “Satanic mills” of urban putrefaction. His denomination never owned his zeal, his compassion, his urgency, his preoccupation. This is not to say that it was wrong and Booth right. Neither is it to say the converse. It is, however, to recognize afresh that wisdom always awaits justification at the hands of her children.

Notes

1. Minutes of Wesleyan Conference, 1812 ed., i(1766), 60. (emphasis Wesley’s). For much of the information in this part of the paper I am indebted to Davies, George and Rupp (ed.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain.

2. Davies, George and Rupp, 276.

3. Minutes, 1791, 234 Letters, VII, 266. Wrote this letter in 1788.

4. Letters, VII, 196.

5. Kilhaln, The Progress of Liberty Amongst the People Called Methodists, (Alnwick: 1795).

6. Kilharn, 18-19.

7. Townsend, Alexander Kilham, The First Methodist Reformer; (Lon-

don: 1889), 72.

8. Minutes of the Methodist New Connexion, 1798 10.

9. Coke, Cardinal Examination of the London Methodist Bill, in Edwards,

After Wesley,. (London: Epworth Press, 1935), 50-51.

10. For much of the following I am indebted to Begbie, Life of William Booth, Vols. 1 and 11. (London: MacMillan, 1923) and Collier, The General Next To God; (London: Collins, 1965).

11. Encyclopedia of World Methodism, II, 156-7.

12. quoted in Begbie, op. cit., 1, 181.

13. Ibid., I, 194.

14. Ibid., 197.

15. Ibid., (emphasis added).

16. Ibid., 201.

17. Ibid., (emphasis Booth’s)

18. Ibid., 1, 244 (emphasis Booth’s).

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., I, 245.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., 1, 248.

23. Collier, 35.

24. Begbie, 1, 230.

25. Ibid., I, 253.

26. Hughes, “An Interview with William Booth on The Salvation Army”, The Methodist Times, 5 February 1885, 81-82.

27. Wesley, Letters VII, 15 Septernber 1790.

28. Wesley, Sermons (Burwash ed.), “On Original Sin”.

29. Collier, 33.

30. Ibid., 55.

31. Ibid., 34.

32. Begbie, 1, 208 (emphasis Catherine’s).

33. Ibid., 1, 249.

34. Noncomformist and Independent, 9 February 1882 in Kew, Closer Communion, 42.

35. Kew, 50.

 

The following paper first appeared in The United Church Observer (Toronto) in
September of 1984.

 

JOHN WESLEY: A PARENT TO BE HONOURED

I:– Wesley is “all the rage” these days. After having been neglected for so long in The United Church of Canada he has been dusted off and hailed as someone whom our church should hear and heed. While the meetings of the Canadian Methodist Historical Society usually attract only a handful of Wesley enthusiasts (and even among them a significant portion belong to the Free Methodist Church), this year the national office of our own church advertised and commanded the meetings. Several of our Conferences decreed Wesley and his theology to be the theme of their annual meeting. In August, General Council referred again and again to Wesley’s Quadrilateral.(although one cannot be sure how much understanding met the references: one man told me he was sick and tired of hearing about the quadrangle.) And too often people have been treated to the spectacle of the Methodist circuitrider appearing on his horse, or even a black-coated couple in period costume arriving in a buggy, looking for all the world as sour and miserable as the supposed Calvinists whom Canadian writers like Hugh MacLennan and Robertson Davies relish depicting. The occasion of this recrudescent interest was, of course, the 200th anniversary of the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church in North America, and the 100th Anniversary of a major union of Methodist Churches in Upper Canada.

The celebrations are entirely appropriate, including this one. After all, the God who frees us from any and all bondage is the God who frees us to obey him; and frees us, in today’s context, to honour our parents. As a parent of The United Church of Canada Wesley surely merits being honoured.

At the same time, it is easy for children who now regard themselves as grownups to forget their aged parents. Accordingly, a year or two from now, when the anniversaries are behind us, will Wesley himself be behind us once more? I think not. Even before the most recent events drew attention to the little man and his work, 1 had noticed a nascent interest in him. Many different people, occupying many different spaces, had looked to him because they thought they saw in him someone who had anticipated their particular interest in or interpretation of the Christian life, and who felt he could lend illumination, encouragement and direction. As a matter of fact, someone with the gifts and insight and experience of a Wesley can do a great deal for different people with different interests. At the same time, we must be fair. We should not pretend that he is merely a catalyst who can enhance the development of our theological chemistry. To look upon Wesley in this manner is not to hear him and heed him, but is rather to use him as a handy grab bag into which we can reach whenever we want our ‘,thing” illustrated, even if it means ignoring him when we find something else in the grab bag which contradicts our “thing”.

The point I am making is this: while I have rejoiced in the rediscovery of Wesley today, I have also become alarmed at the manner in which he is being co-opted. On the one hand, we ought not to pretend that we live in the 18th century, speak its vocabulary, share its mind-set, and ask its questions. We don’t live in the 18th century. On the other hand, we ought not to trifle with Wesley — and thereby demean him — by rewarding him as a handy tool for reinforcing our theological or philosophical or social or personal agenda, which agenda breathes a logic bearing little resemblance to the logic of Wesley himself.

I have noticed a parallel situation in the way our own church approaches scripture. Virtually all preachers make reference to scripture. If many biblical passages are cited in the course of the sermon, the preacher is said to be an expository preacher. And if the sermon has to do with the passages of the day set by the ecumenical church, the same person is said to be a lectionary preacher. Yet even with lectionary preaching (a new wave among younger ministers,

I have found) there is still an almost universal tendency to use the Bible as a handy compendium of illustrations for the sermon, instead of allowing the logic of scripture to be the logic of the sermon. A case in point. One Sunday the sermon has to do with forgiveness. The logic of the sermon arises from the preacher’s own mind-set, her own self-understanding. Nevertheless, the fragrance of orthodoxy hovers around the sermon as illustrations are pulled from Joseph, who forgave his brothers, from David, who spared Saul, from Peter, who learned to forgive seventy times seven. Yet the logic of the sermon is not the logic of the passage on which the sermon is supposedly based. In other words, scripture has been co-opted to reinforce the preacher’s self-understanding or pet peeve; but scripture does not correct the preacher’s understanding of herself, her depraved heart, her God.

It is a similar development in the rediscovery of Wesley which alarms me. Wesley is co-opted in order to reinforce our theological or social world-view; but rarely is Wesley allowed to correct us. Our first responsibility, then, is to gain an appreciation of Wesley’s thought, for only as we do this shall we truly hear him and profoundly heed him. Only as we do this shall we obey the command of God to honour our parents.

 

II.– My first concern, then, is with the different special interest groups who wish to co-opt Wesley.

(i) Like the charismatic movement. It is easy to see how this could happen. Wesley spoke of the Spirit; of the Spirit of God, and the spirit (humankind as related to God). He maintained that the Spirit of God must bear witness to our spirit that we are God’s child. In view of the spiritual inertness which Wesley saw in so much of the church catholic, he knew and appreciated the difference between lifegiving Spirit and dead letter, between a heart set on fire with the truth of God and cold assent to cold orthodoxy. He knew that joy is a fruit of the Spirit. He knew that where the command of God is not obeyed cheerfully it is not obeyed at all.  And with St. Paul Wesley certainly insisted that “the signs of an apostle” had mainifested themselves wherever there had been apostolic ministry (“the signs of an apostle” being chiefly men and women coming to a lively faith in Jesus Christ).  It is but a short stop from “the signs of an apostle” to the “signs following” of which both the New Testament and our charismatic friends speak.  It cannot be questioned that in the course of the evangelical revival in 18th century England there were occurrences which are reflected in the charismatic movement today:  some people were overcome and did fall unconscious.  There was effusive, excited utterance.   Wesley knew that when the Spirit acts, people are either mad, sad, or glad.   The “mad” (i.e., angry) he came to know first-hand when authorities opposed him and mobs assaulted him.  The “sad” (i.e., wistful) he spoke of as “almost Christians”, under conviction of sin and loging for the assurance of salvation.  And the “glad” burst forth with a joy which he never tried to suppress and which Wesleyan hymnody captured as little else has.  At the same time, Wesley was not uncritical of religious effusiveness.  He insisted that the test of the Spirit’s activity was love.  It was love which distinguished a genuine work of the Spirit form the counterfeit work of a spirit which was less than holy. Wesley never agreed that any bizarre behaviour which claimed the Spirit of God as its genesis and rationale was to be received as such just because of the claim. Love ever remained normative as the test of the work of God.

While there were some behavioural similarities between Wesleyan communities and the charismatic movement today we should not assume that Wesley was the 18th century progenitor of this movement. He should not be co-opted by it. His logic and its logic do not square at all points.

(ii) Neither can he be co-opted by the pietists. Pietism was a movement which developed in Europe as a reaction to the cold, sterile barrenness of Protestant scholasticism or Protestant Orthodoxy as it is called. Both Lutheran and Reformed scholasticism emphasized, in fact overemphasized, the objective truth of the gospel. Moreover, in scholasticism the truth of the gospel, truth in the sense of reality, as John’s gospel makes clear, evaporated as the notion of the truths of the gospel took hold. Mind was divorced from heart. Theology became a highly abstract jigsaw puzzle of no little subtlety, and it exercised and preoccupied minds given to this kind of reasoning. In effect, the Christian reality ceased to be the total person bound to Jesus Christ in faith and to the neighbour in love. The Christian reality became mental assent to doctrinal propositions whose convolutions and correctness had been worked out as finely as the links in a gold necklace. Concomitant with this overdeveloped objectivism was often a spiritual (and moral) indifference which many people found as unacceptable as it was certainly undeniable. Pietism was the reaction of the heart — always the heart — to all of this. Wesley encountered a pietism significant -Lor him in the person of Peter Bö hler and the Moravians. In the midst of a north Atlantic storm, when the early Wesley’s anxiety level was out of sight, he marvelled at the equanimity of the Moravians. He marvelled and wondered. Subsequently one of them said to him, “Do you know Christ as your Saviour?” “I know him to be the Saviour of the world”, replied Wesley. “That’s not what I asked. Do you know him to be yours?” “I said I did,” he wrote in his journal, “but alas, I did not.”

Wesley came to appreciate very much the leading Pietist hymnwriter, Count Nicolas von Zinzendorf. In 1738, in the Aldersgate episode, he spoke of having his own heart “strangely warmed”. Certainly the hymns of the Wesley brothers abound in references to the heart: “0 for a heart to praise my God, a heart from sin set free. . . ” Stanzas such as the following were not at all atypical:

Open, Lord, my inward ear
And bid my heart rejoice,
Bid my quiet spirit hear
Thy comfortabel voice.

Another hymn began, “Show me, as my soul can bear, the depth of inbred sin. . . ”
And another, “My heart is full of Christ and longs for its glorious matter to
declare. . . ” In the wake of the influence of Pietism upon him Wesley would surely have found fresh force in the words his dying father spoke to him: “The inward witness; don’t forget the inward witness.”

Pietism, however, was a mixed blessing. In reacting against the abstract frigidity of Protestant scholasticism it tended to regard the heart as the measure, the canon, of Christian truth and reality. That is, Christian truth was what happened to speak to my heart, and the reality of Jesus Christ was what my heart could grasp. The believer’s standing in grace, indeed her/his total spiritual condition, was what the heart could discern of itself. Pietism was obviously highly introspective, a movement which fostered despair in those who found in their heart what made them ashamed, a movement which fostered self-righteousness in those who found in their heart what incited self-congratulation. Wesley came to see this side of Pietism. In addition, he was unhappy with its disdaining of the sacramental side of the church, as well as with an emphasis on inner heart-experiences which was not matched by outer cross-bearing.

After his Aldersgate awakening Wesley put Pietism behind him. From this point on he insisted, in concert with the Reformers, on justification by faith: believers are justified (rightly related to God) as they entrust themselves to the provision God has made for them in the ever-righteous Son. Wesley never surrendered his conviction on this point, and in him and his people it would always check any drift toward Pietism. Faith in one’s own inferiority, the Achilles heel of Pietism, Wesley recognized as psychologically unhealthy and spiritually erroneous. Like the Reformers, he knew that faith, genuine faith, is determined by the author and object of faith, Jesus Christ. Faith is always faith in Christ, not confidence in one’s own religious capacity, sensitivity or achievement. And like the Reformers, Wesley knew that it is Jesus Christ who not only determines who I am but also acquaints me with who I am. No amount of inner inspection can disclose my spiritual standing or condition.

It cannot be denied that Wesley had some affinities with Pietism. When the Protestant Orthodoxy of his day spoke chiefly of transaction (Christ has done something “out there” on my behalf so as to alter my status before God), Pietism spoke chiefly of transformation (Christ has done something “in here”, within me, so as to alter my nature). Certainly Wesley appreciated the force of transformation and eagerly commanded it as part of the whole counsel of God. At the same time, his eyes were open to the pitfalls of Pietism. Any doubt concerning the distance Wesley put between it and himself is dispelled when we remember the importance Wesley ascribed to theology and to church tradition. While Pietism did develop some significant devotional literature, it was woefully deficient in theology. And its jettisoning of the tradition of the church catholic never sat well with the man who knew patristics like the back of his hand.

North American pietism has always claimed Wesley as one of its major facilitators and spokespersons. Wesley would have rejected the claim. At several critical places he indicated that he stood much closer to the catholic substance of the faith.

(iii) Perhaps the area of contemporary life and churchmanship where Wesley is most likely to be co-opted is the area of social criticism. Unquestionably Wesley was appalled at the social situation of his day and the human wreckage it produced. (We ought not to assume that anyone of his era would have been appalled; all too many leaders in church and society, in fact, were not appalled at all.) Not only was he upset, he did something about it. He worked indefatigably to reflect the light of the gospel into such dark corners as the slave trade, child abuse, gambling, drunkenness, bear-baiting, lasciviousness, factory conditions, prisons, and so on. The positive side of his protest Wesley sought to implement in his classes and societies as well as in a social amelioration effected by those who heard him even if they never became followers.

Those in The United Church of Canada whose focus is social dismantling and social reconstruction latch on to Wesley at this point and herald him as the patron saint. Overlooked in this, however, is a crucial matter which must be given full weight: Wesley never reduced the gospel, without remainder, to an ideology of social transmutation. He was unsparing in his opposition to the social oppression whose victims looked at and lived with (and loved, we might add) day after day. Nevertheless, his gospel was not a leftist programme which merely borrowed religious trappings as a convenient (if dishonest) vehicle while ignoring the unique content of the faith once delivered to the saints. Wesley spoke of the slave trade as “the most execrable villainy in the world”. When others argued that the abolition of slavery would deprive Britain of cheap labour, thus plunging everyone into material misery as the economy collapsed, he insisted that he did not care what price had to be paid: slavery was an abomination which stank in the nostrils of God and would have to be eradicated. Yet Wesley always regarded the cause of abolition and other expressions of social protest as an implicate of the gospel, not as an ideology for which the “gospel”, so-called, merely provided the primitive and picturesque dress which sophisticated people had grown beyond.

Admirers of Wesley are fond of saying that his gospel was so effective in altering social conditions that Britain was spared a revolution as bloody as that which racked France in 1789. Whereupon leftwing historians snort, “That’s just the trouble!” The point is, Wesley did not aim at revolution. He wanted only to allow Jesus Christ to stand forth in the totality of his reality, that he might bring forth a new creature and a new earth.

Today, in our church, Wesley is most readily co-opted and misinterpreted right here. Nevertheless, an unbiased reading of Wesley himself will disclose, unarguably, that his gospel cannot be reduced without remainder to an ideology of social reconstruction. And a reading of his l9th century descendants who shared his vision will disclose the same: Wesleyan theology is the God-ordained reflection of believing men and women upon the reality of Jesus Christ and upon the actuality of God’s world.

(iv) In the fourth place Wesley is in danger of being co-opted by those who incorrectly suppose him to be theologically or intellectually indifferent. When I was visiting professor in Newfoundland a United Church minister, commenting on the difference between Methodists and Presbyterians on the island, said, “The Presbyterians had scholarship, but we (i.e., the Methodists) had religion.” His remark may have reflected with some accuracy the state of affairs, historically, in Newfoundland. But his remark does not at all reflect the value Wesley himself placed on learning in general and on theological learning in particular. A current myth, as unedifying as it is false, is that the Reformed Church had a coherent theology while the Methodist had an amorphous “blob”. Not so for Wesley! My own research has turned up many instances where Wesley reflects almost word for word significant passages in Calvin’s Institutes. This is not to deny important distinctions between Reformed and Wesleyan theology. It is to insist, however, that Wesley was thoroughly acquainted with the riches of the Christian tradition, and recognized where Christian truth had been articulated ably, even as he retained his own critical independence. It is simply not the case that the Presbyterian inheritance in The United Church of Canada represents theological rigour, while the Methodist inheritance represents vacuity.

Think of the literary formation of the Wesley brothers, not the sufficient condition but certainly a necessary condition of their hymn-writing. At Charterhouse school, where John went at age eleven, the lower form boys wrote an English prose pré cis of Sunday’s sermon; the middle form boys a Latin prose pré cis, and the upper form boys a Latin verse pré cis. We should not overlook the fact that among the dozens of books Wesley wrote one is newly reprinted, The Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion. John knew early in life the learning required of the clergy. A study of the scriptures presupposed mastery of Greek and Hebrew, in addition to ancillary Semitic tongues. Added to these were disciplines which we would scarcely regard as essential to the intellectual formation of ministers yet which were almost self-evidently so to Wesley: logic, history, law, pharmacy (!), philosophy, geography, mathematics, poetry, and music. William Law, from whom Wesley parted company after 1738 (Aldersgate), disdained this emphasis on the mind. He demeaned Wesley’s programme as “empty babble, more suited for someone who has grown bleary eyed from mending dictionaries than for one who has tasted the age to come.” (1)

The first item in Wesley’s programme of study, we should note, was logic, which he regarded as “the gate of the sciences”. At Oxford he had lectured in logic. In’ 1788, at age 85, his diary informs us that he had read logic on four successive mornings. Neologisms and slang he had no use for at all, just as he had no use for high flown language: ‘I could. . . write floridly and rhetorically … but I dare not … let who will admire the French frippery. I am still for plain, sound English.” (2)

Wesley insisted that his preachers spend several hours in study every day. He did so himself. To suggest that Wesleyanism was the refuge of the intellectually effete is simply to confess ignorance of the man himself. And to think that he can be co-opted as a support for a religiosity whose zeal is not according to knowledge is simply to insult him. For he knew, as much as any other Christian leader, that God was to be loved with the mind.

Today, as Wesley is hailed by so many as their spokesperson and inspiration, we must not allow him to be co-opted by lobbyists whose view of Christian faith and life is less than whole. We must not regard him as a ready-to-hand storehouse of illustrations and rationales which reinforce our religious predilections. He must be heard for himself, in the catholicity of his mind and heart, or we shall forfeit the riches which he can yet give us.
III:(i) —  Having seen where we should not distort Wesley we should now endeavour to understand where he can help us.  Wesley can help us as we struggle to develop a folk theology and as we struggle to become a folk church.

When we ponder Wesley’s background and upbringing — son of an English Anglican clergyman (that is, born into the professional class in a society where class distinctions meant more than we in North America shall ever imagine), educated at Oxford University, ordained to the ministry of the established

church — when we ponder this we are amazed that Wesley’s ministry unfolded so largely among people who did not remotely share his situation: working class poor, widows, orphans, miners and so on. We are even more amazed that he wanted to. It required no little grace and effort for him to speak to these people and to be loved and trusted by them. (In passing we might note that while Wesley was moving down the social scale, another leader of the Evangelical Awakening, George Whitefield, was moving up. Whitefield was the bastard son of an English barmaid — a long way from Oxford University — spent much of his evangelistic endeavour among the upper classes, with people such as the Countess of Huntington. Wesley spent very little time with these people, insisting that too many hours had to be frittered in the 18th century equivalent of a cocktail party. The returns were far too meagre for the colossal amount of time invested, Wesley explained.)

Wesley was a folk theologian in the best sense of the word, the sense used first by Professor Albert Outler of Perkins School Theology. Folk theology reflects upon and addresses, in the light of the gospel, the concerns and questions of where people live. Folk theology, as the name implies, leaves to someone else the task of confronting the issues raised by academic enquiry. When we speak of “folk theology”, then, we are using “folk” in the sense of “folk music”. Folk music is not bad music; neither is it music written by semi-competent people; neither is it “music” which aims at unleashing the “superid” in us. Folk music, rather, is music which expresses the aspirations, apprehensions and pain, even the tragedies and triumphs of people on the street, of people where they live. Traditionally, seminarians concentrate on theological issues raised by colleagues in other university departments. Think, for instance, of the concern to develop a theological response to questions raised by Heidegger’s metaphysics, by Hegel’s

philosophy of history, or by Sartre’s existentialism. Wesley would not slight this at all. He would insist, however, that this approach be balanced by another approach which grapples with whatever worries and elates, angers and excites people who are not academic philosophers.

Quite frankly, I am surprised that our church has paid so little serious attention to the sociologist, the anthropologist, the statistician. I am not suggesting for a minute, as Wesley would never suggest, that the sociologist et al supply the content of the church’s preaching and teaching. Standing as he did within the Reformation Wesley knew that scripture is the primary source and norm of the church’s proclamation. At the same time, the social scientist does provide a description of the world which the church engages and which the church must address. A description — not a definitive understanding — a description, yet a description we cannot afford to ignore.

When the sociologist tells us that churchgoing, from his professional standpoint, is simply part and parcel of middle class culture, like the ballet and the B.A. degree; that virtually no one with an income below $20,000 bothers with the church, its message and its witness — do we thoughtlessly dismiss the remark as another attempt at a naturalistic reduction of faith? Or do we ask ourselves if there might just be some substance to the remark? Why is it that we have virtually no credibility with people of lower incomes?

This question has haunted me for some time now. We know that that segment of the socioeconomic spectrum from which The United Church of Canada draws its people is getting narrower and narrower as The United Church constituency becomes more and more affluent. That is, we attract people from a smaller base demographically, and the fewer people whom we do attract have more of this world’s goods. Now the effect of rampant inflation is that the economic middle class, especially the mid-to-upper middle class, is precipitated

downwards, towards the poorer people in our society. Throughout economic crisis the rich remain rich and the poor remain poor, but the middle class is accelerated downward economically. In other words, rampant inflation would tumble our church’s constituency into those people with whom we have, at present, no credibility whatsoever. Have we pondered with sufficient seriousness how vulnerable our church support base is economically? How do we begin now to exercise a credible ministry among people who are not economically privileged? Do we care? Wesley cared!

Yet we must not equate economic disadvantage with human impoverishment. The suburb immediately adjacent to me in Mississauga is Meadowvale West. It is the planned community. It is advertised as an edenic or paradisaical situation. Implied is the notion that to live there is to transcend the contradictions and disruptions which afflict everyone else. Nevertheless, Meadowvale West has one of the highest, if not the highest, incidences of child abuse in the greater Toronto region. An ambulance attendant told me that on Friday evenings his ambulance picks up people who have managed to get the week in at work but who are facing an unendurably lonely weekend. They overdose on pills. Recently, one ambulance crew, on one Friday evening, picked up twelve such persons. How do we deal with such loneliness, isolation, alienation? Wesley wanted to do something for the dislocated of his era who had moved from rural villages to the high density slums of industrial cities and who found themselves bereft. He developed a vehicle through his class, band and society. Genuine care was evident and effective. What are we to do to keep people from falling between the cracks? Folk theology, remember, is not amateurish theology or fad theology or secularized theology. Folk theology is that articulation of the gospel which hears the heartbeat and feels the anguish of where people live.

Related to folk theology is ethos. Ethos is the characteristic spirit of a community. While most discussions of Wesley have to do with formal distinctions between his theology and someone else’s, I have come to think that a major dimension of the entire Wesley phenomenon is the Wesleyan ethos, the spirit or soul of the community of those people whom he had been given to serve and love. While Wesley himself said, on one occasion, that there was but a hair’s breadth between him and Calvinism, for me a question which merits greater investigation is this: was there more than a hair’s breadth between the ethos of a Calvinist church-community in a mercantile city of continental Europe and the ethos of a Wesleyan church-community in an industrial “Satanic mill” of England?.

Wesley can help us in our quest for a folk theology.

(ii) A second area where Wesley can help us today is sanctification. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance the doctrine of sanctification held for early-day Methodism. “This doctrine is the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists,” wrote Wesley, “and for the sake of propagating this chiefly he appeared to have raised us up.” (3) By “sanctification” or “Christian perfection” he meant genuine human transformation, by the grace of God, together with the absence of limits to that transformation. In other words, God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it.

Contrary to the opinion of those whose understanding of Wesley is shallow, Wesley never maintained that grace divinizes us, that as we are sanctified we leave our humanity behind and become semi-divine. Similarly, he never maintained that the grace-wrought transformation overcame all the marks of the Fall so as to render us flawless. Neither was Wesley semi-Pelagian, thinking the human will to be so slightly impaired by the Fall as to allow us to move unaided toward God. For Wesley the Fall was as severe in nature and scope as for Luther and Calvin. Like the Reformers Wesley upheld the notion of Total Depravity; i.e., there is no one area or aspect of our humanity which is unaffected by sin and which can, of itself, save other areas or aspects. Indeed, concerning Total Depravity Wesley wrote, “Allow this, and you are so far a Christian. Deny it, and you are but a heathen still.” (4) To be sure, he did replace predestination with prevenient grace. Yet he insisted that the human awareness of sin, of the need for repentance, was a predicate of grace, not a predicate of natural human ability. Wesley’s emphasis on the reality of human transformation, then, does not presuppose a shallow view of the Fall.

Like the Reformers, Wesley espoused a pessimism of nature. He went beyond them, however, in his espousing an optimism of grace. God could change people profoundly, such change should be sought, and an ever-deeper work of grace welcomed and lived out. This, Wesley maintained, was the secret of what God was doing in the Methodist societies.

In our own milieu there is great longing for human transformation. People implicitly ask one question of our church, our theologies, our programmes: “What difference does it all make?” While never using the vocabulary, they ask, in their own way, “How does the heart of stone become the heart of flesh?”

Sadly, where and when the historic churches do speak of human transformation too often we run after something which glitters but is not gold, like the human potential movement. But such movements deny the Fall (that is, their view of human nature is naive), they confirm people in their narcissism, they repudiate grace and the need for grace. In a word, they reinforce precisely what needs to be dealt with: concupiscence, humankind’s being turned in on itself, willing itself and its self-understanding as the centre of all that is. In other words, the “transformation” held up, in this regard, is simply an intrapsychic movement within naturalistic limits. Wesley held up something much better. He avoided both the Deistic notion that people were cast upon their own resources, since God was remote, and the mediaeval “ladder of merit”, whereby people achieved sanctification by climbing (God ordained) steps and stairs. He brought sanctification where it belongs, under the Reformation truth of salvation by grace through faith.

Admittedly, in places Wesley’s teaching on Christian perfection is difficult to sort out. He makes an assertion, qualifies it, amplifies it, alters it, and then picks up a fresh approach to the same topic. And in fact nuances in his doctrine have given rise to various schisms within Methodism. Nevertheless, the lineaments oil his teaching are clear:

-Christian perfection is not sinlessness in the sense of faultlessness;
-it is not a rising above human finitude;
-the sanctified never possess sanctification in such a way as to be independent of Jesus Christ, and they always stand in need of forgiveness; they do continue to grow in grace; they are on the road, as Wesley said one hundred times, to perfection in love.

To be overwhelmed by the love of God is to be infused with love for God’s creation. The sanctification or perfection of which Wesley speaks has nothing to do with the self righteousness whose superiority is imagined, or with the neuroticism whose inferiority is distressing. Wesley’s sanctification has everything to do with genuine transformation as earnest believers are taken out of themselves, for they live in Christ through faith and in their neighbour through love, as Wesley’s friend, Luther; said before him.

Obviously we shall not necessarily use Wesley’s vocabulary or share his mind-set in all respects. Yet as we and others groan in anticipation of the revealing of the sons and daughters of God, we shall have to learn from the little man, and learn something profound about sanctification, or else we shall abandon our people and our needy society to sectarian churches which continue to speak of the work of God in the human heart, or to a secular version of the same which is less than helpful, or to an ideological programme of social wrenching. Needed so very sorely is a vision of perfection in love as the worthy goal of followers of him whose crucified arms denote love without measure and without end.

(iii) A third area where Wesley can help us is spirituality. As I have indicated, Wesley gained much from the Reformed tradition. His mother came from Puritan stock.. Again, he profited from exposure to it while distancing himself from it at several points. It is certainly significant that he espoused an evangelical Arminianism. It is significant too that while Roman Catholics claimed apostolic succession to be unbroken continuity with the apostles through the church’s hierarchy, and while Reformed Christians claimed apostolic succession to be continuity with apostolic doctrine, Wesley insisted that it meant continuity with apostolic witness and sprit in the Christian community. He was aware of the
distinction between conformity to doctrine and oneness of spirit with those Christians whose witness is normative for all others.

Unquestionably there is in our church today a hunger for spiritual formation. Candidates for the ministry (whom I interview on behalf of presbytery) tell me that they often feel, upon completing their formal course in theology, as though they are equipped to become religious functionaries while being underdeveloped spiritually. I have found many students and non-students-attempting to remedy such a deficiency by informing their quest with a Roman Catholic content. To be sure, there are riches here. At the same time, there is much that is puzzling and even off-putting. Their quest would be aided immeasurably if they knew how and where Wesley had anticipated them.

We should not forget that from 1725 to 1738 Wesley was much influenced by mystics and moralists. Under their inf1uence his aspiration left him psychologically burdened and theologically warped. It was after 1738, when ‘justification by faith’ (“It is the first principle and can never be enforced too much”) came to the forefront of his theology that his quest became a reality which he could enjoy, in the biblical sense of this word.

In other words, while Wesley knew of and borrowed from a variety of traditions — Reformed, Roman, Puritan, mystical — Wesleyan spirituality came to have its own unique shape. Members of our church today, and especially candidates for the ministry, will be helped as they are apprised of a sprituality which avoids some of the starker aspects of the Reformed tradition, and which also checks a flight into mystical religiosity by its conviction of the scriptural norm.

There remains one important dimension of Wesley’s spirituality which we must not overlook. Wesley was aware that humankind thinks imagistically as well as conceptually. Concrete symbols affect us as well as abstractions. The Roman Catholic tradition emphasizes a seeing of the gospel, while the Reformed tradition emphasizes a hearing of the gospel. With respect to spiritual direction the Reformed tradition magnifies understanding. While not denying the necessity of understanding Wesley magnified the role of the imagination. While his images are not always those which you and I would find helpful (we cannot pretend that we are equipped with the imagistic tools of the 18th century), we do need to recover, once more, the logic of Wesley’s position. We need to grasp not the specific images which he and his brother hung up in the imaginations of their people; rather, we need to grasp the fact that humankind is image-oriented. Something besides theological or doctrinal correctness (always in danger of becoming an ideology which happens to employ a religious vocabulary) is needed to foster spiritual formation. How this is done, how the imaginative is used to assist spiritual formation, is something to be distilled from a sensitivity to Wesley and a sensitivity to the contemporary mind-set. (One case in point. Many modern hymns in our red hymn book are splendid. But one, which I forbear to mention, is replete with imagery which is consistently ugly)

In short, Wesley saw enough of sterile Protestant scholasticism to convince him that the body which is beautifully attired may yet be a corpse. At the same time his concern with spiritual development did not betray him into confusing religiosity with maturity of discipleship. Religiosity he knew, from his experience with it, to be sub-Christian, self-serving, and subtly self-righteous. The danger of a similar confusion is with us today, but just as surely a similar opportunity awaits us.

You may be wondering why there has been so little exposition of Wesley’s works in this address. No attempt, for example, has been made to speak the next-to-definitive word on his notion of prevenient grace or on his eucharistic understanding. In preparing this material I was aware that I would not be addressing academics chiefly or those for whom Wesley scholarship is a preoccupation. I wanted to say something which would incite hearers to read Wesley for themselves, while not giving the impression that Wesley himself now need not be read.

I admit that if we are to be informed by the logic of Wesley’s thought and not simply “dip” into him to illustrate a sermon or two per year, then our acquaintance with him must be more than cursory. But then, dilettantism, which is nothing less than defiance of God’s command to love with our mind, is something from which we must ever be saved.

 

 

NOTES

1. quoted in E. G. Rupp, Just Men, 117
2.      Wesley, Preface to Sermons on Several occasions (1778); in Works, vi, 186-7
3. Wesley, Letters, VIII (15 September, 1790)
4. Wesley, Sermons (Burvash edition.), No. 44, “On Original Sin”

 

The Reverend Dr. Victor A. Shepherd
October, 1984

 

This paper first appeared in Touchstone (Winnipeg) in May of 1988.

 

“…THAT WE MAY PERFECTLY LOVE THEE.”
JOHN WESLEY AND SANCTIFICATION

by Victor Shepherd

“Strive for. . .the holiness without which no one will see the Lord”                 Hebrews 12:24

“Christian perfection. . .is only another term for holiness.”      Sermon on Christian Perfection

“Question 4. What was the rise of Methodism, so-called?
Answer. In 1729, two young men, reading the Bible, saw they could not be saved without holiness, followed after it, and incited others so to do. In 1737 they saw holiness comes by faith they say likewise that men are justified before they are sanctified; but still holiness was their point. God then thrust them out, utterly against their will, to raise a holy people.”
Works, VIII, 300

 

Demographic statistics for early-to-mid eighteenth-century Britain are available only for the City of London, yet the picture which they generate is typical of the industrial-era cities.

Three-quarters of all children died before age five. While irreversible disease accounted for a large percentage of the fatalities, the most callous neglect, not to say wilful cruelty, accounted for the rest. Among the poorest people, and amidst the human impoverishment which accompanies material deprivation, the child mortality rate was almost one hundred percent.¹ Mr. Hanway, a governor of the Foundling Hospital (established in 1739, one year after Wesley’s conversion) commented on this aspect of English social life. “The pagan Chinese may legally drown female children; but an English Churchwarden, or ‘Father of the Poor’ . . . may suffer children to be starved to death or poisoned with noxious air.”² Scores of thousands of children were entrusted to nurses who pocketed the paltry sum given them for “caring”, permitting starvation to overtake the child who was too expensive to feed. And since remains were too expensive to inter, infant corpses were routinely thrown onto manure piles. At birth the very poorest children were commonly abandoned in the street to perish. Frequently destitute parents blinded, maimed or deformed their child in hope of teasing out a few more pennies when the child was sent forth to beg. “Saddling the spit” was the highlight of parish entertainment; parish officers commandeered the monies paid to the parish to care for resourceless children and treated themselves to a large-scale drunk. The children, as many as five hundred at a time, were simply forsaken.

In 1684 Britain distilled 527,000 gallons of spirits. By 1750 the flow reached eleven million. (For a total population of only five million people!) Of the two thousand houses in St. Giles, London, 506 were gin shops. The record of proceedings from the Old Bailey, England’s principal criminal court, informs us of the tragedy of Judith Dufour. She had removed her young child from the workhouse, strangled her, thrown the body into a ditch, sold the child’s clothing for one shilling and four pence, and finally spent the money on gin, which she then shared with another woman who had collaborated in the murder.
The sign in gin shop windows read:

Drunk: one shilling
Dead Drunk: two shillings
Free straw

Some shops advertised “clean straw,” a concession to a better class of patron who preferred not to sleep in someone else’s vomit. Parliament often foreshortened its debates “because the honourable members were too drunk to continue the affairs of state”³ Couples aimed at solemnizing their marriages in the morning; by evening solemnity had given way to sottishness.

Gambling was equally addictive. The well-to-do forfeited huge sums at the roll of dice, up to twenty-thousand pounds. The poor lost their money piecemeal yet lost it as surely to the government lotteries whose seduction they found irresistible. (Westminster Bridge and the British Museum were built largely by funds naively offered up by the poorest classes.) The degeneration which accompanied all of this need not be detailed. Its depth and scope are sufficiently attested in one advertisement for entertainment, “Champagne, Dice, Music, or your Neighbour’s Spouse.”⁴

Defiant and Disordered Self-Will

John Wesley was acquainted with all of the foregoing. He was certain of the reason for it, for he concurred with the Reformers’ understanding of Total Depravity; i.e., there is no area or aspect of our humanity unaffected by sin, and hence there is no area or aspect which of itself can save the rest. Concerning this doctrine Wesley wrote, “Allow this, and you are so far a Christian. Deny it, and you are but a heathen still.”⁵ Humankind, in his opinion, was afflicted with an innermost corruption, a corrupt root which could yield only corrupt branches and fruits. The human heart, Wesley insisted in a sermon at Oxford on 11 June 1738 (three weeks after his conversion), is “altogether corrupt and abominable”.⁶ He still held this perception of the human condition fifty years later. Like the Reformers, Wesley believed that the elemental problem in the wake of the Fall was that the human will is in se curvatus, i.e., it can will only its defiant and disordered self-will before God. This was not to deny that fallen persons are capable of some good. They are, and Wesley gladly acknowledged that there are “many, fair shreds of morality among them”.⁷ Nonetheless, before God humankind remains imprisoned within itself: “whither-so-ever they move, they cannot move beyond the circle of self”.⁸ While Wesley disagreed vehemently with the Calvinists of his own day on such matters as predestination, he admitted that with respect to the human situation he came “to the very edge of Calvinism”:

In ascribing all good to the grace of God,
In denying all natural free will, and all power antecedent to grace,
In excluding all merit from man, even for what he has or does by the grace of God.⁹

Wesley readily admitted that people “acknowledge God’s being” and as uncompromisingly insisted that “they have no acquaintance with him”.¹⁰ In other words, the relationship with God for which humankind was created was forfeited with catastrophic results. Some of these results were touched on in the first part of this article. The all-pervasive “result” which is the cause of all subsequent personal and social deterioration Wesley states succinctly: “We have by nature, not only no love, but no fear of God.”¹¹

Impute and Impart

In light of this diagnosis there can he only one cure: “the great end of religion is to renew our hearts in the image of God, to repair that total loss of righteousness and true holiness. . .”¹² With the Reformers Wesley argued that justification or forgiveness of sins was the ground of the Christian life. (He never surrendered this conviction.) At the same time, Wesley was sure that God could do something for penitent sinners beyond forgiving them. The righteousness which God imputed to them, in virtue of Christ’s righteous obedience unto death, God could also impart in virtue of the Spirit’s power and penetration. This doctrine of sanctification (or “perfection”, a somewhat misleading synonym, as is made plain below), Wesley insisted, “is the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly God appeared to have raised us up.”¹³ His conviction here he amplified elsewhere:

By Methodists, I mean a people who profess to pursue (in whatsoever measure they have attained) holiness of heart and life; inward and outward conformity in all things to the revealed will of God; who place religion in a uniform resemblance to the great object of it; in a steady imitation of him they worship, in all his inimitable perfections; more particularly in justice, mercy and truth, or universal love filling the heart and governing the life. ¹⁴

While Wesley had been influenced as early as 1725 by mystics and moralists (William Law, Jeremy Taylor, Thomas à Kempis) after his Aldersgate experience he renounced the moralist/mystic concern with self-purgation and emphasized instead God’s gift of faith and God’s ongoing work of restoring the defaced image of God through believers’ faith. Whereas the Reformers had carefully balanced justification and sanctification, the forgiveness of sins and the restoration of the sinner, always reminding Christians that the work of restoration remained hidden and would be completed and revealed only in the end-time, Wesley massively emphasized the “new creature” which the Christian had become now through clinging in faith to the crucified one. His reading of Scripture yielded God’s promise in this matter, and he never doubted the fulfilment of the promise. He saw no grounds for necessarily relegating this fulfilment to the end time.

At the same time it must be admitted that Wesley slightly obscured his theology in the matter of sanctification/perfection. He agreed with the Reformers that the Christian remains simul peccator simul justus, i.e. a sinner still yet justified: the Christian never moves beyond needing daily forgiveness. Even “. . . the most perfect have continual need of the merits of Christ, even for their actual transgressions”.¹⁵ Indeed, a favourite hymn-line of earlyday Methodists, sung as frequently as it was believed sincerely, was

Every moment, Lord, I need
The merit of Thy death.¹⁶

Even the “perfect” live only by God’s mercy. “They still need Christ as their priest”, Wesley added, meaning that the most godly can live before God only by the constant efficacious intercession of the sin-bearing one himself.

Wesley’s vocabulary, then, was not always precise in discussing this topic, especially in the writings which immediately followed his conversion. The impression has confused many, even as it spawned nineteenth-century conflicts within Methodism concerning the nature, conditions and end of sanctification. Nevertheless, when we assess the foundational statements of the doctrine, modifications to it and comments upon it — all of this from the pen of a man who tested his theological formulations with his societies for fifty years — a more coherent pattern emerges.

 

Residing But No Longer Ruling

Wesley’s conversion reinforced his predilection for the Eastern Church’s emphasis on transformation rather than the Western Church’s emphasis on transaction. While he never disputed transaction as the foundation of the Christian life (the believer’s status before God is changed through the vicarious work of Christ), transformation remained the theme of his theology. This “new birth” was instantaneous. (This is not to say that it had to be felt or identified as instantaneous.) While gestation is a long period preceding physical birth, Wesley argued, and physical development requires a long period after birth, the moment of birth is not protracted. So it is with those who are born of the Spirit. Undoubtedly God has been at work for no little time within believers, preparing them for this event (“prevenient grace”); God would certainly be at work long after the event. Yet the moment at which people pass from death to life, from being children of wrath to children of God, from those bent in on themselves to those whose life is characterized (ultimately) by self-forgetful love; the moment is just that, a moment. (Again, Wesley must not be thought to insist that all believers were aware of such a moment .)¹⁷

Once the penitent was “born of God” Wesley insisted, following St. Paul (Romans 6, et al.), that while sin resides in the new creature, sin no longer rules. While sin is present in believers, it does not characterize them. Believers are characterized by the one who now rules over them, Jesus Christ. Unlike some of the more effusive sects, Wesley never pretended that believers had ceased needing repentance and pardon. When faced with theological opponents who insisted that “Sin cannot, in any kind or degree, exist where it does not reign”, Wesley’s reply was clear and brief. “Absolutely contrary this to all experience, all Scripture, all common sense. Resentment of an affront is sin…. This has existed in me a thousand times.”¹⁸ Believers, he knew from Scripture and his own heartsearching, “. . . are daily sensible of sin remaining in their heart, pride, self-will, unbelief; and of sin cleaving to all they speak and do, even their best action and holiest duties.”¹⁹ Lest they lose confidence in the reality and efficacy of their new birth, believers must be convinced “. . . that the whole work of sanctification is not, as they imagined, wrought at once”.²⁰ And lest they capitulate in the struggle to “work out” that salvation which is entirely the gift of God, Wesley reassured them that Christ “. . . is and dwells in the heart of every believer who is fighting against all sin”.²¹

Sanctification Impels Good Works

In his early post-1738 writings Wesley sometimes spoke of “new birth” (or “sanctification”) and “entire sanctification” interchangeably. His inconsistent use of language cannot be rooted in a supposed failure to appreciate the ongoing sinfulness of believers. It was rooted, rather, in a promise which loomed so large and shone so brightly in the coming Last Day that it reached back into the present, constraining Wesley’s heart and mind to foreshorten the penultimate days.

At the same time Wesley’s zeal in this matter did not betray him into the errors he saw unfolding around him. He rejected the passivity of the quietists, insisting that so far from rendering good works superfluous sanctification impelled such works. In the face of the antinomians who anticipated the end time in such a way as to mimic the indiscipline of the Christians in Corinth, he maintained obedience to be essential to discipleship. Quakers he suspected inasmuch as they looked within themselves instead of to Scripture for the source and norm of Christian faith and conduct. When he was accused of departing from the tradition and wisdom of the Church Catholic with respect to his understanding of sanctification, he argued cogently that he was only faithfully reflecting Church of England teaching, which teaching was embodied in the liturgy. He cited the Prayer Book collect, . . . . cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee. . .,” adding, “The perfection I hold is so far from being contrary to the doctrine of our Church that it is exactly the same which every clergyman prays for every Sunday.”²² He maintained that he invented nothing; Scripture, the “Fathers” and the Anglican divines supported him. While forgiveness was never to be regarded lightly, he knew that deliverance was what people needed, as well as what the Gospel proffered. Convinced of this, he was adamant that he should set limits neither to what God could do in the grace-steeped heart nor to when God might do it. (Wesley insisted too that where faith lacked conviction of God’s promise and power, the reality did not appear!)

 

Abiding In The Lord

“Perfection” comprehended three aspects: purity of intention; imitation of, or conformity to, Christ; and love to God and neighbour.²³ By “purity of intention” he meant “a wholehearted attitude to God unsullied by any kind of ulterior motive”: more pithily, “one design and one desire”.²⁴ Imitation of Christ was the formation of the new creation itself in those who abided in their Lord and who cherished his abiding in them.

Love to God and neighbour was, however, the essence of Christian perfection. Any notion of inner sanctity which undervalued human fellowship Wesley regarded as a contradiction of God’s work. It was God’s purpose to call and create a people whom love suffused wholly and whose actions love governed entirely. This purpose was realized as God’s love created in men and women the capacity and the desire to love God unrestrainedly, While love for God was logically prior, love for God always implied love for the neighbour who was alike the beneficiary of God’s love. Although Wesley never used the expression of Thomas Chalmers, “the expulsive power of a new affection”, he was one with Chalmers’ conviction that the Christian life flowed from this two-fold love, even as such love proved the only profound deterrent to sin.

To be sure, when Wesley spoke of perfection as a love unmixed with sin, his definition of sin — “voluntary transgression of a known law [of God]” — strikes the modern reader as unnecessarily and inaccurately narrow, suggesting a shallow understanding of sin. The Reformers were on surer ground when they spoke of sin effervescing hiddenly in such a way as to deceive even believers of its ubiquity. (Yet Wesley was certainly acquainted with sin’s selfdeceptions: “As we do not then feel any evil in our hearts, we readily imagine none is there.”²⁵) Furthermore, if perfection means that the “root” of sin is eradicated (as Wesley and subsequent Methodists affirmed2²⁶) then could fully sanctified persons sin at all?

Wesley insisted they could. Those “perfected in love” were not thereby rendered invulnerable to temptation, since sanctification of any degree was never something they now “had” irrespective of their relationship to Christ. It was only believers’ unremitting dependence upon the crucified one which kept them suffused with the love which Christ himself incarnated. Again, while to have the “root” of sin eradicated would appear to render sin impossible, with truer instinct Wesley commented, “That believers are delivered from the guilt and power of sin we allow; that they are delivered from the being of it we deny.”²⁷ Consequently believers never moved beyond having to plead, “forgive us … as we forgive others.” The “perfect” (i.e., those whose sanctification was blossoming into love) do need forgiveness: “. . . the most perfect have continual need of the merits of Christ, even for their actual transgressions. . . “²⁸ Profound reflection on the matter did not subsequently change his mind: “They still need Christ as their priest.”²⁹

A Limpid Simplicity

While the very mention of “perfection” would seem to fan the most prideful self-righteousness, Wesley took pains to emphasize that love, the self-forgetful heart overflowing to God and neighbour, precluded this dreadful sickness: the deeper the work of grace, the more humble the believer. At the same time he asserted that “self-forgetful” must never be confused with “self-deprecating”. Wesley was as fully cognizant as any modern psychologist of the place of self-love in the healthy psyche. Self-love was not only permissible, even desirable; it was “an indisputable duty”.³⁰ (“Inordinate” selflove, he rightly deemed sinful.³¹) Where Wesley differed from so many moderns, however, and what he would not allow his followers to lose sight of, was his recognition that self-love is genuinely selflove and is preserved from becoming “inordinate” only as it is a consequence of love for God. Only love for God prevents love for neighbour from curdling into stealthy manipulation or evaporating into empty sentiment, and prevents self-love from degenerating into a self-interest cloaked in religious rationalization. The foundation of all of this was a limpid simplicity which Wesley found in the catholic tradition: believers enjoy the extraordinary privilege of “delighting” in God. Fallen humankind may give credence to the notion that God exists, may have a vague awareness of God’s power, may even cower before God in terror — or may be indifferent to all of this. In no case does unsanctified humankind “delight” in God.³² Wesley reserved his pithiest comment on this topic for the address he delivered at the memorial service for George Whitefield: “Can anything but love beget love?”³³

Wesley always knew that the full flowering of God’s grace restored men and women to authentic humanity; it did not render them superhuman or angelic. For this reason Wesley averred that the “entirely sanctified” were not lifted above finitude, not transposed beyond creatureliness. Accordingly, he told his readers that among the fully sanctified they would find errors arising from ignorance, mistakes due to poor judgement, defects in intellectual equipment, together with the personal and social complications arising from all of these. Concerning such people he disclaimed, “. . . we are no more to expect any living man to be infallible than to be omniscient.”³⁴ Indeed, Charles Wesley wrote of him, “My brother was, I think, born for the benefit of knaves.”³⁵

Sharing Now In God’s Salvation

Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification has always called forth detractors, among whom are some whose criticism is weighty. Not a few critics will fault Wesley’s understanding for being both unrealistic and narrow. Unrealistic because they disagree with his contention that grace can banish conscious sin; narrow because the restriction to “conscious sin” is unjustifiable in view of the pool of contamination which lurks in all of us.

Nevertheless, he must be heard when he claims that any declaration of the Gospel which a priori limits the scope of God’s deliverance in this life prejudges, even impugns, the character of God. At the same time it weakens the work and witness of the Christian community by inducing compliance towards sin (not to mention despair). Upon finding a decline in the quantity and quality of Methodists in one locality, Wesley blamed it on the fact that the teaching of perfection had fallen into neglect. “I was surprised to find fifty members fewer than I left in it in October. One reason is, Christian Perfection had been little insisted on; and when this is not done, be the preachers ever so eloquent, there is little increase either in the number or the grace of the hearers “36

Like the author of Hebrews who spoke of believers as those who have “tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come” (Heb. 6:5), Wesley knew that the “taste” was not a tiny sip but rather an experience of the full flavour of what is appropriated. Believers were sharers now in the salvation of God; and because sharers in it, credible pointers to its end-time fulfilment. (Wesley’s “perfect” was much closer to the Greek teleios, meaning “mature” or “fulfilled”, than to the Latin perfectus.) He ever held up a goal for the encouragement of the earnest pilgrim. Of course he had seen the doctrine mishandled so badly as to discourage God’s people, Perceptively he asked, “Does the harshly preaching perfection tend to bring believers into a kind of bondage, or slavish fear? It does.”³⁷ With much pastoral sensitivity he was careful to exalt the doctrine so as to comfort and hearten those who heard it in faith. To this end he maintained it must be articulated “always by way of promise; always drawing, rather than driving”.³⁸ It must ever shine winsomely “so that it may excite only hope, joy and desire”.³⁹ Candidly he identified the malice, bitterness, jealousies and “evil surmisings” which fester within even the Christian’s heart and infect the Christian fellowship, and then held up the Gospel-promise of deliverance from all “evil thoughts and evil tempers”.⁴⁰ Because he set no limits to the present efficacy of God’s grace he refused to restrict the consequences of grace to the individual. “Christianity is essentially a social religion, and to turn it into a solitary religion is indeed to destroy it.”⁴¹ Elsewhere he insisted, “The gospel of Christ knows no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness”⁴² — and then exemplified his conviction in the work on behalf of the poor, the enslaved, the imprisoned, the unlearned, the addicted.

With the Reformers, Wesley insisted that the Gospel included justification and sanctification (regeneration). Unlike the Reformers he claimed that sanctification could progress, by grace, until love flooded the believer’s consciousness and became the “temper” which characterized motive and mission. He never claimed this “perfection” for himself (although he claimed to have discerned it in such saints as John Fletcher, his Methodist colleague). He readily admitted that even within the love-saturated there remained buried sinfulness for which they had to pray for God’s forgiveness. Still, all God’s children were beckoned homeward by the bright light of a definitive sanctification. This one light singularly enlightened every aspect of his theology, It also brightened the lives of those who benefited from the compassion and industry of the regenerated. For had not Charles cried,

Yet when the work is done
The work is yet begun?

Not least to be considered was Wesley’s awareness of a truth which our narcissistic age overlooks: “For it is not possible, in the nature of things, that a man should be happy who is not holy.”⁴³

Notes:

1.  Bready, England Before And After Wesley (Londaon: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939) p.142.
2.  Ibid., p.143.
3.  Ibid., p.147.
4.  Ibid., p.155.
5.  Wesley, Sermon, “Original Sin”.
6.  Sermon, “Salvation By Faith”.
7.  Works, IX, p.456.
8.  Ibid.
9.  Ibid.
10.  Sermon, “Original Sin”.
11.  Ibid.
12.  Ibid.
13.  Letters, VIII, p.238.
14.  Advice To The People Called Methodists.
15.  Works, XI, p.395.
16.  Letters, IV, p.208.
17.  Works, XI, p.443.
18. Sermon, “Sin In Believers” (emphasis his).
19.  Ibid.
20.  Sermon, “The Wilderness State”.
21.  Sermon, “Sin In Believers”.
22. Works, X, p.450.
23.  Sermon, “On Riches”.
24.  Letters, VII, p.129.
25. Sermon, “Repentance In Believers”.
26.  Sermon, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation”.
27.  Sermon, “Sin In Believers” (emphasis his).
28.  Works, XI, p.395 (“A Plain Account of Christian Perfection”).
29.  Ibid., XI, p.417 (“Further Thoughts on Christina Perfection”).
30.  Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament, Ephesians 5:28.
31.  Sermon, “The Wilderness State”.
32.  Works, XI, p.60.
33.  Sermon, “The Death Of Mr. Whitefield”.
34. Sermon, “Christian Perfection”.
35.  Quoted in Sangster, The Path To Perfection, 87.
36.  Journal, V. p.149.
37.  Works, VIII, p.297.
38.  Ibid., VIII, p.275.
39.  Ibid., VIII, p. 297.
40.  Sermon, “Repentance In Believers”.
Sermon, “Christian Perfection”.
41.  Works, V, p. 296.
42.  Works, (Emory edition), VII, p. 593.
43.  Sermon, “The New Birth”.

Curnock, Nehemiah. ed. The Journal of John Wesley, 8 Volumes, 1938.
Jackson, Thomas, ed. The Works of John Wesley. A.M., 14 Volumes, 1829.
Telford, John, ed. The Letters of John Wesley, 8 Volumes, 1931.

 

JOHN WESLEY: A GIFT TO THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH

INTRODUCTION

The most casual glance at Wesley’s Catholic Spirit attests his rejection of doctrinal indifference. Truth matters, and theological truths (statements) that point to and commend Truth (the operative reality of Jesus Christ) are not to be trifled with, let alone traduced. At the same time Wesley was aware that his Shepherd had sheep of other folds. In light of such diverse sheep-folds he gratefully adopted (and zealously adjusted) the work of Eastern Fathers and Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation mystics. His magnanimity is evident in his ‘olive branch,’ A Letter to a Roman Catholic. And when nephew Samuel Jr. became a Roman Catholic, thereby rendering his father, Charles, apoplectic, John calmly wrote Samuel:
Whether of this church or that I care not: you can be saved in either or damned in either…and except you be born again you cannot see the kingdom of God…Let the Spirit of God bear witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, and let the love of God be shed abroad in your heart….then, if you have no better work, I will talk with you of transubstantiation and purgatory.
Wesley consistently maintained he was Protestant and the Church of England Protestant. Consistently he discountenanced both the “Romish” error and the latitudinarianism that blunted the cutting the edge of the gospel. Still, he wanted the sole stumbling block to faith to be the affront of the gospel, never the affront of a narrow or bigoted spirit. Not least, Wesley insisted on one condition only for those desiring admittance to the Methodist Society: “A desire to flee from the wrath to come, to be saved from their sins.” In many respects, then, Wesley remains a model of gospel catholicity and ecumenical magnanimity.

I: ESCHATOLOGY

In accord with all New Testament writers the apostle Paul maintains that in Jesus Christ “the end of the ages” has come (1 Cor. 10:11). Since the eschaton is upon us now, Christians look not for its arrival but rather for its final, full manifestation.
Different families in the church catholic, however, emphasize different aspects of the eschaton.
The Reformed family emphasizes an eschatology of knowing: we are going to know God in such a way as to render doubt impossible. From John Calvin to Karl Barth the Reformed family has underlined the cruciality of a proper knowledge of God and the conditions of such knowledge; e.g., the truth that since God alone knows God, we can know God only as we are included (by grace) in God’s self-knowing. While at present we know “in part,” the day has been appointed when “in part” will disappear, all noetic distortions remedied.

The Roman Catholic family, on the other hand, emphasizes an eschatology of seeing – no surprise in light of the emphasis that Roman Catholicism customarily places on seeing, the visible accorded a place in Rome’s ethos that Protestants reserve for the audible. In line with the accent on the visual are the visions that Roman Catholics have and whose fruitfulness has appeared in new orders, missions, and educational institutions.
In its eschatology of seeing the Roman Catholic family avers that God’s people have been appointed to the Beatific Vision. We are going to see God; see God in God’s inherent beauty, the beauty of God (according to Scripture) being one aspect of the glory of God.
And the Methodist family? Wesley’s eschatology is an eschatology of loving. We are going to love as we have been loved by a Father who spared not his Son and therein spared not himself in the course of sparing us. Love divine, all other loves excelling, will finally love every last vestige of unlove out of us, and we shall be transported, “lost in wonder, love and praise.”

A major indication of Wesley’s love-eschatology is found in his sermon, “The Almost Christian,” a tract about not the “almost” Christian but the nominal Christian (who may be far from “almost persuaded”). In Part I of the sermon Wesley discusses the spiritual deficits of those who have substituted nominal Christianity for self-abandonment to the Saviour. He concludes, to no one’s surprise, that nominal Christians are marked by lack of faith. In Part II Wesley announces immediately what marks “altogether Christians,” those who cling to the Son and are born of the Spirit. Such people are marked not by faith (what we expect him to say) but by love.

It is pointless to say that Wesley has unconscionably jettisoned justification by faith for justification by love. Everywhere he insists on justification by faith (as we shall see shortly), and justification by faith alone, necessarily by faith alone. Along with the Protestant Reformers Wesley insists that while faith includes understanding (or else the deity we worship is an idol) and assent, faith becomes such only at the point of trust as the sinner entrusts herself to the only Saviour she can ever have. To be sure, having contrasted the unbeliever’s lack of faith in God with the believer’s love for God, Wesley immediately goes on to expound the nature of faith. Still, the Wesleyan trajectory is evident.

In his celebrated Catholic Spirit Wesley pleads for a love that is neither spineless sentimentality nor affectionless admonition. In this regard he writes, “Love me with a love that is patient if I am ignorant and out of the way, bearing and not increasing my burden.” And if, continues Wesley, you, a believer, find me, a believer, sinning, love me so as to recognize that I sinned “in sudden stress of temptation.”

Wesley’s eschatological love-orientation is evident in the space he gives to the exposition of his favourite epistle, 1 John. Whereas Reformed Protestants have returned again and again to Paul’s epistle to the Romans whenever the church was staggering and needed to be strengthened and stiffened, Wesley turns to John’s first letter. His exposition of 1 John, a small epistle compared to Romans, is at least half the size of his exposition of Romans.

Always to be remembered in the context of Wesley’s eschatology is his understanding of Christian perfection. Characteristically his ‘Christian perfection’ isn’t utter sinlessness or faultlessness or flawlessness. (He points out in his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection that the godliest never get beyond needing the intercession of the atonement.) Christian perfection is perfection in love (recall the Anglican collect for Holy Communion, “…that we may perfectly love Thee.”). It is the removal of every last impediment to unobstructed loving. He insists that God’s people have been appointed to a single-minded, self-forgetful love of God and neighbour.

Then is Wesley’s eschatology merely one among three (at least), one alongside several others? Or is an eschatology of love the substance, integration and crown of all others? Tirelessly Wesley reminds us that the Great Commandment is that we are to love profligately both God and neighbour. To be sure, faith is a form of knowing, and faith knows God without any weakening of ‘know’ at all. Still, the Great Commandment isn’t that we understand God on the grounds that God is intelligible intelligence. We are to love God on the grounds that God is love (1 John 4:8); love is all God is. Yet since the ‘root commandment’ of Scripture (‘root commandment’ is my idiosyncratic expression) is “You shall be holy as I the Lord your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2), the Great Commandment to love is the content of the ‘root’ commandment to be holy. And since Wesley was Puritan-informed and therefore aware that all God’s commands are ‘covered promises,’ both commandments are fulfilled in what Wesley called “the great, overarching promise of Scripture”; namely, the salvation at God’s hand that is nothing less than the transmogrification of women and men whose knowledge of God is the apprehension of love and whose sight of God is the beholding of love.

In 1770 Wesley was shocked to hear of the premature death of his younger friend and fellow-evangelist, George Whitefield. At a memorial service for Whitefield Wesley commented, tersely and tear-choked, on the love that Whitefield had awakened in him: “Can anything but love beget love?” Only love can beget love. And just as surely, Methodists since Wesley have always known, ultimately love begets love and nothing else.
Wesley’s is an eschatology of love.

II: THEOLOGY

The myth shows no sign of evaporating; the myth, that is, that compared to the Reformed or Lutheran traditions the Methodist tradition is theologically effete.
In fact Wesley expected (unrealistically perhaps) that his lay preachers, like him, would study five hours per day. He maintained the most important subject for the preacher to study was Scripture; and after that, logic – since a self-contradicted preacher will never utter a coherent message, and the preacher’s utterance ought to reflect the consistency of God’s action and speech. All theology has to be logically rigorous or else it doesn’t help the would-be preacher and can’t be communicated in any case.

Then what theology informed Wesley, and will continue to inform those who bear his name? He was thoroughly acquainted with seventeenth-century Anglican thought; he read the sixteenth-century continental Reformers; he cherished the English Reformers (Ridley, Latimer, Tyndale and Cranmer, the lattermost’s Book of Common Prayer being, Wesley insisted, the finest liturgical vehicle the church catholic had ever seen.)
Regularly I point out to my students passages in Wesley where the vocabulary and word-patterns come straight out of Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. (It should be noted here that Wesley always insisted he agreed without reservation with the Genevan Reformer’s understanding of Total Depravity, and was only a “hair’s breadth” from Calvin on several other matters.) It was while Wesley heard read at worship the preface to Luther’s commentary on Romans that he came to faith; it was while Charles was reading the text of Luther’s commentary on Galatians that Methodism’s major poet came to faith.
When Wesley published his Christian Library, a fifty-book collection he edited and expected Methodists to read, thirty-two of the fifty volumes were by Puritan divines.

Wesley’s studies at Oxford found him meticulously apprised in the Patristic scholarship for which the University was reputed. Wesley knew the Church Fathers thoroughly, and while a son of the Western church he was critical of Augustine, the chief Western thinker, always preferring the Eastern fathers whose outstanding representative was Athanasius.

While Wesley was sharp in his criticism of what he observed concerning the Eastern Orthodox congregation in London, he remained indebted to outstanding Eastern Fathers such as Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306-373) and Macarius (ca. 300-391), Macarius being the Eastern thinker whose Spiritual Homilies underlie Wesley’s understanding of sanctification.

Then is Wesley’s theology a hodgepodge, little more than a grab-bag through which he runs his fingers, retaining whatever his hand happens to grasp? On the contrary there is a profound, coherent theology that Christians who bear his name have found compelling; a theology that admits many ingredients just because it disdains no one yet is stamped ultimately by Wesley’s genius as he forged a theology that, he maintained and those after him have acknowledged, is formed, informed and normed by the substance and logic of “the general tenor of Scripture,” as he customarily put it. For instance, while admitting that some bible texts might be read as supporting predestination, the “general tenor” of Scripture may not be read in this way; neither does the “general tenor” permit us to deny that God’s mercy is over all his works, an eternal decree of reprobation thereby ruled out. The “general tenor of Scripture” forbids us to narrow “God desires all to be saved” into an under-one’s-breath “God desires some.”

Wesley’s theology is catholic (i.e., non-sectarian). At its centre he upholds the three “grand doctrines,” without which the gospel is neither needed nor effective: original sin, justification by faith, and holiness (“present, inward salvation”). He endorses the Vincentian Canon: what has been believed by all Christians, at all times, in all places.

To be sure, Wesley wrote no tome of systematic theology. Neither did Luther, however, and no one disputes Luther’s theological singularity and profundity. Nevertheless, Wesley thought systematically, as an examination of his corpus on any topic shows.

III: TRADITION

Amnesia, G. K. Chesterton has written, is distressing not because someone can’t remember where she left her umbrella; amnesia is distressing because the amnesiac, lacking all memory, doesn’t know who she is; i.e., the person devoid of memory lacks an identity. Lacking an identity, she doesn’t know how she ought to behave and therefore can’t be trusted. Wesley was aware that a denomination or a congregation without Christian memory is a denomination or congregation that can never be trusted.

Christian memory the church more commonly calls tradition. Yet tradition, the received wisdom of the church, is never to be confused with traditionalism, the mindless absorption of all aspects of Christian history, many of which contradict the gospel and therefore should be jettisoned. Tradition, said Chesterton once again, is simply enfranchising the departed: the dead are permitted to vote. Wesley too insisted that the dead are permitted to vote; at the same time he insisted no less emphatically that the dead mustn’t be permitted to veto. For this reason he cherished Christian memory without sacralizing it so as to elevate it above Scripture and therein denature the gospel.

Insisting on the necessity of Christian memory, Wesley eschewed theological novelty. The theologically novel is ipso facto heretical. Since God has never left himself without witnesses, Wesley finds salvifically memorable many aspects of Christian history contemporary evangelicals set aside too readily. Evangelicals frequently assume they are the first generation of Christians to face the challenges they have recently identified, not realising that little is new in church history and the challenges besetting the church today have been faced and fought several times already in the centuries between antiquity and contemporaneity.
To be sure, Wesley never uses the word ‘tradition,’ since the first of the Edwardian Homilies (one of Anglicanism’s theological benchmarks) speaks of “the stinking puddles of men’s traditions.” He prefers “Christian Antiquity.” In this connection Wesley always sees Patristics as amplifying Scripture and resolving ambiguities in Scripture. To this end he writes, “The esteeming of the first three centuries, not equally with but next to the Scriptures, never carried any man (sic) into dangerous errors, nor probably ever will.”

There are other aspects of tradition that Wesley, a Protestant who never hesitated to speak of “the Romish delusion,” nonetheless finds in Rome. For instance, eight of the books listed in his Christian Library are by Roman Catholic mystics of the Counter Reformation, the Counter Reformation being Rome’s implacable opposition to the ‘Lutheranism’ claiming vast tracts of Europe in the Sixteenth Century. Admittedly, he read Roman Catholic mystics critically, red pen poised at all times (the way he read everyone). Nevertheless, always honouring God’s command to “plunder the Egyptians” (Exod. 3:22) he recognized in them an immersion in God whose experience and vocabulary were one with a biblical mysticism unashamed to speak of transport, rapture, vision, audition; unashamed to speak of revelations, visitations, hearing and seeing what may not be uttered; unashamed of Daniel’s trance and Paul’s man from Macedonia and Isaiah’s lip-seared prostration in the temple. Wesley knows that the Christian tradition has never lacked people for whom God’s Mediated immediacy is intimate and intense in equal measure.

Wesley is always aware that there is nothing more pathetic, useless and dangerous than individual or congregation or denomination devoid of Christian memory.

IV: PROTESTANT CONVICTIONS

Lest anyone think that Wesley was in truth what he was often accused of being, a crypto-Jesuit, it must be added immediately that Wesley upholds both the formal and material principles of the Magisterial Reformation.

Wesley’s endorsement of the formal principle, sola scriptura, is evident explicitly and implicitly throughout the thirty-five volumes of his Works. Characteristically he asserts he is homo unius libri, a man of one book. He never means he reads one book only. (Five paragraphs after describing himself as homo unius libri he quotes Homer’s Iliad in Greek.) ‘One-book-only’ bibliolatry he pronounces “rank enthusiasm; you are then above St. Paul” (who asked Timothy to bring him books). He means rather that one book is the unmodified norm of Christian faith and conduct. In a letter to a critic he maintains, “I receive the written Word as the whole and sole rule of my faith.” The four young men who birthed Methodism at Oxford “had one, and only one rule of judgement with regard to all their tempers, words and actions; namely, the oracles of God” (“oracles” being a term he borrowed from Calvin). On the matter of Scripture Wesley is incontrovertibly Reformational.

Similarly Wesley insists on the material principle of the Reformation, justification by faith. In a sermon he expostulates that justification by faith is the “the very foundation of our Church [i.e., Anglican]…and indeed the fundamental [doctrine] of the Reformed Churches.” In the Minutes of the second Methodist Conference (1745) he states categorically that where justification isn’t upheld the church doesn’t exist. In the face of detractors he maintains he has extolled justification by faith from the day of his evangelical awakening: “I believe justification by faith alone as much as I believe there is a God….I have never varied from it, no, not an hair’s breadth from 1738 to this day.” Always suspicious of Quakerism for several reasons, he declares, “I have not known ten Quakers in my life whose experience went so far as justification.” (He means he hasn’t met any.)

Wesley’s elaboration of justification sufficiently attests his agreement with the Reformers. He concurs with them concerning “the imputation of Christ’s righteousness” (while noting that Scripture nowhere uses the expression).

V: ZEAL FOR EVANGELISM

While Wesley was a gifted Patristics scholar and the most important Anglican thinker in the Eighteenth Century, we remember him today primarily because he was an evangelist.

Contemporary ‘evangelism,’ however, appears to differ from his in several respects. Our concern with evangelistic techniques, programs and “Ten Effective Steps” he would regard as manipulation at best and unbelief at worst. Wesley’s evangelism presupposes three pillars: predicament, penalty and provision.
Humankind’s predicament is bleak: the unrepentant sinner “abides in death…lost, dead, damned already” (emphasis Wesley’s). There is nothing in Wesley of modernity’s psychologizing of the human predicament; namely, we feel guilty (without being guilty), feel anxious, feel nervous, feel frustrated. Neither is there any existentializing of the human predicament: through our sin we have alienated ourselves from God, others and self. Wesley insists, rather, that we are alienated from God, others and self not on account of our sin but on account of God’s judgement on our sin. We haven’t sashayed or wandered out of Eden; we have been expelled by a judicial act of God.

The penalty for our primal disobedience is God’s condemnation. Such condemnation isn’t reserved for the future; it’s operative now. The Day of Judgement will merely render undeniable that truth of which the condemned are now culpably ignorant.
In light of the foregoing predicament and penalty the divinely-wrought provision is the atonement. Before sinners can repent and “return home,” provision must be made for them wherein the barricade to their return is removed. Before we can be reconciled to God, God must be reconciled to us.
It is little wonder Charles Wesley exults:

Neither is it surprising that Charles characteristically speaks of someone’s coming to faith as “She received the atonement.” He typically gathers up predicament, penalty and provision in his pithy hymn:

Who hath done the dreadful deed,
Hath crucified my God?
Curses on his guilty head,
Who spilt that precious blood.
Worthy is the wretch to die;
Self-condemned, alas, is he! –
I have sold my Saviour, I
Have nailed him to the tree.

Yet thy wrath I cannot fear,
Thou gentle, bleeding Lamb!
By thy judgement I am clear,
Healed by stripes I am:
Thou for me a curse wast made,
That I might in thee be blest;
Thou hast my full ransom paid,
And in thy wounds I rest.

Methodist hymnody sings about the atonement more than about anything else.

VI: PASSION FOR HOLINESS

The ‘predestination/election’ word-group occurs approximately fifteen times in Scripture, and Christians have fought fiercely over its meaning. The ‘holy/sanctity’ word-group occurs 833 times, yet Christians have paid far less attention to it. Wesley, however, insists that holiness or final, full salvation is the grand promise of Scripture and the overarching theme of Scripture; it is the raison d’être of Methodism, the latter raised up by God “to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.” (In every class I tell my students that Scripture is preoccupied with holiness. In the wake of our denial of God’s, he re-affirms it; in the wake of our contradiction of ours, he re-establishes it. The ultimate purpose of the cross isn’t that we are forgiven but that we are rendered holy, forgiveness being necessary to the restoration of our holiness.)

In addressing this topic Wesley characteristically speaks of “holiness of heart and life.” By “heart” Wesley means our inner intent, attitude, disposition; by “life” he means our behaviour, conduct, visibility. He insists that inner intent unmatched by outer manifestation is useless posturing, while an attempt at outer manifestation not rooted in inner transformation is crass self-righteousness. Supposed holiness of heart alone dishonours God in that it is feeble. Supposed holiness of life alone dishonours God in that it is arrogant. Holiness of heart and life are one as Spirit-quickened intention is fulfilled in Spirit-generated conduct.
Every day in his public ministry Wesley interacted with people whose addictions had held them fast for years. In the face of their enslavement he insisted, in effect, that God could do something with sin beyond forgiving it. Specifically, God could not only release them from sin’s guilt (justification, forgiveness); God could release them from sin’s grip (sanctification, holiness). Beyond being pardoned his people needed to be delivered.
And lest we forget Wesley’s eschatological orientation we need to hear him say again, “Justification gives us the right to heaven; holiness makes us fit for heaven.” A ticket gives someone the right to the symphony concert; her musicality, however, renders her fit for the concert. What’s the point of being admitted to the concert if one is tone-deaf and finds the world-class violinist a screechy scourge? What’s the point of being admitted to that realm where God’s will is done perfectly if one has never relished doing it at all?

Wesley was anything but naïve as to the grip wherewith sin throttles people. We need the company and wisdom of fellow-believers, especially of those whose present deliverance will spare us paralyzing discouragement. In this context Wesley utters his famous “No holiness but social holiness.” By ‘social’ he doesn’t mean, contrary to the misunderstanding of liberal churchmanship, that ‘social holiness’ is another term for a programme of leftist social transmutation. He means, rather, precisely what the para-church groups that have arisen from his ethos and exist to facilitate a great deliverance (the “Anonymous” groups assisting the addicted of all sorts) have long known: the habituated (all sinners are such) need each other in order to escape their prison.

VII: KINGDOM VISIBILITY

Repeatedly Wesley asked whether Britain could be called “Christian” in light of social inequities so extreme as to be iniquities. Repeatedly he challenged distillers on account of the damage their “liquid fire” fostered; rich horse moguls whose grain-devouring steeds deprived the needy of bread; even tea-drinkers whose carriage-trade habit left them with insufficient funds for the poor. (See his “A Letter To A Friend Concerning Tea,” 1748.) “I love the poor,” Wesley reminded sobered, industrious, thrifty Methodists whose social ascendancy distressed him.

Aware that the disadvantaged are more frequently ill than the privileged, are more seriously ill, and are more remote from medical intervention, Wesley scrounged money to employ a surgeon and an apothecary. (In the first five months alone drugs were distributed to 500 people.) In 1746 he established London’s first free pharmacy. Haunted by the banks’ refusal to lend his people money for start-up business loans, he scrabbled fifty pounds for the first wave of entrepreneurs, these people in turn lending to others so that 250 were helped in the first year. The school he developed for the children of Kingswood coal miners operates to this day.

While some Christian advocates of a quasi-Marxist “social justice” like to claim Wesley as progenitor,he never vested confidence in a putative proletarian wisdom or virtue. Always concerned with the Kingdom of God, he regarded a philosophically-defined ‘justice’ as no better, no more God-honouring, and not least, no more just than the privilege it attempted to replace, as the French Revolution would shortly make plain. The scars he bore on his face and forehead reminded him every day of what Methodists could expect from mobs whose passions had not yet been reoriented by the gospel. If anyone needed to be informed, a survivor of the Wednesbury riots (1743) could help. For at Wednesbury Methodists had been assaulted, their services violated, their homes torched and their women raped. (Wesley’s non-vindictiveness attests his Lord’s triumph within him, for he visited the town thirty-three times and preached there at age 87, in 1790.)

An able Hebraist, Wesley knew that the primary meaning of mishpat is ‘judgement’; secondarily it means ‘justice’ as that human act quickened by God’s judgement, which judgement aims at restoration (shalom) and is therefore replete with mercy. ‘Justice’ in the Aristotelian (philosophical) sense – one gets what one deserves (and no more) – was not a determination of Wesley’s understanding or ethos. Always nervous about the clamour for social justice in Revolutionary France where unjust savagery of the right would soon give way to unjust savagery of the left, Wesley-the-Tory held up the reign of God, not politically correct ideology, as the operative reality whereby a fallen creation is assimilated to the “new heavens and new earth in which righteousness dwells” (2 Peter 3:13).

VIII: EUCHARISTIC WORSHIP

Anglicans in Wesley’s era received Holy Communion three times per year: Christmas, Easter and Pentecost. Throughout his adult life Wesley received Holy Communion on average 4.5 times per week. The Lord’s Supper is an “instituted” means of grace, “instituted” signifying that in this Christ-mandated rite Jesus has pledged himself to his people unfailingly.

Wesley was always astounded that some people who genuinely (claim to) fear God are indifferent concerning Holy Communion. For him the grounds of “constant communion” (his unaltered vocabulary in 1732 and fifty-five years later in 1787) were twofold: one, God commands it; two, we need it. Since Holy Communion is God’s command and is therefore to be obeyed, neglecting it means we have “no piety.” Since Holy Communion is God’s provision and is therein a mercy, neglecting it means we have “no wisdom.” Not surprisingly, then, Wesley’s realism concerning the nature and efficacy of the Lord’s Supper is notable: “What better way of procuring pardon?…You have an opportunity of receiving his mercy” (emphasis mine). The Eucharist conveys the mercy it attests.

When absentees advanced ‘reasons’ why they shouldn’t communicate, Wesley’s stern response was that they shouldn’t add disobedience to disobedience, no ‘reason,’ however piously cherished, overturning God’s precept and provision.
Those who proffered “We don’t feel any different for having been to the Lord’s Table” Wesley dealt with at greater length. Drawing on his pastoral wisdom, he averred that if evaders simply obeyed they would find affect catching up with act. Not finished with those who claim to be affect-deficient Wesley maintained that at the Lord’s Table Christ meets them in person with a fivefold “benefit”: they are strengthened “insensibly”, made more fit for the service of God, made more constant in the service of God, kept from backsliding, and spared many temptations. Undeniably it is Wesley’s conviction – together with that of the church catholic – that at the Lord’s Table one receives Christ himself.

Not relenting at all Wesley warns, “No man (sic) who does not receive it as often as he can has any pretence to prudence”; and such a person, Wesley insists, lacks self-perception. In short, unless we frequent the Lord’s Table we are deficient in piety, prudence, obedience, and perception of our need of mercy.
One more aspect of Wesley’s understanding must be highlighted. Whereas the Reformed tradition maintains that Holy Communion is a “confirming” sacrament, ever since June, 1740, Wesley maintained it to be “converting” as well. The Lord’s Supper not merely confirms and strengthens in faith those already possessed of faith; it may also bring to faith the unbeliever whose dark night ends at the communion rail.

EPILOGUE

We shouldn’t equate Wesley’s contribution with his theological legacy, with “our doctrines” (as he liked to say) or even with his broader intellectual influence. The gift of John Wesley is given anew, rather, as the people who name him embody his spirit; given again as his descendents exemplify the ethos of those whose work and witness fuelled the conflagration spreading throughout England and the New World. While it would be unfair to restrict ‘descendents’ to Methodist preachers, it remains that Methodism, then and now, is conveyed not by a liturgy or a curia or a bureaucracy or even a hymnody but chiefly, as Methodist icon Hugh Price Hughes (1847–1902) insisted, by its preachers. Concerning these preachers historian Dee Andrews has written that their service to the gospel, in early-day American Methodism, required “not only a gambler’s nerves and a dancer’s endurance but also the cunning of a hunter and the courage of a soldier.” She doesn’t exaggerate, for of the first 737 Methodist ministers in America, one-half died before they were thirty years old. Two-thirds didn’t live long enough to serve twelve years. Vocation meant immolation.

Not the least of Wesley’s gifts to the wider church is selfless service to the Master, voiced by the apostle Peter and offered up by Methodist preachers, “We have left everything and followed you” (Mark 10:28 RSV).

John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley (bicentennial ed.; vol. 1; Nashville: Abingdon, 1984), pp. 79–95.
John Wesley, “A Letter to a Roman Catholic,” in John Wesley (ed. Albert C. Outler, ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 493 ff.
Kenneth G. Newport and Ted A. Campbell, eds., Charles Wesley: Life, Literature & Legacy (Peterborough, U.K.: Epworth, 2007), p. 134.
Not infrequently Wesley speaks of the “Romish delusion.” See, e.g., his Works, vol. 1, pp.128–129.
Wesley, Works, vol. 9, p. 70.
Charles Wesley, “Love divine, all loves excelling,” in John Wesley, Works, vol. 7, p. 546.
Wesley, Works, vol. 1, pp. 131–141.
Wesley, Works, vol. 2, p. 91.
John Wesley, Notes on the New Testament (Wakefield: William Nicholson and Sons, 1972).
John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (London: Epworth Press, 1952), p. 43.
Wesley, Works, vol. 2, p. 338.
Wesley, Works, vol. 2, p. 184.
Thomas Jackson, ed., The Works of John Wesley (vol. IX; reprint; Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1958–1959), pp. 216–217.
Wesley, Notes on the New Testament (Wakefield: William Nicholson and Sons, 1872), Romans 12:6.
Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. XII, p. 246. Wesley insisted that the denial of original sin renders all Christian doctrine incoherent. He makes this point repeatedly in his tract, “The Doctrine of Original Sin, according to Scripture, Reason and Experience,” in Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. IX. It is Wesley’s single largest tract.
While Chesterton makes similar points in many works, for a protracted discussion of the place of tradition see Orthodoxy (New York: Dover Publications, 2004) and The Everlasting Man (New York: Dover Publications, 2007).
For an amplification of Wesley’s understanding here see Ted A. Campbell, John Wesley and Christian Antiquity (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991).
Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. X, p. 14.
Wesley, Works, vol. 1, p. 105.
Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. VIII, p. 315.
For a cogent discussion of Wesley’s understanding of Scripture see Scott J. Jones, John Wesley’s Conception and Use of Scripture (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), as well as Jones, “The Rule of Scripture,” in Wesley and the Quadrilateral (W. Stephen Gunter et al.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1997).
Jones, John Wesley’s Conception and Use of Scripture.
Wesley, Works, vol. 4, p. 395.
Wesley, Works, vol. 10, pp. 126–127.
Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. X, p. 349. Wesley makes the same point in his Works, vol. 4, p. 147. For Wesley’s single most sustained treatment of justification see his Works, vol. 1, pp. 182-199.
John Wesley, The Letters of John Wesley (ed. John Telford; vol. 7; London: Epworth, 1931), p. 26. For a more sustained discussion of Wesley’s assessment of Quakerism see his “A Letter to a Person Lately Joined with the People Called Quakers,” in Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. X, pp. 177–188.
Wesley, Works, vol. 1, p. 458.
Wesley, Works, vol. 1, p. 151.
Charles Wesley, “Arise, my soul, arise,” in John Wesley, Works, vol. 7, pp. 324–325.
Charles Wesley. “Glorious Saviour of my soul,” in John Wesley, Works, vol. 7, pp. 337–338.
For an exposition of this programmatic term see Wesley, Works, vol. 1, pp. 159–182.
This expression is found passim in Wesley. For an amplification of his “holiness of life arising from holiness of heart” see his Works, vol. 3, p. 75.
Holiness of heart and life is intimately related to freedom from sin’s guilt and grip. For an amplification of the latter see, e.g., Wesley, Works, vol. 1, pp. 122–124; vol. 2, p. 120.
Wesley, Christian Perfection, p. 31. Wesley makes the same point in “On the Wedding Garment,” in his Works, vol. 4, p. 144. He expected this written sermon (March, 1790) to be his last, his pronouncement here concerning the relationship of justification to holiness being his final word to the Methodist people. (He lived another year and penned another five sermons.)
In this connexion Wesley averred, “‘Holy solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers.” In Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. XIV, p. 321. For the same point see Wesley, Works, vol. 1, pp. 533–534.
In Jackson, Works of John Wesley, vol. XI, chap. LI.
John Wesley, The Letters of John Wesley, (ed. John Telford; vol. 3; London, Epworth, 1931), p.229.
For a depiction of the incidents referred to above and a comprehensive exploration of this assault on the Methodist people see J. Leonard Waddy, The Bitter Sacred Cup: The Wednesbury Riots 1743-44, (Madison, N.J.: World Methodist Historical Society, 1976).
See, e.g., Wesley, Works, vol. 1, pp. 378–397.
Wesley, Works, vol. 3, p. 428.
Wesley, Works, vol. 3, p. 428.
Wesley, Works, vol. 3, p. 435.
Wesley, Works, vol. 3, p. 437.
Wesley, Works, vol. 3, p. 439.
Wesley, Works, vol. 19, p. 158.
Dee Andrews, The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 234.