Wesleyan Theology
Wesleyan Theology » Melvin E. Dieter In this essay I hope to provide some sense of how the Aldersgate event of two hundred and fifty years ago shaped a theology in which persons today still are finding windows to a renewed vision for a Church that is groping for direction within a welter of confusing change. Some degree of oversimplification and presumption is inescapable in so brief arf attempt to describe John
Wesley's theology, but, appropriately for this occasion, his account of his Aldersgate experience provides us with as useful a paradigm in as manageable a form as any we have available to us for sampling the essence of his thought. His terse words of testimony will be quoted again and again as we commemorate the significance of the events of 24 May 1738:
About a quarter before nine, while he [Luther, through a reader of his preface to the Epistle to the Romans in the Aldersgate assembly] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.
I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation: And an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death. '
What is there in these words that intimates the distinctive emphases in his via media of Christian thought, a way which Wesley always defended as fully confirmed in the grand themes of scripture and yet was one that was also not wholly consonant with the great theological systems which had risen out of the Protestant
Reformation or out of medieval Catholicism before it? Wesley's witness to his Aldersgate experience here and in other commentary of his upon it brings into focus three elements which
Wesleyan Theology
characterized his thought. In each of these elements Wesley expanded, or even altered, the theological perspectives on the nature and ends of the divine plan of salvation and the Christian life which shaped the prevailing Christianity of the eighteenthcentury England of his day: These three elements are:
1. An enlarged perspective of the nature of justification and the new birth. 2. An altered understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing persons to salvation and establishing the life of God in the heart of the believer. 3. An expanded expectation of the work of God in his people and of his people in the world.
Before we can consider that story more fully, however, we must respond to several questions which some may raise concerning the propriety of such a project itself. The first of these is, 'Why?' The obvious answer may be an adequate one: "To commemorate and celebrate one of the great moments within Christian history.' A much more relevant inquiry may be whether or not a theology shaped by an event two hundred and fifty years ago can have meaning today for the people of God as they regroup for ministry under the onslaught of unprecedented change. In the light of the increasing interest in Wesley studies in religious circles our answer is that whenever movements find themselves in the middle, or more accurately, the 'muddle', of radical dislocation, they often turn to the past for guidance. They search for new paradigms for leaving the past behind and moving into the future. Old normative categories of thought and action often begin to lose their power to give focus and meaning to traditions in transition. At such times, movements attach new importance to the views of persons who are still regarded as faithful to a fundamental mission, but whose perspectives have in the past been overshadowed by those views which dominated the shaping of failing cultural norms. This is one of the dynamics which is producing the new burst of interest in Wesley studies. Growing numbers of individuals are looking to his work in an effort to identify authentic alternatives of Christian thought and action to replace those whose usefulness seems to be waning.
Another contemporary issue which always presses to the fore is whether writing about Wesleyan theology or that of any other particular Christian group is appropriate in an age in which persons all across the Christian spectrum are sensing the deep need for greater commonality and unity in the faith. Wesleyans
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives respond to this concern with an unhestitating affirmation of their commitment to as full a participation as possible in the universal body of Christ. They believe in a holy and catholic church and want to promote its unity and mission. Nevertheless, it is just as true today as it was in Wesley's time that one cannot be a 'catholic
Christian' unless one first finds a home among a group of Christians who are functioning as a part of the inclusive family of Christians. However, particularity of experience and understanding of the Gospel is authentic only as it contributes to, or serves, the creation of the richer and broader community of Christian faith. The readiness of the whole to recognize and accept the grace which it can receive only by due recognition of God's gifts to each member is equally important. Wesleyans, therefore, seek to bring whatever strengths of Christian experience and spiritual understanding that God's grace may have worked in them to the service of all the people of God. They also need the enrichment of their own thought and life which comes from all others in the body of Christ.
, Another preliminary question is whether theology is really important to the Wesleyan movement. Writers commonly have praised Wesley for his ardent evangelism and for his promotion of experiential and practical religion. However, not until our own times have they begun to value him as a theologian. The Wesleyan movement has usually been viewed as an essentially experiential tradition. The initial impetus to this non-theological bent of Methodism was born out of the nature of the Aldersgate event itself. The overbearing experiential import of that moment of personal spiritual enlightenment tends to overshadow the abiding significance of basic Christian doctrines to John Wesley and his
Methodists. Does one readily conceive of a Lutheran theology?
Yes. A Reformed theology? Yes! But a Wesleyan theology?
Historically, a positive answer to that question has always come grudgingly, if at all.
We may even raise the question whether Wesley himself allowed that doctrines and theological opinions played any significant role in true religion. He cautioned his followers against getting too deeply involved in controversial writings. He admonished them not to be caught up in anything but the living and the preaching of the Gospel. Winning souls, calling them to holiness, caring for the poor, becoming representatives of God at work in
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the world were to be Methodism's priorities. To those critics who charged that his own answers to the doctrinal questions with which they challenged him were always too brief, he made the rather abrupt retort that the time he was already giving to such writing would have to suffice. But those who have used such references, and others like them, to determine the whole of Wesley's judgment on the importance of doctrine and theological definition fall into the trap of proof-texting. The simple fact is that like Luther and others thrust into the limelight of leadership in abrasive and even revolutionary movements he spent much more time in defending and explicating his doctrinal commitments than the forenamed aversions and cautions would suggest.
His sermon on the 'Catholic Spirit' demonstrates, as well as any of his writings, his attempt to maintain a proper balance between the experimental-practical and the doctrinal-theoretical polarities of the Christian faith. Wesley's deft use in that sermon of his text,
'Is thine heart right, as my heart is with thy heart? .
. Ifit be, give me thine hand' [2 Kings 10.15]," enables him to rise above the obstacles which so commonly have prevented genuine Christian love for those with different opinions and Christian practices, means of worship, etc., from our own. He concludes that genuine religion is the knowledge of God in the heart and may be present there in spite of faulty doctrine or religious opinion.
However, many of those who quote this sermon of Wesley's to deny the importance of a good doctrine to true Christianity abuse his meaning here as much as at any other point in his writings.
They fail to stay with him and hear him out to the end. He concluded his sermon by observing that the greatest danger in making such broad statements as he had made was that some would use the ideal of the catholic spirit as an excuse for their own lack of personal conviction in belief or practice. The absence of decisiveness in fundamental Christian beliefs is 'an irreconcilable enemy . .
. to true catholicism'. Persons of truly catholic spirit are always ready to hear and consider the opinions of others but, at the same time, they are 'fixed as the sun' in their judgements concerning 'the main branches of Christian doctrine', or 'the elements of the Gospel of Christ'. The 'royal way of universal love' which he had described was to be no hiding place for people 'of a muddy understanding' and 'unsettledness of thought'. Any such wavering concerning the faith was 'the spawn of hell .
. > Wesley
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives did think beliefs were important and was concerned about basic doctrinal definition!
We can now turn to a brief look at Wesley's way of thinking about theological matters and then go on to an analysis of his own understanding of 'the elements of the Gospel of Christ', and the 'main branches of Christianity'.
Finally, we must consider whether any of Wesley's theological insights are at all helpful to the church today.
First, a word about his method. Wesley's pilings is dialogical and incarnational. It is a theology of the life of God in the souls of men and women; true religion is a constant dialogue between God's
Word and promise and the faithful response of men and women as God brings them to salvation and lives in them through Christ in the Holy Spirit. Humankind's holiness and happiness in God are the ultimate goal of the work of salvation in this life.+ Its most basic tenets lie grounded in the maxim that God will not save us because of ourselves, nor will he save us without ourselves. The merit of our salvation, Wesley came to realize at Aldersgate, lies in God and Christ alone, and is ministered to all persons at all times, in every place as the Holy Spirit seeks to bring them to accept the saving revelation of himself. The ability of men and women to believe and to accept the 'Good News', however, is also the free gift of God; persons must receive grace as freely as God has given it before salvation can come to them.
Aldersgate radically reformed and reordered all his prior theological understanding, especially that of justification and sanctification. But the new experiential relationship with God which the event initiated and the passion to witness which it inspired in him did not make his concern for the importance of proper doctrines irrelevant to his future life or ministry. Rather, it allowed him to bring biblical convictions and doctrinal beliefs into the service of his mission of saving his own soul and the soul of every other person he could touch. After his evangelical conversion he never again could approach questions of beliefs and doctrines as he and many of the theologians in the church before him had been accustomed to doing. His theology became a working theology, not averse to the usefulness of the historically accepted objective, logical or systematic discussion of truth, but never satisfied to stop there. From that time on, all purported knowledge of God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Christian life, the
Wesleyan Theology
church or its mission would have to take into account what such knowledge meant to the everyday life of the Christian and the church in the world. It had always to address such questions as these. How does it encourage the development of the life of God in the souls of men and women? How does it compel and empower those who experience the wholeness of entire sanctification to love other Christians, to reach out, in the name of Christ, to the poor and oppressed and to promote righteousness and justice wherever and whenever they have opportunity? Christian doctrine which did not speak to questions like these was deficient and possibly even destructive of true Christianity. Without doubt his Aldersgate experience set the pattern for an understanding of biblical truths which gave more prominence to the subjective elements of the faith than the largely objectively-orientated theologies of the Protestant Reformers before him.° Nevertheless, Wesley lived, ministered and reasoned with the assumption that he shared an underlying common core of agreement with all believers on what he called 'the elements of the Gospel', or 'the main branches of Christian doctrine."° In all else, he demonstrated such an unusual openness that he was accused of borrowing from everyone and of being a party to every tradition from which he learned.' But Wesley was no eclectic, picking and choosing indiscriminately to suit his own purposes at any given moment. Rather, he drew upon sound spiritual and doctrinal teaching wherever he discovered it, so long as it measured up to the Gospel of Jesus Christ as revealed in the Word of God. As a result, his theology is more like a recipe of God's plan of salvation and the Christian life than it is like the ordered propositions of logic which characterize the usual efforts to describe beliefs.
Consequently, we cannot explain the Christian life by scriptural descriptions alone (although Scripture alone was the final arbiter for all his 'opinions'). We also must take into proper account the best reasoning which can be brought to the service of understanding faith; reason, too, is God's gracious gift. We must engage in sober reflection on the nature of the work of God in us and in the life of the whole Christian community, both present and past, particularly in the more pristine life of the early church. Guarded and guided by biblical revelation, all of these ingredients became part of his recipe for scriptural Christianity. The result was a carefully proportioned blend of biblical, practical religion which
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives concerned itself chiefly with understanding and experiencing
Gods plan of salvation. It was a way of looking at the Christian faith which placed the principle of divine love at the heart of it all.
It had a flavour and texture about it sufficiently distinct from the doctrinal systems generated in the Protestant tradition before him, to create new options for understanding, practising, and promoting Christianity.® We can turn now to those elements in Wesley's Aldersgate testimony which illustrate for us the most significant of these distinctive features, at least in their seminal form.
1. There was an enlarged understanding of justification and the new birth:
'I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation...'
First and foremost the conviction came to him that God was the sole source of his salvation. Wesley came to Aldersgate with a heavy heart and a heavy load of the conventional theological baggage of his time. The one element in his spiritual quest which was most real to him even then and always thereafter was a vision of the holiness and happiness which he believed to be the grand end of all of God's redemptive work in men and women in this life.
This vision first came to him in 1725 at Oxford as he reasoned out the faint outlines of true religion. Five years before Aldersgate he carefully described the vision in his sermon on "The Circumcision of the Heart',? a major pre-Aldersgate sermon which Wesley allowed to stand as part of his later collections of major sermons. '°
By that time he had immersed himself in the study of the Bible.
Everything he found there confirmed his vision. From that moment on he was never willing to give it up, in spite of the extreme difficulties he experienced as he defended its validity both within and without his movement.
But before Aldersgate, he had come up dreadfully short in his progress toward his goal of whole-hearted love for God and others and the happiness it promised. In company with so many other individuals in his day, and in spite of the much more evangelical theology which he voiced daily as he followed the Anglican ritual, he was following the path of personal moralistic striving. He and other sincere seekers for understanding of God's work in the world were little different from their contemporaries, the deists, whose philosophies permeated the popular mind. God was a far-off God for both parties; he had established the rules for the game of life in
Wesleyan Theology
the world and the church, but the ordering of society and the working out of one's salvation were chiefly the concern of men and women. Reason, discipline and dedication would win the prize and bring the vision of a better world and happiness and holiness to reality. But it didn't, either for the deist or for this heaven-bent
Anglican priest.
Long before Aldersgate, Wesley had already joined the 'fellowship of the frustrated'. The path from his present state of spirituality to the bright light of the vision which had been beckoning him on to holiness and happiness seemed to stretch out farther than it had when he caught the first glimpses of it at Oxford more than ten years before. A new sense of his own inability and of God as his only hope of salvation were the first steps toward the 'new theology', shaped by Aldersgate. Wesley became aware of the radical measure of his own depravity, forsook his efforts to commend himself to God and joined the company of Luther,
Calvin and all the other less-renowned souls of the Reformation of the sixteenth century who came to know for themselves that salvation is from God alone and by his grace through faith alone.
Analyzing his own condition before and after the event, he noted that previously he had been 'fighting'? with all his might, grounding his hope of justification on his 'own works and righteousness'. Now he was 'always conqueror' as he trusted in Christ as his 'sole justification, sanctification and redemption'."'
After Aldersgate, Wesley never wavered: it was Christ alone for justification, Christ alone for forgiveness, and Christ alone for the regeneration and sanctification, for himself and for all humankind. His encounter with a God who offered him pardon and forgiveness without condition so upset all his previous ideas of how one comes to holiness and happiness that we may still say that Wesleyan theology, along with most everything else Wesleyan, began at that point.
There is nothing distinctively Wesleyan, however, in his discovery of salvation in Christ alone and by faith alone; Wesley was just catching up on one of the most fundamental truths of scriptural salvation — justification by faith alone. Luther and the Moravians had shown him the way home to God. It is with reference to the content of the word, salvation, that nuances and emphases appear in Wesley's teaching which pushed his thought beyond the parameters of prevailing evangelical Protestant
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives understanding of the new birth. When he began to lay the expectations of those theologies alongside the biblical vision of holiness and happiness as the ends of God's work in men's and women's lives he believed that they came up short. Prompted by that vision he gave new attention to the regeneration of the believer and the restoration of new life 'in Christ', which were part of the Aldersgate experience. Wesley affirmed that the righteousness which comes to believers when they trust in Christ consists not only in God's imputation of Christ's righteousness to their account for the justification of their sins, but is at the same time the impartation of the life of righteousness to the believer in whom
Christ now dwells through the indwelling Holy Spirit. He would never allow that God called someone righteous as a mere legal or objective gesture. The scriptural promise was much broader than that. Through the indwelling power ofthe Holy Spirit, God would enable believers to overcome sin and to do works pleasing to him;
God's promise was the assurance of his provision. He freely justified believers in Christ. The ends however, is not merely a question of righteous standing, but rather that they may become
'partakers of the divine nature'. But more of that later when we discuss Wesley's doctrine of sanctification, which he always regarded as a process distinct from justification but begun in the regeneration of life which came with the new birth. Wesley realized that by God's grace he not only was saved in Christ but that by the Holy Spirit Christ was living in him. Which leads us to our next consideration.
2. There was an altered understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit: 'And an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine...
The personal relationship which God confirmed to Wesley through the witness of God's Holy Spirit to his own spirit brought to him a new inner sense of acceptance and peace. As he sought to understand and explain what had occurred, he turned for instruction, as he often did, to the theology and testimony of early Christians.
In this instance he imbibed deeply at the springs of Eastern Orthodox teaching concerning the work of the Holy Spirit.'? What he learned there reinforced his conviction that true Christianity did not rest upon verbal formulations or propositions of faith alone but had to have the dialogical dimension by which the life of God — life in the Spirit — is realized in the
Wesleyan Theology
lives of believers; that experiential realization in turn becomes valid data for fuller reflection upon the revelation of God from whom it sprang. A personal assurance of personal acceptance by God had confirmed the reality of salvation which he had experienced. In later sermons on this witness of the Spirit with that of our own spirit, he defined his understanding of the inner word of assurance which had warmed his heart at Aldersgate.'3 God's
Word affirmed that all of the Christian's life is in the Spirit. The Holy Spirit communicates the grace and life of God to us by his prevenient presence (the grace of God which always comes before any action or knowledge of our own) which brings us to salvation and sustains life in believers by his continuing presence. Christian life, then, becomes an inspiration, an 'inbreathing of the Holy Spirit' into the new-born soul. God establishes a conscious, developing relationship with the believer in which the Spirit 'is continually received by faith' and then 'is continued back [to God] — by love, by prayer, by praise, and thanksgiving .
. .' It constitutes a 'new kind of spiritual respiration' which becomes the lifegiving source of spiritual knowledge and growth in the love and service of God and others.'* A Christcentred trinitarian pneumatology became the heart-beat of Wesley's understanding of a believer's relationshp with God. At every point it is life in and from the Holy Spirit, whether it be the first intimations of the gracious presence of God in granting persons the grace of conscience or the grace to see his wisdom in creation, or the revelation of himself in his daily providence, wooing and nudging them on to faith in Christ for their salvation, or calling them on to the whole-hearted love of God and neighbour. Although in later reflections on his doctrines of 'assurance'
Wesley did not insist that such an initial sense of assurance as he had enjoyed and had once insisted upon was always prerequisite to authenticate one's relationship with God, nevertheless it remained a keystone of his understanding of evangelical salvation because it was the common experience of those who believed they had fully trusted in Christ and were living obediently in the Spirit.
It is Wesley's understanding of the fundamental importance of the work of the Holy Spirit to the whole continuum of salvation that again moves his perceptions of the nature of the Christian life into arenas of thought which were not common to the prevailing
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives theologies of his time. The Spirit is always present and working with individuals before and after salvation, seeking to bring them to the salvation which God in Christ had already provided for all who will believe. This prevenient grace which always precedes all our inclinations to seek God and all our faithful responses to grace was Wesley's answer to the doctrines of particular predestination to salvation or damnation by divine decree which dominated the theologies of the Reformation.
It is this new daily, living relationship with God and Christ in the presence and power of the Holy Spirit — the Holy Spirit giving assurance, wisdom, discipline and holiness to individual believers and the church — which has led revival movements in subsequent Wesleyan history to understand themselves in Pentecostal categories. Wesleyans believe that Christmas, Good Friday and Easter all find their fulfillment in Pentecost, the people of God living daily 'in Christ' and witnessing to his righteous kingdom in the presence and power of the Holy
Spirit.
This brings us to the final point of our brief survey of the theology intimated at Aldersgate.
3. There was an expanded conception of the work of God in his people and of his people in the world: '. .
. and saved me from the law of sin and death'.
As we have already noted, Wesley was a person who immersed himself in Scripture. Its imagery and cadences flowed into his descriptive and analytical language naturally and habitually. His Aldersgate witness echoed the words of St Paul: 'The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made me free from the law of sin and death' (Romans 8.2). The end of salvation was the happiness of people who represented the holiness of God's love and the love of God's holiness in their lives in the world. It is no easier today to talk of Wesley's understanding of 'being saved from the law of sin and death' than he himself found it to be in his time. It was at this juncture in his teaching that his views clashed most directly with those Reformation traditions which from the time of Luther and Calvin had emphasized the imperfectibility of believers in this life. Wesley not only believed that the whole tenor of Scripture denied that position but ardently urged upon his followers and all Christians the necessity of going on to the entire sanctification of their hearts and lives — to both inner and outer holiness. A key question
Wesleyan Theology
for his people was: 'Do you expect to be perfected in love in this life?'"> He used a number of terms to describe the essence of this climactic experience of grace through faith and the relationships in divine love which it made possible both with God and neighbours. 'Christian perfection', 'perfect love', 'scriptural holiness',
'entire sanctification' or simply 'sanctification' turn up interchangeably in his writings. The same Holy Spirit who had led him into faithful response to God's saving work in Christ would by the same grace and faith make him a 'partaker of the divine nature'. This freedom from the old 'law of sin and death' and the freedom to 'be' under the 'royal law of love' is the ultimate gift of the indwelling Spirit. It is nothing less than the restoration through the 'second Adam' of the quality of love for God which the 'first Adam had enjoyed'.'® The fall of humankind was not the result of illicit desire which broke a relationship of love, but rather the breaking of the relationship of love which led to illicit desire. The ultimate end of salvation then was a restoration of love. If love failed, all failed. If love prevailed,
God's 'royal law' was ruling. It is the moment by moment possibility of victory over faithlessness. This wilful failure to exercise faith (Wesley's essential definition of sin) is the ultimate ever-present problem at every point in the Christian's progress — even at the heights of a relationship with God. Even those perfected in love can fail, as Adam himself would affirm.
By faith we have the power to love God, but it never abrogates the freedom to forsake love; it is not, therefore, sinless perfection. It brings calm assurance of perseverance and final salvation, but not its infallibility.
But the end of the Gospel of salvation is not complete in the establishment of his people in true holiness. Christian holiness sacralizes not only the whole of the person, but all of life. From its first intimations long before Aldersgate, his vision of holiness and happiness was a social vision; Christians were entirely or wholly sanctified to minister the love of God to men and women everywhere, but especially wherever injustice and unrighteousness violated God's royal law of love. By his own precept and example Wesley taught that Christianity's special obligation was to the poor and the weak. It is always 'faith working by love','' fulfilling the great commandment. Love rules the heart and love works in a fallen world: both polarities must be present in any
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives doctrine of Christian holiness if it is to represent the biblical promise and possibility. Wesley put the essence of this complex balance of theological elements into the tightest of summaries when he wrote:
... 'the end of every 'commandment is love, out of a pure heart', with 'faith unfeigned': the loving of the Lord their God with all their heart and their neighour as themselves: and the being purified from pride, anger, and evil desire, by a 'faith of the operation of God'.'® God had implanted and nourished within him God's own life, a life always on the move from grace to grace, stamped with the Spirit's seal of divine integrity at every point, yet always reaching out toward a richer and deeper experience of God, a scala sancta of grace, which finally led to the ultimate perfection: an eternity of love, an unbounded enlargement upon enlargement of fellowship with the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in heaven itself.
Wesley identified this understanding of the biblical pattern of the life of the people of God in the world as a special "depositum' of truth and evangelistic responsibility which God had entrusted to Methodists to preach and live.
Does all of this have any significance for us today, other than its commemorative value? The responses of contemporary Methodists would vary greatly at that point, as all who have participated in ecumenical Methodist theological institutes well know.
But one observation always seems to come to the fore. It is that after all the qualifications have been made for contemporary political and cultural contexts, after all of the current theologies have raised the many legitimate questions which they do, it is difficult to leave John and Charles Wesley.and Aldersgate behind.
To be biblical and useful, theology must still speak to men and women who have to live the life of God in sinful and unjust societies. Wesley's doctrinal and practical affirmation of the scriptural word that God in Christ is always present in the Holy
Spirit, working with men and women, wherever they are and within whatever context, calling them to love him with all their hearts, does just that. Such relevance assures that he will rise out of history to participate in future discussions of doctrinal formulation and missional strategy not only in Methodism but in broader
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councils of the whole of the Christian Church. He will be there, not as an authoritarian patriarch, nor as a mystical guru, but as a peer whose authentic life and thought have earned him the right to be heard.