I was once struck by a book by Harald Lindstrom called Wesley and Sanctification because of the way he shows that there are historical layers to Wesley's thinking. I believe Bud Bence's unpublished dissertation also explored this dynamic (trying to get him to self-publish it). Below let me share some of my sense of a historical "archaeology" of Wesley's thought.
1. Wesley the Anglo-Catholic
It is well known that, at university, Wesley was part of what they called the "Holy Club" at Oxford. Although it was a nickname given them by others, holiness was also their true aspiration. They read Anglican works like William Law's A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life and Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying.
From the standpoint of a Lutheran at the time, these books would likely seem to focus too much on "works." They no doubt would have seemed like a lot of "striving" to live a holy life. In short, they no doubt would have felt a little "Catholic" to a high Protestant. Too much "works righteousness," Luther might have said. Thomas a Kempis' The Imitation of Christ was actually written while everyone was still Catholic.
These books also befit Wesley's perfectionist personality. God would use Wesley's perfectionism mightily to bring his organization skills to bear on the Methodist movement. But perfectionism was also a curse to Wesley at times. Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection has struggled at times under that word, perfection. In his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Wesley would work hard to distinguish this doctrine from Adamic perfection and sinless perfection.
When you have to explain and re-explain a concept, it's possible that you need to take it back to the shop and give it a little more work. Some of the NT passages with the word perfection in them should probably be translated with the word maturity rather than "perfection." Completely different feel. "Go on into maturity," Hebrews 6:1 is better rendered. I might paraphrase Matthew 5:48 to say something like, "Be complete and love everyone just like your heavenly Father loves everyone."
Personally, Wesley's perfectionist tendencies could lead him to write to his brother at one point in 1766, "I do not love God... I've never believed... I am only an honest heathen." Pish posh. I know that devil of perfectionism, the faith of a servant of God but not a son. Snap out of it Wesley.
Similarly, Chris Bounds has called Wesley's view of sanctification as sometimes being "a longer way." There are places where Wesley said it could happen earlier in life. But he also had his pessimistic moments when he thought it might only be a few people and even then late in life or near death. I wonder if this dynamic reflects the fact that Wesley was never able to completely shake the perfectionism of his personality and early days at Oxford.
A final note on infant baptism. As a good Anglican, Wesley practiced infant baptism. It is hard for a lot of Wesleyans today to understand this practice, but this is largely because of our inability to see the hyper-individualist nature of American culture. Luther and Calvin both practiced infant baptism and saw no conflict between it and the doctrine of justification by faith.
The Wesleyan Methodists practiced infant baptism as well, and it remains a little-known option in the Wesleyan Discipline today. It is no surprise, however, that as Western culture became more and more individualist, it would become difficult for people to see how a corporate body could exercise faith for a child until that child is old enough to exercise faith for him or herself.
In the earliest days of Protestantism, the Anabaptists ("re-baptizers") of Switzerland saw how justification by faith might be correlated with baptism, seeing such a direct connection in the book of Acts. Their new interpretation based in their sense of "Scripture only" would earn them persecution (and sometimes death) by Zwingli.
In America, believer's baptism made perfect sense and would become a hallmark of the American Baptist tradition. It is one of the winds that has blown strongly on the Wesleyan Church. The Reformed Baptist Church of Canada received an assurance that they would not have to baptize infants as part of their agreement to merge with the Wesleyan Methodists in the late 1960s.
2. Wesley and the Moravians
It is hard for us to get our heads around the fact that a good deal of insecurity could attend a Protestant in the 1700s about their eternal destiny. The Roman Church with its sacraments provided somewhat of a guarantee and there was purgatory to get you the whole way if needed. Luther's "justification by faith" made the question of salvation individual. Have you exercised personal faith?
Calvinism taught that salvation was purely a matter of God's choosing. There was nothing you could do to get it. Either you were chosen or you weren't. In Pilgrim's Progress, Christian doesn't know if he's going to make it to heaven until he makes it to heaven. The Puritans lived strict lives in hopes that it meant they were one of the chosen. Someone who lived an ungodly life obviously wasn't chosen.
One of the key features of Wesley, perhaps in fact his greatest contribution, was the notion that you could know that you were saved. Wesley taught an "assurance of salvation." This has become a core feature of American Christianity. You can know you are saved.
Wesley took this concept from the German Pietists. After Oxford, he went to Georgia to be a missionary. But the whole experience caused him to doubt whether he himself was saved. On the way there, some Moravians (German pietists) had a peace in the midst of a storm. Wesley couldn't believe it. How are they so calm? He himself was beset by fear.
It was finally on May 24, 1738 that he had his heart-warming experience on Aldersgate Street. "I felt my heart strangely warmed." It was a moment of assurance. Would Wesley have gone to heaven if he had died before then? I truly believe so. Attempts to align this experience with salvation or sanctification are attempts to make his experience fit our systems. Wesley was filled with the Spirit and given an assurance of his justification. It can happen more than once, but this moment was significant because it was really Wesley's first time. On the other hand, he never mentions the experience again.
This was a key moment in the story of evangelicalism. Assurance of salvation at the moment one is justified by faith is a key hallmark of evangelicalism, and it arguably started here. More below.
I might note that the American Baptist mutation known as eternal security begins here too. The Puritans believed that you would make it to the end if you were one of the elect ("the perseverance of the saints") but they didn't believe you could know if you were one of the elect. The Baptist tradition combined 1) the fact that you could know you were saved with 2) the fact that the elect would persevere.
Voila! Eternal security. If you are assured of your salvation now, you are elect. And if you are elect, you're going to make it to the end. This is not a biblical concoction but a doctrine shaped in the historical currents of the 1700s.
3. Wesley and Luther
Wesley had his heart-warming experience after attending a Bible study where they had read Luther's Preface to Romans. He probably interpreted this moment as him being justified by faith. Justification has to do with having a right standing before God. It is generally seen at its root as a legal term. It is about being found "not guilty" in the divine court.
Luther himself struggled in the early 1500s with a sense of acceptance before God. He didn't feel like his "works" were good enough. He had a pervasive sense of moral failure before God. God freed him from this bondage by helping him see that Paul taught justification by faith and not by works. God gives us a right standing before him on the basis of Christ's righteousness rather than our own.
Here is the Lutheran layer of Wesley's theology. On the few occasions when Wesley uses the word evangelical, he seems to mean those Protestants who believe in justification by faith.
This, by the way, is a beef I have with David Bebbington's identification of an evangelical as someone who believes in 1) Bible-focus, 2) cross-focus, 3) born-again focus and 4) activism. To beat the dead horse again, what a word means depends on how it is used. Bebbington runs rough shod over five hundred years looking for some universal definition of an evangelical when, in truth, the meaning and emphasis of the term will change over time depending on the context. Evangelical at the moment has a major political component, for example.
Wesley the evangelical focused on getting people to be justified by faith in an experience. The other elements may be true of him too, but they're not what made him an evangelical in the 1700s.
Wesley took the concept of "imputed righteousness" from Luther. When we are justified, we have no righteousness of our own. It is "imputed" to us. However, Wesley would go on to teach that God thereafter imparted true righteousness to us as well. We actually become righteous.
For Luther, the whole of our Christian life was God looking at Jesus rather than our continuing sin. As Luther put it, we are "both righteous and sinner as long as we are always repenting." Wesley believed that God wanted to do more than this in our lives (and so did Paul).
4. Wesley, Augustine, and Calvin
As a New Testament scholar, I believe that Wesley anticipated some of the insights that came in the late 1900s under what was called "a new perspective on Paul." However, Wesley remained a child of his time. He made modifications to the path of Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Arminius, but I can't help but feel that he was not able to get out from under them. He would say at one point that he was a "hair's breadth from Calvinism," for example.
This is some of the perceived tension, I suspect, between Ken Collins at Asbury Seminary and Randy Maddox at Duke. Collins largely takes Wesley as he is. Maddox seems to want to construct a Wesleyan theology that is not as bound by Wesley's own categories. I welcome redirection there.
Here are some ways in which I believe it is possible to construct a Wesleyan theology that is truer to Paul and that reformulates some of the "baggage" Wesley retained from this Augustinian heritage:
a. thorough vs. absolute depravity
Roger Olson has gone to great lengths to show that Arminius (and Wesley) were not Pelagians or semi-Pelagians. They did not believe that a person could come to God in his or her own power. It required God's grace, God's prevenient grace that goes before and empowers us to make choices.
That theology makes sense to me. However, it is a connecting of the dots outside of Scripture. Paul does not articulate a full-blown theology on the subject of election and free will. Calvin connected the dots (outside of Scripture) one way, Arminius connected them (outside of Scripture) another way. So we thank you, Olson, even if I'm not too bothered by those who might accuse a Wesleyan of Pelagianism.
You may regularly see in these pages the remnants of my Pilgrim Holiness sentimentalities. I am not bothered too much by the old controversies of church history. I am open to the Spirit bringing new and fresh insights. As I recall, we didn't even emphasize the Trinity very much growing up. We prayed "in Jesus' name." To this day, it feels a little Catholic for me to say, "in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."
It seems to me that Paul expresses a thorough depravity in Romans 3 rather than an absolute depravity. We are morally flawed. You might even say every aspect of who we are is affected. But Paul never says that every bit of us is depraved. Indeed, our Augustinian heritage makes more of Adam than Paul himself does on balance. I am told that the expression "total depravity" can be interpreted in this thoroughgoing way as opposed to an absolute way.
Wesley's sense of the image of God as the 1) natural, 2) moral, and 3) political also goes well beyond anything the biblical text says. In Genesis 1 the image of God is largely political -- it refers to humanity's rule over the creation as God rules over all. In other places, it simply is used to suggest that we should treat other humans with respect because they are a reflection of God.
So while Wesley's thoughts on the image of God can bring insights into our human condition, they are extensively extra-biblical, going way beyond anything the biblical texts actually say.
b. sin "like" Adam rather than "in" Adam
Augustine's misinterpretation of Romans 5:12 is notorious. (He couldn't read Greek, after all.) He took it to mean that we all sinned in Adam. Thus we have the guilt of original sin before we ever commit an act of sin in this life.
This is not what Paul teaches. Paul does not teach that we have guilt from Adam's sin. Rather, we have guilt because we sin like Adam. One of Wesley's justifications for infant baptism was to be cleansed of original sin. Completely extra-biblical.
The original sin was the sin of Adam and Eve, but Paul never taught that we have original sin.
c. Sin power vs. sin nature
Wesley inherited Augustine's sense that we have a sin nature. Our human nature is corrupted and our desires are malformed. But this is not what Paul actually teaches. In fact, in Romans 7, the "I" wants to do the good. It is not malformed into desiring the bad (see Krister Stendahl).
Paul expresses the sinful human condition in terms of a conflict between our spirits (where our "I" resides) and our "flesh," our bodies under the power of Sin. In Romans 7, the person Paul is dramatizing wants to do the good in their spirit, but they are foiled by the power of Sin over their flesh. Receiving the Holy Spirit is the antidote. Now a person's spirit has the power to do the good they want to do.
You'll note that the NIV2011 withdrew its previous language of "sinful nature" for the more accurate term "flesh." My flesh is my "skin under the power of Sin." For Paul, Sin is a power over me. It is not a feature of a corrupted nature inside of me. It is an "accidental" property of my default humanity rather than an "essential" one that is fundamental to our nature.
This distinction solves a lot of rabbit trails in Wesleyan debates over sanctification over the years. Is our sinful nature suppressed (Keswick) or eradicated (holiness)? Wrong question because it is based on an Augustinian sense of human nature. We are set free from the power of Sin by the Spirit. Yet if we do not continually walk in fellowship with the Spirit, "sin lieth at the door" to come back over our skin.
d. general satisfaction vs. penal substitution
Wesley inherited from medieval Catholicism the doctrine of penal substitution. Paul taught that Jesus was an atonement for our sins. That is, he satisfied the need for justice. Less developed in Paul is the idea that Jesus took our place. Rather, we get "in" Christ when we receive the Spirit. We participate in his death and resurrection. This is different from a straightforward substitution. Verses like 2 Corinthians 5:21 and Galatians 3:13 seem a little more profound than a simple substitution.
The doctrine of penal substitution in its current form especially goes back to Anselm in the 1000s. He makes it a virtually mathematical equation. You 1) take the total amount of "sin units" that humanity has and will commit that need forgiven and 2) you shoot Jesus with exactly that much punishment on the cross (or when he dips his toes in hell) and, voila, Jesus has substituted for our precise punishment (penal).
Funny how none of this is in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Apparently, the Father has the authority to simply forgive on the spot! So while the satisfaction of justice is in Paul and our participation in his sacrifice is there too, the more precise version of penal substitution that Wesley inherited is not really expressed in the New Testament and probably has more to do with Anselm.
5. Wesley and the Enlightenment
One of the biggest currents in Wesley's day was the Enlightenment, an emphasis on human reason and objectivity. As needed as it was, the Protestant Reformation had destabilized a sense of security about what was true. This led thinkers like Descartes to ask the question of how we could know what was certain. His famous answer was, "I think; therefore, I am."
A quest for objectivity ensued in European culture. Reason and experience were the two competing paths to truth. A group known as "rationalists' emphasized reason as the path to truth. Another group known as the "empiricists" emphasized gathering evidence (e.g., the scientific method).
The so-called Wesleyan Quadrilateral has reason and experience as part of the equation, although situating them under Scripture and including tradition. Notice how the quadrilateral balances all the historical forces of Wesley's day. It grounds knowledge on Scripture in keeping with the Reformation. It does not reject tradition, revealing Wesley's Anglican roots. And it incorporates the two new emphases of "modernism": reason and experience.
There have been recent voices in Methodism (like Billy Abraham) who have tried to purge Methodism of the quadrilateral. They see the elevation of reason and experience at the root of the liberalism of the Methodist Church. Many of them are what I might call "post-liberals." These are postmodern forces within Methodism that want to reclaim faith by doing an end-run around reason, returning to some sort of pre-modern Shangrila. (Alistair MacIntyre's After Virtue and Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self are also important works in this discussion.)
Wesley lived on the cusp of the pre-modern/modern transition. We therefore have to be careful when we quote him in favor of one or the other. He was both. Billy Abraham and others are right to point out that the quadrilateral was a term coined by Albert Outler in the twentieth century, not a term that goes back to Wesley.
However, it is my conviction that modernism needs to be chastened and reformed, not abandoned. The American Constitution is an artifact of the Enlightenment, and it's pretty good if you ask me. Wesleyan-Arminianism has a good deal of Enlightenment in it as well. The concept of individual freedom over determinism would be a case in point. In my opinion, critical realism is a great approach to knowledge and reality -- but it is in the end a chastened modernist approach.
Wesley's activism fits well within the Enlightenment focus on individual rights as well. The child in the coal mine matters. The slave matters. The same forces that would lead Jeremy Bentham to formulate utilitarianism and Adam Smith to formulate capitalism were driving Wesley to jump on board with social reform in England.
Wesley's relationship with women was somewhat uneven. One of the commitments of the Holy Club was for the men to remain unmarried in keeping with 1 Corinthians 7. They all abandoned this commitment but Wesley's brother Charles unfairly wanted him to keep it. Wesley got driven out of Georgia over a woman. He missed out on love a second time because of his brother. Then he secretly mismarried without telling his brother. That marriage was not a success story.
Nevertheless, in his later years Wesley recognized the giftings of some women in his groups and he gave them the authority to preach and disciple others. This was a major move forward. Wesley often did things that went against his early intuitions. Preaching outside of a church, for example, did not come naturally to this formerly Anglo-Catholic. Empowering women to minister was probably another example of his yielding to the Spirit rather than the biases with which he grew up.
6. Wesley the Organizer
Although it had less to do with ideology, we should mention that Wesley was organized. George Whitefield, the famous evangelist, once noted that his own followers were a "rope of sand" because he did not set up any organization. By contrast, the organized Wesley set up his followers in societies, classes, and bands. He made accountability a key feature.
The result is that Methodism continued long after his death. For more on leadership lessons we can learn from Wesley, see Mark Gorveatte's Lead Like Wesley. And if you want a more playful overview of Wesley's life and ministry, you can see my biography of Wesley through the voice of his horses: A Horse Strangely Warmed: The Life of John Wesley as Told by His Horses.
1 comment:
Thanks. I will review the quadrilateral.
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