Chapter Two
WESLEYAN PERSPECTIVE
Every work of Christian Theology stands within a particular tradition of the Great Church – Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Anabaptist or Baptist, Wesleyan, Pentecostal, or whatever. It is not possible to be within the Great Church without working at least mainly in one of these specific traditions. In the past, Theology was often pursued in a deliberately sectarian way, denouncing all others as at least misled if not positively heretical. But all the major traditions within Trinitarian orthodoxy actually share the core beliefs of the Nicene Creed (at least officially), and since the evangelical movement of the late nineteenth century gave birth to a new ecumenicity through the Student Volunteer Movement, Christians in all these traditions have learned to treat each other with the respect demanded by the Lord’s command to ‘love one another’. For a century now therefore, Theology has been conducted in a less sectarian way with fruitful conversation between these different major traditions. All of them have a common heritage from the Fathers of the undivided Church of the first Christian millennium. The traditions of the Reformation also share in the common heritage of the great theologians of the medieval Latin West, such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Thomas Aquinas. In the modern era, the Lutheran, Reformed and Roman traditions have been the most intellectually robust and have produced most of the great thinkers. The Pietist, Anabaptist, Anglican, Wesleyan Methodist and Pentecostal traditions have produced great biblical scholars, but no front-rank Systematic or Dogmatic theologians of the calibre of Barth or Rahner.
Within this wide range of perspectives and traditions in the one Church of Jesus Christ, this three-volume work of Christian Theology stands within that tradition labelled ‘Wesleyan’. This is the tradition of all those churches affiliated to the World Methodist Council, whose members and adherents, it has been claimed, number somewhere around seventy million Christians world-wide. Like all traditions within the One Church, the Wesleyan tradition has much, much more in common with other Christian traditions than it holds as ‘distinctive’. It has particular emphases of course, notably the concern with Christian holiness, but, when we get down to it, while some have made much of Wesleyan ‘distinctives’, it can be argued that the Wesleyan tradition is in fact close to being simply that ‘mere Christianity’ of which C.S. Lewis wrote. It is dubious therefore whether the term 'Wesleyanism' should be used. If that is simply a way of designating Christianity in the tradition of the Wesleys, it may be defensible; but if it is taken to be an 'ism' in the sense that it is an ideology, a self-contained system of doctrine in such a way that there is a distinctive Wesleyan form of every Christian doctrine, then that is misleading. The Wesleys would have been horrified at such an idea. They would not have wanted any Christian to base their faith and doctrine on Paul or Apollos, Luther, Calvin or Wesley. They were not interested in any sectarian 'ism', but in living and authentic Christianity, that faith shared by all who are one in Christ Jesus. As John Wesley put it, preaching in 1777 at the laying of the foundation stone of his new chapel in the City of London: ‘Methodism, so called, is the old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the primitive church, the religion of the Church of England.’
In this three volume work therefore, we are not attempting to produce a ‘Wesleyan Theology.’ There are several excellent volumes on the Theology of John Wesley and various works on the particular characteristics of the Theology typical of Wesleyans. But that is not what we are about here. We are concerned to delineate Christian Theology following in the footsteps of such Wesleyan theologians as William Burt Pope, H. Orton Wiley, Geoffrey Wainwright and Thomas Oden. We shall do that therefore from within the Wesleyan tradition and so in Wesleyan perspective. But that does not mean that we begin with what is peculiarly Wesleyan. It means rather that we shall begin with what is peculiarly Christian, the Trinitarian-Christological core of the Christian faith uniting all Christians. Nor has Christian Theology been at a standstill since John Wesley died. There have been immense advances in biblical and historical scholarship and immense debates leading the Church (despite some treacherous by-paths) more deeply into the truth of God revealed in Christ. Only once we have studied the great central convictions of the Christian faith then – Incarnation, Atonement, creation and the work of the Spirit, all comprehended within the doctrine of the Holy Trinity - and only by building on that foundation, the only one for Christians, shall we come to examine the particular convictions of the Wesleys and the Wesleyan tradition about our understanding of the Christian life – justification, sanctification and final redemption. But Christian Theology is not focused on us and our life: it is about God. We can only come to understand the Christian life and Christian living if our focus is not on ourselves and how we live, but on the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. By focusing then on the core convictions of the Christian faith, we shall endeavour to show how the particular emphases of the Wesleys arise from a centre in Christ.
(A) The Wesleys as Theologians
John and Charles Wesley were life-long members of the Church of England, a national church established by Queen Elizabeth on the principle that the whole nation should belong to the one Church, the Church of Christ in England. At its best, it set out to include all Protestants – Puritans and Episcopalians, Arminians and Calvinists, Augustinians and Christian Humanists – within the one Church. Both of the Wesleys’ parents had been brought up in Puritan families. In the 1660s, the Puritans had been excluded from the Church and formed the three Dissenting or Nonconformist denominations (Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists). But young Samuel Wesley and Susanna Annesley had both returned to the national Church. They identified with the so-called ‘Arminian’ or ‘High Church’ party which was quite clearly Protestant (unlike the later ‘High Church’ or Tractarian or Anglo-Catholic party in nineteenth-century Anglicanism) but rejected Calvinism. That older ‘High Church’ tradition included the ‘holy living school’ of George Herbert, Jeremy Taylor and William Law with their strong emphasis on the life of holiness, on the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, and on the Church Fathers. Through the Moravians, German Pietists, the Wesley brothers recovered the Reformation emphasis on justification by faith which in their day had become largely obscured, and so became leaders in the great Evangelical revival. But their theology was still in no way sectarian. They sought the ‘purity and simplicity’ of the primitive Church, the one, united catholic Church of the earliest Christian centuries. They embraced the orthodox Nicene Christianity of the Fathers, affirmed by the Reformers. And while their theology was labelled ‘Arminian’ over against the exaggerated predestinarian Calvinism of their day, and was labelled ‘perfectionist’ by some in the Reformed and Lutheran traditions, it was in fact in both respects following the majority tradition of the Eastern Fathers and of the Church universal. At the same time, it was deeply Augustinian in those areas of doctrine where Augustine did not run against the great Eastern Patristic tradition. The Wesleys drew upon the Fathers, medieval writers of Christian spirituality, the Reformers, the Puritans, and the Pietists, and John Wesley published extracts from many traditions of the Great Church in his multi-volume Christian Library.
Their Catholic Spirit
It was utterly appropriate therefore that John Wesley should emphasize the ‘catholic spirit’, for while he maintained the strong Reformation criticisms of that tradition known as Roman Catholicism after the Reformation, he was a doughty advocate of that true Catholicism, the faith kath holou (‘according to the whole’), the faith of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church, the Body of Christ, which he called ‘Scriptural Christianity’. While he stated in ‘The Principles of a Methodist Farther Explained’ that ‘our main doctrines, which include all the rest, are three, -- that of repentance, faith, and of holiness,’ it has been argued that he was referring here to the particular emphases of the Methodist movement. In his ‘Letter to a Roman Catholic’ (1749) he summarized the core doctrines of the Christian faith and of the Church catholic by giving the substance of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. A wider survey of the doctrines he considered essential to the faith include ‘the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the atonement, the doctrine of biblical authority, the doctrine of original sin, the doctrine of justification by faith, and the doctrine of regeneration.’ His understanding of Christian Theology as a whole can also be illuminated by his editing of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England to produce his Twenty-Four Articles for the American Methodists.
Clearly Wesley stood in the Great Tradition of Christian Theology which traces its trajectory through the ‘Great Doctors’ of the Church, the Fathers and Reformers. If he did not normally expound the whole of that tradition in his writings, it was because he saw Methodism as a revival movement within the Great Church. Its mission was not to expound Christian orthodoxy as a whole, but to arouse the Church from ‘dead orthodoxy’ by focussing on ‘repentance, faith and holiness’. To some extent, it could take the catholic and Reformation structure of Christian Theology for granted, but not entirely, for the eighteenth-century Enlightenment posed the greatest challenge to the intellectual dominance of the Christian faith since the conversion of Europe in the Dark Ages. This came in the form of deism, which masqueraded as a more 'rational' form of Christianity, but was actually another gospel. If anything, the deist challenge to continental Roman Catholicism was more direct, for its Tridentine theology seemed to be quite medieval in many respects. But deism posed a more subtle threat to Protestant theology, for it seemed to have inherited the innovative and progressive political and social role of Protestantism, but to have moved beyond the fanaticism or 'enthusiasm' which was blamed for the two hundred years of wars of religion. Protestant Theology, apparently crystallized if not ossified in the arcane scholasticism of Lutheran or Reformed orthodoxy (expressed for example in the Westminster Confession of Faith), was being outmoded by the apparently more 'rational' and ethical religion of deism. In this intellectual climate, it was the Wesleys' rediscovery from the Moravians of the Evangelical faith of the Reformation which was to lead to their life's work. To the piety of the primitive Church which came to them through the 'holy living' school of the Arminian party of the Church of England, was added now the vital faith of the Reformation that salvation was sola gratia (by grace alone), sola fide (by faith alone) and (as the central key to both of those) a solo Christo (by Christ alone). They also embraced what has been called the 'formal' principle of the Reformation, sola scriptura, that the Bible was the final authority for Christian faith and practice. It was the Wesleys' recovery not just of Reformation theology from Luther via the Moravians, but of Reformation faith and experience, which led to their becoming leaders in the Evangelical Revival, which led in turn to the modern missionary movement which has revolutionized world Christianity.
Their Evangelical Faith
The Wesleys' allies in the revival were the Evangelical clergy of the Church of England. Some of them, such as his great colleague, the outstanding evangelist George Whitefield, stood clearly in the tradition of English Calvinism passed on through the Puritans. Although a clergyman of the national Church, Whitefield’s closest allies were the Congregationalists, Isaac Watts in England, and Jonathan Edwards in New England, the Evangelicals in the Church of Scotland (who were, of course, Presbyterian and Calvinist), and the Welsh Calvinistic Methodists (later known as the Presbyterian Church in Wales) led by Howell Harris and Daniel Rowland. Some of the Evangelical clergy in the Church of England, such as Walker of Truro, Grimshaw of Haworth, and later, John Newton, also inclined to the Calvinist tradition, but others such as the Perronets and John Fletcher of Madeley, inclined to the Arminian side. At the end of Wesley's life he had a famous interview with the most influential leader of the Evangelical tradition in the Church of England, Charles Simeon, Fellow of King's College and Vicar of Holy Trinity, Cambridge. Although he was called a Calvinist and Wesley was called an Arminian, the two decided that they were fully in accord with the heart of the Christian gospel, salvation through Christ alone. Leading Evangelical lay people in the Church of England included William Wilberforce, who was encouraged by Wesley in the last letter he wrote to persevere in his fight against the slave trade. Simeon's influence on generations of Cambridge students firmly established the Evangelical influence in the Church of England. This lived on the nineteenth century through bishops like J.C. Ryle of Liverpool and Handley Moule of Durham, who was associated with the Keswick holiness movement. The Evangelical tradition in the world-wide Anglican communion today includes those on the Calvinist wing, such as J.I. Packer, but the wider Simeon tradition, represented by such figures as John Stott, N.T. Wright, formerly Bishop of Durham, and scholars such as Oliver O'Donovan, Richard Bauckham and Alister McGrath, is theologically close to the Wesleyan tradition.
While the Wesleys cannot be included among the greatest creative minds of Christian Theology, they did exemplify that unity of word and action, doctrine and life, preaching and practice, which marks the true theologian. Indeed, since some of the ‘great doctors’ (such as Augustine or Calvin), being creative thinkers, espoused some doctrines which the Great Church as a whole has refused to embrace, it may be suggested that the Wesley brothers are more representative of those doctrines which have been believed ‘everywhere, always, and by all.’ Wesley has often been regarded as a ‘synthesiser’, that is, a theologian who sees the truth in different traditions. One scholar characterized him as uniting ‘the Protestant ethic of grace’ and ‘the Catholic ethic of holiness’, but it may be more accurate to say that he brought together the Patristic and medieval concept of Christian ‘perfection’ and the Reformation doctrine of justification by grace. Recent joint statements on justification by Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians might have been penned by Wesley.
Their Insight and Limitations
Yet there was a greater theological synthesis required which neither the Wesleys nor anyone else in their time attempted or even imagined. The Protestant-Evangelical Reformation and the movements of German Pietism and English Puritanism which followed, focussed on the doctrines of justification, atonement and the Christian life as these affected the individual believer. The whole Protestant tradition therefore tended to be highly individualistic and to take for granted the great classical Patristic doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity which had not been at issue in the Reformation debates. Not even Luther or Calvin, the greatest theologians of the Reformation, really fully perceived the need to think through the creative integration of soteriology on the one hand and the Trinitarian doctrine of God on the other. Therefore Wesley can hardly be blamed for being a person of his time. Indeed the eighteenth century was probably the most theologically barren century of the modern era, noted for the rise of deism rather than any deeper wrestling with the Trinitarian faith of the Church. While Wesley was aware of deism, and fought it, his mission was rather to reach the common people and bring them back to living Christian faith, and his theology was therefore more pastoral and pragmatic then dogmatic. That was its glory, but at the same time its limitation, for while it resulted in a revival of faith and commitment in the churches that was to grow throughout the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth and lead to the great evangelical missionary movement, it did not successfully address the intellectual questions raised by the Enlightenment, which in the long term helped to lead to the great apostasy in Britain and Europe in the late twentieth century and the catastrophic decline of the Church. Moreover, once Methodism became a separate denomination often despising even the doctrinal anchor provided by the Anglican liturgy, its weakness in Dogmatics, and particularly the central doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity, made it particularly vulnerable to theological Liberalism.
Nevertheless, we must recognize that Systematic Theology was not Wesley's calling. Rightly called ‘the Apostle of England’, his Herculean labours over sixty years of itinerant preaching and publishing, evangelism and pastoral oversight made him indeed one of the greatest apostles and teacher-bishops of Christian history. While his Anglican tradition did not characteristically engage in writing ‘Systematic Theology’ or ‘Dogmatics’, and while the ministry he was called to exercise did not include the writing of a great Summa, the deep structure of his theology was undoubtedly Christocentric and Trinitarian. Like the great Theologian of the Greek Church, Gregory of Nazianzus (also noted not so much for creativity as for a balanced statement of the central tradition of the Church), Wesley formulated his theology in sermons which arose from the theological issues of his ministry.
It is surely significant that he structured his sermon collection not in the way that Systematic Theology has traditionally been structured in the modern era, beginning with epistemology and the doctrine of God, but by beginning instead with the gospel as it was understood in the Evangelical tradition of the Reformation. In Sermon 1, 'Salvation by Faith,' on Ephesians 2:8, 'By grace are ye saved through faith,' Wesley nails his colours to the Reformation mast. The first seven sermons make clear his stance on Justification and atonement through Christ. This reflects his experience in the meeting at Aldersgate Street in the old city of London on 24th May, 1738. In his famous account of that in his Journal the key sentence is not, 'I felt my heart strangely warmed,' but the source of that heart-warming, 'I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation.' There is the heart of Reformation faith and doctrine, the solus Christus. Linked to that is the assurance of the forgiveness of his sins. Wesley's sermons therefore go on to address the work of the Holy Spirit in assurance ('The Witness of the Spirit') and in sanctification, which begins with regeneration and leads to what the Scriptures and the Fathers call 'perfection'. This leads in turn into his series of thirteen sermons on Christian ethics, 'Upon our Lord's Sermon on the Mount.' But it becomes clear in all his writings, and particularly in his debates with his Calvinist allies in the Evangelical Revival, that undergirding all of this is his theology of the 'sufficient, saving, sovereign grace' of the Triune God whose 'mercy was over all his works.' Wesley's opposition to the Calvinist view of predestination arose out of his deep gut reaction against anything that impugned the universal love of the Father. The structure he gives then to his sermon collection suggests that his theology begins Christocentrically and evangelically with the Gospel of the Son, Christ crucified, understands that this salvation is brought home to us by the Holy Spirit, and that all of this rests upon the love of the Father. It can be seen then that although Wesley may not have fully explored and theologically articulated the greater theological synthesis that brought together the Trinitarian, Nicene faith of the Fathers and the Evangelical faith of the Reformation, it was in fact that great synthesis which was the deep ground of his theology.
It may be claimed on behalf of Charles Wesley that he was one of the greatest hymnists, possibly even the greatest hymnist of the Church, producing the largest corpus of biblically-imbued and theologically acute hymnody in the whole of Christian history. He reminds us that Christian Theology, the articulation of our knowledge of God, has its primary form not in systematic treatises, but in the worship of the Church, centred in the preaching of the Word. It may be argued that, even more successfully than John Wesley in his sermons, the hymns of Charles marry and integrate the subjective appropriation of faith with the objective truths of the faith. His hymnody characteristically weaves into one the great doctrines of Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement, and the experience of the worshippers brought face to face with the action of the Triune God in the story of salvation and by the Spirit in the life of faith.
Yet both the Wesley brothers, as people of their time, were therefore of course unaware of later developments in Christian Theology and in the more advanced understanding of the world which we must take into account today. They precede that creative development in theological thinking which began with Schleiermacher in which doctrines are less isolated than they were in the age of distinct 'articles of faith', and attempts are made to see Christian Theology in its profound unity and coherence. After the nineteenth-century attempts to ground this anthropocentrically in religious experience, the twentieth century saw a recovery of the centrality of Christology and therefore of the Doctrine of the Trinity as that which best integrates Christian theology as a whole. Similarly, biblical scholarship has moved on with its recovery of Eschatology as not merely the last chapter of Theology, detailing 'the Last Things' (Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell), but as the clue to the whole of Christian Theology. The 'already but not yet' structure of thought is the key in which all of the music is set. Seen in retrospect therefore, it is clear that eighteenth-century theology as a whole lacked a sufficient focus on the resurrection of Jesus and its eschatological significance, a stance which was typical of their age. Theological developments such as these, which have taken place since the Wesleys - a renewed Christocentrism, a new appreciation of the Trinitarian shape of Christian theology as a whole, a deeper understanding of the eschatological structure of New Testament faith - all mean that to be faithful to their concern with biblical, evangelical Christianity, we must go beyond them at those points. Similarly, new developments in the natural sciences, such as for example the new cosmology of the age of Einstein or the developments in Psychology, must all be taken into account in contextualizing the theology of the Wesleys today.
At the same time however, there are other developments which would be untrue to the theology of the Wesleys. Anything which departed from Nicene orthodoxy or the Reformation doctrine of 'justification by faith' would be untrue to the Wesleys. Anything which gave human reason the primacy instead of Holy Scripture, such as a system of doctrine which made a metaphysic or philosophy the Procrustean bed into which theology must fit, would be a departure from the theology of the Wesleys. Anything which made Christian theology essentially anthropocentric, such as a doctrinal system based on human experience or human religion, would be a betrayal of the theology of the Wesleys. Anything which weakened the passion for evangelism or the care for the poor would be contrary to the concerns and theology of one of the world's greatest evangelists who was also a beacon in the struggle for social justice. But of course what really matters in all this is not just being true to the Wesleys, but being true to the Christian gospel which they lived to serve and propagate.
As we look next at the Wesleyan tradition which developed from their ministry and as we come to shape a Christian Theology in Wesleyan perspective in the rest of this work, creative development is necessary. We cannot simply repeat an antiquarian eighteenth-century formulation of the Christian faith. But we must carefully distinguish between valid development of the thought of the Wesleys, and development which departs from the authentic catholic and evangelical Christianity which was their lodestar.
(B) The Wesleyan Tradition
After the death of the Wesleys, and contrary to their intentions, the Methodist movement formed into distinct denominations in Britain, America and elsewhere. This had certain advantages for mission and consequently the world-wide Methodist tradition today is not much smaller than the parent Anglican tradition which gave birth to it, albeit by a kind of Caesarean section. But arguably both traditions have suffered theologically from the alienation which followed the separation. Methodism in Britain and Ireland and in the United States had all the strength of a marginalized but highly committed group with firm boundaries and clear doctrines and experienced a century of sustained growth, but it lost to some extent the cross-fertilization of the Church catholic and, while it grew among the common people and influenced popular culture, it tended to lose touch with the intellectual trends in the Church at large and in the universities which were forming the deep currents of the culture and eventually were to lead to the serious decline of the Church as a whole in Britain and continental Europe.
Nineteenth-Century British Theologians
Two leading British Methodist theologians of the nineteenth century represent these developments. Richard Watson (1781-1833), re-expressed Methodist doctrine in a more comprehensive, systematized and apologetic form. Unlike Wesley, who could take for granted the Book of Common Prayer, the Homilies of the Church of England, and works such as Bishop Pearson’s exposition of the creed, Watson supplied the need for a movement now hardening into a separate denomination to have its own comprehensive Systematic Theology. The first volume of his Theological Institutes was published in 1823. His thinking shows some awareness of the intellectual context of his day in its attempt to keep to the Reformation and Wesleyan emphasis on the authority of the Bible, but to relate revelation to reason. Much more intentionally than Wesley, Watson devised his theology to counter the rationalist thinking of ‘modernity’. Later in the nineteenth century a fuller, more balanced Systematic Theology appeared, A Compendium of Christian Theology (1875-76), written by William Burt Pope (1822-1903) from Nova Scotia, who taught at Didsbury College near Manchester. But once again, this was a denominational theology, for while it was perfectly orthodox in its catholic Christianity, the real interest lay in the particular focus of the Wesleyan tradition on ‘repentance, faith and holiness’. Pope gave a deeply loyal and conservative systematic treatment of Wesleyan doctrine, but one largely unaware of the currents out in the wider Church, far less in European culture at large. Indeed his conservative theology was probably less influential than the preaching and writings of William Arthur in the mid-century who aligned British and Irish Methodism with the revivalist movement in the United States, and Hugh Price Hughes at the end of the century who held firm to the Methodist emphasis on personal salvation and piety, but widened their horizons to engage in social and political action.
The Increasing Influence of ‘Liberal’ Theology
But British Methodism, while growing, was always somewhat marginal in the life of the nation. American Methodism by contrast became one of the formative influences in the life and popular culture of the United States. To a large degree it defined itself by its opposition to Calvinism, a debate which tended to resolve into an opposition between the sovereignty of God and the freedom of humankind. Nathan Bangs (1778-1862) and Wilbur Fisk (1792-1839) took up the cause against the heirs of Jonathan Edwards, followed in the next generation by Albert Bledsoe (1809-1877) and Daniel Whedon (1808-1885). Bledsoe, in his Theodicy, took up the issue of God’s moral nature and the free agency of human beings, while for Whedon, ‘a thoroughly articulated philosophic interpretation of human nature’ was ‘the beginning point of theological construction.’
Fuller Systematic Theologies were written by Henry Bascom (1796-1850), Thomas Ralston (1806-1891) and Thomas Summers (1812-1882), who was the first professor of Theology at Vanderbilt University. Like their Calvinist contemporaries, Bascom and Ralston were dependent on the Scottish ‘Common Sense’ Realism of the previous century, and thought that they could marry revelation and natural reason. Summers’ two-volume work closely followed Richard Watson and placed human freedom within the context of divine grace in a more balanced way than Bledsoe and Whedon. William Warren (1833-1929), the first president of Boston University (a Methodist foundation), had studied and taught in Germany and was influenced by Schleiermacher and the development of so-called ‘Higher’ Biblical Criticism. He did not publish a full Systematic Theology however, being diverted into academic administration.
John Miley (1813-1895) in his influential Systematic Theology (1893) also tried to marry natural and dogmatic Theology. He held a high view of biblical authority, even the Bible’s inerrancy, but its infallibility was in interpreting religious experience. For him the ‘ground truth’ of Christianity was Theism, leading on then to the doctrine of the Trinity, then Anthropology, then Christology and Atonement, followed by justification, sanctification and the church. He characterized his position as ‘ethical Arminianism’. Another significant voice was Daniel Payne (1811-1893), a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, who had wide theological concerns, but, given the context of slavery, thought deeply about the problem of evil.
But it was with Borden Parker Bowne (1847-1910) of Boston University that the influence of the Liberal theology which was dominant in Germany and throughout Europe entered fully into the American Methodist scene and opened it up to wider currents of thought. Influenced by his studies in Germany, Bowne strongly emphasized the immanence of God and proposed the philosophy of Personal Idealism as the metaphysic to marry with Christian Theology. Through the revelation of God in Jesus Christ we understand that God is an infinite Person. ‘Personality as the key to reality became the central organizing principle of Bowne’s entire philosophy’ and Personalism implied free personal agency.
Thomas Langford summarizes the late-nineteenth developments in the Wesleyan tradition:
In contrast to earlier Wesleyan interpretation, grace lost its tight Christological connection. Whereas grace previously was directly related to Jesus Christ and his saving activity, the prevenient graciousness of God became increasingly understood as a general endowment of humankind with ability for free agency. Grace remained the foundation, but the emphasis was shifted to human responsibility.
Behind this development lay a methodological transition:
An explanation of this change lay in the fact that all these thinkers were shifting to philosophical bases for interpreting human experience. Philosophical argument increasingly provided the groundwork upon which human free agency was constructed and this was subsequently substantiated by scriptural and theological support.
Olin Curtis (1850-1918), Professor of Theology at Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey, maintained that ‘the source of all data is the Bible, and the Bible alone,’ and took a critical stance towards Liberal Theology, but anthropology and personalistic philosophy dominate his thought. And the influence of the dominant Liberal Theology became even stronger in the thought of Henry Clay Sheldon (1845-1928), Edgar S. Brightman (1884-1953) and Albert C. Knudson (1873-1953). Sheldon, who taught at Boston, rejected biblical infallibility and made Christian experience central to Theology. His focus was on the humanity rather than the deity of Christ, on the immanence rather than the transcendence of God, and on the moral influence view of the atonement. In Brightman the philosophy of Personalism was allied with a focus on experience and ‘consciousness’, clearly rooted in the Liberal tradition fathered by Schleiermacher, and issuing in a doctrine of a finite God. Knudson, who succeeded Sheldon as Professor of Systematic Theology at Boston, gave comprehensive expression to this Liberal Methodist tradition based on religious experience. While it is true that he tried to avoid subjectivism, seeing religion as personal commitment to the objective reality of God, the foundations of his thought were philosophical rather than biblical.
British Methodism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did not produce the same flowering of Systematic Theology: Pope’s conservative denominational theology was without a competitor. But John Scott Lidgett (1854-1953) followed Hugh Price Hughes in working to alleviate poverty, and his intellectual interests, which were broad, included Darwin and German theology. In line with the dominant Liberal German theology of the day, he emphasized the immanence of God the Father of all, the sacramental spirituality of creation, and personal religious experience as the root of theology. British Methodists throughout the twentieth century were more prominent in Biblical Studies, and included such leading scholars as J.H. Moulton, A.S. Peake, Vincent Taylor, Norman Snaith, G.W. Anderson, C.K. Barrett, I. Howard Marshall, Morna Hooker and J.D.G. Dunn. Significant works of Historical Theology were produced by R. Newton Flew, Gordon Rupp and Philip Watson. Newton Flew’s work demonstrated that Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection stood in the centuries-old tradition of the Church catholic. Frances Young and John Stacey produced doctrinal studies. Generally, the biblical and historical scholars were little influenced by philosophy or Liberal theology.
But much of British Methodism throughout the twentieth century found it hard to move beyond the influence of the old ‘Liberal’ theology, perhaps because Schleiermacher’s Pietist-sounding appeal to religious experience seemed on the face of it to be akin to Wesley. Even as late as 1968, Rupert Davies, a prominent British Methodist scholar, was aligning himself explicitly with Schleiermacher, while John Kent questioned the validity of the Christian tradition because of its failure to conform to the ‘modern’ intellectual convictions of the Enlightenment, and John Vincent was frankly declaring that Wesley’s doctrines of justification and sanctification and the priesthood of Christ had to be abandoned. The new emphasis, he said, should be on obedient discipleship.
Throughout the twentieth century however, the Wesleyan tradition has included those who rejected Liberal theology and remained closer to the theology of the Wesleys themselves and to biblical and Nicene Christianity. At the beginning of the twenty-first century a more authentic Wesleyan theology is emerging within the tradition of biblical, historic, Nicene and Evangelical Christianity. In the first place, there always has been loyalty to the historic Wesleyan tradition springing from the grass-roots. Many Methodist lay people continued to identify with the evangelical theology of the Wesleys, but it was particularly exemplified in the Wesleyan ‘holiness’ movement. Secondly, there has been a scholarly movement since in the second half of the twentieth century to rediscover Wesley as a serious theologian. Thirdly, there has been the intellectual influence of the world of academic theology itself, where the dominance of Liberalism was challenged as early as 1919 by Barth and where, despite the flowering of new forms of Liberalism in the mid-twentieth century, Liberal theology now appears to be in serious, possibly terminal, decline.
The Holiness Movement
The movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries which focussed on Christian holiness was one expression of grass-roots loyalty to Wesley’s evangelical theology which rejected so-called ‘Liberalism’. Evangelism was in the DNA of the Wesleyan tradition, and in the nineteenth century, before Liberal theology eventually blunted the edge of its evangel, Methodism grew strongly in Britain and America. But the Wesleys held as inseparable from the preaching of the Gospel that careful pastoral oversight and mentoring which led to growth in Christian holiness. John Wesley particularly urged his followers to ‘go on to perfection’ (Hebrews 6:1), which he identified (following the Fathers and medieval spiritual writers) as ‘purity of heart’. Methodism was all about a life of ‘method’ or discipline, but in the end this purity of heart was not attained by human achievement or self-discipline, but received by grace. That is to say that it was brought about by an act of God, and Wesley called this act ‘entire sanctification’ (II Thess. 5:23). He did not mean that the sanctification was ‘entire’ in the sense that it was the final completion of the sanctification of the Christian (who continued to confess shortcomings and grow in grace), but in the sense that this was the sanctification of the ‘entire’ Christian. That is to say: the Christian was sanctified ‘as a whole’ or holistically. Although still a fallen creature, he or she was no longer of a divided mind or heart, but loved God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Among Methodist lay people (and Methodism promoted preaching and pastoral care by lay people, local preachers and class leaders), personal holiness was of prime concern. And it was a Methodist laywoman, Phoebe Palmer, the wife of a New York doctor, who promoted the idea that the Christian did not need to struggle for years before receiving the witness of the Spirit that God had purified the heart, but could come to ‘entire sanctification’ by a ‘shorter way’. One simply had to consecrate oneself fully, lay oneself ‘on the altar’ as a ‘living sacrifice’, and believe that the work was done. This new interpretation of Methodist doctrine was criticized by the theologian, Nathan Bangs, and by the Methodist bishop, Randolph S. Foster, as untrue to the teaching of Wesley, but it gained popularity in the Methodist camp meetings.
A further twist was given to the tradition from outside Methodism by the Congregationalists, Charles G. Finney and Asa Mahan. Finney, the most powerful shaper of the American revivalist tradition since Wesley’s friend and colleague, George Whitefield, had developed an interpretation of the day of Pentecost as a ‘second’ crisis in the life of the apostles. They were already disciples converted to Christ when they were ‘baptized’ with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost in order to carry out the great commission to ‘preach the gospel to every creature’. Finney and Mahan identified this Pentecostal baptism of the Spirit with the Wesleyan experience of ‘entire sanctification’.
The resulting marriage of Phoebe Palmer’s ‘altar theology’, and the Finney-Mahan emphasis on the ‘baptism of the Spirit’ shaped the resulting ‘holiness movement’ which spread across the American denominations in various forms of ‘higher life’ teaching. It also influenced the British evangelical movement, particularly following the ‘Second Great Awakening’ of the mid-nineteenth century. The Irish Methodist, William Arthur, echoed the new focus on the Holy Spirit, and the theme of ‘Blood and Fire’ (Calvary and Pentecost) characterized the message of the Wesleyan preachers, William and Catherine Booth, and their Salvation Army. ‘Higher life’ teaching (although departing from the Wesleyan understanding) was the purpose of the annual Keswick Convention which influenced the army of young British graduates who volunteered for missionary service, founding churches around the world. In the United States, the Wesleyan holiness movement was not only active in the Methodist Episcopal Church, but also in offshoots such as the Free Methodists, the Wesleyan Methodists, the Pilgrim Holiness Church, and numerous independent churches and missions, some of whom united early in the twentieth century to form the Church of the Nazarene.
It was not until the early twentieth century that the ‘Wesleyan-holiness’ tradition was given expression in a work of Systematic Theology. E.P. Ellyson (1869-1954) wrote his brief Theological Compend in 1908, and A.M. Hills (1848-1935) produced Fundamental Christian Theology: A Systematic Theology in 1931. Once a student of Finney, Hills’ work reflected Finney’s influence and the Nazarene Publishing House would not publish the work, largely because of its stance on eschatology. But Hill’s theology also showed some of the contemporary influence of the fundamentalist phase which American evangelicalism was experiencing. A much more balanced presentation of the Wesleyan-holiness tradition by H. Orton Wiley (1877-1962), Christian Theology, was published by the Nazarene Publishing House in 1940. Here the influence of Palmer and Finney was muted and the influence of William Burt Pope was strong in a work which was more truly Wesleyan and fully ‘catholic’ in its exposition of biblical, historic, Nicene Christianity.
Thirty years later, Mildred Bangs Wynkoop (1908-1997) published A Theology of Love (1972), not a complete system of Christian Theology, but a study of Wesley’s theology which belonged more to Systematic than to Historical Theology. It attempted to re-interpret Wesley’s teaching on Christian holiness with the insights of the mid-twentieth-century Biblical Theology movement and the insights of philosophical Personalism. It implicitly criticized the ways in which the revivalistic ‘holiness movement’ had created a ‘credibility gap’ with an account of the doctrine of Christian holiness which was too often simplistic, de-personalized and ‘magical’. Christian holiness always had to be a matter not of the ‘magical’ but of the ‘moral’. Two one-volume works of Systematic Theology were published in the late twentieth century by Nazarene theologians. H. Ray Dunning’s Grace, Faith and Holiness (1988), influenced by the thought of Paul Tillich, majored on epistemological issues while reflecting the trend to return to a more Wesleyan expression of Christian holiness. J. Kenneth Grider’s A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology (1994) was a scholastic defence of the Palmer-Finney-Mahan tradition. In addition to these works of Systematic Theology, three Nazarene theologians published a one-volume work of Biblical Theology, God, Man and Salvation.
The Rediscovery of Wesley’s Theology
The second reason given above for the development of a more authentic Wesleyan theology today is the new interest in Wesley himself as a theologian, reflected in the work of Wynkoop and Dunning, which had been sparked by the Methodist patristic scholar, Albert Outler. Outler argued in 1961 that Wesley should be re-evaluated as a major theologian. He was prepared to grant that Wesley was not a speculative systematic theologian in the academic sense, but a ‘folk theologian’ with the ability to ‘simplify, synthesize, and communicate the essential teachings of the Christian gospel to laity’. It was this recovery of Wesley’s significance as a theologian which led to the launching of a project to produce the Bicentennial Edition of The Works of John Wesley, a critical edition, edited at first by the British Methodist scholar, Frank Baker, and by Outler. It was also Outler who suggested that Wesley’s theological method could be described as a ‘quadrilateral’ of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience. Several studies of Wesley’s thought had already been published, but Colin Williams' John Wesley’s Theology Today (1960), although it was an introductory work, was possibly the first to treat Wesley’s theology as a whole in a systematic rather than an historical way.
A number of scholarly studies of Wesley’s own theology have followed. In Responsible Grace (1994), Randy L. Maddox presented the theology of Wesley laid out in the traditional form of a Systematic Theology, beginning with epistemological questions followed by the doctrines of God, Humanity, Christ, the Holy Spirit, Salvation, the Means of Grace, and Eschatology. Unity is given to Wesley’s thought by the ‘orienting concern’ that ‘without God’s grace we cannot be saved; while without our (grace-empowered, but uncoerced) participation, God’s grace will not save.’ Thomas Oden collated quotations from Wesley, organized also in the traditional shape of Systematic Theology in John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity (1994). This has now been expanded into four volumes. Kenneth J. Collins laid out Wesley’s theology also in the form of a Systematics in A Faithful Witness (1993), and re-presented it around the theme of salvation in The Scripture Way of Salvation (1997). He then presented it in a more comprehensive way in a work which embodies the most sophisticated understanding yet of the nuances of Wesley's thought, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace. In addition to attempts to lay out Wesley’s theology in the form of a Systematic Theology, there have been studies of particular aspects of this theology. Leo George Cox presented a notable study of Wesley’s concept of Christian perfection in 1964, while Herbert B. McGonigle looked at Wesley’s theology from the perspective of his Arminianism.
Among contemporary theologians in the Wesleyan tradition, note should also be taken of those who have produced works of Systematic Theology. These include the English theologian, Geoffrey Wainwright, professor at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina, who has formulated his theology in relation to worship. Thomas Oden of Drew Seminary, New Jersey, became in his mature years a strong advocate of what he called ‘paleo-orthodoxy’ in reaction to the tendency of contemporary theologians to jump on every new bandwagon. His three-volume Systematics incorporated the thought of the Christian Fathers and of the medieval and Reformation theologians, deliberately reducing the attention given to modern and contemporary theology. He is also the general editor of a series giving Patristic commentary on each book of the Bible. The Irish theologian, William Abraham of Southern Methodist University in Texas, has written more on questions of theological method, particularly the role of Holy Scripture in divine revelation, advocating what he calls ‘Canonical Theism’. Various multi-author works have also been published by theologians in the Wesleyan tradition. In the closely related field of Moral Theology, we must also take note first of all of the major contribution of Stanley Hauerwas, acknowledging the influence of Barth, Frei and Yoder on his thought. The contributions of D. Stephen Long, H. Ray Dunning, and Kevin Twain Lowery among others, also should be noted.
In this work of Systematic or Integrative Theology, centred on Christian Dogmatics, we shall be concerned not merely with 'Wesleyan Theology', but, like Watson, Pope, Wiley, Wainwright, Oden and others, with Christian Theology. The day has passed when Christian Theology can be presented in a sectarian or merely denominational way. Too easily in the past, the launching of particular denominations in order to defend and propagate some doctrinal emphasis has morphed into using that doctrinal emphasis in order to justify the existence of that separate denomination with its particular organizational structure and sub-culture. Denominational structures have furthered the Church’s mission, and they have proved strongly resistant to the idealistic ecumenism of the mid-twentieth century. But across the Church of Jesus Christ today, Christians are more concerned with mission centred in the evangelistic proclamation the central truths of the Christian faith than with propagating particular denominations. The Wesleyan tradition will therefore only survive if it is ready to present its particular doctrinal emphases as aspects of ‘mere Christianity’ rather than perpetuating denominational ‘distinctives’ in a sectarian way. In no way does that mean abandoning particular Wesleyan emphases, particularly Wesley’s focus on ‘repentance, faith and holiness’, but it does require seeing these as integral to the Trinitarian, Christ-centred faith of the Church catholic.
Wesleyan theology therefore must not see itself as a narrow sect called ‘Wesleyanism’, gathering up its skirts and defending its narrow ‘distinctives’. Wesley would have been horrified at the idea that his name should be given to an ‘ism’. To repeat, what he was committed to was 'the old religion, the religion of the Bible, the religion of the primitive church, the religion of the Church of England,' or, in other words, ‘mere Christianity’, the catholic and evangelical faith. Theologians in the Wesleyan tradition must serve the mission of the growing, global catholic and evangelical Church of today in all its branches. In this work of Theology we shall therefore view Christian Theology in Wesleyan perspective in the belief that it will become evident that the evangelical perspective of the Wesleys with its concern with Christian holiness gives us one of the best possible ways of articulating biblical, Nicene Christianity.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952, originated in a series of broadcast talks during the Second World War and has sold millions of copies as an introduction to the Christian faith. Works, 3:585. Queen Elizabeth would even have included those inclined to old Catholic ways, but the Pope’s declaration of her illegitimacy effectively put all Catholics under suspicion of being traitors. See Herbert McGonigle (2001) for an examination of John Wesley’s Arminian Evangelicalism over against both Calvinist Evangelicals and the non-Evangelical Arminianism of the later Remonstrants. See Noble (2003) for the way in which John Wesley unites influences from the Eastern and Western Fathers. See Maddox (1995), Noble (2010), and Vickers (2010) for articles on Wesley as a theologian. See Sermon 39, ‘Catholic Spirit,’ The Works of John Wesley, Vol. 2 [Bicentennial Edition], Nashville: Abingdon, 1985 Of course, as his sermon on ‘Scriptural Christianity’ emphasizes (Works [BE], Vol. 1, Nashville: Abingdon, 1984, Sermon 4, 159-180), this is not just a matter of doctrine, but being ‘filled with the Holy Ghost’. Works [BE], Vol. 9, The Methodist Societies: History, Nature and Design (ed. Rupert E. Davies), Nashville: Abingdon, 1989, 95. The argument that we must distinguish these ‘two distinct groups of “essential” or definitive doctrines’ in Wesley’s thinking is presented in Ted A. Campbell, ‘The Legacy of Methodist Theology,’ BJRULM, 85: 2 & 3 (2003), 405-420. Works [Jackson edition], Vol. 10, London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1873, 80-86. Campbell, ‘Legacy’, 410. Simeon gives his account of the interview in the preface to his published sermons, Horae Homileticae, p. xviin. This is the criteria for Christian doctrine proposed by Vincent of Lérins and known as the ‘Vincentian Canon’: quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. George Croft Cell, The Re-discovery of John Wesley (Henry Holt, 1935). Ps. 145:9 (BCP), a favourite verse in countering the Calvinist view of predestination. The quotation is a line from Charles Wesley’s hymn, ‘Father, whose everlasting love,’ which was not in the original Hymns for the People Called Methodists, but was inserted as No. 39 after Wesley’s death. See Noble (2010) for a fuller argument for this exposition of Wesley's Trinitarian theology according to this structure (Christ and justification, the Spirit and sanctification, the love of the Father and election). See also Geoffrey Wainwright (1990), (2002) and (2004) See Noble (2011) for further comments on authentic Wesleyan theology today. For a fuller account of the development in the Wesleyan theological tradition in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Thomas Langford, Practical Divinity: Theology in the Wesleyan Tradition, Vol. 1, Nashville: Abingdon, 1983. John Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed, London: Bowyer, 1710 (9th ed.). Langford, 93. Langford, 108 Langford, 113 Langford, 114. R. Newton Flew, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology, Oxford: Clarendon, 1934. Primarily a patristic scholar, Frances Young has produced studies in the doctrine of the atonement, notably Sacrifice and the Death of Christ, London: SPCK, 1975. John Stacey, Groundwork of Theology (1984). See also Abraham and Kirby (2009) and Maddox and Vickers (2010). Rupert E. Davies, Religious Authority in an Age of Doubt, London: Epworth, 1968 John H.S. Kent, The End of the Line? The Development of Christian Theology in the Last Two Centuries, London: SCM, 1982 John J. Vincent, Christ and Methodism, London: Epworth Press, 1955 W.T. Purkiser, R.S. Taylor and W.H. Taylor, God, Man and Salvation, Kansas City: Beacon Hill, 1977 Albert Outler, ‘Towards a Re-appraisal of John Wesley as a Theologian,’ The Perkins School of Theology Journal, 14 (1961), 5-14, reprinted in The Wesleyan Theological Heritage, ed. Oden & Longden, Zondervan, 1991, 40-54. Maddox, Responsible Grace, Nashville:Kingswood, 1994, 16. These included the study by the American, George Croft Cell, The Rediscovery of John Wesley (1934); the study of Wesley from a Roman Catholic perspective by the French scholar, Maximin Piette, John Wesley and the Evolution of Protestantism (1937); William R. Cannon, The Theology of John Wesley, with Special Reference to the Doctrine of Justification (1946), which presented a very Reformed Wesley; the thorough study by the Swedish scholar, Harald Lindström, Wesley and Sanctification (1946); the work by the refugee German pastor and friend of Bonhoeffer, Franz Hildebrandt, From Luther to Wesley (1951), highlighting the influence of Luther; and John Deschner, Wesley’s Christology: an Interpretation (1960). Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology, Nashville: Kingswood, 1994, 19 Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Scriptural Christianity: A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994. Oden has now expanded this work into the multi-volume John Wesley’s Teachings (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, from 2012). An earlier collection of quotations arranged in systematic order was Robert W. Burtner and Robert E. Chiles, eds, A Compend of Wesley’s Theology, Nashville: Abingdon, 1954. Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley’s Teachings, 4 Vols, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012-14. Kenneth J. Collins, A Faithful Witness: John Wesley’s Homiletical Theology, Wilmore, KY: Wesley Heritage Press, 1993. Kenneth J. Collins, The Scripture Way of Salvation: the Heart of John Wesley’s Theology, Nashville: Abingdon, 1997. Kenneth J. Collins, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace, Nashville: Abingdon, 2007. Leo George Cox, John Wesley’s Concept of Perfection, Kansas City: Beacon Hill, 1964. Herbert B. McGonigle, Sufficient Saving Grace: John Wesley’s Evangelical Arminianism, Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001. Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life, Oxford: OUP, 1980 Thomas C. Oden, Systematic Theology, Vol 1: The Living God , Vol. 2: The Word of Life, Vol. 3: Life in the Spirit (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992). This now appears in one volume as Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology (2009). Thomas Oden (ed), The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, 28 Vols, Downers Grove: IVP, 2002-2009. Theodore Runyon (ed), Wesleyan Theology Today: A Bicentennial Theological Consultation (Nashville: Kingswood, 1985). See also Wesleyan Theological Perspectives (Anderson, Indiana: Warner Press): Vol. 1, Salvation (ed. John E.Hartley & R. Larry Shelton, 1981), Vol. 2, God’s Word for Today (ed. Wayne McCown & James Massey, 1982); Vol. 3, Christian Ethics (ed. Lane A. Scott & Leon O. Hynson, 1983); Vol. 4, The Church (ed. Melvin E. Dieter & Daniel E. Berg, 1984); Vol. 5, The Spirit and the New Age (ed. Alex R.G. Deasley & R. Larry Shelton, 1986) Among his many publications, see particularly Hauerwas (1981), (1983), (1988), (1994), (1998), (2001), and (2015) Dunning (1998), Long (2005), Lowery (2008) Sermon 112, 'On Laying the Foundation of the New Chapel,' Works [BE], Vol. 3, 585. [8858 words]