John Wesley: Optimist of Grace

John Wesley

Optimist of Grace

Henry H. Knight III

John Wesley

Optimist of Grace

Cascade Companions 32

Copyright © 2018 Henry H. Knight III. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-62564-838-9

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8690-9

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-4639-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Knight, Henry H., 1948–, author.

Title: John Wesley : optimist of grace / by Henry H. Knight III.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2018 | Series: Cascade Companions 32 | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-62564-838-9 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-8690-9 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-5326-4639-3 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Wesley, John, 1703–1791. | Grace (Theology)—History of doctrines. | Holiness—Christianity. | Sanctification—Christianity. | Perfection—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: BT761.3 .K6544 2018 (paperback) | BT761.3 .K6544 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 11/16/16

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Quest for Holiness

Chapter 2: The Search for Salvation

Chapter 3: The Moravian Controversy

Chapter 4: The Calvinist Controversy

Chapter 5: Proclaiming the Way of Salvation

Chapter 6: Restoring the Image of God

Chapter 7: The Means of Grace

Chapter 8: Relieving the Distress of the Neighbor

Chapter 9: The Later Controversies

Chapter 10: Renewing the Face of the Earth

Conclusion: The Triumph of Love

Bibliography

Cascade Companions

The Christian theological tradition provides an embarrassment of riches: from Scripture to modern scholarship, we are blessed with a vast and complex theological inheritance. And yet this feast of traditional riches is too frequently inaccessible to the general reader.

The Cascade Companions series addresses the challenge by publishing books that combine academic rigor with broad appeal and readability. They aim to introduce nonspecialist readers to that vital storehouse of authors, documents, themes, histories, arguments, and movements that comprise this heritage with brief yet compelling volumes.

Titles in this series:

Reading Augustine by Jason Byassee

Conflict, Community, and Honor by John H. Elliott

An Introduction to the Desert Fathers by Jason Byassee

Reading Paul by Michael J. Gorman

Theology and Culture by D. Stephen Long

Creation and Evolution by Tatha Wiley

Theological Interpretation of Scripture by Stephen Fowl

Reading Bonhoeffer by Geffrey B. Kelly

Justpeace Ethics by Jarem Sawatsky

Feminism and Christianity by Caryn D. Griswold

Angels, Worms, and Bogeys by Michelle A. Clifton-Soderstrom

Christianity and Politics by C. C. Pecknold

A Way to Scholasticism by Peter S. Dillard

Theological Theodicy by Daniel Castelo

The Letter to the Hebrews in Social-Scientific Perspective by David A. deSilva

Basil of Caesarea by Andrew Radde-Galwitz

A Guide to St. Symeon the New Theologian by Hannah Hunt

Reading John by Christopher W. Skinner

Forgiveness by Anthony Bash

Jacob Arminius by Rustin Brian

Reading Jeremiah by Jack Lundbom

John Calvin by Donald McKim

To my wife

Eloise,

for her unfailing encouragement

and support

Introduction

An Optimism of Grace

John Wesley is perhaps the most influential theologian of the eighteenth century. This is easier seen from our vantage point than that of his contemporaries. In his own day Wesley was commonly considered a divisive and somewhat marginal figure within the Church of England. Although recognized as a prime mover in the eighteenth century awakening, he was still seen as the leader of an Arminian side branch of what was then a revival largely led by Calvinists.

Today historians consider Wesley and his Calvinist contemporary Jonathan Edwards as the pre-eminent theologians of that awakening, together laying the foundation for a Protestant evangelicalism that would flourish in the next two centuries.¹ Wesley is also the father of Methodism, which now includes 75 million adherents across the globe² in over a hundred denominations. In addition, he provided the theological impetus for the Holiness movement that emerged in the nineteenth century, both in and outside of Methodism.³ If he is seen, as many do, as also foundational to Pentecostalism, then his contemporary impact is enormous.⁴

Although he sought simply to proclaim the scripture way of salvation, Wesley developed a distinctive theological vision that formed and shaped a new Protestant tradition. While firmly grounding his theology in scripture, Wesley drew upon a wide array of prior and contemporary sources to assist his interpretation of scripture. Prominent among these were patristic Christianity, Wesley’s own Anglican tradition, moderate Puritans, continental Pietism, and the testimonies of others to their experience of God. The result was a theology that emphasized the love of God in Christ, universality of grace, present power of the Holy Spirit, and hope for a new life centered and grounded in love.

To spread this message Wesley employed a connection of lay preachers to travel throughout Great Britain. Those who responded to the message were brought together in small groups called classes, centered on enabling persons to follow a set of spiritual disciplines. If the Wesleyan message drew thousands in England, it found even more fertile soil across the Atlantic. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, Methodism would become the dominant form of Christianity in America.

For his part, Wesley never intended to form a new denomination. He saw the mission of his Methodists as not to form any new sect, but to reform the nation, particularly the Church, and to spread scriptural holiness over the land.⁵ Yet this understanding of Methodism as a renewal movement came under increasing stress in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Wesley’s methods were seen as irregular, perhaps even illegal, by many in the Church of England. Meanwhile Methodism itself began to develop an ethos and identity distinct from the Church of England. Methodism became a separate denomination in America during Wesley’s lifetime, in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Methodism in England became separate in the decade after Wesley’s death.

Historians have long recognized Wesley as an accomplished evangelist and organizer, but it has not been until the twentieth century that he has been reclaimed as a serious theologian. The groundwork for a reassessment of Wesley’s theology began with a series of works by George Croft Cell (1935), William R. Cannon (1946), Harold Lindstrom (1950), Colin Williams (1960), Mildred Bangs Wynkoop (1972), and especially Albert C. Outler (1964, 1975). The year 1975 also marks the publication of the first volume of the Bicentennial Edition of The Works of John Wesley, consisting of 35 volumes that contain a wealth of interpretative information for a new generation of scholars. This, along with a renaissance in Wesley studies by both historians and theologians, has already borne fruit in three major contemporary interpretations of Wesley’s theology by Randy L. Maddox (1994), Theodore Runyon (1998), and Kenneth J. Collins (2007) plus a host of more specialized books and articles.

Part of the difficulty in seeing Wesley as a serious theologian was due to assumptions about the form and purpose of theology. As Randy Maddox has argued, from the late medieval period on, theology was increasingly understood as an academic discipline pursued for its own sake with the goal of attaining systematic coherence.⁶ Among Protestants the ideal model was John Calvin’s Theological Institutes and the tightly logical systems of the post-Reformation Lutheran and Reformed scholastics. That Wesley never produced a work of this kind was seen as indicating a lack of theological rigor.

But Wesley was an Anglican theologian. Unlike theology on the European continent, Wesley’s tradition was influenced by the early church for which theology emerged in the pastoral context of shepherding the formation of Christians for their lives in the world.⁷ Wesley’s theological writing, like that of many of his fellow Anglicans, took the form of sermons, essays, letters and prayers, as well as apologetic writings to defend his theology and practice in response to critics. Theology for Wesley did not have the goal of producing a theological textbook but was more like a map pointing to God and showing the way of salvation.

To say his theology did not take the form of a system is not to say it is eclectic or disorganized. At its heart, Wesley’s theology is centered on the relationship of love and grace: love as both the governing attribute of God and the content and goal of the Christian life, and grace as the action of God enabling persons to receive and grow in a new life of love.

Recent interpreters have emphasized one or both of these two foci. Randy Maddox argues that consistency in Wesley’s theology is due to an orienting concern for responsible grace, that is, a concern to maintain both that without grace we cannot be saved, and because grace is enabling but not coercive, salvation requires our participation.⁸ Kenneth Collins sees the conjunction of holiness and grace as the axial theme of Wesley’s theology with each of the two elements also a conjunction: holiness as holy love, and grace as both free and co-operant.⁹

While these insights are essential to understanding Wesley’s theology, they do not in my opinion fully account for his distinctive theological vision. For that we must look more closely at the goal of salvation, as well as grace as the means to attaining that goal.

While in his day (as in ours) salvation was often understood in terms of attaining a happy afterlife, Wesley’s focus was firmly on the present: By salvation I mean . . . a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health, in original purity; a recovery of the divine nature.¹⁰ This recovery of the divine nature Wesley termed full salvation, while he used salvation to encompass the entire process of its recovery.

Wesley’s more common terms for full salvation were Christian perfection and entire sanctification. Wesley believed that the promise of salvation was at its heart a promise to restore us to the image of God in which we were created, but had lost when humanity fell into sin, and to be so restored in this life. As God is love, we were meant to have love as our governing disposition, as the fount of our motivation and desire. To be restored to that image would mean we could fully obey the two great commandments given by Jesus Christ, to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The teaching of the possibility of Christian perfection in this life was the most distinctive and controversial element of Wesley’s theology. It was an especially radical claim for a Protestant. While Catholic and Orthodox theologies could envision something like this for a select group of people—usually those who had left everyday life behind to be solely focused on God—they could do so only because they believed that in spite of the fall into sin there remained in persons a capacity for God upon which grace could do its work of restoration. But Protestants had a more thoroughgoing doctrine of original sin, in which no portion of human nature was untouched by sin. Their focus was on our being declared righteous rather than actually becoming so. Even if one did speak of a measure of growth in the Christian life, for most Protestants something like Christian perfection would necessarily be reserved for the life to come.

How, then, could a Protestant like John Wesley claim that salvation culminates in Christian perfection in this life (unlike most Protestants), and also that it is available to everyone (unlike most Catholic and Orthodox theologians)? The answer is found in his understanding of grace as the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

As we have noted, Protestants have understood grace most centrally as an unmerited declaration of forgiveness of sins, grounded solely on the atonement of Jesus Christ. Wesley certainly was in agreement with this. But he added to that an understanding of grace as the work of the Spirit. In The Witness of Our Own Spirit, a sermon based on 2 Cor 1:12, Wesley said,

By the grace of God is sometimes to be understood that free love, that unmerited mercy, by which I, a sinner, through the merits of Christ am now reconciled to God. But in this place it rather means that power of God the Holy Ghost which worketh in us both to will and to do of his good pleasure. As soon as ever the grace of God (in the former sense, his pardoning love) is manifested to our soul, the grace of God (in the latter sense, the power of his Spirit) takes place therein. And now we can perform, through God, what to man was impossible."¹¹

As we will see, Wesley actually envisioned a transforming work of the Spirit all along the way of salvation. It is also the theological key for how Wesley could move from a Protestant doctrine of original sin to the promise of Christian perfection in this life.

It is this optimism of grace,¹² in connection with the goal of perfection in love, that gives Wesley’s theology its inner dynamic. That it proved attractive to so many is not only due to its resolute focus on God’s love revealed in Jesus Christ, but on the power of the Holy Spirit to enable us to love as God does. This is not only a theology of love and grace, but also at its heart a theology of hope, a promise of new creation in the midst of this present age.

Discussion Questions

1. What did John Wesley mean by salvation?

2. How was Wesley an optimist of grace?

1. See for example Noll, Rise of Evangelicalism.

2. Cracknell and White, World Methodism,

1.

3. For a fine survey see Dieter, Holiness Revival.

4. As argued by Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal; Hollenweger, Pentecostalism; Martin, Pentecostalism; and Knight,