The Significance of John Wesley's Conversion
The Significance of John Wesley's Conversion Experience Frances Young When I was growing up in the Methodist Church, teenagers were from time to time presented with the Gospel message in highly emotional terms, and invited to repent and give their lives to Christ. An evangelical tradition of the 'conversion experience' was well established, the once-for-all challenge and change in a person's orientation. John Wesley's warmed heart on 24 May
1738 was an influential model.
I do not wish to suggest that this belongs solely to the past, though it does seem to me that in Methodism this kind of thing has, for better or for worse, been weakened. William James' book
The Varieties of Religious Experience had long since taught people to recognize two kinds of believer — the 'once-born' and the 'twiceborn' — and there was considerable concern to avoid the implication that one kind of experience was superior to another: some simply 'grew up' as Christians, and not everyone should expect to have a conversion experience. People had also long been concerned that the converted so often got stuck there and never matured in the Christian life, always going back to the experience of the past. But for many the final nail in the coffin was probably the controversial book by William Sargent, Battle for the Mind: uneasiness about manipulating people into the Kingdom emotionally was increased by the realization that the procedures were psychologically analogous to brain-washing.
It seems to me that the consequent nervousness about 'conversion experiences' is really rather unfortunate.
Throughout Christian history we find examples of people for whom dramatic
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives moments have been profoundly significant for their future: Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, John Wesley. The problems arise when the complexity of their experience is reduced to a kind of reproducible formula, and assimilated to what has become a kind of liturgical practice. Neither Paul nor Augustine nor John
Wesley were subjected to the group dynamics of a mass evangelistic rally, and none came to Christianity exclusively through an emotional experience. In each case the experiertce was the endproduct of a long search, and the past was not so much rejected as taken up in a new way. So attempts to explain away what happened to them in terms of psychological and emotional manipulation have never been entirely successful and certainly fall short of accounting for the 'fruits' produced by the experience in each case. We should not dismiss John Wesley's warmed heart, not should we denigrate the power of the story. Rather we should resist the temptation to think that that was all it was!
What was the significance of 24 May for John Wesley's life and development?
Let's begin by hearing again what John Wesley himself said about the experience:
In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt
I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart. But it was not long before the enemy suggested, 'This cannot be faith, for where is thy joy?' Then was I taught that 'peace and victory over sin are essential to faith in the Captain of our salvation but that, as to the transports of joy — that usually attend the beginning of it especially in those who have mourned deeply — God sometimes giveth, sometimes withholdest them, according to the counsels of his own will.'
The Significance of John Wesley's Conversion Experience
There are a number of things to notice here. First, the emotional element was far less central than the 'myth' has suggested. John
Wesley's desire for 'faith' had been born of long conversations about the interpretation of Paul with his Moravian friend Peter
Bohler, and he had only been convinced that the 'faith' his friend spoke of was something real and something he lacked when it had been proved from scripture and evidenced in the lives of people he actually met. He then began to pray for this gift. The gift came when he was engaged with a 'study group' in reading Luther's
Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. It was confirmed later by his rediscovery of the Anglican Homilies dating from the time of the Reformation. It was as much an intellectual conviction as an emotional experience: he felt he did trust in Christ for his salvation, and his heart was strangely warmed. Whose wouldn't be? Afterwards he doubted whether it was the real thing, since he
'felt no joy'. The emotional element was rather cooler than we might expect, and certainly not the most important thing about it.
The second thing we notice about Wesley's account of it is that the immediate effect was that he began to pray for his enemies: in other words it was far from a self-indulgent experience, as seem to be so many of the experiences that people claim are religious. He did not wallow in his feelings, but his whole being was released from self-concern and turned outwards to others. For Wesley this was surely fundamental. All his life he had been concerned about his 'holiness' or lack of it, had done 'good works' aplenty, and undertaken spiritual disciplines that put most of us to shame. The great change was loss of concern about his own salvation, and indeed about his own respectability: this alone could open the way a little while later to his submitting 'to be more vile' and preach in the open air. Ina sense his 'conversion' was not for himself but for others.
The third surprising thing about it is that apart from the famous Journal entry, Wesley hardly ever refers to this experience. What has seemed to the 'myth-makers' of Methodism the most important thing about Wesley does not seem to have been regarded in that light by himself. On the other hand, the manner of his reporting it suggests that at the time he regarded it as of peculiar significance: he led up to it by a review of his past life, and seemed to present this as the climax. His later estimate of the experience is right in the sense that it was one element in a period
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives of profound development, and as others have pointed out, it was not his only 'conversion'. But the estimate of the observers is also right. Had Wesley's deepest drives and feelings not been taken up into his changing ideas, had he not begun to be liberated from concern with his own spiritual temperature, there could not have been the remarkable fruits which ensued. Before this period,
Wesley was an ineffective campaigner for a more whole-hearted Christian profession in the midst of the complacency and indifference of the eighteenth-century church, a prickly Pelagian, over-moral and over-religious.
Afterwards things began to happen.
And yet can we really describe the change that took place? It can hardly be called a conversion from being a non-Christian, even though at first Wesley himself could almost regard it in that light. Like all converts to a new perspective, to begin with Wesley was a rather belligerent advocate of his new ideas; but gradually his past was reclaimed in the face of extremist followers. In the case of all the great names we haVe mentioned,
Paul and Augustine as well as Wesley, there is an amazing blend of the new and the old in their mature Christianity. Paul remained a Jew, and despite his attacks on the 'Law', he never rejected his Jewish past which he saw taken up and fulfilled in Christ. There was continuity as well as change. Similarly Augustine and Wesley consciously and unconsciously took their past into the new present and into their future. To some extent this is humanly inevitable, but it also points to something deeper — the recognition that 'the child is father of the man', and in some mysterious way discernible by hindsight alone, the future is prepared in the past. Wesley's change is best described in his own terms: he left behind the relationship of slave to master, and entered by adoption into the relationship of son and heir. Duty remained, but the sense of obligation was infused with an altogether different spirit. The change was born of a long search, and yet was experienced as gift, as sheer undeserved grace. Thanksgiving rather than fear became the hallmark of devotion. What happened was that things long known, things Wesley himself had preached, became meaningful to him in a new way, and therefore his communication of them became the more powerful.
Clearly the experience was significant for Wesley's career, even if it was not quite what the pious legend has passed down.
The Significance of John Wesley's Conversion Experience
Does it remain significant for us? Is it worth remembering?
There are, I think, at least three reasons why it is:
1. Our culture is hungry for 'religious experience'. This is partly because its popular 'empiricism' will only believe what has been experienced. But its popular empiricism is also deeply sceptical about experiences which cannot be 'tested'. When David Hay
(Exploring Inner Space: Scientists and Religious Experience, Penguin Books 1982) proves by research and statistics that lots of people have experiences which are out of the ordinary, and it is not just people who are mad or obsessed and ought to be in mental hospitals, many people feel relieved, as if this provides some kind of reassuring 'proof'. But if it does, it only proves a very watered down and vague sort of thing; and raises profound questions about the criteria for deciding what are truly 'religious' experiences.
Why should we regard Wesley's experience as any different from a woman who came to see me once with her story of a revelatory experience years before which no-one would take seriously, despite her visits to archbishops.
Wesley stood for personal experience of the Gospel in a very different age, an age in which religion was thought to be founded on reason, and 'enthusiasm' was frowned upon. Their religion founded on reason was as vague as our religion founded on experience. Neither will do without a profound earthing in the corporate experience of the Christian tradition, something which relieves the narrowness of individualism, and provides a way of 'testing the spirits whether they be of God'. The process of discernment cannot be reduced to formulae or objective criteria that can be spelt out and applied, but the New Testament points to a fundamental principle: 'by their fruits you shall know them'.
Nothing came of that woman's 'experience' because she was stuck with it, obsessed by it, and no fruit was born of it. Much came of John Wesley's experience, because it arose in the context of a search for the truth, particularly the truth of scripture, and so it was a 'scripture-shaped' experience; besides that, it was formed out of active engagement with Christian tradition, in its Protestant forms and also through Anglicanism in its more catholic and ecumenical forms; above all it was not something he got stuck with —it was something that released him in such a way that it became significant on a far broader canvass. In the end it was more
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives significant for others than it was for him personally. It proved to be more a 'call' than a 'conversion'.
The 'fruits' of religious experience and the 'graces' in a person's life are more often discernible by others than by the individual.
The complex relationship of 'change' and 'continuity' will hardly be fully analysable, by the self or by the observer. But the reality of a religious experience will emerge as the recipient 'grows' in response and obedience, or not emerge as the individual keeps trying self-indulgently to have the same kind of experience again.
Wesley's experience is a challenge to our expectations. It is a challenge to those who have foregone conclusions about the pattern of religious experience; and it is a challenge to those who are wary of untestable claims to communication with God. We desperately need to reclaim in the life of the Church the tradition of 'conversion experiences', of Wesley's 'doctrine of assurance' that holds out to people the possibility of really knowing that God so loves them that their spiritual struggles and moral anxieties are as nothing compared with the sheer' grace and the riches of Christ's gift of salvation. But we need to do so without reverting to an individualism and subjectivity that focusses on the experience rather than its fruits, and without manipulating people into thinking that religion is only genuine if it issues in emotional
'highs'. Nothing is so deceptive as 'feelings'; nothing so creative as a love that captures the whole person, mind and will as well as heart, and issues in a transforming commitment. John Wesley demonstrates what that kind of experience can produce.
2. One of the fruits of Wesley's conversion was the emergence of a new 'mind' as well as a new heart. Increasingly he forged a new integration of many perennial tensions within the Christian tradition, and it is here that his significance as a theologian really rests. Since the Reformation, faith and works had been dialectical opposites, with Lutherans particularly tending to emphasize the idea that humanity on its own can do nothing good, that human nature is totally depraved, that only God in Christ can save, and all you need is faith, over against the tendency to see Christianity as a God-given morality. Once John Wesley had embraced the need for faith and faith alone, he was able to create that very special integration which we know as the doctrine of Christian
Perfection. Faith does not take away from good works, it gives works a new spirit. Faith does not undermine obedience, it means
The Significance of John Wesley's Conversion Experience
that obedience is the willing response of one who is loved to one loved in return. Perfect love casts out fear; and perfect love is a possibility for the one who receives it from God. Like 'humility', it is scarcely something one can claim for oneself without paradox; but for Wesley it was something to be sought actively in the hope and belief that even in this life it could be realized. Wesley translated from Greek for his followers the Homilies attributed to the fourth-century monk Macarius, so bringing together the ancient ascetic search for perfection and the faith of the Reformation. Both aimed to cultivate 'the real life of God in the heart and soul, that kingdom of God which consists in righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost', to kindle the ambition 'to recover the divine image we were made in', to fulfil the Law by faith working through love.
This was not the only area in which he managed to maintain the balances: providence and freewill, the gift of grace and free response, those paradoxical tensions over which Augustine and Pelagius had struggled — John Wesley contrived to hold together.
He affirmed both the universal call of God and his particular election, of a people, of individuals. His emphasis on personal experience and commitment was married with the requirement of fellowship and community; his emphasis on the Word was balanced-by a renewed sacramental focus — it is often forgotten that early Methodism anticipated the Oxford Movement as a eucharistic movement in the Anglican Church. The individual and the community, the personal and the corporate, like Law and Gospel, Old Testament and New Testament, rationalism and emotionalism, were welded inseparably together. And in each case, Wesley's experience informed the integration, and made it plausible rather than contradictory.
Now this too seems particularly significant for our generation.
Methodism anticipated liberation theology with its social gospel, and has often become a religion of good works. 'Mission alongside the poor' is a practical emphasis we know very well. So is mission in the more evangelical sense. Sometimes it seems that those who emphasize one are at loggerheads with those who emphasize the other. The evangelical emphasis suggests that the only way to change the world is to change people's hearts, minds and lives; the social emphasis insists that people are bound by social structures, and change can only take place through political action to free
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives people from oppression. Truth, of course, lies on both sides, and Wesley's ability to hold together such tensions was born of the commitment to charity which preceded his conversion, and was transmuted by it. And this is not the only tension which lives on in the contemporary Church. We need the catholic spirit among Methodists, as well as on the ecumenical scene — not least when we struggle to balance word and sacrament, individual and community, heart and head, the culture of the old andNhe culture of the young, the role of the laity and the role of the ordained, the claims of order and the claims of spontaneity .
. 'Conversion' involves an enlargement of the spirit, not a narrowing down, an opening of the heart and mind.
3. The experience of the Wesleys created a real sense of 'chiming' between their lives and the biblical story. Charles Wesley's hymns are a brilliant expression of this, and the conversion of Charles, a few days before John, must not be forgotten. Many of these hymns have shaped Methodist self-understanding, and they area treasure to be reclaimed over and over agairi, and passed on into the great treasury of the whole Christian heritage.
There is a mood in the Church which prefers to focus on the new rather than reclaim the old and traditional. But in many ways the new songs of charismatic renewal, at their best, are in the same tradition. It is not just musical fashion, but the sense of 'chiming' with the language and experience of scripture that gives the singing vitality. But how much deeper it goes when the language of scripture is not simply repeated, but re-minted into sustained theological expression and interpretation by the mind and experience of such as the Wesleys! We need the fruit of their experience to save ours from frothy superficiality.
There is another tendency in the Church these days, the 'liberal' tendency to reduce the 'scandal' of particular providence, and promulgate a rather generalized utopian ideal of peace which easily becomes a kind of tolerant 'niceness'. Here more than anywhere else has the personal note of the Wesleys' biblical spirituality been eroded. Even the approved liturgies, like the form of Covenant
Service in the new Service Book, seem shy of the particularizing expressions of the old thanksgivings:
... we give Thee thanks for thy loving kindness which has filled our days and brought us to this time and place ..
. Thou hast
The Significance of John Wesley's Conversion Experience
comforted us with kindred and friends, and ministered to us through the hands and minds of our fellows .
. Thou hast set in our hearts a hunger for Thee, and given us Thy peace... In darkness Thou hast been our light; in adversity and temptation a rock of strength; in our joys the very spirit of joy; in our labours the all-sufficient reward .
. Thou hast remembered us when we have forgotten Thee, followed us even when we fled from Thee, met us with forgiveness when we turned back to Thee. For all
Thy long-suffering and the abundance of Thy grace, We praise Thy holy Name, O Lord.
The experience of the Wesleys and the great hymns of the Wesleys will not let us water down the particular claim of Christ upon each individual, who is elected and destined to be what he or she was meant to be, and over whose life hangs a mysterious providence. We need to face up to this 'scandal of particularity'. It is difficult philosophically, not just for a sophisticated philosophy but for the 'man in the street' with his common sense. But here the experience of the Wesleys enabled them to appropriate boldly a feature of the biblical story which will not go away, and which alone draws out those deeper levels of spirituality and commitment which we need to rediscover. It was no more comfortable a doctrine in those days of rational deism in which the Wesleys lived, and certainly contributed to the charges of 'enthusiasm'. But for all the mockery, because of their experience and because of its 'chiming' with scripture, the Wesleys would not let it go, not even in the interests of resisting predestination and hanging on to the universal love of God. We need to learn from that. There are some mysteries that will not go away. And the significance of an event like John Wesley's conversion is that its recollection and celebration cannot help but remind us that they will not go away. Everyone of us is a 'called' person. That is the glory of it, and the obligation of it, and the wonder of it.
And can it be that I should gain An interest in the Saviour's blood?
Died he for me who caused his pain, For me, who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be That thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives Behold the servant of the Lord!
I wait thy guiding eye to feel, To hear and keep thy every word, To prove and do thy perfect will, Joyful from my own works to cease, Glad to fulfil all righteousness.
All praise to our redeeming Lord, _ Who joins us by his grace, And bids us, each to each restored, Together seek his face.
We all partake the joy of one, The common peace we feel, A peace to sensual minds unknown, A joy unspeakable.
Finish then thy new creation, Pure and spotless let us be; Let us see thy great salvation, Perfectly restored in thee:
Changed from glory into glory, Till in heaven we take our place, Till we cast our crowns before thee, Lost in wonder, love and praise!