Wesley for Armchair Theologians

Index

PREFACE

This little volume on John Wesley is intended both as a contribution to the debate about his theology and as an introduction for the beginner. I offer a fresh interpretation of his theology, but I do so in a way that I hope proves interesting to the newcomer to Wesleyan studies. I also aim to draw folk into their own theological reflections today. My fondest desire is to make Wesley come alive for those who would truly love to become unpretentious armchair theologians. Wesley is a friend who can ably launch them on a wonderful intellectual journey in faith.

I confess at the outset my own ambivalence about Wesley. In the early stages of my own intellectual and spiritual journey, Wesley was pivotal for me. After my conversion in my teenage years through the ministry of the people called Methodists in Ireland, I read Wesley avidly. I did not then know that I was supposed to be bored by his writings. While I was at university the lively biography of Wesley by John Wesley Bready, England before and after Wesley (New York: Harper, 1938), was a godsend during a period of backbreaking summer work in a cement factory in East Anglia in England.

When I took up the formal study of theology, Wesley suddenly went dead on me. I found him not so much archaic as surreal. I thought I would never come back to my first love, even though the hymns the early Methodists let loose in the world remain a spiritual treasure that I still sorely miss in the move from Ireland to North America. Happily, listening to some purloined audiotapes on Wesley by Albert Outler during a bad dose of the flu arrested this journey away from Wesley. Yet Wesley remains a figure who is both near and remote. He is clearly an extraordinarily interesting figure in the history of Christianity; but it is far from easy to know what to make of his life or his theology. So I write this volume with a certain fear and trembling.

Wesley clearly has a distinctive theology. I hope I have offered a persuasive rendering of that theology. My thesis is that Wesley’s theology is an intellectual oasis lodged within the traditional faith of the church enshrined in the creeds. This move dictates the ordering of the material up ahead. I begin with two chapters on Wesley’s life and context in the eighteenth century. I then provide a chapter that picks out one component of the classical faith of the church that is critical for understanding his theology as a whole. The next five chapters provide the meat of his theology. I then circle back up into the wider faith of the church and take up a topic that has always been a source of comfort and curiosity to me. I hope the reader will find a pleasing symmetry in the work.

William J. Abraham 

Dallas, Texas 

December 11, 2004  

CHAPTER ONE

On the Road Again

A Fortunate Family Row

John Wesley began life as a happy by-product of a family dispute in the local Anglican parsonage in Epworth, England, in 1702. His parents had had a royal row over praying for the current king. His mother, Susanna, had refused to say amen after the family prayers for the reigning monarch William III. As she remembered the event, her husband, Samuel, had immediately kneeled down and imprecated the divine vengeance upon himself and all his posterity if ever he touched me more or came to bed with me before I had begged God’s pardon and his.¹ So Samuel had gone off in a huff. When he at last decided to return, John Wesley was conceived. He was number fifteen in a family of nineteen children.

Both Susanna and Samuel Wesley were formidable in their own way, and they both left their mark on John, who was born on June 17, 1703, and lived until March 2, 1791. They began life as Dissenters, that is, as those who rejected the vision of Christianity developed by the Anglican Church after the Reformation. Independently of each other, they had examined the theological issues of the day for themselves and been converted to the Anglican tradition. Susanna was the daughter of a distinguished Dissenting preacher and had made ample use of her father’s library for her research. She made the move to the Anglican tradition when she was twelve. As long as Susanna lived, she had a powerful influence on her son, beginning with intensive homeschooling in which Thursdays were devoted to the intellectual and spiritual care of John. Samuel Wesley had gone over to Anglicanism as a young man, went up to Oxford to study for the priesthood, became a minor churchman of his day, and devoted forty years of his life to his contrary parishioners.

Given this background, it is no surprise that John Wesley was steeped in the Anglican Church of his day. While he led a renewal movement within it that ultimately went its own way, he never wavered in his own sense of loyalty. He loved the Church of England dearly, gloried in its treasures, pined over its faults, and worked mightily to goad it into a deeper spirituality and into a more effective service to God.

John Wesley inherited a rich theological tradition, and he was steeped in its ways of piety and ritual. From the age of eleven in 1714 until he sailed for Georgia in the New World in 1735, he spent most of his life in Anglican educational institutions, first as a student and then as a lecturer in logic and Greek. As a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he received a living from the Church of England until he married. He was totally immersed in his church’s worship and prayers, shaped in a host of ways by its wonderful intellectual balance, its openness to truth, its stately presence in politics and country, its internal linguistic beauty, and its sense of humble grandeur and confidence. While Oxford University was in his day something of a glorified high school crossed with a finishing school for grandees, he gained a priceless education there as a student and teacher that served him well throughout his career. He learned well how to articulate and defend his ideas even when they were daft and irregular. When he reluctantly abandoned the university to work as an itinerant preacher, he took with him an abundance of skills and self-assurance.

In his late thirties Wesley tended to underestimate the depth of his early spiritual life, but there can be no doubt about the genuineness of his faith. He was an ardent servant of God, becoming first a priest and then an enthusiastic missionary. In preparation for his ordination as a deacon in 1725 he devoted himself to a life of holiness. He read avidly in the literature of personal sanctity, working across the theological spectrum that was available to him. When his brother Charles and some friends began a small-group ministry at Oxford University devoted to Bible study, prayer, and service to the needy, he readily joined, becoming the natural leader. He was not afraid of hard names or opposition and later came to see this experiment in smallgroup ministry as the nucleus of his Methodist Societies. Such was his commitment and diligence that he became a missionary to the New World. He persuaded his brother Charles to go with him. Wesley’s personal prayers, his obsession with spiritual discipline, his rigor in matters of church law, and his sermons display a man who was bent on a quest for real Christianity.

Below the surface, however, John Wesley was far from settled spiritually. While his father lay dying on April 25, 1735, he urged his son to seek a truly personal encounter with God through the work of the Holy Spirit. On the way to Georgia, Wesley fell in with a group of Moravian missionaries whose vibrant faith challenged his own inner uncertainties. He was so impressed with their assurance in the face of death in the storms at sea that he learned German so as to better understand their spiritual secrets. He met regularly with their spiritual leaders, one of whom, Peter Böhler, challenged him back in England to the very core of his being about his faith in Christ. Working in and around Savannah, he failed as a missionary. His efforts to impose his rigorous vision of church life on a mixed bag of immigrants came to naught in the end. He fell in love with one of his parishioners, but like many a rural Irish bachelor, he dithered when it came to the time for commitment. When Sophia Hopkey married a rival, he barred her from Communion on flimsy grounds and landed himself before the grand jury for misconduct. Protesting his innocence and accurately calculating his slim chances of a fair trial, he slipped out under cover of darkness and headed back to England in December 1737. He had been gone for twenty-two months. He came back a failure in love, in missionary service, and in his own search for a truly inward relation to God.

Turning Up the Heat

The year 1738 was a very important one for John Wesley, as it was for his brother Charles. The debate about what happened in that year remains intense, but the central development is secure. Wesley found an initial assurance of the love of God for himself. It took him years to reach a settled account of his spiritual experiences, but there can be no doubt that he caught fire within in his love for God. The human agent who more than anybody acted as a catalyst in this was Peter Böhler. He and Wesley started a religious society together in London called the Fetter Lane Society, so they had ample time to talk. Böhler introduced Wesley to a vision of the Christian life that put enormous emphasis on personal, inward certainty about forgiveness and victory over sin here and now. Böhler argued that it was possible to experience the love and power of God as something tangible, that one could enter into this experience instantaneously, and that it was imperative to do so. Wesley was reluctant to buy this spiritual package, but he checked it against Scripture, mulled it over, listened to pertinent witnesses, stuck to his spiritual routines as a good Anglican, and wandered off on occasion to find spiritual resources in other pastures.

In the midst of the challenge presented by Böhler, the penny finally dropped, and Wesley found himself catapulted into a new world of faith. His brother Charles had been converted three days earlier. On Sunday, May 24, after the regular morning service in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London,

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. 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 sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.²

Wesley had met God for himself. Yet we must be careful how we understand this experience. This encounter with God did not take place in a vacuum. It was integrally related to his coming to a much clearer account of the Reformation doctrine of justification by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Rather than do all he could to be worthy of God’s mercy, he discovered that true faith must be directed outward to the work God had done in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. Here Wesley moved from a notional to a real assent to theological proposals that were already incorporated into his intellectual hard drive. Wesley went back immediately and resurrected theological material on justification that was available in his own Anglican tradition in a set of normative sermons called the Homilies. The Aldersgate encounter with God was more than some sugary, pious experience; it was a profound spiritual and intellectual reorientation. At one and the same time, Wesley found assurance in his relationship to God, saw acquittal in the courts of God as the critical door to true holiness, and was flooded with zeal to share what he had discovered with others.

Since his days at Oxford in the 1730s, he had been experimenting with new ways of helping people find faith for themselves. His collaboration with Böhler led him to take a study tour of the Moravians in Germany. They refused to give him Communion, not really accepting him as a true believer. Even as he wobbled his way into his new spiritual world, he had a keen eye for effective innovation that would bring spiritual renewal within the boundaries of his Anglican heritage. At the same time, Wesley was fascinated by the reports coming from New England about the religious awakening in and around the ministry of Jonathan Edwards, a tough-minded intellectual who was taken aback by the work of the Holy Spirit operating through his tight, carefully constructed sermons. Thus, just as Wesley was sorting through his new encounter with God, he was also wrestling with how best to hold together the need for effective forms of new ministry with the mysterious presence of God