Wesley and Aldersgate

Interpreting Conversion Narratives

Mark K. Olson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351391238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Despite being widely recognized as John Wesley's key moment of Christian conversion, Aldersgate has continued to mystify regarding its exact meaning and significance to Wesley personally. This book brings clarity to the impact this event had on Wesley over the course of his lifetime by closely examining all of Wesley's writings pertaining to Aldersgate and framing them within the wider context of contemporary conversion narratives.

The central aim of this study is to establish Wesley's interpretation of his Aldersgate experience as it developed from its initial impressions on the night of 24 May 1738 to its mature articulation in the 1770s. By paying close attention to the language of his diaries, letters, journals, sermons, tracts and other writings, fresh insights into Wesley's own perspective are revealed. When these insights are brought into wider context of other conversion narratives in the Christian milieu in which Wesley worked and wrote, this book demonstrates that this single event contributed in significant ways to the ethos of the Methodist movement, and many other denominations, even up to the present day.

This is a unique study of the conversion of one of history's most influential Christian figures, and the impact that such narratives still have on us today. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of Methodism, theology, religious history and religious studies more generally.

1 The riddle of Aldersgate

Aldersgate remains a riddle.¹ On the surface, John Wesley’s Journal for the opening months of 1738 appears to be straightforward. Wesley had been a devout Anglican clergyman for thirteen years. He had pursued holiness of heart and life down to minute details and had faithfully worshipped according to his Anglican tradition. He even travelled to the ‘ends of the earth’ to bring the gospel to those who had never heard of Christ.² Yet, despite all this personal goodness Wesley discovered he had never been truly converted to Christ: ‘I went to America to convert the Indians; but Oh! who shall convert me?’³

Then he met Peter Böhler, a Moravian missionary to America. Böhler taught that salvation is a free gift to be received by faith alone, with the immediate fruits a perceptible assurance of God’s forgiveness and of a full deliverance from sin – ‘happiness and holiness’ as Wesley put it. By mid-April Wesley was convinced of Böhler’s message, and from that moment he ‘resolved to seek’ the gift of ‘justifying, saving faith’.⁴ The breakthrough came a month later on 24 May 1738:

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.⁵

One reason the story remains so fascinating is that Aldersgate continues as a ‘powerful symbol’ for Wesley’s significance as the primary founder of Methodism and as a central leader in the Evangelical Revival.⁶ Still, in spite of its symbolic character the interpretation and meaning of nearly every detail in the story continues to be vigorously debated. Over twenty years ago Randy Maddox asked, ‘How could a single event spawn such a variety of interpretations?’⁷ Even many of Wesley’s peers were bewildered by his testimony and did not know exactly what to make of it – or him. Fellow Oxford Methodist, Thomas Broughton, found it difficult to accept Wesley’s testimony that he had not been a Christian before Aldersgate. Broughton reasoned that someone like Wesley, who had done and suffered so much for the gospel, must be a Christian.⁸ Another family friend, Elizabeth Hutton, told Wesley he must be a ‘great hypocrite’ if he was not a Christian before 24 May, ‘for you made us all believe you was one’. Elizabeth felt Wesley had ‘turned a wild enthusiast’ for making such assertions.⁹

Whether Wesley was an enthusiast or not in regard to his religious devotion, it remains a fact that Aldersgate has continued to mystify interpreters. The primary reason is the textual record. Randy Maddox listed what he called the ‘major textual dilemmas’:

First: On the one hand, Wesley’s initial account of Aldersgate in his Journal presented it as a dramatic transition to a consistent Christian life, in explicit contrast with the perceived shortcomings of his earlier practice. On the other hand, Wesley added footnotes to the 1774 and 1775 editions of the Journal which significantly qualified this contrast.

Moreover, the accounts of the full journal cast doubt upon both Wesley’s initial pessimistic reading of his life before Aldersgate and his initial optimistic claims about the results of the event.

Again: On the one hand, Wesley reprinted the extract of the Journal containing the Aldersgate account five times during his life. On the other hand, he almost never again mentioned Aldersgate explicitly in his journal or published works.

Finally: On the other hand, Wesley made frequent chronological references that highlight 1738 as significant both to his own life and to the Methodist revival. On the other hand, these references are all quite general and may have referred to the beginning of open-air preaching or the organization of the first society rather than to the event of Aldersgate.¹⁰

Besides these textual ambiguities, there is also the question of how to relate Wesley’s experience at Aldersgate to his 1725 dedication to God.¹¹ After all, Wesley was not an irreligious person before 1738 and this must be factored in when weighing the significance of Aldersgate in his life. Apart from the Journal memorandum on 24 May 1738, which underscored his conversion at Aldersgate, Wesley never discussed or sought to correlate what were perhaps the two most consequential crisis events in his spiritual and theological development. He simply left his various statements to stand as they were, leaving it to his posterity to sort out what each event meant in relation to the other. As we will learn, in later life he did look back to both 1725 and 1738 as foundational years for his doctrines of justification and sanctification, yet his many comments have left their meaning in relation to each other an enigma for future generations to resolve.

The textual discrepancies draw attention to the challenges that await any investigation of Aldersgate and explain in part why Wesley’s experience on 24 May has remained mired in debate, even to this day.¹² To posit a response to Maddox’s query – ‘How could a single event spawn such a variety of interpretations?’ – I submit that Wesley left it a riddle.

A history of interpretation

Attempts to solve the enigma have been plentiful and at times creative. But their number and diversity can make the riddle appear unsolvable. For this reason an historical review is necessary to explain the need for a new study.¹³

The early biographies

For the first biographers the enigma centred on how to harmonize the 1774/75 footnotes to the Journal account. The reason is that the footnotes claimed that Wesley was already in a state of salvation before 1738, while the Journal account asserted the opposite. The first to attempt a solution was John Hampson, who published his Memoirs of the Late Rev. John Wesley just three months following Wesley’s death in March 1791. Hampson’s Memoirs were received with little fanfare by Methodists since he had left the Methodist connection because Wesley did not include him and his father in the ‘Legal Hundred’, the official membership of the Methodist Conference.¹⁴ While he understood 24 May 1738 as Wesley’s conversion to saving faith, he considered the later footnotes a contradiction of the journal account. Hampson’s response was direct, ‘If a man has not faith, he is not a Christian, consequently, not in a state of salvation’.¹⁵ Consequently, he largely ignored Wesley’s struggles both before and after 24 May and instead presented Aldersgate in a triumphant light.

In 1792 the first ‘official’ biography of Wesley was published by Thomas Coke and Henry Moore, two of the three executors of Wesley’s papers.¹⁶ Following Hampson’s lead, Coke and Moore left out any hint of a 1725 conversion and put the emphasis squarely on 24 May by quoting the entire Aldersgate Memorandum.¹⁷ But in contrast to Hampson, Coke and Moore included Wesley’s struggles before and after Aldersgate, but ascribed his post-Aldersgate doubts to having been a ‘weak’ believer who had received poor counsel.¹⁸ No attempt was made to reconcile the footnotes to the Journal account, instead the authors inserted the following footnote into the 24 May account, ‘Mr. Wesley acknowledged, many years after this … he was then in a state of salvation as a servant, but not as a child, of God: and that he had a measure of faith, but not the proper Christian faith’.¹⁹

The third executor, John Whitehead, published a two-volume biography in 1793 and 1796.²⁰ In the second volume Whitehead presented Aldersgate as Wesley’s conversion and defined its character through the lens of the later footnotes. Whereas the previous biographers ignored Wesley’s 1725 dedication to God, Whitehead stressed this as a key moment in Wesley’s spiritual development and included a le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: interpreting conversion narratives
• 1 The riddle of Aldersgate
• 2 The sources of Aldersgate
• 3 The ‘official’ version: part one
• 4 The ‘official’ version: part two
• 5 The ‘unofficial’ versions
• 6 The corroborating witnesses
• 7 The legacy of Aldersgate
• Conclusion: Wesley and Aldersgate
• Appendix 1: references to Wesley’s conversion
• Appendix 2: John Wesley’s conversion in parallel accounts
• Bibliography
• Person index
• Subject index