Its Birth-Pangs at Tyndale

                                        Its Unapologetic Contribution of Theological Riches

                              Its Full Flowering in a World God Refuses to Forsake

Rev. Dr. Victor A. Shepherd

   I shall never forget the faculty meeting, autumn 1993, at which Ian Rennie, dean of the seminary, introduced me as the first occupant of the new Chair of Wesley Studies. One faculty member looked askance at me, unable to disguise his aversion if not to me personally then certainly to the Wesley Chair and all it held out. He turned to Rennie and sniffed superciliously, “Does this mean that Tyndale Seminary will be moving in a Wesleyan direction?” With his characteristic good humour that defused nascent hostility Rennie shot back, “Why not? For then we could all get the second blessing!”

   Now the extent to which ‘second blessing’ is characteristic of Wesley and the ethos of his descendants I shall leave for you to deliberate. In any case I rejoiced that the dean of the seminary, a Presbyterian, was undisguisedly delighted with the theological breadth and the spiritual richness the new Chair would lend Tyndale University.

    Already Tyndale’s Board of Governors had approved necessary changes to Tyndale’s statement of faith. Heretofore the statement of faith had endorsed a predestinarian view of the security of believers, denying the possibility of apostasy. Now, however, it read, “Believers are kept by the power of God”—a New Testament statement no one upholding scriptural normativity could deny. At this point the trustees of the Chair gladly announced that the Chair would be housed henceforth at Tyndale. (The alternative, in case Tyndale had been unwilling to alter its statement of faith, was Wycliffe College, University of Toronto.)

   While the location of the Chair at Tyndale was now formally a fait accompli, I continued to find untoward putdowns of Wesley in informal settings, such as the faculty lunchroom. Wesley, it was suggested, may have been a remarkable evangelist, but he was surely a theological lightweight, no better than a second-rate thinker compared to the giants of the Sixteenth Century Reformation. (Apparently overlooked, in these informal comparisons, was the fact that I was the only faculty member with a doctorate in the Sixteenth Century Reformation.) No longer could I sit by and allow John Wesley to be defamed. I decided (good-naturedly, of course) to bring down the hammer.

   At our next noonhour confab I pointed out that Wesley had written 35 tomes, including a textbook on logic; in addition to his native English he knew thoroughly eight other languages: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish; in truth he knew them so very thoroughly that he wrote a grammar textbook in seven of them. Wesley, I observed, read more comfortably, in more languages, than Martin Luther, John Calvin, Philip Melanchthon, Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Butler or Immanuel Kant. Not least, Wesley was a superb Patristics Scholar, having studied at Oxford in the twilight of a remarkable period of Patristic research.

   Lest my seminary lunchroom companions thought Wesley to be one more ivory-tower theology professor remote from human anguish, I went on to inform them that when Wesley was 81 he was found begging door-to-door in winter, walking day after day through ice-cold slush, garnering money for his beloved poor.  Having raised 200 pounds he stopped on the fourth day—because he had all the money his poor people needed? Of course not. He had stopped, rather, because he was ill; he was suffering, he wrote in his journal, from a “violent flux” (18th Century English for uncontrollable diarrhoea).He had stopped only because he was too sick and too shaky to continue.

   By now, of course, I was in full flight, and nothing could deflect me from extolling the toughness of early-day Methodist preachers, in the U.K. to be sure, but more pointedly in the new world, where life was far more dangerous. With all the kindness I could muster I pointed out that Anglicans and Presbyterians thrived on the eastern seaboard of the Thirteen Colonies, but they lacked the flexibility, and above all, the hard-nosed toughness to thrive on the frontier. After all, of the first 737 Methodist preachers in the new world, 50% were dead before they were 30; two-thirds didn’t live long enough to serve twelve years. Ordination to the Methodist ministry was a death sentence.

    What befell these preachers?  They got lost in the woods and died of exposure, or they were caught in a forest fire, or they were swept away in a flash flood, or they froze to death, or they were slain by those threatened by the Methodist gospel and its implicates.

     Thanks to these preachers, Methodism exploded in the new world, especially on the frontier.  In this regard I often recall the story of Thomas Ware, an itinerant Methodist preacher on the frontier in early-day America. Come nightfall, on one occasion, Ware needed accommodation.  He asked a young settler-couple if they would share their one-room cabin with him for one night. The settler-couple said “No”.  In his journal Ware later wrote, “I looked at the man, and said, smiling, ‘That would depend on our comparative strength’”—meaning, “Do you really think you can lick me?” Ware was allowed to stay the night.

   I continued to hear that whereas the Reformational tradition had a profound understanding of sin, Wesley had a shallow grasp of sin, superficial ‘Arminian’ that he was. (By the way, Wesley’s theology was set before he had read so much as one word of Arminius; and Wesley’s theology never reflected Arminius’ Aristotelian scholasticism, Thomas Aquinas being the most frequently referenced thinker in Arminius.) I knew I had to acquaint my skeptical colleagues with Wesley’s understanding of human depravity. At this point I spoke of Charles Wesley’s tract, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’ (1742).  Charles speaks of the sinner’s ‘supineness’ or utter spiritual inertia and non-sentience. He speaks of the sinner’s ‘indolence’ in the mediaeval sense of sloth, the condition of those who do not grasp, because they cannot grasp, their appointment as children of God, and cannot grasp it inasmuch as they are sin-blinded (not merely impaired) and therefore ignorant of their predicament as sinners before the One who does not tolerate sin. Charles speaks in the same tract of ‘stupidity’ not in our 21^st century sense of ‘feeble-minded’ but in the 18^th century sense of cognitive stupor and volitional torpor. He speaks of sinners as ‘insensible of their real condition’; in other words, one of the worst features of our depravity is that it renders us wholly unaware of our depravity and its fatal outcome before the Holy God. To make sure no one misunderstands him on this point, Charles insists that we are not only spiritually blind and numb; we are also corrupt, our putrefaction rendering us loathsome. In other words, not only does sin provoke God’s anger; sin also (and here Charles is one with Luther) arouses God’s disgust. Sinners are an ‘abomination’ [Greek: bdelugma] to God, where according to Scripture that which is an abomination to God is that which God cannot withstand and therefore ultimately destroys.

   Perhaps I should moderate my severity concerning those who dismiss Wesley as theological fluff. For as recently as 1998 when I was in Seoul, Korea, for the meetings of the International Congress on Calvin Research, Professor Heiko Oberman, a Reformation scholar without peer, emphasized that Reformation scholars must maintain the most rigorous scholarship, or else, he expostulated, “We shall end up no better than Methodists!”

   My informal lunchroom profferings suspended forever any suggestions that Wesley was a spiritual dilettante who had failed to endorse the Reformers’ understanding of the nature, scope, and arrears of sin.

   As the first occupant of the Chair, and therefore the person who would determine the ethos of the undertaking for the next several years, I knew that initially I had to  magnify the theology of John Wesley. As often as I heard the Chair spoken of, at Tyndale, as a Chair of Wesleyan Studies I made an immediate correction: “It’s a Chair of Wesley Studies.”

   For too long, I insisted, Wesley has been regarded, not least by Methodist people, as inferior to the major thinkers in the Christian tradition. Overlooked here is the fact that Wesley is the most important Church of England theologian since Cranmer, and the most important Anglican thinker in the 18^th Century, a theologian who is unquestionably Protestant and therefore belongs to the Western or Latin Church.

    I deemed it my first responsibility to slay the notion that compared to the Reformed or Lutheran or Roman Catholic traditions the Methodist tradition is theologically unsubstantial and intellectually 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 logical consistency of God’s action and speech. All theology has to be logically rigorous or else it doesn’t help the would-be preacher, it can only confuse the hearer, and it cannot be communicated in any case. Then what theology informed Wesley and will continue to inform those who bear his name?

   Wesley 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 the 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 authored by Puritan divines. Wesley’s studies at Oxford found him meticulously apprised of the patristic scholarship for which the university was reputed. Wesley knew the church fathers thoroughly, and, although 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. Even though 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). In fact, Macarius was 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; it is a theology that admits many ingredients just because it disdains no one. Nevertheless it is stamped ultimately by Wesley’s genius as he forged a theology that, as he maintained and as those after him have acknowledged, is formed, informed, and normed by the substance and the logic of “the general tenor of Scripture,” as he customarily put it. For instance, although some biblical 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 the idea that “God desires all to be saved” into “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.

II

    Unquestionably, however, we remember Wesley today chiefly on account of his evangelism.

While he was, indisputably, the greatest 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.”  There is nothing in Wesley of modernity’s psychologizing of the human predicament; namely, we feel guilty (without being guilty), anxious, nervous, and frustrated. Neither is there any existentializing of the human predicament; that is, through our sin we have alienated ourselves from God, from others, and from self. Wesley insists, rather, that we are alienated from God, from others, and from self not on account of our sin but on account of God’s judgment 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 is not reserved for the future; it is operative now. The Day of Judgment 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:

His blood atoned for all our race,

And sprinkles now the throne of grace…

My God is reconciled,

His pard’ning voice I hear;

He owns me for his child,

I can no longer fear….

     When I recited Charles’ hymn, in a gathering of people who claimed to be theological descendants of John Wesley, I met fierce objection: “We need to be reconciled to God because we sinners are estranged from God,” I was told; “but it is unthinkable that God would need to be reconciled to us.  Does he not love us eternally?” As gently as I could I replied to the objector: [1] God does love us. In truth he loves us so very much that he refuses to confirm us in our sinful disobedience. It is never loving to confirm sinners in their sin; [2] as sinners we are indeed estranged from God—but not because sin results in estrangement from God. We are estranged from God because our sin has mobilized God’s judgement, and until God’s judgement has been dealt with; that is, until his righteous anger, his holy hostility to sinners, is dealt with, we cannot be reconciled to him; [3] in the cross of Jesus, God-incarnate, God’s wrath is averted at God’s initiative; i.e., God is reconciled to us. Now and only now may we and must we be reconciled to  him. Now and only now can the gospel invitation, the evangelistic summons, ‘Come home.’ be issued. Apart from the cross, that act of God by which he reconciles himself to the ‘world’ God loves (the ‘world’, in John’s understanding, being the sum total of disobedient humankind tacitly organized in its hostility to God); apart from the cross as first God’s reconciliation of himself to us there is no ground for or possibility of our being reconciled to God; apart from the cross as God’s reconciliation of himself to us there is no home for sinners to go home to. “My God is reconciled”: Charles Wesley is oceans deeper than his detractors.

   Wesley typically gathers up predicament, penalty, and provision in his pithy hymn: “Who hath done the dreadful deed.”

First Charles speaks of the human predicament:

Who hath done the dreadful deed

Hath crucified my God?

Curses on his guilty head,

Who spilt that precious blood.

Then he speaks of the human penalty:

Worthy is the wretch to die;

Self-condemned, alas, is he! –

I have sold my Saviour,

I have nailed him to the tree.

And then, typically, Charles concludes with God’s breath-taking, incomprehensible, ever-merciful provision:

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, we should always be aware, sings about the atonement more than about anything else. Repentance and faith are impossible apart from God’s prior propitiation. Any so-called evangelism that denies or overlooks this much is shallow and ineffective. It is little wonder that when people came to faith Charles Wesley characteristically announced, “They received the atonement.”

  Make no mistake. The gospel that early-day Methodists cherished, eagerly embraced by Spirit-sensitized hearers, was not welcomed in the sitting rooms of ecclesiastical officialdom. Indeed, wherever Whitefield and the Wesley brothers went they met shallow, ineffective, and obstructive fellow-clergy. In September 1740 George Whitefield, a lifelong Anglican glowing with Methodist light and warmth, arrived in Boston. There were five Anglican parishes in the city. All five denied Whitefield access to their pulpits. Whereupon Whitefield went outside, on Boston Common, and preached to 20,000 people. In October 1740 Whitefield went to New York City. There were ten Anglican parishes in New York. All ten clergy barred Whitefield from their pulpits. Whereupon he spoke outdoors to huge gatherings as he had done in Boston.

   Whitefield will never be forgotten, and his name will ever remain fragrant. The five clergy in Boston and the ten in New York City who thought themselves and their anaemic drivel superior to Whitefield: can any person in this room name me one?

   C.S. Lewis insisted that Jesus was kind, compassionate, caring, sensitive, truthful, merciful, even self-sacrificial; nevertheless, said Lewis, there was one thing Jesus never was: nice. Anyone who reads the written gospels with even one eye open finds our Lord endlessly sympathetic with sinning, suffering people, whether victimized by others or self-victimized, at the same time as our Lord’s public ministry always has a sharp edge to it, a laser-like penetration, and all of this articulated so very pithily and pointedly as to be unforgettable. The Wesley brothers were one with the Master in this regard.

   As the Evangelical Revival gained  momentum it threatened ecclesiastical officialdom, since church-bureaucrats are always rendered nervous by what they cannot control or co-opt. John Wesley was summoned to appear before hostile bishops. When told his theology was un-Anglican, especially his notion of Christian perfection, he knew how to handle the accusation.  “Did you receive Holy Communion this morning, prior to arraigning me before you?”, he asked his episcopal interrogators. Of course they had. “And did you first repeat the Collect for Holy Communion”? That went without saying. “Would you remind repeating it with me?”—‘Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be 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.’”  “Now when you prayed these words earlier today,” continued Wesley fearlessly, “did you mean them?” Of course they had meant them. “Then,” said Wesley, why do you fault me for holding out to my people a Christian perfection, a sanctification neither more nor less than self-forgetful, self-abandoning love to God and neighbour, when you prayed as much for yourself? Tell me what is un-Anglican about my notion of Christian perfection as single-minded, unimpeded love when you implore God for precisely this every time you celebrate or receive Holy Communion according to the Prayer Book you cherish?” (Wesley could have added that John Calvin, no less, had insisted, 200 years earlier, that the only way for Christians to avoid backsliding was to “resolve to go on unto perfection.”)

   On another occasion the bishop of London summoned Charles Wesley to appear before him and articulate the substance, ethos and trajectory of the Methodist movement. Charles complied. Before dismissing Charles, the  bishop of London said, “I trust you don’t think that by asking you to explain what you and your movement are about I am hereby granting you my approval.” Whereupon Charles riposted, “And I hope you don’t think, my lord bishop, that by complying with your request I am seeking your approval.”

   The Wesley brothers, like their Lord before them, were many things to many people, but they were never nice. (By the way, just in passing, I want to remind you that in mediaeval English ‘nice’ meant ‘stupid.’)

   Throughout my occupancy of the Wesley Chair I told every class that I remain persuaded that Wesley needs to be ‘owned’ for what he is in himself; namely, the ecumenical figure who can do so very much to bridge Eastern and Western churches. Unquestionably Wesley is Protestant and therefore Western, the Western church including both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic. Wesley always maintained that the Book of Common Prayer was thoroughly Protestant (in truth it has an undeniable Calvinist ‘ring’ to it), and the Church of England itself was Protestant (Anglo-Catholicism, the predominant expression of Anglicanism in Canada today, didn’t assert itself until the rise of the Oxford Movement in the Nineteenth Century.) Wesley maintained that Article XVII (the Thirty-Nine Articles being theologically normative for the Church of England); Article XVII, “Of Predestination and Election,” admitted ambiguity, and because the article was ambiguous it could be read in a manner that didn’t presuppose a Calvinistic, twofold decree of election and reprobation, eternal election to life (and therefore before the believer was born, or even conceived) and eternal reprobation to eternal loss (and therefore before the unbeliever could even have sinned.) Wesley chose to read Article XVII in a manner that didn’t contradict his scorching criticisms of Reformed predestination.

   Article XI, concerning justification by faith, on the other hand, admitted no ambiguity at all. Therefore, said Wesley, Anglicanism was committed unreservedly to the Protestant sola fide, justification by faith alone. Anglicanism is Protestant, and Protestant only.

   At the same time, Wesley is a Western church thinker who leans farther East than anyone else. For instance, while the Western church massively emphasized original guilt as a consequence of original sin, Wesley, while never denying that sinners are guilty before God, preferred to emphasize the East’s insistence on original sin as the introduction of death and corruption and the loss of the Spirit’s immediate presence. In the same vein, while Wesley agreed with the West’s Protestant avowal of justification by faith and the doctrine’s attendant juridical features, he agreed with the East’s greater contention that the main strand in Christianity isn’t juridical but restorative. And whereas Protestant Scholasticism (especially in the century following the Reformation) liked to speak of believers living in a ‘state of grace,’ Wesley objected, with the East, that the problem with ‘state of grace’ is simply that it is static. Believers live in the ongoing dynamic of grace as Christ’s life and their life interpenetrate in a mutual indwelling that finds believers living ever more intimately with their Lord and reflecting ever more vividly the fruits of that Spirit which the Lord bears and bestows upon his people. However, lest we think Wesley naïve concerning the East’s emphasis on the restorative nature of grace, Wesley maintained the East to have understated the Christological basis of grace: grace isn’t a substance, especially a substance to be discussed as ‘uncreated’ or ‘created;’ grace, rather, is always and only the effectual presence of the living Lord Jesus Christ.

III

 While rightly appreciating the necessary polemical element in the Wesleys, we mustn’t lose sight of the ‘downbeat’ in their ministry and mission, the ‘bass note’ that reverberates throughout their outward articulation and organization just because it lies ever so close to their inward conviction and experience. I speak now of their concern for holiness, “present, inward salvation”.  Tirelessly Wesley insisted that God had raised up Methodism to “spread Scriptural holiness throughout the land.” He had profoundly come to see that holiness is the preoccupation of Scripture.

   Here I am one with my theological ancestor. I have long been convinced that the ‘general tenor’ (Wesley’s expression) of Scripture is holiness: the holiness of God and the holiness of God’s people. I have long been convinced that Scripture, cover-to-cover, re-affirms God’s holiness in the wake of our denying it, and re-establishes our holiness in the wake of our contradicting it. As sinners we deny God’s holiness, God’s sheer, uncompromisable, inimitable Godness—whereupon God reasserts it. And as sinners we repudiate our own holiness—whereupon God re-establishes it. In this regard I have insisted, in every course I have taught, that the ‘root’ commandment in Scripture is Lev. 19:2 (and parallels): “You shall be holy, as I the Lord your God am holy.” And in every class I have taught I have pointed out, as our Puritan friends remind us, that all God’s commands are ‘covered promises;’ that is, all God’s commands may and must be read also as promise. “You shall be holy” contemporary Christians always hear rightly as command, but wrongly fail to hear as accompanying promise. Not only does God insist that his people must be holy; God also guarantees that his people will be holy, will appear before him one day without spot or blemish.

    Rightly apprehending the substance and logic of Scripture, Wesley consistently pointed to holiness, that of God and that of his people, as the raison d’être of his movement.

   Yet Wesley magnified the theme of holiness for another reason; namely, he had noticed that where the doctrine was held up, people in the Methodist societies knew and enjoyed a genuine deliverance from sin’s grip. Where the doctrine was neglected, the same people may have been assured of forgiveness, relief of sin’s guilt, but they remained unreleased from sin’s grip. What is the point of being relieved of sin’s guilt if sin’s power is undiminished? Wesley had noticed that in his communities where the inculcation of holiness was neglected, his people remained sin-habituated. (Not to put too fine an edge on it: for how long would an Alcoholics Anonymous group last if each meeting began with the speaker saying, ‘We are certainly glad to see all of you tonight; we want you to know you are always welcome. And by the way, no one in this group has ever been rendered contentedly sober’?) Wesley had observed that where release from sin’s power wasn’t at the forefront of his communities, they withered quickly.

   Wesley announced to his people, “God can do something with sin beyond forgiving it.” What, specifically, can God do? Charles Wesley announced, “He breaks the power of cancelled sin; He sets the prisoner free.”  Isn’t any gospel, so-called, that can’t undo addiction ultimately useless? Isn’t a gospel that proffers forgiveness but doesn’t effect deliverance no gospel at all?

   We are fond of singing, “He can break every fetter.”  Can he? If not, why not? If not, which not? In his understanding of holiness/perfection Wesley wasn’t concerned to defend himself in an abstract argument about doctrine that is abstract by definition; rather, in his insistence on ‘practical theology’ his heart broke for habituated people whose last hope was release in this life. For this reason—and this reason alone—he maintained it was nothing less than cruel to pronounce limits to God’s deliverance in this life.  Of course all Christians are going to be freed definitively in the eschaton. Wesley, however, refused to proffer as spiritual counsel, ‘Wait until death.’

   We should note that all deliverance groups (Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Porn-Addicts Anonymous) survive for one reason only: realistically they hold out hope for deliverance now.

IV

 I want to conclude my address with my vision for Tyndale’s Chair of Wesley Studies.

[A]  Without losing sight of any of the profundities the Chair was designed to uphold, expounded already in my address, I envision the Chair to be Tyndale University’s locus of ecumenical conversation. While always convinced of his own theological tradition, Wesley appreciated the contribution of others within the church catholic. For instance, while he never hesitated to speak of the “Romish delusion” and its theological deficits, at the same time he published the works (admittedly thoroughly edited) of eight Roman Catholics from the Counter-Reformation, so highly did he esteem their spiritual discipline, their experience of Jesus Christ, their self-renunciation, and their concern for holy living. (Let us not forget that Wesley himself was criticized frequently for being a crypto-Jesuit.)

   Wesley appreciated the contribution of Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Pietists of different sorts, not least Anglican Calvinists like George Whitefield and John Newton. Then was there anyone of whom Wesley had virtually nothing good to say? Yes: Quakers. Because Quakers elevated the ‘inner light,’ their idiosyncratic experience, above Scripture, Wesley denounced them. He knew the whole point of the primacy of Scripture to be the ultimacy of Jesus Christ; and therefore to elevate the ‘inner light’ above Scripture was to deny Christ’s lordship and substitute one’s self-perception as normative. For this reason he wrote, in his letter to someone who had recently become a Quaker, “Friend, you have an honest heart, but a weak head.” Wesley maintained that for fifty-five years he hadn’t found any Quakers who grasped the foundation of the gospel, justification by faith.

   I envision the Wesley Chair promoting conversations with the diverse families in the church catholic, while simultaneously exercising a discernment (discernment being the principal manifestation of the Holy Spirit in the Book of Acts) that can properly recognize and charitably forfend theologies, movements, ideologies, novelties, and ethical compromises that are a denial of the gospel.

[B] The second aspect of my vision for the Wesley Chair reflects Wesley’s position in the burgeoning Enlightenment of his era. Wesley never allowed his gospel-driven theology to be adulterated by developments in world-occurrence even as he recognized aspects of world-occurrence that were humanly helpful. In this regard he always urged his people to “Plunder the Egyptians” (Exodus 3:22). On the one hand, the Egyptians were Israel’s oppressors, ignorant of HaShem, wantonly cruel, and idolatrous. On the other hand, the Egyptians possessed no little worldly wisdom that all people, everywhere, could profit from.

   Among other matters, electricity was a preoccupation in Wesley’s day (think of Benjamin Franklin, his kite, and lightning) , and Wesley himself was entranced. When I first visited Wesley’s Chapel in London, I was intrigued by his ‘electrification machine.’ It consisted of a stator, a rotor, and two electrodes to be attached to a suffering person’s temples. The faster one cranked the rotor, the greater the electric shock to the recipient. Whom did Wesley shock? Depressed people, those who today are diagnosed as suffering from endogenous depression. The point is, Wesley came upon  severely depressed people whose depression, he insisted, was not rooted in spiritual defectiveness or degenerate behaviour or demonic possession. In this regard he was light years ahead of many contemporaries. To be sure, he had no grasp of the neurological sophistication that underlies today’s Electro-Convulsive Therapy. However, when faced with atrocious human suffering, he was willing to learn from anyone.

   In 1747 Wesley penned his Primitive Physic, a compend of treatments, no better than folkloric to us, aimed at relieving human distresses. Those afflicted with ‘the flux’ (diarrhoea) were to “Receive the smoke of turpentine cast on burning coals.” And for the ‘bloody flux,’ “Apply suppository of linen dipped in aqua vitae.” At the same time, Wesley never disdained professional medical treatment. In 1773 (Wesley was 70 years old) his horse stumbled, throwing him against the pommel of his saddle. Soon he found himself with a hydrocele, a large fluid collection in his scrotum. When next he was in Edinburgh he visited three leaders of the university’s faculty of medicine, and ultimately underwent surgery for his affliction.

  Always aware of the suffering attending gynecological disorders, Wesley proposed a treatment for menorrhagia: half an ounce of powdered alum was to be drunk with a quarter of an ounce of dragon’s blood (dragon’s blood being the bright red resin that is obtained from different plants.) Before we laugh at Wesley, we should note that dragon’s blood is possessed of antiviral and wound-healing effects. Taspine, a component of dragon’s blood, is an alkaloid whose wound-healing efficacy is scientifically documented.

  My vision for the Wesley Chair includes a willingness to speak with and learn from anyone, in any discipline, especially where human suffering may be alleviated. What creaturely wisdom (not the gospel, to be sure, but creaturely wisdom nonetheless) can be gained from the social sciences? (In my work with convicts and ex-convicts, for instance, I am aware of the dreadful effects of inadequate provision in early childhood, of family instability, of assorted abuses that will haunt victims for life.)

Although I am not medically trained, I am hugely immersed in the psychiatric world, and have been invited to address both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association, on the assumption that Christian faith and psychiatric wisdom can together promote the healing of wounded people. What creaturely wisdom can we gain from the rising tide of neuroscience? What wisdom can be found in such disciplines as philosophy, literature, and history? Cicero once remarked, “To be ignorant of history is to remain forever a child.” Is not part of the church’s mission to have people become mature in all dimensions of human existence?

   Wesley spared no effort to “plunder the Egyptians” not only because of the creaturely wisdom they possessed but also because he already knew, even more profoundly, that “In Jesus Christ all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:17) Wesley knew there are no dichotomies in the universe (apart from that of sin). Knowing that in Christ all things hold together, and aspiring to obey God’s command to plunder the Egyptians, Wesley magnified the Lord who is himself the integration and coherence of a creation that the same Lord has already rendered the Kingdom of God.

   My vision for the Wesley Chair includes a forum where gospel-conviction and theological sophistication welcome, gain from, and contribute to any discipline that enhances us. Herein the Wesley Chair will anticipate the person, made in God’s image but  now wounded as a creature and sinful as a human; herein the Wesley Chair will anticipate that person who will be found on the day of our Lord’s appearing with their creatureliness no longer disfigured by pain and their humanness no longer distorted by sin. In other words, in its multi-disciplinary conversation the Wesley Chair will promote both wholeness and holiness; it will promote nothing less than a human flourishing that redounds to the praise of God’s glory.

   Everyone fails somewhere in life.  Everyone, however successful on however many fronts, nevertheless fails somewhere.  Therefore I too am a failure.  Specifically, I am a failed agnostic.  I wanted to be an agnostic, even tried to be an agnostic, but I didn’t succeed.  Here’s what happened. 

   I had been aware of a vocation to the ministry, nothing less than a commission from the hand of Jesus Christ, since I was 14 years old.  My vocation irked me, however, since I didn’t want to be a minister; I wanted to be a lawyer.  When I began university, I enrolled in courses that would prepare me for law school.  Along the way I majored in philosophy, and did so very well in it that I gave up my dream of being a lawyer in favour of becoming a philosophy professor. 

  Yet my vocation to the ministry nagged me.  No one likes to be nagged.  And so I decided to will myself into agnosticism (not hard to do in a philosophy programme, I assumed).  After all, God would never call an agnostic to the ministry, would he?  Surely an agnostic is of no use to God in the ministry.  All around me, in university classes, young Christians were struggling to retain faith.  I was struggling to jettison it.  I was determined to be an agnostic.

  But I couldn’t get there.  I failed.  The One who abandons nobody; the One who said to Jeremiah, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you”—this One hounded me and haunted me.  Little by little I had to give up my pursuit of agnosticism.

   And then in a fourth-year philosophy course a bomb fell on me.  I had to speak with one of my professors about an essay I was to write.  I went to his office.  This time he wasn’t standing formally behind a lectern in front of a class.  Instead he was sitting casually with his feet on his desk, chair tipped back, glasses on his forehead.  He was much warmer than he appeared in class, and we chatted about my essay topic for three or four minutes.

  Prof. Emil Fackenheim, the brightest star in U of T’s 85-philosopher firmament; Fackenheim, a Jew who had survived Sachsenhausen (30 kms outside Berlin) where 6000 men were reduced to 300 in a Nazi horror beyond telling; Fackenheim, not only philosopher but rabbi (I didn’t know this at the time), took a cigar out his shirt pocket, lit it, exhaled smoke like the incense that had overwhelmed Isaiah in the temple centuries earlier; Fackenheim barked, “Shepherd, enough about philosophy; let’s talk about God.”  And for reasons I’ll never grasp, when he said “God”, the room ignited.  I was overwhelmed with the shekinah (the perceptible presence of God’s glory); it seemed I was on Sinai with Moses or on Carmel with Elijah. 

   “Shepherd,” Fackenheim continued after another noxious exhalation, “modernity thinks God to be vague, abstract, ethereal, ‘iffy.’ God, however, is concrete, solid, dense beyond our imagining. There is nothing ‘iffy’ about God; but there is a great deal that is ‘iffy’ about you and me.”    
   Dumbfounded at the spiritual assault (albeit benign) from a world-class philosopher, I was still reeling when he launched the next salvo: “Shepherd, in view of the horrific depredations of our century—crowned by the Shoah—there are huge question marks above humankind. But concerning God there is no question whatever.  Never forget,” he concluded, “We do not demythologize God; God demythologizes us as God exposes the lethal, groundless myths by which we mesmerize ourselves and on account of which we slay each other.”

   My encounter with a world-class philosopher exposed my attempted agnosticism as ridiculous, stupid, juvenile fatuity.

   God is dense beyond our imagining?  God is weightier than we can imagine?  What’s the densest substance you can think of?  Lead?  Lead isn’t very dense at all.  The flaming hydrogen gas that constitutes the sun is far denser; one milk-jug of the sun’s flaming hydrogen gas weighs 400 pounds.

   The densest substance I know?  A neutron star.  The matter comprising a neutron star is so very dense that one thimbleful of it vastly outweighs the earth’s total human population.  One teaspoon of it weighs one billion tons. 

    Then how dense is God?  Do you understand now that when God leans on a Hebrew prophet, the prophet cannot doubt him? – that the prophet’s only concern is how to survive?

  I: — “The Lord reigns”, exults the psalmist.  The God we’ve just spoken of is operative; not remote, not disengaged, not indifferent; this God is present to us and alive among us and forever at work within us; this God is operative at all times, in all places, amidst all circumstances.

    “Let the many coastlands be glad”, continues the psalmist.  “Coastlands” is a Hebrew expression for the farthest outposts of humankind; “coastlands” means the entire inhabited world, all women and men everywhere.  There is no one and nothing that escapes the rulership of God.  “The Lord reigns.”

   Now in a different sense Queen Elizabeth reigns.  Elizabeth reigns, but she doesn’t rule.  She doesn’t govern.  The queen is a figurehead; she is a carryover from a bygone era; her sovereign effectiveness (beyond sentimentality) is zero.  The queen may reign, but the British government rules.

   When the psalmist cries “The Lord reigns”, on the other hand, he means that the living God rules, rules effectually.  The One who reigns isn’t a figurehead; he’s nothing symbolic.  His reign is his rule; he reigns effectually, and reigns regardless of what overtakes his creation and contradicts him.

   Think of the coronavirus.  For the past several months the coronavirus has been on everyone’s mind.  The newscasts expatiate on it every day.   To be sure, the coronavirus is no small matter.  But we are mistaken if we think it is the first such pestilence to overtake us. 

   I grew up when polio was no minor threat, and everyday we were warned about the disease and the horror of having to live immobilized in an iron lung.  In 1918, just when World War I ended and the western world anticipated relief, Spanish flu appeared: it killed between 50 and 100 million people. A century earlier tuberculosis took down millions.  Before that smallpox was a scourge.  

   Our mediaeval foreparents had to contend with bubonic plague.  Bubonic plague, the black death, surfaced in Europe in 1347, and it quickly devoured 50% of Europe’s people.  “Old stuff”, we  say; “bubonic plague is gone forever.”  Wrong!  The deadliest outbreak of bubonic plague in modern times occurred in Madagascar in October 2017.  It infected thousands and killed 170.

II: — The psalmist (who wrote his priceless encouragement 3000 years ago) faced everything we must confront; he encountered everything we can’t avoid; he had to contend with everything that upsets us.  And still his experience of God was so very rich that he could shout, “Clouds and thick darkness are round about him.”

   The cloud is the Hebrew symbol for God’s majestic presence; God’s presence that is grand yet inherently attractive; God’s presence that is imposing yet resplendent.  When we speak of clouds, we usually have something negative in mind: “It’s such a cloudy day again; I wish the sun would shine; I’m tired of dirty grey clouds.”  But when the Hebrew thinker speaks of clouds, he has in mind the hugest, whitest, grandest clouds (the sort, by the way, I see on Prince Edward Island.)  Such a cloud, for the Hebrew mind, symbolizes the presence and loftiness and grandeur and towering transcendence of God.

   Then what about “thick darkness”?  Let me say in passing that ‘darkness’ and ‘thick darkness’ are entirely different and translate two different Hebrew words. ‘Darkness’ refers to evil.  ‘Thick darkness’ is the Hebrew expression for God’s solidity, density, opacity. ‘Thick darkness’ is the Hebrew expression for God’s thickness; thicker, denser, weightier than a neutron star.  “Thick darkness” means that God cannot be dislodged, cannot be set aside,  yet also cannot be domesticated.

   So this God reigns.  To what end?  What does his rule accomplish?  The psalmist tells us that “righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.”  “Righteousness and justice” is Hebrew shorthand for shalom; God’s restoration of a disordered, evil-afflicted cosmos; and God’s salvation of a dysfunctional, sin-ridden people.  Right now the entire creation, marred by evil, lacks wholeness; right now the human creature, marred by sin, lacks holiness.  What’s more, the disordered creation and dysfunctional sinners interpenetrate each other. While neither is the cause of the other’s problem, both torment each other.  A disordered creation that finds people lacking the necessities of life lends them an added inducement to sin (as if they needed added inducement); on the other hand, sinners who are self-preoccupied care little for a creation they are polluting and degrading every day.  God’s purpose is to remedy both.  He is intent on a world in which righteousness dwells; and he pursues a people who will praise him everlastingly as only rescued sinners can.

   Will God achieve his purpose?  Or is he going to be stymied, frustrated finally?  Using yet another vivid image, the Psalmist reminds us, “Fire goes before him, and burns up his adversaries round about….The mountains melt like wax before the Lord, before the Lord of all the earth.”

   Now please don’t say, “Just a minute, Shepherd.  God is thick darkness; God is also consuming fire that overcomes his adversaries.  How can God be dark and fiery at the same time?  Doesn’t fire shed light and thereby eliminate what’s dark?”  If you ask this question you are asking the wrong question.  Concerning these wonderfully vivid images of God’s presence and power we are to think not literally but literarily.  Of course God isn’t literally fire, flaming methane gas.  Of course God isn’t literally a cloud, water droplets suspended in air.  We aren’t to think literally but literarily.

   It all adds up to one thing: God is bigger, grander, denser, more substantive, more effective, than anything we could guess at apart from the God-ordained images the psalmist gives us.

III: — The truth that God’s commitment to the restoration of the creation and those creatures made in his image; the truth that God’s commitment to this end and God’s zeal in pursuing it; the truth that God’s adversary-consuming intensity is hot enough and intense enough to have mountains melt like wax; none of this means that we, God’ people are to do nothing.  God has called us into his Kingdom; God has recruited his people to join him in his pursuit. For this reason the psalmist declares, “O you who love the Lord, hate evil!”

   I am always startled at the juxtaposition: those who love are simultaneously to hate; those who love God are to hate evil.  Love and hatred are passions.  Plainly God expects his people to be impassioned, as impassioned as he is.  What’s more, he expects his impassioned people to be more than impassioned; he expects them to act.  The apostle James insists it isn’t enough to be an enthusiastic hearer of the Word; we must no less be an ardent doer of the Word.  Jesus Christ challenges misguided disciples, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord’, and not do what I tell you?” (Luke 6:46)  We are to hate evil. 

    Now the last thing I want to do this morning is to foster false guilt in anyone, make anyone feel inadequate or deficient in that she isn’t zealous enough, discerning enough, resolute enough, brave enough in her active hatred of evil.  False guilt doesn’t help anyone.

   Neither do I want to deny that more than a little discretion is needed before we hurl ourselves against evil, even the most blatant evil.  I am always aware that many a person has recognized an evil to be just that, has determined to roll it back, only to find himself overtaken by, victimized by, the very evil he thought he was called to undo.

   A friend told me he had a vocation to work on behalf of the women wretchedly immersed in the sex-trade, now proliferating everywhere.

   Now I had had several opportunities to observe certain domestic sensitivities concerning my friend.  I feared that if he worked among these women he risked disgrace.  As gently as I could I said to him, “The evil you want to roll back; it is evil and it should be rolled back; but it isn’t your task to do this.  You identify a different evil to hate.”

   While we are on this topic we should admit that there is much evil we can do nothing about.  If someone tells me that there is corruption in the way government funds are assigned to some researchers (but not to others, equally deserving); if someone tells me there is corruption in the tow-truck industry (this point is beyond dispute), I’m not doubting it, denying it, or minimizing its seriousness.  But neither is there anything I can do immediately about it.  I have no access to the tow-truck industry; I have no access to the assigning of government funds to researchers.  I don’t have a ready-to-hand tool to use against such corruption.

   Then were do we begin?  Instead of beginning with massive evil or dramatic evil, let’s begin at the other end.  Let’s begin with something closer to home, something personal, something to which we do have access and about which we can do something.

    Let’s look at the book of Proverbs.  The author of Proverbs exclaims, “There are six things which the Lord hates, seven which are an abomination to  him.” (Prov. 6:16-19)  Then he lists them.

   The first is “haughty eyes.”  The Lord hates haughty eyes.  Haughty eyes are the murderous facial expression of the disdainful person, the contemptuous person.  Haughty eyes are the bodily expression, the dismissive wave of the hand, the sarcastic smile, the derisive write-off of the person now written-off as not worth bothering with, not even considered to exist. 

  In Matthew 5:12 Jesus says, “Whoever insults her sister mobilizes God’s prosecution; and whoever gives his brother the finger is on the brink of hell.”

   People who are adept at verbal or bodily putdowns are proud of what they do and protective of themselves (they think) at the same time.  Even as they slay those they deem beneath them they remark, “Did I say anything?”  Of course they haven’t said anything.  There’s no need to speak when facial expression kills more quickly.

   Haven’t we all seen someone publicly humiliated by a false smile? Wretchedly embarrassed by a snort of superiority?  Haven’t we all seen someone shamed publicly and reduced to helpless, voiceless anguish by the smart aleck’s smirk?  Haven’t we all seen someone shrivelled by a belittlement she will never forget? 

   “Did I say anything?”  Haughty eyes, says our Hebrew friend, is an evil no less evil than the tuberculosis bacillus or the cancer cell or the corona virus.  The Lord hates evil.  We must hate evil.  If we can’t do anything about evil in Putin’s Russia, we can surely do something closer to home.

   Next, says the book of Proverbs, is “a lying tongue.”  In Matthew 5:37 Jesus says, “Let what you say be simply ‘yes’ or ‘no’.  Anything more than this comes from evil.”  Christ’s pronouncement is repeated five times in the New Testament.  It’s plain that transparent speech, devoid of deviousness or dissimulation, must be found in Christ’s people.  Christians are to be characterized by unadorned, unambiguous speech.  We mean what we say and say what we mean.  We don’t traffic in that subtly disguised doublespeak wherein we can say something caustic and then deny it credibly when we are faulted for it.

   We have all met those who are adept at ambiguous speech.  They know how to say something that publicly allows them maximal wiggle room, even as they know the hearer will hear something that suggests no wiggle room at all.  They laugh at how clever they are.  They dismiss Christ’s command concerning ‘yes’ and ‘no’.  They dismiss the apostle James: “Let your ‘yes’ be ‘yes’ and your’ no’ ‘no’, so that you may not fall under condemnation.” (James 5:12)

   When John Wesley was putting together the earliest Methodist classes, he wrote in 1743 that Methodists must never be found “using many words in buying or selling.”  Using many words in buying or selling simply means the speaker is bent on making a sucker out of the person he’s doing business with.  It appears some Methodists didn’t get Wesley’s point, because one year later, 1744, he wrote that Methodists must always “be at a word [one word – only] in buying or selling.”

   If we are not truthful, not transparent, then we shouldn’t expect people to trust us.  Why would anyone trust those who display themselves as untrustworthy?  

   If we love the Lord, says the psalmist, we must simultaneously hate evil.

   “Six things the Lord hates; seven are an abomination to him”, says Proverbs.  Today we have looked at only two.  The remaining five we shall leave for another day, even as we are invited to search our hearts and honestly confront ourselves with the as-yet un-named evil within us that we are to repent and repudiate.

IV: — Finally, Psalm 97 tells us, at the end of the day, we are summoned to rejoice in the Lord and give thanks to his holy name.  In Hebrew, ‘name’ means nature, person, presence, power, deserved reputation.  As God acts in history God names himself.  In the calling of Abraham and Sarah for the sake of a people who live to the praise of his glory; in the summoning of Moses to lead a people into a promised land that would one day be nothing less than the Kingdom of God; in the calling of prophets who re-acquainted God’s people with God’s uncompromisable truth and God’s undeflectable purpose—in all of this God named himself repeatedly, ever revealing his nature, his person, his presence, his power and his reputation.

   And then he named himself definitively in his Son.  At the Jordan and again at the Transfiguration God said concerning Jesus of Nazareth, “You are my Son; you are the One the whole inhabited earth is to hear and heed; you are the One who bears my Spirit for the sake of bestowing it upon my people.”

   The apostle Paul reminds the congregation in Ephesus that God has named himself forever in the name “that is above every name”, the name of Jesus Christ.  For Christ Jesus our Lord has pioneered for us that way through life which honours God.  Jesus Christ has borne our sin and borne it away leaving us the freedom to follow him, our elder brother, in our lives as children of God.  Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead; God has thereby vindicated his Son, and vindicated his people with him, allowing us his people to stand with him cheerfully amidst those who still mock him and scorn his people.

   Just because God has named himself victoriously in the name of him whose name is above every name we can rejoice; we must rejoice.  For the God who is brightest cloud, thickest darkness and consuming fire all at once; this One has defined himself for us in Jesus Christ, now guarantees the fulfilment of his purpose for us and our world, and holds us close to him in a grip that will never let us go.

    Every day I thank God I’m a failure; a failed agnostic, that is.   Victor Shepherd  9^th August 2020  S.U.C.

Psalm 97 English Standard Version

The Lord Reigns

97 The Lord reigns, let the earth rejoice;
    let the many coastlands be glad!
² Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;
    righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
³ Fire goes before him
    and burns up his adversaries all around.
⁴ His lightnings light up the world;
    the earth sees and trembles.
⁵ The mountains melt like wax before the Lord,
    before the Lord of all the earth.

⁶ The heavens proclaim his righteousness,
    and all the peoples see his glory.
⁷ All worshipers of images are put to shame,
    who make their boast in worthless idols;
    worship him, all you gods!

⁸ Zion hears and is glad,
    and the daughters of Judah rejoice,
    because of your judgments, O Lord.
⁹ For you, O Lord, are most high over all the earth;
    you are exalted far above all gods.

¹⁰ O you who love the Lord, hate evil!
    He preserves the lives of his saints;
    he delivers them from the hand of the wicked.
¹¹ Light is sown for the righteous,
    and joy for the upright in heart.
¹² Rejoice in the Lord, O you righteous,
    and give thanks to his holy name!