Real Denomination 4: Wesley-an

In the first post, I argued that the most basic flavor of our denomination is "revivalist" or might we say, "a pietist mutation"? The Wesleyan Church is a church oriented around the Spirit, with much in common with Pentecostals in terms of how we look and operate. Our most formative decades emphasized personal holiness and a "second blessing" experience of the Holy Spirit.

The language of our "spiritual" identity was the Scriptures. While our fathers and mothers often did not read the Bible in context, they breathed the Scriptures as they preached and presented what they believed the Holy Spirit had to say. The last thirty years have seen some correctives to some excesses. In particular, we (over?) corrected the legalism into which a belief in "Christian perfection" can so easily slip. In some quarters, we replaced a "inward looking" orientation with an emphasis on evangelism, discipleship, church planting, and growing the church. To be fair, we had always had a huge emphasis on "classical" missions, even going so far as getting our children to commit 52 cents a year to missions.

We probably threw out some good with the excesses. We have used Scripture less, and we have lost our sense of personal holiness to some extent. Many Wesleyans today find themselves somewhat adrift with little sense of why we're even here.

In all these comments, the question arises--if we are so much a denomination of heart and experience, do we also have a head? Is there a place in our church for the person God has gifted intellectually as well? Given our past, must we be anti-education? Many in our "neck of the woods" are. Some in our pulpits have not always been great friends of further education. Do we deemphasize cognition as much as, say, the Anabaptist tradition seems to?

Surely we can't because of our very name--Wesley-an! I have a certain delight that Wesley was not the founder of our specific church, for then we can't get bogged down in hero worship. Wesley provides the background, not the foreground, for our identity. This is a point many a Wesleyan seminarian should remember. In a sense we cannot "get back" to Wesley, for he predates our origins. He is prolegomena. We have inherited his DNA, but we have a mother too with her own genes.

But what important DNA! My intent is to set out some of the elements of our identity that show Wesley's DNA in our genes. Wesley is the best place to start to discuss the "head" that's guided by our heart. And I would argue Wesley is also the best place to start discussing the "feet" I hear young Wesleyans trying to get moving. And indeed, Wesley would have been a great one for the leaders of our "church growth phase" to reference as well. As it was, we more seemed to follow the lead of others in the contemporary American scene. It's not too late to give some grounding to those correct impulses retroactively from our own tradition!

Wesley: Assurance of Salvation
These days everybody believes that you can know you are bound for heaven--even Baptists. But in Wesley's day, this was a more unusual thing to believe. The Calvinists of Puritan New England, even John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress--these did not believe you could know you were predestined until you got there. By the way, Wesley can apparently thus claim some role in the current Baptist belief of eternal security. Perseverence of the saints only becomes apparent after you have persevered. The current Calvinist sense that you can know now and thus will make it thereafter, is a hybrid of classic Calvinism with Wesley's belief in assurance in this life.

P.S. Wesleyans still believe you can know if you are on the way to heaven. And time forbids that I go on to speak of how profoundly the Arminian tradition can contributie to theology in the postmodern age. Calvinism will struggle in this age. Its arrogant claims to having God figured out turn out to be confessions of ignorance about a God whose ways are past finding out. What a shame Wheaton--founded originally as a Wesleyan school--chose to leave us and take the path of modernist Calvinism!

Wesley: Full Salvation
When we think of Wesley today, we probably think more about his contribution of entire sanctification to theology than the idea of the assurance of salvation, since the latter is now widely held. Wesley taught that a person should be victorious over willful sin from the moment they become a Christian. But a few, he believed, would find themselves set free in this life from the "bent to sinning" as well--the tendency to sin, the sinful nature. He called this "Christian perfection."

The belief in victory over sin in this world is not a very common belief in the church today. Yet it is the clear teaching of the entire Bible. I cannot think of a single verse in the entirety of the Bible that in any way advocates intentional sin as a normal or expected part of a Christian's life. This remains one of the greatest strengths of our tradition and one in which almost all other Christian traditions remain in the dark.

Of course our version of entire sanctification came more directly through Phoebe Palmer and the holiness movement of the 1800's. While Wesley saw few experiencing Christian perfection and probably late in life, Palmer taught "the shorter way" and made it the expectation of all Christians to experience it. Further, from John Fletcher on, American Methodists increasingly identified the Spirit-fillings of Acts as experiences of entire sanctification.

I personally would say that the "death" of the holiness movement pronounced by Drury ten years ago was more a death of Palmer type holiness than the Wesley type. A conference last year on salvation at Wesleyan Church HQ found strong support by Wesleyan educators of a more John Wesley version of the doctrine. While it is arguably less Wesleyan in terms of our own history, it looks like this form of the doctrine actually has actually survived. It was in the heart of the tree that looked so dead, a life hidden inside to view but now sprouting and about to bloom on the tree again.

Wesleyans thus continue to believe in the necessity of victory over sin and the power of God to free all Christians from the power of sin.

Wesley: "No Holiness but Social Holiness"
In the early twentieth century, some conservatives became averse to phrases like "social holiness." It sounds too much like "social gospel," a theme propagated in the early twentieth century by Christians who had ceased to believe in the divinity of Christ but liked the helping the poor part of the gospel.

But those in our tradition who might have thrown out the social implications of the gospel threw the baby out with the bath water. This is an essential part of our DNA. Wesley is known for the saying, "There is no holiness but social holiness." By it he implied that any sense of Christian holiness that does not lead to positive social action is no real holiness. It was this impulse that lead Wesley to preach to coal miners in the north of England and the reason why even today English Methodism is heavily composed of the everyday working class of England. Some think England was spared the bloody revolution of France in part for the actions of people like Wesley who gave hope to the disempowered.

So it was when Methodism entered America. The Midwest is a powerhouse in Methodism because this was the frontier when the gospel entered America. And while their children are now upper middle class, they were originally the salt of American earth.

Our more specific roots were founded in the abolitionist movement, as the Wesleyan Methodist Connection withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church for its refusal to take a stand against slavery. The women's rights movement--something some modern Wesleyans are embarrassed about--is usually dated from a meeting in a Wesleyan Church in the late 1800's in Seneca Falls, New York. I proudly celebrate that our fathers and mothers were fighting for women to be able to vote when other Christians were emphasizing that women should stay in their "place."

I disdain any Wesleyan who has questions about women in ministry or Pharisaic restrictions on what a woman can do in the home. You don't deserve such a rich tradition--you're the type that would have opposed women voting back when we were leading the way of the Spirit in the cause of "full salvation" for women as well as men. You were the Methodists whose Judaizing tendencies led you to keep quiet in the days of slavery or even oppose their emancipation. Find your way to some other more impoverished tradition.

In the early 1900's there was no stigma to a woman minister in our churches. It was only after WW2, when men came home from the war to find women empowered in the workplace and increasingly in society, that the numbers of women in ministry began to decline in our churches. They had lots of children in the baby boom, no doubt diverting many from ministry. Meanwhile, some men felt intimidated by the increasing power of women in society, and the result was a backlash among bigots and the insecure who hid behind the mask of the Bible. But now the disease has infected even the well-intentioned, people like Dobson who--with Nazarene roots--should know better.

This social dimension passed on into many of the Methodist offshoots of the late 1800's. The Salvation Army is a perfect example of the spirit that was also a part of our forebears. It has survived at the grass roots level of the Wesleyan Church--what Wesleyan Church has not kept a food pantry for the homeless or needy who might come to the parsonage door? While many other conservatives oppose helping the needy as if it were actually unchristian in some way, many of our most conservative holiness churches--the ones we have sometimes disdained as legalistic--have continued to reach out to the poor and needy. The father of the president-elect of IWU spent his entire life humbly and without acclaim--practically unnoticed--faithfully ministering to the down and out of Frankfort, Indiana. That's the stuff of our genes!

Wesley: Missional
Wesley saw one of his tasks as "the spreading of Scriptural holiness throughout the land." This man was not perfect. Indeed, one of his "sins" was that he did so much mission that he did not give appropriate attention to his marriage. This man circled England again and again and again preaching the good news to anyone who would hear. He was a church planter, an evangelist, a discipler whose class meetings set up incredible accountability for individual Christians. His writings are a treasure trove of resources for the next generation of Wesleyans to plunder.


What do I take from all this?
1. Wesleyans believe in victory over sin and the fullness of the Spirit.
This is the greatest current contribution our tradition can perhaps make to theology. We believe that every person by God's power can consistently defeat sin. And while the phrase "the fullness of the Spirit" is not strictly a biblical phrase, we can legitimately use it to push for a moment (a moment that must be repeatedly affirmed) in which we surrender everything we know about in our lives at that moment to God and are thus able to be fully under the control of the Holy Spirit.

2. Wesleyans take the Great Commission seriously.
Go into all the world and make disciples. We've never stopped believing in our mission to the whole world. And the last thirty years have emphasized that we should never just settle for the status quo of our church, but be ever pushing to bring more in.

3. That commission involves a mission to the whole person.
We stand squarely behind the full personhood and spirituality of women without pigeonholing them into some rigid, legalistic preconception of what God can and cannot do through them. We continue to stand for the oppressed and disempowered both at home and abroad. I have a feeling that the emerging generation will play out this part of our heritage with a vengeance.

4. Open season on the theological and practical seeds of our tradition that the Spirit is just waiting to quicken to the next generation!