Wesley for Armchair Theologians

William J. Abraham

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781611644036
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Wesley for Armchair Theologians engagingly presents the life and theology of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. Written by prominent Wesley scholar William Abraham, who aimed to "make Wesley come alive for those who would truly love to become armchair theologians, " the book is an excellent, entertaining, and expert guide to the work of this important Christian figure.

Written by experts but designed for the novice, the Armchair series provides accurate, concise, and witty overviews of some of the most profound moments and theologians in Christian history. These books are essential supplements for first-time encounters with primary texts, lucid refreshers for scholars and clergy, and enjoyable reads for the theologically curious.

CHAPTER ONE

On the Road Again

A Fortunate Family Row

John Wesley began life as a happy by-product of a family dispute in the local Anglican parsonage in Epworth, England, in 1702. His parents had had a royal row over praying for the current king. His mother, Susanna, had refused to say amen after the family prayers for the reigning monarch William III. As she remembered the event, her husband, Samuel, had “immediately kneeled down and imprecated the divine vengeance upon himself and all his posterity if ever he touched me more or came to bed with me before I had begged God’s pardon and his.”¹ So Samuel had gone off in a huff. When he at last decided to return, John Wesley was conceived. He was number fifteen in a family of nineteen children.

Both Susanna and Samuel Wesley were formidable in their own way, and they both left their mark on John, who was born on June 17, 1703, and lived until March 2, 1791. They began life as Dissenters, that is, as those who rejected the vision of Christianity developed by the Anglican Church after the Reformation. Independently of each other, they had examined the theological issues of the day for themselves and been converted to the Anglican tradition. Susanna was the daughter of a distinguished Dissenting preacher and had made ample use of her father’s library for her research. She made the move to the Anglican tradition when she was twelve. As long as Susanna lived, she had a powerful influence on her son, beginning with intensive homeschooling in which Thursdays were devoted to the intellectual and spiritual care of John. Samuel Wesley had gone over to Anglicanism as a young man, went up to Oxford to study for the priesthood, became a minor churchman of his day, and devoted forty years of his life to his contrary parishioners.

Given this background, it is no surprise that John Wesley was steeped in the Anglican Church of his day. While he led a renewal movement within it that ultimately went its own way, he never wavered in his own sense of loyalty. He loved the Church of England dearly, gloried in its treasures, pined over its faults, and worked mightily to goad it into a deeper spirituality and into a more effective service to God.

John Wesley inherited a rich theological tradition, and he was steeped in its ways of piety and ritual. From the age of eleven in 1714 until he sailed for Georgia in the New World in 1735, he spent most of his life in Anglican educational institutions, first as a student and then as a lecturer in logic and Greek. As a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he received a living from the Church of England until he married. He was totally immersed in his church’s worship and prayers, shaped in a host of ways by its wonderful intellectual balance, its openness to truth, its stately presence in politics and country, its internal linguistic beauty, and its sense of humble grandeur and confidence. While Oxford University was in his day something of a glorified high school crossed with a finishing school for grandees, he gained a priceless education there as a student and teacher that served him well throughout his career. He learned well how to articulate and defend his ideas even when they were daft and irregular. When he reluctantly abandoned the university to work as an itinerant preacher, he took with him an abundance of skills and self-assurance.

In his late thirties Wesley tended to underestimate the depth of his early spiritual life, but there can be no doubt about the genuineness of his faith. He was an ardent servant of God, becoming first a priest and then an enthusiastic missionary. In preparation for his ordination as a deacon in 1725 he devoted himself to a life of holiness. He read avidly in the literature of personal sanctity, working across the theological spectrum that was available to him. When his brother Charles and some friends began a small-group ministry at Oxford University devoted to Bible study, prayer, and service to the needy, he readily joined, becoming the natural leader. He was not afraid of hard names or opposition and later came to see this experiment in smallgroup ministry as the nucleus of his Methodist Societies. Such was his commitment and diligence that he became a missionary to the New World. He persuaded his brother Charles to go with him. Wesley’s personal prayers, his obsession with spiritual discipline, his rigor in matters of church law, and his sermons display a man who was bent on a quest for real Christianity.

Below the surface, however, John Wesley was far from settled spiritually. While his father lay dying on April 25, 1735, he urged his son to seek a truly personal encounter with God through the work of the Holy Spirit. On the way to Georgia, Wesley fell in with a group of Moravian missionaries whose vibrant faith challenged his own inner uncertainties. He was so impressed with their assurance in the face of death in the storms at sea that he learned German so as to better understand their spiritual secrets. He met regularly with their spiritual leaders, one of whom, Peter Böhler, challenged him back in England to the very core of his being about his faith in Christ. Working in and around Savannah, he failed as a missionary. His efforts to impose his rigorous vision of church life on a mixed bag of immigrants came to naught in the end. He fell in love with one of his parishioners, but like many a rural Irish bachelor, he dithered when it came to the time for commitment. When Sophia Hopkey married a rival, he barred her from Communion on flimsy grounds and landed himself before the grand jury for misconduct. Protesting his innocence and accurately calculating his slim chances of a fair trial, he slipped out under cover of darkness and headed back to England in December 1737. He had been gone for twenty-two months. He came back a failure in love, in missionary service, and in his own search for a truly inward relation to God.

Turning Up the Heat

The year 1738 was a very important one for John Wesley, as it was for his brother Charles. The debate about what happened in that year remains intense, but the central development is secure. Wesley found an initial assurance of the love of God for himself. It took him years to reach a settled account of his spiritual experiences, but there can be no doubt that he caught fire within in his love for God. The human agent who more than anybody acted as a catalyst in this was Peter Böhler. He and Wesley started a religious society together in London called the Fetter Lane Society, so they had ample time to talk. Böhler introduced Wesley to a vision of the Christian life that put enormous emphasis on personal, inward certainty about forgiveness and victory over sin here and now. Böhler argued that it was possible to experience the love and power of God as something tangible, that one could enter into this experience instantaneously, and that it was imperative to do so. Wesley was reluctant to buy this spiritual package, but he checked it against Scripture, mulled it over, listened to pertinent witnesses, stuck to his spiritual routines as a good Anglican, and wandered off on occasion to find spiritual resources in other pastures.

In the midst of the challenge presented by Böhler, the penny finally dropped, and Wesley found himself catapulted into a new world of faith. His brother Charles had been converted three days earlier. On Sunday, May 24, after the regular morning service in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London,

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.²

Wesley had met God for himself. Yet we must be careful how we understand this experience. This encounter with God did not take place in a vacuum. It was integrally related to his coming to a much clearer account of the Reformation doctrine of justification by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. Rather than do all he could to be worthy of God’s mercy, he discovered that true faith must be directed outward to the work God had done in Jesus Christ for the salvation of the world. Here Wesley moved from a notional to a real assent to theological proposals that were already incorporated into his intellectual hard drive. Wesley went back immediately and resurrected theological material on justification that was available in his own Anglican tradition in a set of normative sermons called the Homilies. The Aldersgate encounter with God was more than some sugary, pious experience; it was a profound spiritual and intellectual reorientation. At one and the same time, Wesley found assurance in his relationship to God, saw acquittal in the courts of God as the critical door to true holiness, and was flooded with zeal to share what he had discovered with others.

Since his days at Oxford in the 1730s, he had been experimenting with new ways of helping people find faith for themselves. His collaboration with Böhler led him to take a study tour of the Moravians in Germany. They refused to give him Communion, not really accepting him as a true believer. Even as he wobbled his way into his new spiritual world, he had a keen eye for effective innovation that would bring spiritual renewal within the boundaries of his Anglican heritage. At the same time, Wesley was fascinated by the reports coming from New England about the religious awakening in and around the ministry of Jonathan Edwards, a tough-minded intellectual who was taken aback by the work of the Holy Spirit operating through his tight, carefully constructed sermons. Thus, just as Wesley was sorting through his new encounter with God, he was also wrestling with how best to hold together the need for effective forms of new ministry with the mysterious presence of God in religious awakening.

Wesley was not alone in this journey toward God and effective evangelism. A friend from his Oxford days, George Whitefield, was much more radical in his readiness to innovate. Drawing on antecedents in Wales initiated by a remarkable layman named Howel Harris, Whitefield had taken to preaching in the open air. Called away from Bristol to Wales in March 1739, he asked Wesley to fill in. After casting lots, Wesley reluctantly launched forth. On Monday, April 2:

At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people. The scripture on which I spoke was this, (is it possible any one should be ignorant, that it is fulfilled in every true Minister of Christ?) “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind: To set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”³

The thousands who heard clearly benefited from his preaching, and Wesley was launched into a new phase of his life and ministry. The rest of his life was spent in caring for and organizing the people who found him to be an effective spiritual director, an inspiring leader, an effective organizer, a calm but fearless preacher, and a clear and astute thinker. His theological work was always related to his primary vocation of evangelism and spiritual direction. By 1739 he was beginning to reintegrate all that he had learned and experienced into a new vision of the Christian tradition. He shied away from speculative theological divinity, yet when it came to the theological and spiritual issues that mattered to him and his converts he was picky, shrewd, and resolute. He is rightly remembered for his genius as an administrator and organizer, but his practical and institutional work was always informed by a knowledgeable theological intelligence. We can readily see the interaction between theory and practice in his long span as leader of the people called Methodists.

Birthing a Movement

The term “Methodist” was used at Oxford as a pejorative label for the student society Wesley had led in the early 1730s. Wesley simply co-opted it and used it positively to name the movement that emerged under his leadership. Whatever its origins, it gave the right impression, for it signaled a readiness to be methodical in all things spiritual. Wesley accepted the people who responded to his preaching as he found them, and worked out a complex arrangement of practices to foster their quest for genuine faith. Central to his method of working was the gathering of seekers into societies, bands, select societies, and recovery units that were truly effective in providing informal spiritual direction among friends. These groups provided space to hear the gospel and to try it on for size. Wesley simply adapted the available models on offer or made up the rules as he went along. He learned early on the importance of listening to advice from every quarter. Despite this, he was a benign dictator in his leadership style. This combination of careful consultation, omnivorous reading, and independence of judgment served him well over the years.

For five long decades he traveled England, Ireland, and Scotland to secure the welfare of the people who voluntarily joined him in faith and service. Clearly Wesley developed and changed over that period. He liked to think of himself as staying consistently on tune, but this was due in part to a natural self-delusion and in part to the need to answer critics who accused him of changing his mind and not coming clean about it to the public.

In the 1740s and ’50s Wesley skillfully spent his time preaching the gospel and developing the institutional resources required to serve the spiritual and material needs of the people who came to him for help. This was a period of organization, of mob persecution, of theological conflict, of intellectual self-defense, and of fundamental theological consolidation. Rebutting the rule on not interfering in another priest’s parish, Wesley claimed a special dispensation as an Oxford scholar to treat the world as his parish. When the issue of preaching outside parish boundaries arose in Bristol, he met with the brilliant Bishop Butler to talk things over; they parted with neither side yielding an inch. Wesley was more interested in reaching the funloving, malicious mobs than in adhering to the objections of a bishop who put good order before effective ministry. There was a certain arrogant cheek in Wesley’s attitude.

There was also a degree of intellectual arrogance in his decision to go to war with George Whitefield over their differences about predestination. Wesley detested the view that God simply chose some unconditionally to salvation and others to damnation. Whether Whitefield held to this version of Calvinism is a matter of dispute. The encounter between the two of them reminds one of modern academics who want to be good friends with colleagues down the hall who disagree with them but whose intellectual certainty and self-satisfaction get the better of them in public. Thus, they publish their attacks, and they do what they can to make up afterward. Wesley’s handling with his critics within the Anglican establishment was no less self-assured and relentless. He published a series of Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion in 1742 and 1743 that argued that he was not out of line with the tradition of the Church of England. Together with The Principles of a Methodist Further Explained (1745), A Plain Account of the People Called Methodists (1748), and various collections of sermons, these furnished the new movement with the theological concepts and background assumptions that were essential for long-term success.

As the interest in personal religion spread, various volunteers attached themselves to Wesley to lend a hand in his labors. Wesley gathered this crucial group of coworkers, carefully designated as “assistants,” into “annual conferences,” where they hammered out their ideas and practices. They divided the work into “circuits” and invented new services of worship. By the end of the 1740s the Methodists had their own meetings for preaching, exhorting, and singing. Charles Wesley supplied a priceless means of grace in his hymns, and lay preachers were trained to keep up with demand. Wesley took over a school, the Kingswood School, and developed a curriculum that was incredibly demanding both intellectually and spiritually.

Making Provision for the Sheep

By the early 1750s Wesley had already established an evangelical order within the Church of England. Ever keen to provide intellectual nurture for his leaders and people, he published A Christian Library: Extracts and Abridgements in fifty volumes between 1749 and 1755; these made available a body of useful theological materials that were sparsely used. On the domestic front he dithered once again in his love life. He was attracted to a young widow named Grace Murray, who was a fine coworker. His brother Charles impetuously stepped in and had her married off to a friend. John was a mere half-hour late for the ceremony. He recovered from this devastating blow, and on the rebound he made a disastrous choice of partner in Mrs. Molly Vazeille, a forty-one-year-old widow with French Huguenot connections. This required him to resign his Oxford fellowship in 1751, thus removing once and for all his fig-leaf defense of his preaching in other priest’s parishes. The marriage was in time a disaster.

One of the reasons for Wesley’s failure as a husband was his resolution to travel and take care of business. One item of business was that of taking care of dividers and schismatics. Given the inevitable dissatisfaction of some of his new converts with the cold reception they got from the Anglican Church, it is not surprising that some wanted to break from the church and go it alone. Wesley was ruthless in his rejection of separation from the parent body. This was not the last time he would have to put his foot down with force on an issue that was to drive him to drastic action thirty years later. In 1758 he published Reasons against Separation from the Church of England in order to explain his foot stomping.

Given this internal tension, Wesley clearly needed not just ironclad discipline but also an accessible vision of the positive theology that governed the movement he was leading. A close brush with death no doubt concentrated his mind in this arena. While laid up sick he took to writing. In 1755 he published Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, a small book that became with his Sermons on Several Occasions his own designated account of the essentials of true religion. In 1760 the fourth volume of his Sermons on Several Occasions was published. To this day these four volumes of sermons are required reading for all preachers in the homeland of Methodism.

Once this material was in place the domino effects were predictable. On the one hand, Wesley had to face down the internal critics who felt that his position was far too tame theologically. Interestingly, some of his critics within Methodism laid claim to have experienced dreams, impressions, visions, healings, and the like, phenomena that would show up in one stream of Wesley’s grandchildren, the Pent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter One: On the Road Again
• Chapter Two: Background Music
• Chapter Three: Life Is Nearly as Bad as You Thought It Was
• Chapter Four: Starting All Over Again
• Chapter Five: With God All Things Are Possible
• Chapter Six: Help Is in the Works
• Chapter Seven: Making Moral Sense
• Chapter Eight: Spiritual Hiccups and Measles
• Chapter Nine: Providence and Predestination: Double or Nothing
• Notes
• For Further Reading
• Index