might be some of the "troubles that sometimes and rewrite them in your own works. Add one or

might be some of the "troubles that sometimes and rewrite them in your own works. Add one or

What "aha" moments have her comments elicited 3. "There is no love of God without patience, and no patience without humility and sweetness of spirit." Is this true? Is this true for you? Do you have the patience for true humility and the sweetness of spirit for true patience?

(and if not "aha," then perhaps "uh oh")?

What practical implications do these reflections offer in your own spiritual life and behavior?

Use the index in The United Methodist Hymnal to identify the hymns of Charles and John Wesley.

Review the hymns to see how these comments are reflected in the Wesleys' hymnody. Sing or say together one or more of the hymns.

4. "Tolerating others and suffering evils in meekness and silence is the sum of a Christian life." Is this so? Is this something you can do and are willing to do? Why or why not?

5. Prayer, and the life of constant prayer, are defined in several ways. Have you recognized prayer in these ways? Is your prayer life more expansive than you thought? If your prayer life is modest, in what ways do you invite God to act in your life and then see that happening?

MM. Review Christian Perfection. Read Paragraph 26 on pages 86-87. Spend a few minutes reviewing and clarifying Wesley's thoughts on Christian perfection. Recall the important insight gained from the previous sections and list some of them.

Read the four Scriptures underlined in question 26 and rewrite them in your own works. Add one or two promises of your own for how to behave your way into that way of being. Keep those promises where you will see and think about them.

6. God cares about the smallest of things. What might be some of the "troubles that sometimes flow from those faults that appear to be minor failings" ? How might excesses of body contribute to the insensitivity of your soul?

7. "The devil never enters more dangerously than by small, unnoticed events that seem to be insignificant. Yet they gradually open the heart to great temptations." (I guess the devil is in the details!)

Do you think this is true? What "insignificant" port of entry is wide open for sin in your life?

These final activities can be included as options for Section VIII, though you are encouraged to plan for an extra session for these closing activities. The Covenant Renewal Service will take about thirty minutes and should be preceded by some time of centering and reflection.

8. "One of the cardinal rules of religion is to lose no opportunity to serve God... in our neighbor."

What opportunities have you left unimproved?

What opportunities do you seize?

NN. Tell Your Own Stories. Spend most (but not all) of your time together telling your own stories.

Who have you known who has most embodied the character of a perfected Christian? Which insight and Scriptures have been the most powerful, even transforming, for you? What, if anything, has encouraged you to a greater dedication to living a LL. Let the "Sparks" Fly. "Sparks From the Fire,"

Chapter 4 of Suchocki's theological reflection, deals with the eight reflections from activity "KK" in a different way. Read the introduction to this chapter together (page 135), then consider the "sparks," either together or by dividing them among small groups. life centered in Jesus Christ? In what new ways do you hear God calling to you (individually or as a church) to be in devoted service?

OO. Develop Action Plans. After you have talked about your stories and sense of call, take time to develop some action plans, both personal and corporate. What specific, attainable, and measurable goals can you set that will move you and your church toward greater godliness in service and worship? e Prayer as participation in God's creative power

(pages 135-138) ¢ Bearing the faults of others and our own faults (pages 138-139) ¢ Praying without ceasing (pages 139-141)

Corporate prayer connecting the body of Christ PP. Have a Covenant Renewal. Close by committing yourself to these goals using the Covenant Renewal

Service (The United Methodist Book of Worship, 288). Include in the service "Jesus, United by Thy

Grace" (The United Methodist Hymnal, 561). Continue in your covenant by forming Covenant

Discipleship Groups (see "N," on page 95).

(pages 141-142) ¢ Offering our good works as prayer (pages 142-144) Read each segment of the chapter and the related text from Wesley's A Plain Account. Examine the theological commentary for each spark and use these questions as discussion/reflection starters: e¢ What is Dr. Suchocki saying?

¢ Do you agree or disagree with her? Why?

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I was not always a United Methodist. In fact, my ecclesial journey took me through many denominations over the years. My family was not a Theological Seminary in Washington, DC, who asked me to be their academic dean. Prayer and deliberation led me to accept the offer.

"church-going" family, so I was sent rather than brought to Sunday school. In my little New England town, that Sunday school was Congregational. My best friend in high school was a Nazarene girl, so I went with her on Sunday evenings to her holiness church—with no idea at all that her denomination traced its heritage back to this little book that I later came to regard as the most astonishing theological book I had ever read. When I decided to go to college

But then I was faced with the conundrum that led me to become a United Methodist. In 1983, there had never been a woman dean of a United Methodist seminary. Neither had Wesley seminary ever had a layperson as dean, or, for that matter, someone who was not United Methodist. Meanwhile, I had observed some of the miscommunications that occurred when the dean of a school did not share the denomination of the school—and after all, I had moved around a bit. So I decided that the first two of these three "it's never been done that way before" were non-negotiable—I am a laywoman. But if they would have me, I certainly could be a United

Methodist. After all, why not? I'd already been connected with all those other denominations; I was a walking ecumenist! To my surprise, I found that the president of the school was absolutely delighted with the idea of my becoming United Methodist, even for these quite pragmatic reasons. And so in January of at age 20, it was to a Wesleyan Methodist college in upstate New York. Once again I was immersed in a culture deeply affected by Wesley's little book.

I married, and that began years of frequent moves. With every move, our little family simply looked for the closest church that felt like "home," and joined it. Consequently, I was for six months a Nazarene, for two years an old-style Presbyterian

(long since merged into its successor denominations), for one year a Baptist, and then for ten years a member of a nondenominational community church.

Another move brought me into the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, and by then I had started graduate

1984, being newly arrived in Washington, DC, I joined Metropolitan Memorial United Methodist

Church. At last, I was a Methodist! studies. My studies clashed with a church where I heard, from a respected college dean, that if I didn't believe that God created the world in six days then I did not believe in Jesus Christ. And so with the next move, I became a member of the American Lutheran

Church. The following move found me living across the street from an Episcopalian church where, wonder of wonders, one of the ministers was a woman!

And so I promptly became an Episcopalian.

As a United Methodist dean, I discovered a wonderful custom called pastors' school. Bishops, taking their teaching authority seriously, called all the pastors from a conference together for the specific purpose of theological or biblical or historical study. Splendid, I thought. And then in the spring of 1984, the call came to me from the West Virginia Annual Conference:

"Please come teach a pastors' school for us." "Of course," answered I. "We'd like you to teach John

Wesley's little book, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection." Why not? thought I, even though I had never read John Wesley, much less this little book. But it was

By that time, I was teaching theology in a Presbyterian school and also directing a Doctor of Ministry program. This latter work brought me to the attention of the administration of Wesley a little book; surely I could do it. I agreed.

And that is when my heart was, as they say, strangely warmed. As I read the book, I was clearly astonished. Could he actually be saying that? Did he mean it? He did! John Wesley actually thought that God created us to be in God's image, and this image involved using all our powers to God's glory, which filling the heart and life. But despite his laborious explanations, what the word actually communicated to its hearers was a sort of "holier than thou" stance indicating that one never made any mistakes at all. I fervently wished Wesley had stuck with the word love instead of perfection, since that's what he meant. But, of course, Wesley thought that love was perfect, so perfection was a perfectly adequate word.

Finally, it is quite probable that my long background is sheer love. This in itself may not seem so astonishing, but what Wesley did next is what stunned me.

He taught that since that is what God wants, that is what God makes possible for us in Jesus Christ.

That is, the purpose of salvation is to get on with the adventure of fulfilling God's purposes; and by God, there is grace enough to accomplish it. We can in reading and teaching theology made a difference to my reading the text. Without such a background, it might be hard to see the underlying structure of the text and to pick out the central points.

In 2003 the first of these problems was addressed. Steven W. Manskar led the United

Methodist General Board of Discipleship in developing a contemporary version of Wesley's A Plain

Account of Christian Perfection. This modernlanguage version clarifies outdated words, supplies the context that explains Wesley's references, and suggests how different statements might relate to Wesley's larger theological vision. In short, A Plain

Account of Christian Perfection now exists in a far more readable edition in this book called A Perfect

Love: Understanding John Wesley's "A Plain Account of Christian Perfection." live fully, to the glory of God, in this life, not just the next. Clearly, Wesley was not a "pie in the sky by and by" man. Why, thought I, this is the merriest theologian I have ever read, and | became a "heart"

Methodist on the spot. And I say with confidence that while it may have taken a circuitous route to get me here, I will never be anything other than

United Methodist, by God's grace.

Since that time nearly twenty years ago I have read much in Wesley's writings; and in fact, I taught

Methodist Doctrine at Claremont School of Theology following the retirement of my colleague,

Professor Jack Verheyden. Methodist Doctrine was my favorite course. But no matter how much I read of Wesley, I never found him to depart from the wonder of his teaching in that one small book, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. Christian perfection seemed to me to be the heart of his teaching and, consequently, absolutely central to what it means to be a United Methodist.

And so with great and merry daring, I am writing a theological companion to the book. My hope is that people within the Wesleyan tradition—and certainly United Methodists—will pick up this book and join me and the General Board of Discipleship in celebrating the theological heart of our tradition.

But, of course, celebrating this heart of our tradition When I attended my first ordination service at is not simply a head trip. It is answering, as do those ordinands, "Yes, I am, by God's grace, pressing on an annual conference, I listened joyously to the question asked of each ordinand, "Do you intend to press on to perfection in this life?" But an oddity occurred. I discovered through the years that few

United Methodists had actually read this astonishing to Christian perfection!" little book. "How can this be?" queried I. The answers are various, but I think they come down to these things. First of all, this eighteenth-century book is not written in ways that are comfortable to twenty-first-century Christians. There are words in the text that no longer mean what they did in Wesley's time, which can make the text hard to understand. Second, the very word perfection is still a stumbling block, as it was in Wesley's day. Again and again and again he explains that what he means by perfection is simply the love of God and neighbor

1N\A

Begin with Section VI. "Why not begin at the beginning?" you might very reasonably ask. To which I answer, "We are!" It is just that the nub of Wesley's understanding of Christian perfection, from which all else follows, is right here almost at the center of the book. And so my structure for this theological companion to A Plain Account of Christian Perfection begins with Wesley's reasons outlining why he advocates Christian perfection. There is an amazing theology contained in these few pages.

Following this, in Chapter Two, we will go back and look at Wesley's descriptions, explanations, exasperations, and clarifications that are contained primarily in the first half of the book, culminating in his extensive example of Jane Cooper, a woman whom he believed manifested Christian perfection in her life (Sections I-V).

In Chapter Three we will move on to Wesley's seven "advices" to those who would seek Christian perfection (pages 73-80).

Finally, in Chapter Four, we will conclude, as did Wesley, with the implications of Christian perfection for the life of prayer. It is not that Wesley suddenly switched gears and began a sustained theological treatise on a theology of prayer.

Rather, it is more as if his sustained thinking on Christian perfection led him naturally to make a number of rather astonishing references to prayer as he concluded the book—almost like his own "amen" to the prayer that all who are called Methodists shall be open to the gift of God's love. In this final chapter we will gather up his nuggets on prayer, weaving them into both a conclusion and a beginning—a conclusion to this particular book, but an everlasting beginning to probing the possibilities of prayer and perfection.

Created for the Glory of God So, then, turn to page 61, paragraph number 25, which begins a series of questions numbered 1 through 38 (pages 61-80). Our attention focuses here on questions

1 through 6, but the critical paragraph is the answer to question 1, as follows:

In order to understand this [how Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believes], you must understand what law is spoken of here. This I understand is (1) the Mosaic law, the whole

Mosaic system, which Saint Paul repeatedly speaks of as one, though containing three parts: the political, moral, and ceremonial. (2) The Adamic law was given to Adam in innocence and is properly called "the law of works." This is in substance the same as the angelic law, being common to angels and humans. It required that humans should use, to the glory of God, all the powers with which they were created. Now, they were

created free from any defect, either in understanding or affections. The human body was then no impediment to the mind. It did not hinder clearly understanding all things, judging truly concerning them, and reasoning justly, if they reasoned at all. I say "if they reasoned," for possibly they did not. Perhaps they had no need of reasoning until their corruptible bodies pressed down the mind and impaired their natural abilities. Perhaps until then, the mind saw every truth as directly as the eye now sees the light.

Consequently, this law, proportioned to their original powers, required that they should always think, always speak, and always act precisely right, in every possible point. They were very able to do so. God could not but require the service they were able to give.

But Adam fell.

Wesley has a grand scheme of creation in mind. Imagine it! The God of all the universe spins a world into space for the single purpose of creating such creatures as the Adam whom Wesley describes in this text. It matters not if we, instead of visualizing a single-minded creation, now think of a magnificently profligate God spinning all kinds of bodies into space at the dawn of this current universe. Perhaps, indeed, there are many purposes in the divine mind for such a multifaceted, intensely complex, ultimately relational universe as ours. Regardless, what Wesley tells us in this passage is his notion of what God intended in calling humans into existence, and this is significant indeed.

God created us in order that we should use all the powers with which we were created to the glory of God. And what are these powers? Wesley spells them out: they are intellectual, attitudinal, and physical.

We know this quite well; we are reasoning creatures, feeling creatures, embodied creatures. Wesley suggests that the fullest development of these powers leads to the glory of God. Before we talk about just what this "glory of God" is, think into the radical implications of this text. The import of the text is not just to satisfy our intellectual curiosity about what a supposed first human would be like; rather, it calls us to a vision of what we should be like. Again and again Wesley tells us that the work of Christ is to restore the image of God in us, to give us a "new Eden"

(see the lines of the Charles Wesley hymn on page 15: "My heart, thou know'st, can never rest / Till thou create my peace, / Till, of my Eden repossessed, / From every sin

I cease"). Wesley's description of God's intentions in Adam are directly appropriate to his understanding of God's intentions for us in Christ.

Wesley seems to me to be quite radical here, almost foreseeing what would become liberation theology in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, there is a long tradition within Christian history of devaluing the fullest development of our minds, hearts, and bodies—especially bodies. Flagellation of bodies in order to keep bodily instincts under control is but one of the most egregious examples of this.

And there are far too many writings within the Christian tradition where it seems that there is a direct correlation between a low regard for humanity and a high regard for God. It is as if the very honor of God requires the abasement of the creature; God is great to the degree that creatures are lowly. Is this the glory of God?

Not for Wesley.

Wesley's view is quite contrary to this reasoning. God creates the human for the sake of flourishing, of full development, and this development tends toward

God's glory. A rather homely analogy could be drawn from our own experience.

Whom do we honor more, the cook whose soufflés always fall or the cook whose TnL

perfectly done soufflés win prizes every time? "What a cook!" we say. Or consider the example of art. I have tried my hand at oils a time or two, and believe me, my results will never make it to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art without my smuggling them in. Nobody would look at my painting and say, "What a terrific artist she is!" But consider a Monet painting, or a Rembrandt. We are awestruck, marveling at the creative power of the artist. We honor artists like them precisely because of the beauty of their work, and we call them masters.

Our Intellectual Powers God the creator is not glorified through our denigration but through the wonder of who we were created to be. God created us with minds, and calls us to develop them to the fullest. We are to rejoice in our "mindedness" and learn all we can, pushing our abilities to the very limit. The fun, of course, is that once we find a limit, our limit expands and there is yet more to learn.

I remember when I was a young woman, newly returning to college in my thirties after my youngest child was enrolled in school. I took a philosophy class and was enthralled with what I was learning. I could hardly wait to read the books, listen to lectures, and think about these wonders I was newly finding. My whole being, it seemed, was awakened through this wonder of the life of the mind. As a religious young woman, | began to worry: was it possible, was it barely possible, that my love for studying could rival my love for God? Was I setting up an "idol," and should I cease studying immediately in order to keep my love in its proper channels? I prayed over this issue and finally told God that if God did not want me to study, God would have to stop me, because I simply was not capable of stopping myself.

Reading Wesley made me recall that early agony with joyous laughter. Of course God did not consider my development of my mind as somehow standing in competition with my love of God. To the contrary, God called me to such study. I was endowed with reason for the purpose of developing reason. And to the extent that I cooperated with God in developing my reason, I honored God the creator.

Our Attitudinal Powers Perhaps it is not unusual for a theologian to push us to develop our abilities to reason. But Wesley names affections and bodies as also being part of the powers with which we were created. If we understand affections as our whole attitudinal life, including our emotions, then the implication is that our emotions, too, are not given to us in order to be stunted. To the contrary, we are to rejoice in our emotional life, developing our affections in openness to the love of God. The richer our emotional capacities, the greater are our capacities to give and receive love toward and from God and others.

Our Physical Powers And are not our bodies, too, a wondrous thing? The apostle Paul even calls our bodies temples of the Spirit of God. Having been endowed with bodies, we are to develop our bodies to the fullest of their powers, to the glory of God, The implications of this are certainly practical. It means we are bound to take care of our physical selves with healthy diets, exercise, and proper rest. We are to honor the sexuality that God has given us, developing this as well as our other aspects to the glory of God. As the psalmist said, we are "fearfully and wonderfully made" (139:14).

Thus our attitude toward our embodiedness should be gratitude, joy, and the discipline to develop our bodies to the fullest extent possible given our circumstances.

Developing Our God-Given Powers In short, a Wesleyan understanding of what it is to be human considers our intelligence, emotions, and bodies all to be a gift from God, and thus we honor

God insofar as we gratefully develop the gift as much as possible within our circumstances. And this, of course, leads to two more considerations: First, we must ask a bit further about what this "glory of God" means, since it is the end term of how we should develop the powers with which we were created. Second, we must pay more attention to that word Wesley introduces, impediments, which arise because of that final sentence I quoted, "But Adam fell."

To the Glory of God I have already said that to develop all of our powers is to honor the God who endowed us with these powers, and I have implied that to honor God is to glorify

God. But what does it mean, this glorification? For Wesley there is a depth of meaning to the "glory of God" that goes far beyond paying compliments to God, or even showing through our beings what a wonderful Creator God is. The glory of God is, finally, nothing other than the love of God. God's deepest being is constituted by an enormous profundity of love, beyond anything that the human heart can fully comprehend. To gaze directly into the shining love of God would be equivalent to gazing directly at the sun; like Moses of old, our faces must be veiled.

And yet this boundless love is the very depths of God, the character of God, and therefore also the glory of God. Thus when Wesley says that we are to develop all our powers to the glory of God, he is saying that God's love is the criterion we use for the development of our powers.

There is a wonderful Wesleyan hymn built around the image of Jacob wrestling with the angel by night; only we are the ones who wrestle with this strange adversary. "Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown" (United Methodist Hymnal,

— 386 and 387) portrays us alone in the night, wrestling with one whose name we do not know. Throughout the hymn we demand the name of this wrestler. "I need not tell thee who I am," we cry, for the wrestler knows us all too well; our names are written on the palms of his hands. But who is he? The hymn skirts the issue, daring it and backing away: "I will not let thee go till I thy name, thy nature know." But gradually the knowledge becomes more sure, till finally at the last we cry again and again, "Thy nature and thy name is Love."

God is a pure fountain of love—not abstractly, not philosophically, not in isolated splendor. Rather, God's very nature is to love, and through loving, to elicit our own loving in return. Love is, of all things, relational; and the God whose name and nature is love is relational, through and through. Out of the depths of divine relation, God loves; and we are most wondrously created because of that love, and for that love, and toward that love.

Therefore, when it is stated that we are to develop all the powers with which we were created toward the glory of God, it is clear that there is an end besides selfdevelopment that is in view. Or, rather, self-development is for the sake of that which is beyond the self. And what is beyond the self? Everything is both infinitely and intimately beyond the self. How can this be? Think about it like this. Out of boundless love, God creates a world, and within that world there is at least one singular species that is capable of intentionally reflecting that love of God. This reflection of the love of God will not beam back to God like a laser, singly focused on loving just that one ultimate reality. Rather, just as God's love suffuses all creation, our love inspired by God's love is multidimensional. It is toward God in and

through the creation that God loves; it is toward God out of the sheer answering love that God inspires in us; it is toward God simply because God is God, whose nature and whose name is Love. To develop all the powers with which we are created to the glory of God, then, is to develop ourselves fully for the sake not just of ourselves, but for God and all creation. There is a deep responsiveness and responsibility built into the call to develop ourselves to the glory of God, for it demands from us a joyous relationality, a profound yearning toward community, where there is giving and receiving of love.

Oddly enough, then—or perhaps not so oddly—we are bound together through developing our powers, for we enrich each other through our own richness of being. When the glory of God is the end of our development—or the beginning of our development—then self-development is at the same time communal development. And this is a joyous thing.

"But Adam Fell"

But then we come to the sadness of those three words, "But Adam fell."

Wesley's view was that once Adam fell, God's glorious intent for creation was momentarily thwarted. I say "momentarily," for Wesley then moves quickly from the Adamic (and angelic) law of works to the Mosaic law of works. This is a compensating move. Adam was to develop himself voluntarily, but given his fall—and the fall of us all with him—voluntary development of all our powers in the context of the glory of God became exceedingly problematic. And so the Mosaic law becomes a kind of social channeling of the requirement that we should develop all our powers relationally, lovingly. Instead of depending upon voluntary obedience to this empowering command, we are given aids for obedience. These aids, says Wesley, are political, ceremonial, and moral.

In a sense, if we stretch our imaginations a bit, the political, ceremonial, and moral are like extensions into society of the physical, rational, and emotional. That is, we are embodied into political societies, are we not? And our ceremonial life is in a sense our rational life, our way of formulating the rituals of worship that explain our relationship to God. The moral, of course, is the way we relate to each other, like our attitudinal or emotional life. So in a loose sense, the individual law of works given to Adam now becomes a social structure, a communal law of works. And just as our own identity comes about through the development of our personal powers, our social identity comes about through how we conform to the structures designed to weld us together into community. If God is glorified as personal existence develops through love, then the social complement to this is that God is glorified insofar as social existence develops through justice. For justice is the effective channeling of love.

Thus in the Mosaic law of works we have one refrain that moves throughout the Pentateuch, bidding the society to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger within its gates. The justice of the society is measured by how effectively the society addresses the needs of those who are outside the normal channels of well-being in the patriarchal world. Insofar, then, as the society as a whole tends toward health, toward wisdom, toward morality, God's original intentions in creation are fulfilled. The society will be to the glory of God.

The hitch is that the society is no more successful than Adam in cooperating with the divine intentions. The paradox is that God's intentions are toward the finest well-being of the creature, but the creature acts against its own well-being. The law of works, whether through Adam or Moses, individual or society, does not succeed.

God's Intent Toward Us At this point a contemporary reader of A Plain Account might raise a strong objection. "But there never was an Adam!" one might cry. In the eighteenth century, the radical discoveries of creation through evolution were hardly on the horizon; Adam was the best explanation for the human race—and human problems. There were certainly rumblings. On the philosophical scene, many an alternative was raised to account for the pervasive tendency of human beings to violate their own and others' well-being. But for Wesley and for many in the field of religion, the old story of Adam still had cogent power.

Does Wesley's understanding depend upon a historical Adam? My answer is, not at all. Adam becomes the package through which Wesley discerns the divine intent for creaturely well-being, an intent that is mediated through numerous texts other than those two small chapters in Genesis. The packing may fall away, but the content remains. Our best contemporary knowledge of the world suggests that Adam is a symbol projected back upon the mysteries and limits of the human sense of time. What Wesley reads into the Adamic story does not depend upon a historical Adam; it depends upon the gracious creative intent of God. Wesley's purpose is to say that this wondrous thing, this full development of all our powers in the conp a ee e text and toward the increase of the glory of God, is God's intent toward us, for us.

And if it couldn't happen through a first human being, and if it couldn't happen through a model society, we are not left to despair; for it is in and through God's work in Jesus Christ that this wonderful reality is now made possible for us.

A New Possibility The remarkable thing about Wesley is that he figured God could not be stopped by human recalcitrance. And human recalcitrance there is and was. Wesley understood that with Adam's fall, the development of all the powers with which Adam was created is seriously hindered, not only for Adam but for Adam's race.

We no longer think clearly, and since our thinking is so often muddled, so are our judgments. "It is as natural," says Wesley, "for a human being to mistake as to breathe" (page 61). Likewise with our physical and emotional selves: we are not only frail and subject to illness and injury, but we hardly know how to love properly. We can fulfill neither the Adamic nor the Mosaic version of the command to develop all our powers fully to the glory of God.

But it is God who intends our good, and what God intends, by God, can and will happen! Jesus Christ becomes our Eden, our re-creation, our new possibility of finally becoming what God intended us to be: loving human beings in interlocking communities that foster the development of each for the good of all, to the glory of God. How does this happen? We turn once again to our text (pages 61-62). Given

Adam's fall, ...no human is able to perform the service that the Adamic law requires.

No human is, of course, obliged to perform it. God does not require it of any human. For Christ is the end of the Adamic, as well as the Mosaic, law. By his death he has put an end to both. He has abolished both the one and the other, with regard to humankind. ..

In place of this, Christ has established another, namely, the law of faith.

Not everyone who does, but everyone who believes, now receives righteousness in the full sense of the word. That is, they are justified, sanctified, and glorified.

Since we are no longer capable of following God's intents for us unaided, God's own self both clears our rubble-strewn pathway and enables us to walk upon it.

The Personal and Social Nature of Sin Consider the nature of sin in a Wesleyan world. If God intended us to develop ourselves fully under the criterion of the love of God, then sin is anything that works against that goal. We can consider sin under the blanket category of disobedience, but disobedience alone is an empty category. It begs the question,

Disobedience of what, and why? Here, it is an express disobedience to develop all one's powers to the glory of God, or under the criterion of love. This disobedience, then, is anything that flaunts either the fullest development of oneself or of others.

Ultimately, of course, this disobedience directly violates the love of God.

Furthermore, we must take the Mosaic as well as the Adamic law of works into consideration. Too easily we turn sin into some personal issue only, as if we, like

Wesley's Adam, are responsible only for our own development of our own powers.

Not even Eve appears in these pages discussing Adam's sin. But Wesley quickly takes us into the social dimension of the law of works. Those political, ceremonial, and moral laws were for the sake of communal individuals. That is, on one hand the laws reinforced our weak abilities, helping us through social sanctions to develop all our powers toward the glory of God. But on the other hand, the social structure emphasizes the communal nature of self-development, so that the development of one is for the sake of the good of all, and the good of all is to be mediated to each.

Everyone is responsible not only to the self but to others individually and to the society as a whole. We are communal individuals, or individuals-in-community, and the development of the self is contextualized by the development of others.

The disobedience of sin, then, must take account not only of the Adamic law of works, which easily tends to vaunt the individual alone. It must also take account of the Mosaic law, or the communal nature through which the development of all the powers with which we were created is to take place, to the glory of God. Commonly, we call the violations of the Mosaic law injustice. Sin, then, is both personal and social; and in both cases it is a violation of the love of God. And in both cases, sin refuses the intent of God toward our individual and communal good.

The Law of Faith We can take this analysis one more step and note that God's intent toward us is toward the flourishing of life. We are, each one of us together, to develop our physical, mental, and emotional lives to the good of all. This would make for a thriving good, a communal life sparkling with health and good will. To live otherwise, then, is to live against the flourishing of life. It is, in sad fact, to live toward the destruction of such development; it is to live toward death.

The problem standing in the way of the fulfillment of God's command—both the Adamic and the Mosaic—is not only our disobedience, but the wreckage that accumulates along the way of our disobedience, a wreckage that makes toward death, not life. The connection of sin and death, then, is not arbitrary, but descriptive: to move against that which makes for the flourishing of life is by definition to act toward that which makes for the destruction of life. And this is the problem with which God must deal if God is to help us get on with our own good.

Again, the text (still on page 62):

...Christ has established another, namely, the law of faith. Not everyone who does, but everyone who believes, now receives righteousness in the full

sense of the word. That is, they are justified, sanctified, and glorified.

In one sense, it is not too much to say that for Wesley, the purpose of God's presence in Jesus Christ is to clear away the rubble that sin creates, making a path straight toward the accomplishment of the purposes of God. Sin, and the destruction and deaths that it entails, must be dealt with; otherwise, it remains the obstruction to God's purposes in creation. So in Wesley's view, God in Christ recreates the Adamic setting, only this time the new Adam fully lives up to God's intent. Jesus lives vibrantly, fully developing all the powers with which he was created toward the end of love, which glorifies God. And for Wesley, the life of Jesus as recorded in the gospels is as compellingly important as his birth, death, and resurrection. In and through Jesus, it is possible to see how an individual lives from and toward the love of God. Jesus has clarity about the purpose of all laws not to be ends in themselves but to be means to the end of the flourishing of life. Jesus exercises compassion. He gives of himself toward the empowerment of others. He forgives the sins that get in the way of being what we are called to be before God in community. For Wesley,

Jesus simply "gets it right." He is the fulfillment of God's intent that we should develop all the powers with which we were created to the glory of God, and therefore he is also the clear example of what such a life would look like.

But this is not sufficient in and of itself. Jesus does more than draw us a perfect picture that shows us the way ahead. He takes care of all the rubble in the road, which is to say, the hindering sins that keep us from God's will for us. This is the role of the cross.

There have been many interpretations of just why Jesus' death on the cross is necessary for our salvation; and in some ways, Wesley uses them all. In some places

Wesley talks of Jesus' death as a ransom; in others of his writings he talks of Jesus as our substitute, taking our punishment in our place. Jesus is also the "satisfaction" paid in order to satisfy God's offended honor. And sometimes Wesley uses the law court imagery of a prisoner standing in our place before the bar. Perhaps Wesley's most dominant image is that we owe a debt to God that we cannot pay. So Jesus pays it for us.

That debt must be interpreted in light of what Wesley says is God's creative intent for us, and in light of Jesus' fulfilling of that intent. But our failure has introduced the radical suffering in the world of destruction and death. So the cross is like the final gathering up and focusing of all this rubble, this damnable destruction, into one supreme act of death in which we are all symbolically present—just as we were symbolically present in Adam. If this were the end, of course, nothing would have been accomplished, save one more miserable death. But resurrection becomes God's ultimate answer to death. Christ bursts through the bonds of death, declaring life and its flourishing as the final answer of God to our sin.

And so Wesley says that we now are called to live by the law of faith. By faith we identify with Christ's life, and so his life becomes a blueprint for our own. By faith we identify with Christ's death, dying ourselves to those sins that would block us from living from, in, and toward the love of God. The forgiveness of sins means freedom from the shackles of sin, moving from death toward life. By faith we identify with Christ's resurrection, and are ourselves born into the new life of fulfilling

God's will for us: developing all the powers with which we were created to the glory of God. This is the law of faith, but of course it is also the law of love. Hear

Wesley on this point (page 62):

Q. 4. Is love the fulfilling of this law?

A. Certainly, it is. The whole law under which we now live is fulfilled by love...

. Faith working or made active by love is all that God now requires of human beings. God has substituted not sincerity but love in the room of angelic perfection. ..

. [Q. 5. A.] It [Love] is the aim of every commandment of God. It is the expected outcome of the whole and every part of the Christian life. The foundation is faith, purifying the heart. The aim is love, preserving a good conscience.

To be identified with Christ through faith is to be freed for the law of love. And this law, like the Mosaic law before it, is for the sake of guiding us toward the fulfillment of what we are each and communally called to be by God's creative intent.

The rubble is cleared, the path goes before us, and we can now get on with what God intended us to be.

Justification, Sanctification, Glorification Wesley summarizes the law of faith in three words: justification, sanctification, and glorification. The words can be understood temporally, but Wesley meant more than that. That is, one can logically say that first we are justified, and therefore enabled to live a sanctified life, which naturally leads beyond our death to a state of glorification with God. But Wesley tended to see each of these terms as deeply interrelated, so that they all apply at all times throughout our Christian life.

For example, Christ's death (Wesley refers to it as "the atoning blood") was a multifaceted act with deep ramifications for the whole of how we live. It does not apply to one moment of our lives, as if it were summed up and dismissed with the notion that God objectively forgives us (a change in our condition relative to God) so that we might subjectively begin a new life (a change in our real circumstances in our daily lives). Rather, this forgiving, rubble-clearing nature of God covers us throughout our whole lives; we are never without it, nor should we ever wish to be.

It is likewise with sanctification. Sanctification is precisely the loving of God with our whole heart, and our neighbor as ourselves; it is the fulfillment of all the intent of God. With the rubble cleared away, we are to live fully toward love. As we will see later, this can be described both as instantaneous event and as process.

While we live it daily, it is what God has intended for humanity long before we ourselves entered this race, and it shall be the fulfillment of humanity throughout eternity. Sanctification spans all times.

Glorification, also, cannot be restricted to a single time, as if it were a distant goal to be achieved when we finally die. How could this be the case? If our living from, in, and toward God's love is in fact the glory of God, then glorification is something we are about throughout our Christian lives. And insofar as God is in Christ, and we are identified with Christ, then we, too, participate in God's glory through Christ. What was it with those shepherds on the hillside of Judaea? "And the glory of the Lord shone around them," and the angels sang, "Glory to God in the highest heaven" (Luke 2:9, 14). God's glory is not distant, but present in the knowledge of God through Christ both in Bethlehem and here in our own places. It is ever so.

So, then, this is the framework within which Wesley's doctrine of Christian perfection takes place. It is set within the creative will of God, who creates us with an intent toward our flourishing. Our flourishing is not an automatic affair, as if we

ourselves had nothing to do with it. To the contrary, our flourishing is accomplished only insofar as we, in conjunction with our communities, develop all the powers with which we were created, to the glory of God. We participate with God in creating the flourishing of ourselves and all others in this earthly community.

We seem to be uncommonly good at messing up our end of this situation, but that is not enough to stop God from fulfilling the divine intent. Jesus Christ becomes for us God's way of dealing with our recalcitrance and our sin, forgiving us in order that we shall be made able to get on with the task for which God called us into being in the first place. And that task is Christian perfection.

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In the first half of A Plain Account, from its opening pages through the lengthy account of Jane Cooper that ends on page 59, Wesley describes how he has held to his understanding of Christian perfection throughout his life, and how the first annual conferences were devoted to discussions of Christian perfection. In the process, he recounts again and again the difficulties he had in conveying to people exactly what he meant by Christian perfection: what it was, what it was not, and why it was scriptural. No matter how clear he was, it seemed his words always got twisted to mean something that was not at all his intention, which is why he attempted this plain account of exactly what he believed Christian perfection to be.

Christian perfection is love of God and neighbor, exercised by the grace of God through our continuous development of all the powers with which we were created, to the glory of God, which is the service of love. It seems quite clear and simple, but Wesley met continuous resistance in his preaching and teaching.

What Christian Perfection Is Have you ever been in the situation of explaining something to someone over and over again, but the listener still misunderstands you? You wonder if both of you are using the same dictionary or if there is something inarticulate in the way you are expressing yourself. If you have ever been in this situation, you should have some sympathy for John Wesley as he tried repeatedly to explain exactly what he meant by Christian perfection. It is, as he says so often in this little book, a heart filled with love of God and neighbor. Hear him in the following typical passages: e ... both my brother and I affirmed to this day:

(1) that Christian perfection is the love of God and our neighbor that leads to deliverance from all sin; i that this is received only by faith; that it is given instantaneously, in one moment; that we are to expect it, not at death, but every moment (pages

39-40).

Se ¢ Christian perfection is loving God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength. This implies that no passions contrary to love remain in the soul. It means that all thoughts, words, and actions are governed by pure love (page 41).

Perfection is nothing higher and nothing lower than this: the pure love of God and human beings. In other words, loving God with all our heart and soul, and our neighbor as ourselves. It is love

governing the heart and life, running through all our tempers, words, and actions (page 44).

Scriptural perfection is pure love filling the heart and governing all the words and actions (page 48).

It is loving the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength; and loving our neighbor, every human being, as ourselves, as our own souls (page 62).

That Pesky Word Perfection Wesley is certainly quite clear in these statements of explanation. But part of his problem was that pesky word perfection. Our tradition has a long history of interpreting that word to mean something that is unchangeably complete in itself, needing nothing other than itself in order to exist, and never being any better (for that would challenge the perfection of the previous state) or worse (because if decline was possible, perfection had not been attained). Thus perfection meant a rather static state. Such an interpretation of perfection had much to do with the development of the Christian understanding of God as being impassive, immutable, totally impervious to change. This was quite unlike the dynamic description of God given throughout the Christian and Hebrew Scriptures. But the notion of God as perfect in the Greek sense of immutability shaped much of Christian history and theology.

The Greek notion of God's perfection also deeply affected the Christian understanding of the Bible. Whenever the Scriptures spoke of God changing in any way, such as in Jonah 3:10 ("God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring .

. ."), these changes were considered to be only figures of speech that were not really intended to speak about how God really is. They were called anthropomorphisms and discounted. However, passages that spoke of the divine faithfulness as unchanging were seized upon to claim that nothing whatsoever could change within God. For example, Malachi 3:5 speaks of God's steadfast will toward justice: God is "against those who oppress the hired workers in their wages, the widow and the orphan, against those who thrust aside the alien." In this, says

Malachi 3:6, "I the Lorp do not change." But the theological utilization took the passage out of its context of God's unfailing will toward justice and turned it into support for the static perfection of God.

Thus, for Wesley to apply the phrase "Christian perfection" to our actual lives was to run counter to the usual understanding of the word. Almost by definition, perfection and human were contradictory terms. To be perfect meant there could be no change, neither for the better nor for the worse. In fact, perfection was so contrary to the human condition that most people thought perfection was something that could apply to humans only after death, when God would finally make the Christian perfect. To speak of "growth in perfection," as Wesley did, was against the common sense of his time.

What Wesley meant by perfection, as is clear from the passages quoted earlier, was love for God, neighbor, and self. Should he have dropped the troublesome word perfection and stayed with the more acceptable word /ove? It certainly would have made things easier for him (and us!); but in a sense, love is just as ambiguous a word as perfection. The problem if Wesley had used Jove is that everyone would have thought they knew just what Wesley meant without bothering to ask him to define love, for doesn't everyone know what love means? We who live more than

two hundred years after Wesley can be thankful that he used the offensive word perfection, since it forced him repeatedly to clarify what he did and did not mean by it. In the process, of course, he forces us to reconsider our own understanding of divine perfection. If the Greek understanding distorts the meaning of the Scriptures and is so totally contrary to our experience, perhaps the Greek word no more applies to God than it does to us. But we shall return to this later.

What Christian Perfection Is Not Meanwhile, we must probe more of Wesley's explanations in the first half of the book, where he deals not only with what perfection is, but with what it is not.

Christian perfection is not freedom from ignorance and mistakes. Turn to page 18, paragraph number 12 (1), and see how Wesley stresses this point. Because the things we know are so conditioned by our particular perspective, our bodily and spiritual senses, and our limitations of context, there is no way that we can be

"perfect in knowledge." Therefore, we are neither infallible nor omniscient. We are, as Wesley says more than once, liable to error.

There are radical implications to these plain statements. At first they seem simply to be true. Of course we are not infallible! Of course we are not omniscient!

Who would deny this? But Wesley takes these uncontroversial judgments and pushes them to their conclusions. If we are subject to error, and if we are not free from ignorance and mistakes, then some of the things that we think must be erroneous. Which things are these? The conundrum is simply this: If we could name where it is that we are making errors in judgment, then we would immediately change our opinions so that we might be correct. After all, who does not wish to be correct? But by definition we simply cannot know where it is that we are making errors in judgment. We are fallible in our knowledge.

If we took this seriously, would it not change our attitudes and actions toward those who disagree with us? Would it not push us away from defensive arguments and turn us instead toward exciting dialogues? For perhaps the one who thinks differently is right. And if we truly desire to identify our incorrect judgments, then surely we should not spend all of our time trying to convince others that we are right. Instead, we would be most curious about those who thought we were wrong.

Perhaps we could learn from them, and so come to more sound opinions and judgments. And of course if we worshiped and worked within a community of like-minded people who were also going on to perfection, then their attitude toward opinions different from their own that we might hold would likewise be eager and curious rather than belligerent and defensive. Can you imagine living in such a community? What a difference such attitudes would make to the serious differences of opinion that arise in any group setting. Recognizing that Christian perfection is not being right in everything we think we know would provide opportunities to exercise the love that Christian perfection is when controversies arise in the church.

Predestination Versus the Universal Grace of God We will have more to say about these insights when we discuss Wesley's first advice to those seeking Christian perfection in our next chapter. But here we must point to another writing in which Wesley carries out this theme, his sermon on "A Catholic Spirit." One of the most heated theological controversies in Wesley's day had to do with the Calvinist position on predestination. According to Calvin, God controls all things, and therefore controls who will and who will not be saved. Free will is a gift that follows from Christian faith; there is no free will prior to Christian

faith. Therefore, persons are not free to respond to God until God gives them the response of faith. There is no cooperative human response until by grace faith is given. Therefore, God controls who does and does not respond to the gospel.

Wesley was adamantly opposed to this position, for he believed in the universal grace of God. God is so fully gracious that all people, not just some people, are touched by the grace of God. Whether or not one responds to God's grace depends upon the person's free response. Hence the call to believe the gospel appeals to a real freedom. Obviously, then, Wesley thought the Calvinists wrong in their opinions concerning predestination, for both positions could not be right.

Church Worship In addition to this vexing difference of theological opinion, there were also many differences in terms of church worship. The Anglican church had a formal liturgy, whereas some of the worship services at Methodist chapels were essentially preaching services. Was there only one correct way to worship God?

Wesley's sermon "A Catholic Spirit" advocates an openness to those who differ from ourselves on such things. Instead of asking for theological conformity— which would be impossible, given our fallibility—he asks for friendship. "Is your heart as my heart? Then give me your hand!" he asks, quoting Joab from the sermon text 2 Kings 10:15. This is a plain application of the implication of our fallibility of knowledge; it pushes us toward openness toward the other.

Christian Perfection in Practice Openness and recognition of our proneness to error does not lead to a kind of Christian indifferentism, where it doesn't matter at all what one believes. This would be far from a Wesleyan position. Indeed, Wesley insisted upon a number of beliefs, Christian perfection being one of them. One searches the Scriptures, studies the tradition, applies one's reason, and probes one's own experience to determine which things are relatively unshakable within one's Christian faith. And these things are not done all by oneself but in the community of believers, where it is possible to share insights, discuss problems, learn from one another. In the context of the community we develop and refine our formulations of Christian faith. Openness to other opinions, and recognition of our fallibility, does not become an excuse to believe nothing or anything. Rather, it becomes the occasion to apply oneself seriously to thinking about Christian faith, and to listening to those who think otherwise in order to see what we might learn. And when differences seem to be irreconcilable, one nonetheless offers friendship and fellowship to the other. This is

Christian perfection in practice.

Wesley also says that Christian perfection does not save us from ordinary human frailties. He names these frailties as slowness of understanding, inarticulate pronunciation, shortcomings, and temptations (page 18, and reaffirmed on page 41). Once again, naming these frailties as compatible with Christian perfection has enormous implications for the body of believers called Methodists. It means that we do not divide ourselves according to IQ ratings, valuing the "thinkologists" among us more than others. To the contrary,.we should expect that there are varieties of gifts within each congregation, with quickness of understanding being but one of the gifts.

With regard to "inarticulate pronunciation," we may consider this a quaint peculiarity in our own day—until we remember that Wesley was writing in a context where how one spoke revealed one's class. The language of the upper classes was far different from the language of the lower classes; and indeed, our situation

in America is not really so dissimilar. It is not just that we have regional accents that reveal our geographic origins. In a society continually in flux through constant immigration patterns, our speech often reveals whether English is our first language or not, or whether we have been to college, or to what degree we have integrated into mainstream society. "Inarticulate pronunciation" was not an indicator of class just in Wesley's society; it is the same indicator in our own society. And Wesley assures us that Christian perfection has nothing to do with our finely drawn value distinctions concerning class or origin. To the contrary, Christian perfection is possible across the whole social spectrum. A migrant in the fields may or may not have the fullness of Christian perfection; a highly educated and economically successful person may or may not have the fullness of Christian perfection. Whether they do or not depends upon their responsiveness to the profligate grace of God. So Wesley cautions us not to make quick judgments concerning one's standing in grace that are drawn according to a hierarchy of social values. God's values streak across our values, judging them according to how they measure up to the lavish grace of God.

And Christian perfection does not protect one from temptation. Why should it? Temptation belongs to the human condition; we are always struggling in the balancing act between our own needs and desires and the needs and desires of the whole. Christian perfection does not mean the struggle is over, only that victory is ever possible, no matter what the struggle. The love of God, poured into our hearts, leads us always in the direction of that which is the larger good, that which leads to wholeness and wholesomeness. But it is not an automatic thing, as if we were suddenly turned into autonomons with no choices to make. How could love be compatible with such nonsense? Rather, through Christian perfection we build up a character that tends toward the good. The same temptations that would lead us away from the good become the power to strengthen continuous choices toward the good. Exercising choice toward the good in the presence of alternatives is precisely what the daily building up of Christian character is all about.

Ah, but what if we not only have temptations but yield to temptations? What then? Surely this is the great contradiction of Christian perfection. But Wesley would not have it so. He would remind us that "if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness"

(page 20; 1 John 1:9). Yielding to temptations could cause us all kinds of difficulties, but it could never cut off the continuously offered grace of God. Difficulties were entailed not as God's punishing us for yielding, as if God were some stern taskmaster threatening us with a stick should we depart from a given code. To the contrary, the trouble with the sins to which temptation might lead us is that the sins by definition are attitudes and/or actions that contradict love; they lead to the breaking down of the good, whether of ourselves or of the community. Thus yielding to temptation naturally creates problems, building up resistances within ourselves or others to the love of God. But God is so profligate in love, so unceasingly invested in our being restored to the divine image, that God continuously gives grace enabling us to come back to love. When we are faithless, God is yet faithful, calling us to respond to grace. Yielding to temptation is a setback, but it need not be the end of the story.

Recognizing Christian Perfection Well, then, Wesley's interlocutors wanted to know, if Christian perfection does not protect you from all these things—ignorance, temptation, frailty, and even mistakes—how would you possibly recognize a person who was perfect? Wesley found

such questions exasperating. He was dealing with the notion that perfection somehow implied an ethereal creature for whom nothing ever went wrong. But in our concrete human situation, many things can indeed go wrong. What perfection calls for is the fullest development of our powers within whatever frail situation we find ourselves. This development might indeed be what Wesley called "hedged . . . in by outward circumstances" (page 47). For example, a person might be afflicted with some debilitating disease that causes frequent or even constant pain. Can this person know Christian perfection? The answer, of course, is a resounding yes. He or she can develop powers to whatever degree is possible and use these powers in service to the love of God and neighbor. The fullness of the image of God might not be quite so dramatically apparent as in one who enjoys vibrant health. But here Wesley employs the tale of the widow's mite to suggest that the one who is "hedged in" might actually be living a fuller degree of Christian perfection than is the other.

Part of Wesley's point is that the question of who does and who does not enjoy Christian perfection is not for us to judge, for we have no basis for judging others truly (see, for instance, pages 50 and 51). We do not know the other's full circumstances, for the hedges with which the other must deal are not necessarily visible to our eyes. The one person whose circumstances we do know is ourself. Rather than spending our time worrying about other people's state of Christian perfection, we would be far better occupied questioning our own souls.

Pursuing Christian Perfection And how, precisely, are we to do that? Wesley is quick to answer the question on page 49. Here it is quite evident that we are in fact Methodists: there is a method for pursuing the goal of Christian perfection! We are to be vigorous and zealous in keeping the commandments (which are, you will recall, channels through which love can flow throughout society). We are to deal with whatever our own hedges are; we are to fast, to pray, and to attend on all the ordinances of God.

These ordinances are, of course, worship and the sacraments.

It might seem, from this list, that the method Wesley advocated was nothing but sheer discipline, sort of like gritting our teeth and getting on with all these necessary items. But to view it that way is completely wrong, for it fails to see the reason for the method, which is nothing but the grace and love of God. For Wesley, each of the abovementioned methods is a means of grace. By caring about the commandments, engaging in spiritual disciplines, and actively attending on the ordinances, we open ourselves to the wonderful grace of God that flows through these channels directly into our souls. It is sort of like going to a light switch in order to illumine a dark room. The electricity is always there, but we have to move the switch in order to let the current flow to the lamp that in turn gives light to the room. Each of these disciplines is like a light switch, connecting with the constant energy of God. God's energy is God's love, pouring into us in order that we ourselves might become loving creatures. So the method of obedience, spiritual discipline, and attendance at worship is not some kind of a "works sanctification"; instead it is a means of opening ourselves to the empowering grace of God whereby we might become loving people.

The Effects of Christian Perfection And what would we be like, then, as loving Christians? Wesley deals with this on pages 45-46, and also in the long account of Jane Cooper on pages 56-59. First, he suggests that Christian perfection has the effect of causing a soul to pray con-

stantly, to rejoice always, and to give thanks without ceasing. This is a recurring theme throughout the book; it is a way of saying that the soul's fundamental fulcrum point is God, no matter what forms of activity may be going on. That is,

Christian perfection is a sort of soul-orientation, a deep resting in the security of God's love. It is deeper than an emotional reality; it is instead a kind of stance toward life that underlies everything one does. Because of this continuous assumption of God's presence and God's love, there is a depth of gladness and gratitude in the soul—rejoicing and thankfulness. And since God is the resting point within, there is an openness toward communion, a kind of prayerfulness that characterizes life. That is, the triadic refrain of prayer, rejoicing, and giving thanks refers to the wellspring within one's soul, the God-orientation of one's being. It is not that one goes around with prayer beads in a constant murmur of verbal prayer, nor that one continuously waves hands wildly to indicate religious joy, nor that one laughs happily and says thank you in the face of tragedy. These are surface acts. The praying, rejoicing, and gratitude of Christian perfection define the depths of a soul connected to God. Outward actions are then responsible and responsive to whatever the circumstances might be, whether tears of compassion or pain, or patience, or even fierce struggle toward conditions of well-being for those who suffer.

Notice the extended passage on page 16 where Wesley spells out such thoughts.

A Methodist constantly presents his or her soul and "body as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God." Without reserve Methodists completely devote themselves, all they have and are, to the glory of God. Every power and strength of the Methodist's soul, every part of his or her body, and all of his or her talents are constantly employed according to the Master's will.

Restored to the Image of God Does it seem like a tall order? It would be, were it not for the key phrase just prior to these sentences, "Love is the source of this obedience." The meaning is twofold. In the first place, it is God's love that is the empowering source of our full development of every power and strength of our soul and body. And in the second place, precisely because of God's empowering love, our own love grows so that we can develop all our powers to the glory of God. It is from love and for love that we become who we can be in order to offer our best selves in love to God and others.

Wesley calls this state being restored to the image of God. Notice just how many times Wesley uses the phrase "image of God." You can find it on pages 23,

25, 33, 48, and 49, as well as on many pages in the later portions of the book. In order to understand the importance of this phrase, remember Wesley's understanding of salvation as given in Chapter One. God created human beings in order that they should develop all their powers to the glory of God, which is to say, toward loving God and neighbor. To be so created was to be created in God's own image, for God's full being is, in Wesley's words, "boundless love." God's aim in creation, says Wesley, is to create creatures who will be the image of God's own love, first because they are made from God's love, and second because they are made for God's love. Sin is that which is against love; it is uncreation, and as such it is most definitely not the image of God. In Christ we receive the forgiveness of sins, not as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of the restored image of God. With our sins forgiven, they no longer block God's creative intent toward our being in the image of God. Therefore, in Christ we are once again empowered to develop all our powers as much as possible within our circumstances for the sake of becoming fully

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loving creatures. Thus Wesley's constant reference to the image of God simply flows from his understanding that God's creative intent for us now flows freely. We are restored to the image of God, and this is Christian perfection.

This understanding shows why Wesley's critics were so far off the mark when they thought that perfection was possible only following death. If that were the case, then the redemption given to us through Jesus Christ would do us no earthly good.

But how is it possible that so great a salvation should be without earthly effect? For Wesley this concept would be absurd. If Christ redeems us, then Christ takes away the curse of sin in all its blocking, uncreative wreckage. This, then, means that with sin cleared away, God's creative work can begin anew in us. God enables our response so that we can get on with the purpose of creation, which is the development of our creaturely powers toward the love of God and neighbor. God does not wait until some "sweet by and by" to call us to our created end; God moves toward it the moment that we respond in faith to God's prevenient grace, God's ever-given call to be open to the love of God. Wesley takes the word that NOW is the time of salvation with utmost seriousness. Christian perfection is for this life.

Christian Perfection: Wesley's Lifelong Conviction Throughout this first section of A Plain Account, Wesley gives a history of his own life's conviction concerning Christian perfection, and also an account of the way that the annual conferences dealt with it. With regard to his own history, he picked it up in 1725, when he was 23 years old (page 11). While reading Jeremy

Taylor's Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying, Wesley was greatly taken with Taylor's words about purity of intention. A year later, these thoughts were reinforced through reading Thomas 4 Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, and again through William Law's writings. Through these writings, and certainly through his constant study of Scripture, he was convinced that Christians were called to walk as Christ walked. He preached on this in 1733 and throughout his time in Georgia.

What is most interesting in this account of his continuous conviction that salvation relates here and now to this life is that although he continues his account through 1739, he never mentions the Aldersgate experience that we consider so essential to Methodism. Instead, the focus is entirely on his sustained conviction that what God intends, God can do. Through the restored image of God made available through Christ, we can be empowered to lead lives of love. We often think of Aldersgate as a conversion experience for Wesley, but in his own reflections on his life it is not the initial reliance on God that is central, but the effects of that reliance in the possibility of developing all our powers to the glory of God in love.

On page 33 Wesley begins talking about the conferences. He held the First Conference on June 25, 1744, with six clergy and all the lay preachers present. The topic of the conference was serious consideration of the "doctrine of sanctification, also known as perfection." The Second Conference was August 1, 1745, and again the main topic of conversation was Christian perfection. The Third Conference was on May 13, 1746, and the procedure was a careful review of the deliberations of the first two conferences. At the Fourth Conference on June 16, 1747, the topic was again the doctrine of perfection. There is no question that this significant doctrine was pivotal not only for John Wesley but for Methodism itself.

The Life of Jane Cooper Wesley concludes this sustained argument that Christian perfection is the goal of Christian life by illustrating it in the life and death of Jane Cooper. The story

begins on page 56 and continues through 59. The significance of the account is this.

In contrast to the doubt that so many cast concerning the possibility of having a heart full of love in this life, Wesley gives a concrete example of such possibility.

Furthermore, in contrast to the notion that Christian perfection would protect a person from all manner of dreadful things, Wesley chooses as his example a woman in the prime of life who has fallen prey to an illness that claims her life. She is, indeed, "hedged in by outward circumstances." But she is a witness to the fulfilled possibility of one whose full powers are developed to the glory of God in Christian love. And finally, in a world that so often placed men as the best examples of what we are called to be, Wesley gives a woman as the best example of what we are called to be.

Wesley draws his description of Jane Cooper from letters she wrote and from eyewitness accounts. In a letter written in May, 1761, she tells of her agony of soul as she sought salvation and of the peace and joy that came to her in the experience of God's saving presence. But in November she became ill, seriously so; for within a few weeks she died. However, "prayer without ceasing, rejoicing, and in everything giving thanks" marked her life in her dying even as it had in her living. She became a witness to the power of God proclaimed in the closing verses of Romans 8, for neither pain nor death could separate her from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

With this account Wesley closes this section of A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, going on in the next section with the theological ground of the doctrine that we covered in our first chapter. The richness of Wesley's thought cannot be captured simply by organizing and summarizing his thinking; it must be encountered by a close reading of the actual text. But Christian perfection is not a doctrine to be studied and read. It is a Christian blessing to be embraced and lived. It is

God's gracious call to become what we were created to be: creatures of God, developing all the powers with which we were created toward the glory of God. And the glory of God is the love of God, flowing everlastingly from God to creation, and— when mirrored in creation as the image of God—flowing back to God and through God to the whole realm of creaturely being. izs

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Happily, Wesley concludes his plain account of Christian perfection by giving advice to those who are so drawn to the doctrine that they yearn to open their lives to this love. In the earlier portions of the book, Wesley has clarified repeatedly what Christian perfection is not. Interestingly, his advices to those who yearn for Christian perfection take us into unexpected depths concerning how Wesley understood love.

Notice first of all on page 72 in the answer to Q. 31, that Wesley considers perfection to be an "ongoing work." No static doctrine here. And this ongoing work is the work of God "mixed with much human frailty." The assumption is that God works not ov us, like taking a suit coat or dress off of a rack and putting it on us regardless of fit. Rather, God works in and with us, adapting God's work to our condition of frailty. And should we be so surprised by this? Do we not, after all, say with pious wonder that God came to us in a manger? We have so glorified the Christmas story that we make créches of gold or finely carved wood, forgetting the reality that mangers are really unattractive and smelly. But God came to us precisely in that unattractiveness; God comes to us in the midst of our frailty. God is like that, working with us as we are to bring us to what we can be. Christian perfection is an organic happening, a growing of the soul.

To those who yearn for Christian perfection, or worry lest they lose some portion of perfection, Wesley gives seven advices.

The First Advice: Beware of Pride The first, not surprisingly, is against pride (Q. 32, page 73). We are to beware of pride and pray constantly against it; it is that besetting sin that so easily and invidiously takes hold of us. Or, to put it in a more active case, it is that sin that we so easily embrace.

Initially, one could nod quite comfortably in agreement with Wesley. Haven't we been told throughout our tradition that pride is like a Number One Sin? Isn't pride thinking more highly of ourselves than we ought to think? Isn't pride putting ourselves first and everyone else last? Pride is being "puffed up," so full of self that there is no room for God. Why, pride is the initial sin in that ancient

Garden that got us all wrong in the first place. Surely such pride is a great danger to Christian perfection, for it would turn love all 'round wrong, focusing it on ourselves instead of God and others, until it wasn't love at all.

While Wesley might not oppose such an interpretation of pride, his approach to describing pride is astonishing, for he does not at all go in the above direction.

Rather, for Wesley, pride is to be unteachable. "If you think you are so knowledgeable of God as to no longer need human teaching, then pride is at the door."

"Aha," we might respond, "but here I am studying Wesley's own teaching,

so clearly I have escaped this particular sin of pride." Wesley will not let us off the hook so easily. He immediately says to his contemporary readers, "Yes, you need to be taught, not only by Mr. Morgan, one another, Mr. Maxfield, or me, but by the weakest preacher in London, yes, by all people. For God sends to us those whom

God chooses to send."

The remarkable thing about Wesley's point here is that he is telling his readers that they need to be taught by those who oppose Wesley's own teachings. Mr. Morgan and Mr. Maxfield, while at one time closely associated with the Methodist movement, had taken Wesley's theology in directions contrary to Wesley's own thinking. One might expect Wesley to caution Methodists to beware of the extremes taught by these men and to stay to good plain teaching, such as, for example, Mr. Wesley's sermons and tracts. It would be similar to a situation today where a person staunchly holding a position of biblical inerrancy earnestly told others that they need to be taught by those scholars working in the Jesus Seminar. And the opposite is also true: those who study contemporary biblical scholarship should also see what they can learn from those who hold literally to every word of Scripture. Clearly, we find such a recommendation distasteful, for we far prefer to read only those who think in ways that are congruent with our own positions.

Think of the person who is most theologically different from yourself, and apply Wesley's advice: You have much to learn from that person. Or consider the rancor with which we regard those who take opposing views from ours on the social views of our day: homosexuality, war and patriotism, death penalty, abortion, capitalism. Do we really want to say we have something to learn from those who are on the "wrong" side of these issues? Shouldn't we close our ears when they begin to speak, recognizing them as the fanatics they are? Can anything good come out of those "Nazareths"? Wesley's answer is that we must listen to those who oppose us in order to learn from them.

We may think that the teaching thus far is radical enough, but Wesley takes it one surprising step further: "To imagine that none can teach you but those who are themselves saved from sin is a very great and dangerous mistake" (page 73). Ordinarily, we consider all Christians to be saved from sin, for isn't salvation precisely this? Who, then, are those who are not saved from sin? To be "saved from sin" is a Christian category; other religious traditions understand the basic human problem differently. Buddhists, for example, would not consider themselves "saved from sin," because the category is foreign to the way they construct the world. For Buddhists, suffering is the basic problem, not sin. Can we say, then, that those who would flee pride must even be open to learning from those of other religious traditions? What awesome consequences for growth in love! Can you imagine the kind of relationships that would begin to pervade this world if every religious person, while rooted in their own faith, was open to learning from another? To learn from another is to begin to understand the other. Wesley's small phrase, if applied to interreligious dialogue, offers a breathtaking vision of a network of friendship spreading over the world. Love would displace animosity, distrust, hatred, and, in our wildest application of this teaching, would mean that never again could religious teaching be used as an excuse to kill those who think differently. Could there ever be such peace on earth?

Wesley's interpretation of pride as being unwilling to learn from others is immensely important; it is the direct result of what Wesley means by Christian love filling the heart and mind. Remember that in the early portions of A Plain Account

Wesley has taken some pains to point out that Christian perfection does not mean

that we make no mistakes in thought and action. To the contrary, "It is as natural for a human being to mistake as to breathe" (page 61), and "because we live in fallible human bodies, we will be subject to errors in judgment and action. For neither love nor the 'anointing of the Holy One' makes us infallible. Therefore, because we are subject to faulty thinking and understanding, we cannot avoid error in many things" (page 63). Pride pretends to self-sufficiency, particularly in knowledge; and self-sufficiency turns the self into a sort of island, inhabited only by those who mirror in some sense one's own notions. How is this compatible with love? Love reaches beyond the self; love is open to the other; love dares to cross boundaries that would divide us. Therefore, the pride of thinking all of our own ways of thinking and acting are correct while those who oppose us are totally wrong is a great hindrance to Christian perfection, which is love filling all the heart and soul.

Before leaving this advice, one further caution needs to be raised concerning pride interpreted as unteachableness. To be unteachable is to think that our own way of thinking is God's way of thinking. It risks putting ourselves in the place of God, assigning the infallibility and omniscience that belongs only to God to ourselves. This is blatant idolatry. There is, then, a critically important function to disagreements. They can preserve us from idolatry. Disagreements show us that there are ways of thinking other than our own that we must take seriously, seeking to learn from them given the fact that we are fallible. And the other also can learn from us. So the great theological debates within the church should be taken as opportunities rather than crises. They may be God-given times for countering our tendencies toward the idolatry of thinking that Christian perfection is perfect knowledge instead of perfect love. For in the letter to the Philippians, that "mind which was in Christ" was not some encyclopedic knowledge, but the depths of unbounded love. And therefore the first advice for those seeking Christian love is the advice against thinking we have nothing to learn from those whose views oppose our own.

The Second Advice: Beware of Enthusiasm And what is the second advice? Wesley gives it on pages 74-76, telling us to "beware of that child of pride, enthusiasm." This advice is strange to twenty-first century Christians, for whom enthusiasm is considered a good thing. We value enthusiasm as the antithesis of that lukewarmness defining the church at Laodicea in Revelation 3:15. To be enthusiastic, for us, is to care passionately for the gospel, and surely this is good.

But this was not how enthusiasm was defined in Wesley's eighteenth-century England. At that time enthusiasm was supposing that one had a special infusion of God's wisdom, apart from any earthly modes of knowing. It often involved speaking like a seer of things that were to come, something like present day "enthusiasts" who tell us with some satisfaction that as soon as all the Jews of the world crowd into Israel, nuclear weapons will explode in warfare between Israel and the Arab world, creating Armageddon and thus bringing about the return of Christ and the end of the world. Likewise, eighteenth-century enthusiasts saw themselves as having privileged knowledge from God that enabled them to predict earthly events. Enthusiasm, then, was the daughter of pride.

Enthusiasm, Wesley tells us, is also "expecting the end without the means," such as "expecting knowledge without searching the Scriptures and consulting the children of God, expecting spiritual strength without constant prayer and steady watchfulness, expecting any blessing without hearing the word of God at every

opportunity" (page 74). Enthusiasm ignores the means of grace and the humbleness of ordinary Christian love, looking instead for extraordinary manifestations of "gifts of a new kind" (page 75) that it takes to be higher modes of spirituality. In the process, of course, the enthusiast then creates by definition a two-tier structure of Christianity, or what some have called a "holier than thou" complex.

I once experienced this myself, years ago, long before I'd encountered John Wesley's writings. I belonged at the time to a small community church. It was way back in the sixties, when charismatic renewal was sweeping many churches. The pastor of our little church journeyed to a place where people were laying hands on each other, and receiving the gift of tongues. This gift was taken to represent a higher plane of Christianity; and our pastor, thus enthused, came back to our little congregation inviting people to the laying on of hands and the gift of speaking in tongues.

It seems strange now, looking back on it, but there were a number of us who were zealous for going on to this new form of spirituality, experiencing the gifts of the Spirit akin to the days of the apostles. And so I confess that I was one of those who received the laying on of hands and began using this glossolalia in prayer.

In some respects, it seemed a helpful gift; for so often we do not have the words to express our love to God in prayer, and it seemed that this strange new gift released one from the need for words. It was like pouring out one's soul to God in ways that seemed deeper than words could bear. And God, after all, hears us long before our speech, hearing our hearts as our voices. So this speaking in tongues seemed to cut out the muddle of language.

But then I began to notice the effect that this mode of worship was having on the congregation as a whole. Some of the Christians whom I respected most deeply, whose lives showed forth kindness and love in so many ways, just weren't comfortable with these new and unusual ways of worship. And it became apparent that they were feeling that somehow they must be second-class Christians, when it was obvious from their whole lives that they were models of Christian love. This new enthusiasm was creating discord in what had been a unified community. I think I was a heart Methodist long before I became acquainted with Methodism, for it seemed to me that love—that which makes for building up the community—was the criterion of the work of the Spirit. Since these enthusiasms were causing harm in the community, how could they be of God? While they might have value, as seemed apparent in prayer, was not a greater value being lost? And since God always hears the heart anyway, was this glossolalia business necessary? Maybe it was more like a minor convenience sort of thing that would best be dropped for the sake of the wider good, which was the community as a whole, where each was called to care for the other's well-being. The speaking in tongues phenomenon, at least of that particular time, was what Wesley would have called enthusiasm, something that got in the way of love. And so the little church quietly went back to loving God and one another without depending on strange utterances that produced division.

Wesley gives a test for determining that which is merely enthusiasm on page 74, and it includes elements of what Albert Outler eventually came to call the quadrilateral, that fourfold method of developing theology through Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience: Wesley says we are not to "hastily attribute things to God. ... They may be from God. They may be from nature." We are to test things by the Word—but not in a proof-texting sort of way, citing a verse of Scripture as if it answered the whole question, as we could so easily have done in that little church had we simply stayed with the inclusion of speaking in tongues as a spiritual gift, subordinate to love, as recounted in 1 Corinthians 13-14. Instead we are to study

the Scriptures, trying to understand to the best of our ability the context. Today we understand the complexity of context; it is like a spiral, beginning with the peculiarities of the surrounding texts and the structure of the writing, but extending to the cultural and historical context in which the text was written as well. In other words, we are to use all the powers available to us to understand the meaning of a text. This is far from proof texting. And we must use reason, knowledge, and human learning; for, as Wesley says, "Every one of these is an excellent gift of God and may serve the noblest purposes" (page 74). There is a certain irony in his saying this, for of course the enthusiast considers his or her "special" abilities to be extraordinary gifts from God. Wesley points to the ordinariness of everyday things as excellent gifts, always pointing to the greatest gift, which is, finally, simply love, filling the heart and guiding our actions.

Notice that when Wesley describes some things that enthusiasts have mistakenly identified as gifts of a new kind, page 75, he starts with items on which there is common agreement. Enthusiasts—and all Methodists—are enjoined to follow the first six steps for growing in grace: loving God with all our mind, soul, and strength, and seeking oneness with God and Christ. Like the injunction in Colossians 3:3, we are to have our life hid with God in Christ. But then see how the enthusiasts take these things away from the focus on love and turn them to special revelations and to a freedom from the works of love (number 13) and from human frailty (number 14). Christian perfection doesn't use love as the first steps that then take us beyond the works of love or the frailty of our human condition. Rather, love is the purpose of all our steps, it is the fullness of all we could ever hope for; it is the glory of God and the gift of God in Christ. There is nothing higher to which we should aim. "All visions, revelations, manifestations, whatever," says Wesley,

"are small things compared to love" (pages 75). So the enthusiast's mistake is to take love not as the goal but merely as a baby-step means to an end that is not necessarily connected to love at all. This is topsy-turvy, for it is ordinary Christian love to God and neighbor that is extraordinary; love is the beginning, the middle, and the end; there is nothing higher. Beware of enthusiasm.

The Third Advice: Beware of Antinomianism The third advice (pages 76-77) warns us against thinking that love cancels out the law of works. Such thinking is antinomianism, thinking that because we are called to love, works of the law are now null and void. Against this, Wesley points out that Christ "has adopted every point of the moral law and grafted it into the law of love" (page 76). Remember that the Mosaic law was intended to create a society whose laws channeled well-being to all, including the least, who were often litanized as the widow, the orphan, and the stranger (see, for example, Deuteronomy 14:28-29). It is true that the law, as the apostle Paul points out, condemns us by showing us how heartless we can be insofar as we need laws to insure that wellbeing prevails. Clearly, it would be better if we all cared so much that laws were no longer necessary. But this is not so; thus we need laws for at least two reasons.

First, society's laws have as their deepest purpose the guarding of well-being for those who are least. Obviously there are corruptions of the law; too often the law is used to guarantee only the well-being of those who already have well-being. Wesley worked unceasingly for the well-being of the poor, addressing the laws in his own day that worked their ill-being, such as land enclosures that took away public grazing lands and debtors' prisons that punished the poor. And second, on the personal level, love constrains us to do all the good we can to all the people we can. The law

of works is not nullified by love but fulfilled by love.

Notice Wesley's application of this advice on page 76. He begs us not to confine our good works or generosity only to Methodists, "much less to that very small part of them who seem to be renewed in love, or to those who believe yours and their testimony." He tells us not to make this our shibboleth. The word shibboleth is quite interesting, as the marginal notes in this edition of A Plain Account explain.

If you turn to the passage from Judges 12, you will see just what a shibboleth theology is like. Two of the Israelite tribes were warring, and the Gileadites emerged victorious. To be victorious was often to slay those who were the foes—isn't that the way of the victor? The problem, of course, is that they were all Israelites, so there was no particular distinguishing feature whereby the Gileadites could recognize the Ephraimites, the losers. There was, however, a small difference of dialect, for the little word shibboleth was pronounced with a "sh" at the beginning by the Gileadites, and with a straight "s" sound at the beginning by the Ephraimites. The Gileadites had captured the fords, so when anyone attempted to cross the ford, they were forced to say "shibboleth." If they could pronounce it with the "sh" they were allowed across; otherwise, they were slain. And the text tells us that 42,000 met this fate. The interesting thing for us today is that the text doesn't give us any sense at all of what the word meant. It didn't matter what it meant, only that it was pronounced correctly.

Don't we do that sometimes in judging one another's faith? We set up certain dogmas, declaring that in order to be a right Christian you must believe them—for example, the virgin birth or original sin. But oddly enough, we do not require that people understand how the doctrines developed or what they might have meant in their original formulations, only that they "believe" them. And if they don't, they are clearly not the right kind of Christians. We no longer take off their heads, but there are other ways of putting people down when we have a shibboleth theology.

For Wesley, the shibboleth was restricting love and the works that flow from love only to those who are most like ourselves in terms of doctrine and lifestyle.

"Do not make this your shibboleth!" (page 76). Far from despising either works or the means of grace, we are to be a people generous toward all.

Antinomianism, then, or thinking that there is no longer any use for law, works radically against love. Therefore, those who desire to grow in Christian love should be zealous for those works that express Christian love, whether socially through enacting laws that channel love, or personally—and congregationally— through good works that flow from depths of caring for the well-being of all.

One further consequence of antinomianism was to despise the ordinances of God as means of grace. Just as the antinomian spirit considered itself above the commands to express love in good works, the antinomian also considered himself or herself to be so blessed of God as to be beyond the need for any of the ordinary means of grace, such as study or worship services or disciplines of prayer or taking

Holy Communion. To the antinomian, these things are helps for those who have not yet achieved true freedom from the law. The antinomian, then, valued freedom more than love, using freedom as a form of self-indulgence that obviated any need for discipline or good works: But Wesley's response continues to insist that the humility of love is the goal of Christian existence; there is no higher way. And the ordinances of God—whether spiritual disciplines, worship, or the sacraments— are means to opening us still further to the influences of God upon us in every moment. And the end to which God's influence is directed is that we shall become more deeply loving people. Therefore, we must not despise the means of grace but

in a sense flee to them in gratitude for these methods by which we might become ever more attuned to the love of God for us, flowing through us, inspiring our own love to others.

The Fourth Advice: Beware of Sins of Omission The fourth and fifth advices follow naturally after the cautions against antinomianism. The fourth advice warns us to beware of sins of omission. It is fairly simple to understand what Wesley means by sins of omission, particularly given his advice concerning antinomianism; for antinomianism most surely falls into the danger of sins of omission. In contrast, Wesley tells us that if we desire Christian perfection, we are not to neglect any opportunity for doing good of any kind (page

77). To me one of the most compelling illustrations of this teaching is Wesley's own life.

1am profoundly moved by a passage from his journal recounting how, during a bitterly cold January, he fretted that the poor needed not only coal and bread but clothing as well; but the Society did not have enough money for the clothing. So Wesley went out into the streets of London for four days, begging for funds to buy clothes for the poor. "It was hard work, as most of the streets were filled with melting snow, which often lay ankle deep; so that my feet were steeped in snow-water nearly from morning till evening." His efforts yielded two hundred pounds! The date of this journal entry is January 4, 1785: John Wesley was 81 years old. "Do not neglect any opportunity for doing good" indeed.

The Fifth Advice: Beware of Desiring Anything But God Wesley's advice concerning desiring nothing but God might seem a bit unusual, given his strong commitment to love of neighbor. For Wesley, though, love of God could never be separated from love of neighbor; the two commandments were two sides of one coin. Perhaps Psalm 37:4 clarifies the point, for the psalmist tells us that we are to delight ourselves in the Lord, and the Lord will give us the desires of our heart. The implication, of course, is that if indeed we delight in the Lord, the desires of our heart will change into conformity with God's own desires and God's unbounded love. Contrary to this, there is still the peculiar notion abroad that connects holiness with material wealth: "Delight yourself in God," such foolishness might say, "and you will get that red convertible, or great riches, or .. ." This kind of thinking is to delight not in God, but in mammon. As if to underscore such a point, Wesley includes these stringent words under this advice: "Allow no desire of pleasing food or any other pleasure of sense. Allow no desire of pleasing the eye or the imagination by anything grand, or new, or beautiful. Allow no desire of money, praise, or esteem. Do not desire happiness in any creature" (page 77).

Taken on their own, these words suggest a strong asceticism—and there is an element of asceticism in Wesley. But the full A Plain Account tempers these words.

For example, in this passage we are not to desire "pleasing food," but on page 46 we are told that we might prefer pleasing to unpleasing food as a way of increasing our thankfulness to God, and that pleasures can increase our delight in God. Is

Wesley saying two contradictory things, then? I think not. Rather, his point is that the dominating focus of one's life is to be the love from and toward God, and all other things have their place in relation to this focal point. Thus, "do not desire happiness in any creature" is not a contradiction to Wesley's lifelong care to alleviate the desperation and deprivations of poverty. He cared enough that people should be protected from the cold that he braved the sleet-filled streets himself; he fostered cottage industries that would provide means of sustenance for those whose

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lives had become impoverished by changing social structures; he took great care about people's nutrition and health. Surely the happiness of those he helped was not irrelevant. And surely he was not so impervious to what makes for happiness to think that warmth instead of cold could not be a cause of cheer. But he knew in the depths of his being that the fount of all joy—may we call it happiness?—comes from the grace and love of the sustaining God. Happiness is not the goal but the byproduct of the chief goal, which is openness to the grace and love of God.

To desire God is to delight in God, and to delight in God is to delight in that which delights God, which is the well-being of all creation. If God so loved the world that God gave Jesus Christ, then should we not also love the world toward its highest well-being? And doesn't that highest well-being entail love, a mutuality of love whereby all creation is interconnected in a mighty caring for one another's good, to the glory of God? Thus "you simply aim at pleasing God, whether by doing or suffering" (page 78), and all lesser goals fall into their rightful place.

The Sixth Advice: Beware of Schism We come now to the sixth advice, which stands on a par with the first concerning pride and unteachableness, only now in an even stronger application to the community than is obvious in the first advice alone. That is, in the first advice it is not too difficult to read the advice purely in terms of the individual. While it does indeed apply to every individual, its import is toward the community, and this becomes apparent in the sixth advice. "Beware of schism," says Wesley, "or causing separation within the church of Christ. Such internal division begins when sisters and brothers in Christ, the members of his body, no longer have love 'for one another'" (page 78). Obviously, this advice relates to what happens when we ignore the first advice, which is to recognize our fallibility and to engage in learning from one another, whether the other agrees with us or not. This is reinforced by "Do not tolerate any thought of separating from your brothers and sisters, whether their opinions agree with yours or not. Do not dream that anyone sins because he or she doesn't believe you or take your word, or that this or that opinion is essential to the work, and both must stand or fall together" (page 78). What could be stronger?

The plain sense is that theological differences of opinion are to be expected, not discouraged, in the community of faith. The unanimity to be sought is the unanimity of caring, respect, and love within the community.

Often we take disagreements in the church, particularly those where feelings run deep and the gulf between positions is seemingly unbridgeable, as signs of great sin.

We think that one side is clearly right, the other side is clearly wrong, and the best way to deal with the issue is to get rid of the other side by conversion or rejection, and so to establish the "pure" church where everyone agrees on important issues. But when we are tempted in these directions, we have lost sight of the wisdom of Wesley.

Deeply held disagreements become the occasion to exercise love by openness to learning from one another. In the process, we are protected from the idolatry of supposing that "our" side—whichever one that may be—is infallibly right.

Remember that these advices are precisely to Methodists, both individually and as a whole, to lead them'toward Christian perfection, Christian love. This is the end toward which each advice works. We need to interpret Wesley's strong caution against schism in terms of the unlove that schism represents. To argue that it is absolutely necessary to split the body of Christ because of what appears to be irresolvable disagreement is to assume that one party is infallibly correct in whatever the issue is. But this is idolatry, taking one's own thinking as equivalent to the infal-

lible judgment of God. First, such idolatry absolutely refuses to learn from those who differ from a given opinion. It is, therefore, a despising of the other, a refusal of love. It is unlove. Second, such a split assumes that intellectual or ethical agreement is more important than love. Like the enthusiasts, it subordinates love to something else, in this case, to right opinion. In doing so, far from seeking communion with the other, it seeks separation; but this is to stop the possibility of living in one community/congregation/denomination in love. It is unlove.

Against this, Wesley instructs us to "expect contradiction and opposition, together with crosses of various kinds" (page 79). Rather than viewing these contrary views and people as a sad misfortune in the church, Wesley says we should be thankful, seeing their presence as from God and, therefore, as "useful and necessary to you" (page 79). Think of this in relation to growth in love. Loving only those with whom we agree is like trying to build up muscle strength by exercising with a feather.

But loving those with whom we disagree is exercising with the hard stuff; it demands pushing our ability to love to places it has not yet reached, and we grow in Christian perfection. Thus we are to view disagreements as opportunities to exercise love.

The love that we exercise is deeper than mere emotional warmth, although it certainly can include such warmth. Love respects the intentions of the other, whether one feels warmth toward the other or not; love cares beyond one's emotions toward the well-being of the other; love seeks to break beyond all boundaries in concern for the other. Love does not require that the other be simply a mirror of oneself; love delights in the otherness of the other and seeks relation, learning, mutual caring. Love creates dialogue, assuming that the other also respects oneself or one's own party, and that the other also seeks learning and mutual caring. This is essential not only for the person who seeks to grow in love but for the community as well. Schism cuts all of these possibilities away, like some guillotine severing a head from its body. Schism denies the possibility of love and therefore lessens the body of Christ by denying the possibility of Christian perfection. Schism is like a cancer on the body, creating disease and ill-being. Wesley cautions us to shun it like the plague it is.

Strong disagreement can hurt one's own sense of self; it challenges the rightness of one's own position and, therefore, can feel like an undercutting of one's personal integrity. The defensive response is often anger toward the other and a lashing out in righteous indignation. But Wesley cautions us not to be "thinskinned, irritable, or combative," and we are to receive contradictions and oppositions "with humility, meekness, gentleness, and sweetness" (page 79). By recognizing our own fallibility, and the great importance of the body of Christ, we can grow beyond our defensiveness and reach toward a genuine care for the other.

Schism, then, is a terrible witness that the body of Christ has failed in its love.

In times past, such failures have indeed been accompanied by bloodshed and hatred in the name of correct belief. The bloodshed and hatred are but the consequences of pride and self-righteousness that ultimately lead to schism. Hence Wesley's strongest words to those seeking Christian perfection are to guard against all temptation to divide Christ's body so wantonly, and to seek instead to use the occasion of disagreement and disapproval as opportunities to reach new heights of learning how to love.

The Seventh Advice: Be Exemplary in All Things After these six advices designed to help us toward Christian perfection, toward being a people whose hearts and minds are filled with the love of God governing all our thoughts and actions, what advice could possibly be left? Why, just one! Wesley

finally advises us to "be exemplary in all things" (page 80). He tells us in this shortest advice of all that we should be careful in our dress, in little things, in the use of money. And we should look to the usefulness of our lives in this world, for the one who loves loses no opportunity to care for the well-being of those who are loved.

Since God's love is boundless, we who seek to be filled with the love of God put no boundaries on our own love. It is no wonder that one of the goals of Methodism is

"to spread scriptural holiness over these lands" ("Our Theological Task," The Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church), for scriptural holiness is nothing other than Christian perfection, and Christian perfection is nothing other than love. As a Methodist people, given to growth in the love of God, we shall, as Wesley says, be "a light shining in a dark place," daily growing in grace, until

"entry into the eternal kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will be richly provided" for us. So may we be.

Have you ever sat around a campfire on a summer evening, watching sparks take off from the flames like fireflies flitting into the softly beckoning night? While the fire keeps burning, these little spinoffs delight us with their randomness, till they disappear into the enveloping darkness. Something like this happens at the end of A Plain Account. The fiery focus on Christian perfection continues to the end: Wesley not only summarizes his whole teaching on pages 86-87 (paragraph number 26), but, unable yet to leave it, he concludes with an even briefer summary on page 91 ("Brief

Thoughts on Christian Perfection"). Make no mistake, the subject is Christian perfection. But suddenly toward the end of this book, little sparks begin to fly off, reaching for the starry heights. These sparks are rather astonishing teachings on prayer, tossed off almost as an afterthought as Wesley summarizes Christian perfection.

It's not as if Wesley saves all mention of prayer until these closing pages. To the contrary, since he holds that prayer without ceasing is a part of Christian perfection, he has certainly referred to prayer at various points throughout the book.

But here at the end he says rather unusual things about prayer. My thinking is that this is because the book recounts not only his teaching but the manner in which Christian perfection informed the way he lived his whole life through. The last entry in the book is dated 1767, when Wesley was 64 years old. He was a man of prayer, and one learns a thing or two through a lifetime of praying. So I strongly suspect that these strange sparks simply reflect his own continuously deepening experience. He was not intending to teach us a theology of prayer; to the contrary, he intended to teach us plainly about Christian perfection. His "sparks" about prayer spring from his own inner life. To learn from this great man is to let his experience enter our own. His sparks on prayer become invitations to us in our own praying, testing out what he says, seeing where it leads us.

So let us follow these sparks, put them together, and see what they tell us about Christian perfection.

Spark 1: Participating in God's Creative Power The first spark, on page 81, follows the concluding advice concerning exemplary living. He says:

Although all the graces of God depend on God's abundance, God is generally pleased to attach them to the prayers, the teaching, and the holiness of those whom God gives to be our examples in faith.

At first glance this sentence might slip right by us; we might not think it strange to say that God generally attaches grace to the prayers of others. And, of course, in this passage it is not only prayer but teaching and exemplary living that

are means whereby the grace of God comes to us. Whereas traditionally the sacraments were considered the means of grace, Wesley broadens the understanding, seeing God as using every available means to mediate grace to us. God is gracious!

But push the thought about God's grace attached to prayer for a bit, for it suggests an awesome thing. God is full of grace, and grace is that active will toward our good, that generosity of love, that superabundance of sharing from the divine nature itself. In the deepest sense, grace depends not upon us, but upon God's own self. Grace describes God's nature. Well, then, why do our prayers enter into the availability of grace at all? We need to check out similar statements from Wesley to probe his meaning.

On page 83, in (5), Wesley says:

God does nothing but in answer to prayer. Even the people who have been converted to God without praying for it themselves (which is extremely rare) were prayed for by others. Every new victory that a soul gains is the effect of a new prayer.

The context, of course, is conversion. Nonetheless, is it not remarkable for him to say that "God does nothing but in answer to prayer"? There is one more pertinent spark on this theme on page 85:

God frequently conceals the part that we children have in the conversion of other souls. However, whenever a soul is converted to God, we may boldly say that one of the chief causes is the person who persistently intercedes before God for that conversion.

The force of all three of these passages from Wesley is that there is a kind of cooperation between us and God, a sort of responsiveness that becomes a vehicle of grace. The source of grace is God's own character, but the operation of grace seems to be tied in some way to the creature's response. Of course we could simply explain this away by noting that this is how Wesley talks about prevenient grace, but we must first notice that these sparks about prayer qualify our usual understanding of prevenient grace. Usually, this grace affirms the pervasive presence of God to all people. This presence in itself depends upon the omnipresence of God, the fact that there is nowhere that God is not. And since God is gracious, clearly

God's presence anywhere is gracious as well. Prevenient grace is that "calling grace" that goes before us, enabling us to be responsive to God.

But Wesley is deepening that definition by connecting the release of grace to prayer. Indeed, by going so far as to say that "God does nothing but in answer to prayer," even in the context of conversion, he is indicating something radical about the creative power of God. How strange it is! Before we rush to call the statement a hyperbole, think about the wonder in saying that God does nothing except in answer to prayer. What if prayer isn't something that just emerges with human existence? What if prayer says something fundamental about God's creative power, even before God called human beings into existence?

Think about the possibilities. The earth is very old, and humans are relatively young. If dinosaurs lived for millions of years, we fragile little humans are merely thousands of years old—not very old at all in the larger scale of things. But did dinosaurs pray? What about before dinosaurs? Do plants pray? mud? rocks? What sense does it make to say that God does nothing except in answer to prayer when there are no humans to pray?

Play with the notion that all existence, not just the part that is rational, has some form of power to respond to God. After all, doesn't the book of Genesis talk about creation as a kind of calling and responding process long before humans are created? Genesis 1 suggests that God speaks a word, and in response to that word something comes into existence. God then judges that response ("and God saw that it was good") and calls again. Each call builds upon the previous response, so that an orderly creation emerges. And everything that is, is what it is in and through its responsiveness to the creative call of God.

Genesis speaks in terms of vast generalities: light, land, vegetation, animals, humans. But as we look at the creation around us, we know that each of these is multiple; and Genesis also would have it so. The ocean teems with different kinds of fish, the air is filled with birds, and vegetation is a flourishing mass of plants and trees. If we think about God's massive creation of so great a variety of things in light of Wesley's connection of grace and prayer, it suggests that God's call is not some distant thing, heard across vast expanses, but that God's call is always a near thing, closer to us than our jugular veins, as an old Rabbinic saying would have it. Creation, then, is an intimate thing between God and that which God is calling into being. The response is deeply important to what happens next, and insofar as responses are variable, so is creation. Creation itself is an act of grace that involves call and response in a kind of dance between God and that which is coming into being.

God Does Nothing But in Answer to Prayer If you have followed me thus far, now is the time to look again at Wesley's statement, "God does nothing but in answer to prayer." Wouldn't it be so? God's creative power is exercised in awesome calls that are near, enabling, empowering.

But the reason God creates in such a way is that a response is required. "Let there be..." calls for an answer, so that cells are created, are organized, and spring into various forms of existence in response to God. Is this not a rudimentary form of prayer? Maybe the creative dance between God and all creatures is the seed of what will become conscious communion with God, once God calls into existence creatures who can sustain this communion. How intimate, then, is creation! Once, we might have thought of God's creating power as a far-off act of transcendent might, but with Wesley we reconceptualize God's creativity as the wooing, immanent power of God that works with us. That brooding Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters in Genesis is close, as close as prayer. When we pray, then, we are participating in God's creative power. What overflowing grace! Prayer, or responsiveness to God, is like a channel through which God's grace flows, so that between the call and the response something happens.

This thought is reinforced by Wesley's statement on page 83 about "the need we have of grace to sustain the life of God in the soul. This life God gives can no more survive one moment without God's grace than the body can without air." God's creative power did not stop at some moment in the long-ago past, as if creation were a once-upon-a-time sort of thing. Rather, the creative power of God's call and the creatures' responses that we see in Genesis is always operative. If it weren't, creation would cease. And this action of God is the basis of what we know as prayer. God calls; we respond. Prayer is a response to the ever-present calling grace of God.

It is not so strange to say such a thing. Wesley, after all, was no follower of Calvinistic notions of predestination; he did not think God arranged who would respond this way or that to the gospel call. To the contrary, Wesley was convinced that we are responsible for how we respond to the grace of God. God works with

us, not on us. The different happenings of the world show how we have responded to the ever-given prevenient, creative, and empowering grace of God. The little statement "God does nothing but in answer to prayer" suggests that through prayer we have insight into the way God works not just with us but with all of creation.

Applied to our own life then, particularly in the way we turn to God in conversion,

Wesley's statements make eminent sense. Prayer opens us to God's calling, and insofar as we respond to those calls, channels are opened through which God's creative grace pours. When we pray, the creative grace of God pours through us to do what

God can do now that we are open to the work of God.

Obviously this can affect our own lives, but it can also affect the lives of others. Prayers make a difference to what can happen to someone else. This is no magic thing; it is the way of God's working in the whole universe. Prayer is an opening to the grace of God so that things happen in the world that could not happen apart from prayer. God works through our responsiveness, our intentional opening of ourselves to the work of God so that we can be used of God in God's work in the world.

Does this mean we control what God can do? No, it simply means we make a difference to what God does. God working through prayer does not mean that everything we pray for is going to happen, because there is no way that we know all the circumstances about which we pray. Remember Wesley's comments about the "hedges" of outward circumstances that surround us, limiting our possibilities?

We do not know what hedges might affect the outcome of our prayers. All we know is that prayer is going to make a difference. What that difference is, is up to God and what God is doing with the rest of the world. We who follow Wesley, then, must take prayer with utmost seriousness.

Spark 2: Bearing the Faults of Others and Our Own Turn now to yet another spark. This one begins on page 82:

We ought to quietly suffer whatever befalls us, to bear the faults of others and our own, to confess them to God in secret prayer or with groans that are too deep to be spoken in words. ..

. We are to bear with those we cannot change and be content with offering them to God.

This teaching is rather alarming. To catch its full force, imagine that you know someone whom you consider to have a contentious spirit. This person manages to stir up trouble, instigating enmity between groups of people, all in the name of something righteous. In your opinion, you rather think this person is at fault, with a kind of self-righteousness that looks down on those in other camps. You certainly would not name this person as a model of Christian perfection. Perhaps it would not be too out of line to think that you somewhat despise this person; but whether you do or not, you sadly think that this person is certainly sinning in these destructive attitudes and actions.

Now go back to Wesley's teaching. We are to "bear the faults of others and our own, to confess them to God in secret prayer." The practical import of this statement is that when we judge someone to be acting wrongfully, we are to recognize our own faults as well and confess both to God in secret prayer. We are accustomed to the fact that we are to confess our own sins before God, but to confess the sin of the other as if it were our own? How can this be? But notice how practicing this leads to Christian love.

For one thing, if we confess the sins of the other as if they were our own, it means that we must reckon with our own tendencies toward the same sins we identify in the other. We are no stranger to those negative attitudes and actions we are confessing. Perhaps, by the grace of God, we have not actualized those sins; or perhaps, given circumstances, we do not have the same "hedges" around us that the other has. Perhaps we are less tempted toward these sins. But the capacity to sin in those ways is nonetheless within us. By confessing the sins as if they were our own, we begin to identify with the one for whom we pray.

But don't we say that our own salvation comes about in Christ's identification with us in our sin? If we identify with the other, is this not a Christlike activity?

And just as Christ's identification with us springs from divine love, perhaps it is the case that our identification with the other can begin to mediate divine love toward that other. Our naming their sin—not in self-righteousness, but in solidarity despite the distastefulness of the sins we have identified—may be used by God toward the other's good. And it will certainly soften our own hearts toward the other. So we are to "bear with the other," content to offer her or him to God in our prayers.

If we follow Wesley in this teaching, there are wondrous implications for how we would be church together. We would not only be praying for others, but we would know that as others saw faults or sins in us, they would be faithfully lifting us to God, confessing our sins as their own, asking God's strengthening forgiveness for us. We would be bearing one another's burdens, and so fulfilling the law of Christ, as the apostle Paul writes about in Galatians 6:2. We would be recognizing our common humanity, our common struggles. We might grow in humility as well as in love. How caring our churches would be!

Spark 3: Praying Without Ceasing But there are further sparks. In the concluding paragraphs of Paul's first letter to the Thessalonians, Paul writes "rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). Wesley often cites these characteristics as expressions of Christian perfection. On page 83 he expands on unceasing prayer.

When we think of or speak to God, whether we act or suffer for God, all is prayer when we have no other goal than God's love and the desire to please God.

All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer when it is done in simplicity, according to the command of God, without either adding to or diminishing from it by personal choice.

Prayer continues in the desire of the heart, though the understanding is worked out in outward actions.

In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a ceaseless prayer.

... All God requires ..

. is that... they continually offer to God the desires and promises that naturally flow from perfect love. These desires, being the genuine fruits of love, are the most perfect prayers that can flow from such love.

Wesley describes the whole of life as a kind of living prayer. This can happen because of the distinction he makes between "the desire of the heart" and "outward actions." That is, by no means does he suggest that in order to be a living prayer, one must stay on one's knees in a holy place for hours at a time. Rather, he is referring to a kind of basic resting in the presence of God that is at the same time an orientation of openness to God. This is the depth level of one's being,

even as one goes about one's ordinary daily work.

Remember the discussion above about creation and the need for God's sustaining grace in every moment of our lives. Ask yourself how you experience this grace.

If you simply think in terms of your consciousness, you might be chagrined to say that you do not really notice grace much except in special times. But Wesley says you live by the grace of God in every moment. God's grace is constantly infused into you at the depth levels of your being. You are so used to it that you do not notice it, much as you do not really notice the air you breathe unless suddenly it is taken away. God is always present to you.

The life of Christian perfection assumes this constancy of God's gracious presence. It becomes the fundamental lodestone of one's being, the sine qua non of one's life. God pervades life at its deepest levels, always present in the depths of all things, including each person.

The purpose of God's presence is gracious. Grace is God's empowering call to us toward that which is best in our particular circumstances. Since we can count on God's guidance toward the good, our conscious lives are not constantly probing our inward states of being. Rather, we trust God to be working within us, and therefore we are free to think and act about whatever occupies our days and our cares in this world. It is as if there is a deep resting place for our spirits, even while we are mightily engaged in some energetic work.

Because of this trust in the God who is present toward our good, when we experience anxiety—as we most assuredly will from time to time—our response is to take that fundamental trust in God into our conscious thinking and orient ourselves to God in prayer. It is possible for the peace of God to break through our anxieties so that we can deal with those anxieties as well as with the situations that provoke anxiety.

Prayer without ceasing, then, is a fundamental stance of trust in the living presence of God toward the good, no matter what our circumstances. It is an utmost dependence upon the grace of God, underlying all that we do or think. It releases us for the intensities of life, and for Wesley these intensities included countless hours on horseback, preaching, organizing, dealing with problems and issues of the societies, dealing with personal relationships, writing, reading, meeting with friends and colleagues, and of course the daily activities of meals and sleep. Who could think of a more industrious person than Wesley? Praying without ceasing does not cut into the things we have to do; it is a release and freedom for those things precisely because it is the underlying foundation of our whole lives. Or, as Wesley says on page 84, "Add to constant watchfulness and prayer steady employment." Praying without ceasing is a freeing thing, enabling our zest for fulfilling

God's call in our lives.

Intentional Times of Prayer But lest we think, "Because I pray always, I don't need a set time for private prayer," Wesley has a strong caution. This actually comes from his third advice against antinomianism on page 76. The antinomians, as you recall, felt they were above all law and beyond all disciplines, and Wesley rightly cautions us against antinomianism. He sees a rhythm between the fundamental trust in God that is unceasing prayer and the intentional times of bringing concerns, praise, thanksgiving, and intercessions before God. Each actually informs the other. Intentional times of prayer strengthen our underlying trust in God, and the underlying trust in God rises to expression in set times of prayer. Remember, prayer is not only an orienta-

tion; it is also a work that mediates grace to the world. Therefore, it is essential that we do that work, offering our prayers to God so that God may use them to further

God's own purposes in the world. It is a sad and weakening mistake to assume that we pray without ceasing and therefore need no special times of prayer.

Set times of prayer are also important because, as Wesley says on page 84, "It is good to renew ourselves from time to time by thorough self-examination of the state of our soul as if we have never examined it before." The underlying trust in God must not be taken as an automatic purification of our lives; we can drift into a complacency that hinders our spiritual growth. We can easily drift into an acceptance of hurtful attitudes simply because we become accustomed to them. To counter this, prayer is necessary as an openness to God in self-examination, questioning ourselves in the presence of the One who cares most for our good. Unceasing prayer, then, must be supplemented by various kinds of intentional prayers.

Spark 4: Connecting Through Corporate Prayer Wesley also strongly states that prayer must be corporate, and not simply personal. That is, if one were of a pietistic bent, one could easily think that the most important kind of praying is that done privately before God alone. But remember, we are part of the body of Christ; and God works with us not as if we were the sole individual in the entire world but as members of the body of Christ. Corporate prayers are absolutely essential to the life of faith. He talks about this on page 78:

As one said, "That part of our community, the private weekly meetings for prayer, examination, and instruction, has been the greatest means of deepening and confirming every blessing that was received by the word preached and of spreading it to others who could not attend the public ministry. Without this religious connection and fellowship, the most ardent attempts by mere preaching have proved of no lasting use." and also on page 84:

We ought to be in the church as the saints are in heaven, and in the house as the holiest people are in the church, doing our work in the house as we pray in the church, worshiping God from the depths of the heart.

By "the private weekly meetings," he is referring to the small groups that were essential to the Wesleyan societies. Public worship was supplemented by the organization of small bands that met at a specified time for praying, talking about one's spiritual journey, and teaching. Prayer is not just private but must also be corporate, and corporate prayers foster spiritual growth for both the individuals and the society as a whole, and therefore for the society's influence and work in the world. Spiritual growth, of course, is always connectional; it relates us more deeply toward one another in love and binds us in loving actions toward those beyond our own circles.

Think about the corporate praying that usually takes place during a Sunday morning worship service. While the pastor is praying, he or she is doing so not as an individual but as the voice of the congregation lifted to God. The work of the congregation during that corporate prayer is to echo it in their own hearts, joining with the pastor and with one another as the unified body of Christ—whether in confession, intercession, thanksgiving, or simple praise. In the process, we are both individual and corporate at the same time.

Korean Christians have learned this lesson well. Often in Korean worship 14]

there is a time when all members of the congregation pray together individually, aloud, simultaneously. Each voices the concerns of his or her heart and the needs of the wider community. Because each is using his or her own words, the prayer is personal; but because all are doing this together at the same time, the prayers are deeply corporate. There is an attunement to one another in the praying, so that the voices rise and fall together, like a choir creating an anthem. One could hardly find a stronger illustration of the sense in which prayers are personal and corporate at the same time.

There is another implication in the fact that we are called to corporate prayer.

We are together the body of Christ. It is not just that we are the body of Christ when we come together for Sunday worship; we are always the body of Christ.

Thus when we pray in solitude, there is a sense in which we are only seemingly solitary, for we are still part of the body of Christ. Our personal praying has a corporate dimension, just as our corporate praying has a personal dimension. Because we are one body in Christ, the sharp lines we tend to draw between individuals and the church as a whole shift and blur; they are moving lines, manifest now in this way, now in that. Our prayers, offered in the name of Christ, unite us as one body.

It is necessary and good, then, that the corporate dimension of our praying should come to expression where two or three or more are gathered together, our separate prayers joining as a single offering to God.

Spark 5: Offering Our Good Works as Prayer Thus far we have been focusing on Wesley's words about prayer that refer to our common understanding of prayer: private prayer, corporate prayer, underlying prayer, confessional prayer, and prayer as a means of grace. But Wesley does not confine prayer to these traditional activities. He also thinks of the good works that we do as a kind of prayer.

If we were not utterly impotent, our good works would be our own property. But now they belong entirely to God because they flow from God and from God's grace. While giving rise to our works and making them sanctified, God is honored in us through them.

One of the cardinal rules of religion is to lose no opportunity to serve God. Because God cannot be seen, we are to serve God in our neighbor.

God receives such service as if it were done to God in person, standing visibly before us.

... Charity [good works] cannot be practiced correctly unless. .

. [we] offer it to God in humble thanksgiving. (page 85) All of this, of course, follows from life as unceasing prayer. If the foundation is prayer, then all that follows is itself a form of prayer. Works of love are forms of worship offered to God, who empowers the works in the first place through unceasing grace.

But doesn't Wesley carry this to awesome extremes in the passage quoted? We are quite comfortable with the fact that we offer our works to God as a form of worship. Usually we understand this to be done in personal prayer. That is, we do the work and then offer it to God. But in this text, the actual doing of the work is already worship. Look at that line: "God receives such service as if it were done to God in person, standing visibly before us." This concept is radical! It reminds us of the passage in Matthew 25 where Jesus says that inasmuch as we have done good to the least of these, we have done it to him. Wesley says that God stands before us

in the person of our neighbor, and that as we serve the neighbor, we are in fact serving God. And God accepts this service as worship. What could be more holy than this?

If we consider this teaching in the light of Christian perfection, it is not at all strange. We are told that we are to develop all of our powers—mental, emotional, physical—to the glory of God, and the glory of God is the love of God. We are told that the work of salvation is the renewal of the image of God in us, and love is this image. The love of God extends to all; it is expressed as grace; it is boundless; it encompasses all of creation, including the person "standing visibly before us." The love of God in us energizes us to act in conformity with the love of God. But that is precisely to meet the needs of the ones God loves, and those are all creatures. Acting in love toward the other, then, is like completing the circuit of God's love. It is the renewed image of God in the creature, which means that it is God's love toward the other exercised through us. This is the highest of callings, the highest of gifts, the highest form of worship, and it is Christian perfection. In this perfection, we love and serve our neighbor; in doing so, we love and serve God.

As usual, Wesley sees the possible pitfall in all of this, which is that we might get so enamored of thus serving God that we take great pride in it. After all, isn't it our service to God? Wesley saw a certain danger to good works. Works can subvert us from love of God that drives the works in the first place. And this thought brings us to the final spark concerning prayer with which Wesley concludes the book, just prior to his summaries. It also reveals why "spark" is such an appropriate metaphor for prayer.

Wesley begins to deal with the problem in the last lines of 85, which we have already considered and which speak of offering our works to God in prayer. When we do this, Wesley says we unite ourselves to God, in whom the soul expands itself in prayer, with all the graces we have received and the good works we have done, to draw from God new strength against the bad effects these very works may produce in us if we do not make use of the antidotes God has ordained against these poisons.

When we offer our works to God as prayer in the very doing of the works, then the works never do belong to us. They belong to God, for they are given to God in the process of doing them. This is easy to illustrate. When we give a gift to someone we love, perhaps for a special occasion such as a birthday or Christmas, we do not consider that the gift is really ours. It is not ours at all, not like some loan we are making to the person, whom we then allow to use our gift even though it is really ours. Even in the purchasing or making of the gift, we think of it as belonging to the one for whom we intend it. And once it is actually given, it is wholly the other's; it is within his or her ownership. The same is so when we give the gift of our works to God. They do not belong to us any more than birthday presents given to another belong to us. Gifts belong to the one to whom they are given. Doing good works in the spirit of prayer and worship, then, means that the works are always God's. And since it doesn't make sense to pride ourselves on something that is not ours, there's no point in priding ourselves in works. They are not ours; they are God's.

In the passage quoted, Wesley speaks of the offering of our works to God as a uniting with God. See how he continues this theme under the image of fire on page 86:

Fire is the symbol of love. The love of God is the beginning and the end of all our good works. But truth surpasses symbol. The fire of divine love has this advantage over material fire: it can return to its source and raise with it all the good works that it produces. In so doing it prevents corruption by pride, vanity, or any evil mixture. This can be done only when these good works have their beginning and their end in God. This is done through deep gratitude that plunges the soul into God as into an abyss. All that it is and all the grace and works for which it is indebted to God must be returned to God. This is a gratitude through which the soul seems to empty itself of good works so that they may return to their source, like rivers seem willing to empty themselves when they pour themselves into the sea.

When we have received any blessing from God, we need to withdraw, if not into our prayer closets then into our hearts, and say, "I come, Lord, to restore to you what you have given."

These ending words of A Plain Account of Christian Perfection recall words given near the very beginning, on page 13:

Let the spirit return to God that gave it, with all that it holds dear. God does not ask of us any sacrifices other than the living

Jesus, thine all-victorious love sacrifice of the heart. Let our hearts be constantly offered up to God through Christ in flames of holy love.

Shed in my heart abroad!

Then shall my feet no longer rove, Rooted and fixed in God.

It is more than our works that are offered to God in loving worship; it is ourselves. And if prayer is an openness to God in communion, then prayer is an instance in time of that which is our everlasting desO that in me the sacred fire

Might now begin to glow, Burn up the dross of base desire, And make the mountains flow! tiny. We are like those flames ascending to God. We who are called to be living prayers to God are the sparks flying—no (the image changes from heights to depths), plunging—into God. We are not only the sparks flying, the flames soaring, but the rivers emptying themselves into the sea of God. Our lives lived in Christian perfection, ever growing to the fulfillment of all the powers with which God created us, are wholly prayers. We are renewed in love, energized for love, and all the time we are uniting with God in and through our union with one another. We are bound together in love in this river of life flowing into God. And this is Christian perfection.

O that it now from heaven might fall, And all my sins consume!

Come, Holy Ghost, for thee I call, Spirit of burning, come!

Refining fire, go through my heart, Illuminate my soul; Scatter thy life through every part, And sanctify the whole.

My prayer hath power with God; the grace unspeakable I now receive; through faith I see thee face to face, I see thee face to face, and live!

Collection, #351; stanzas 4, 7-9 In vain I have not wept and strove— thy nature, and thy name is Love.

Charles Wesley Come, O Thou Traveler Unknown

THEOLOGY LIBRARY

CLAREMONT, CALIF

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) Game em We, i Ge Gan, Ga ae PRAY IN a So wirkt — — | Praying With John Wesley, by David

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Dawid A. deSilva A Pocket Story of John Wesley, by Charles A. Sauer, tells the life story of the father of Methodism.

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This expanded version of A Perfect Love makes the works of John accessible to those who want to understand Wesley's spiritual si; 19 a Dr. Steven acstegine provides a modernlanguage version of Wesl us better Sa our spite journey. Manskar inelutiea' a We chronology, a brief listing of Wesley's earlier writings referenced i in A Plain Account, and a defining description of Wesley's theology

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' Also included in this volume:

Dr. Marjorie Suchocki offers a careful theologicaand spiritual reflection on Wesley's work.

Dr. Diana Hynson provides a study guide for individuals and small groups. a Using this thought-provoking material as a starting place, readers and students of Wesley be encouraged to work through their own reflections on the text, related notes, and Scrip

"Those who are new to the writings of Wesley need to read this book, and seasoned students should read it again in this new edition. A valuable reference-for all who seek

a resource not only for helping people understand their Methodist heritage, but also

—Dr. David Lowes Watson, author of about what kind of life God is calling us to Covenant Discipleship and other books.

—Dr. Sarah Heaner Lancaster, Associa " to walk with Christ and learn his mind."

Theology, Methodist Theological . provides a helpful way for contemporary readers to engage again Wesley's most extended affirmation of how

God's grace can truly renew our hearts... ." a"

—Dr. Randy L. Maddox, Paul T. Walls Professor of Wesleyan Theology, Seattle Pacific University

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