By
Frank G. Carver
“The essence of Wesleyanism” is simply and profoundly FREE GRACE! Wesley understood the grace of God in two key ways. First like the Reformers, he understood grace as the “undeserved favor” of God, enabling our acceptance with Him. This, Wesley writes is favour altogether undeserved, man having no claim to the least of his mercies. It was free grace that “formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into him a living soul,” and stamped on that soul the image of God, and “put all things under his feet.” The same free grace continues to us, at the day, life and breath, and all things.
Second, out of his immersion in the Greek Christian heritage, Wesley understood grace as the “power of the Holy Ghost” enabling us to walk in the ways of God. The former of these two understandings “accents the divine/human relation; the latter, human participation and renewal.” For Wesley the Holy Spirit was “the mediator of all graces—sufficient grace in all, irresistible grace in none.” H. Ray Dunning’s title for his “Wesleyan Systematic Theology,” Grace, Faith and Holiness, is appropriate for our theme. For in Wesley, and in truly Wesleyan theology, graces issues first in faith, then in holiness! Foundational for Wesleyanism in Wesley’s own language is Grace Free In All, Grace Free For All The word for this in Wesleyan theology is “prevenient grace.” “Prevenient” or “preventing” grace sets every person free to respond to the call of God. In his sermon “Working Out Our Own Salvation,” Mr. Wesley writes: For allowing that all the souls of men are dead in sin by nature, this excuses none, seeing there is no man that is in a state of mere nature; there is no man, unless he has quenched the Spirit, that is wholly void of the grace of God. No man living is entirely destitute of what is vulgarly called “natural conscience.” But this is not natural; it is more properly termed “preventing grace.” Every man has a greater or less measure of this, which waiteth not for the call of man. Everyone has sooner or later good desires, although the generality of men stifle them before they can strike deep root or produce any considerable fruit. Everyone has some measure of that light, some faint glimmering ray, which sooner or later, more or less, enlightens every man that cometh into the world. . . . So that no man sins because he has not grace, but because he does not use the grace which he hath.
In the Conference Minutes of 1745, Wesley asks, “Q. 23. Wherein may we come to the very edge of Calvinism? A. (1.) In ascribing all good to the free grace of God, (2.) In denying all natural free-will, and all power antecedent to grace. And, (3.) In excluding all merit from man; even for what he has or does by the grace of God.” In his Sermon on “Free Grace” from 1739, Wesley defined prevenient grace simply: “The grace or love of God, whence cometh our salvation, is FREE IN ALL, and FREE FOR ALL.” As Collins summarizes: “Wesley’s doctrine of prevenient grace allows him to hold together, without any contradiction, the four motifs of total depravity, salvation by grace, human responsibility, and the offer of salvation to all.” Out of the operation of prevenient grace, grace free in all, and grace free for all, as it brings us to faith, come Wesley’s two unique emphases, so needed in his day and in no way irrelevant to ours, the twin spiritual graces of the assurance of salvation, and the transformation of life—morality and spiritually. The first of these is
The Assurance of Grace
Assurance of salvation is one sure point of Wesley’s Aldersgate testimony. On Wednesday, May 24, 1738, just three days after his brother Charles had broken through to a new level of assurance, Wesley wrote those often quoted words: I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface 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.
Here is the heart of what he heard read from Martin Luther: Hence it comes that faith alone makes righteous and fulfills the law; for out of Christ’s merit it brings the Spirit, and the Spirit makes the heart glad and free as the law requires that it shall be. Faith, however, is a divine work in us. It changes us and makes us to be born anew of God (John 1.); it kills the old Adam and makes altogether new and different men, in heart and spirit and mind and powers, and it brings with it the Holy Ghost. O, it is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, this faith, and so it is impossible for it not to do good works incessantly. It does not ask whether there are good works to do, but before the question rises it has already done them, and is always at the doing of them.
In his sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” one of his sermons on Ephesians 2:8 and the written sermon with the most extensive history of oral preaching behind it, Wesley writes of assurance: The Apostle says: “There is one faith, and one hope of our calling,” one Christian, saving faith, as “there is one Lord” in whom we believe, and “one God and Father of us all.” And it is certain this faith necessarily implies an assurance [. . .] that “Christ loved me, and gave himself for me.” For “he that believeth” with the true, living faith, “hath the witness in himself.” “The Spirit witnesseth with his spirit that he is a child of God.” “Because he is a son, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his son into his heart, crying Abba, Father;” giving him an assurance that he is so, and a childlike confidence in him.
This is grace as “the power of the Holy Ghost” enabling us to believe that God loves us, that Christ died for even my sins—the very ability to do this is “the assurance of grace.” It is the witness of faith itself as effected by the Holy Spirit. As Bultmann comments on 1 John 5:6-7, The witness of the spirit is thus not a datum which could be used to establish the correctness of the assertion of faith on a neutral basis. Faith as faith in the proclaimed word is certain of itself.
God’s love to us in the cross of Christ brought home to our hearts by the Holy Spirit is itself Christian certainty: Faith is the very life of salvation as P. T. Forsyth stress over a century ago: “Faith is not a means of certainty, it is certainty.” As 1 John 5:10 concludes, The one who believes [is believing] in the Son of God has the witness in himself (NASB).
Charles Wesley’s poetry says it best:
Spirit of faith, come down, Reveal the things of God: And make to us the Godhead known, And witness with the blood: ‘Tis Thine the blood to apply, And give us eyes to see, Who did for every sinner die Hath surely died for me. No man can truly say That Jesus is the Lord Unless Thou take the veil away, And breathe the living word; Then, only then we feel Our interest in His blood, And cry with joy unspeakable, Thou art my Lord, my God! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inspire the living faith (Which whoso’er receives, The witness in himself he hath, And consciously believes), The faith that conquers all, And doth the mountain move, And saves whoe’er on Jesus call, And perfects them in love.
This power of grace free in all and for all brings us to
The Grace of Perfect Love
This is grace affecting the moral and spiritual transformation of life! Here above all, it is helpful to let Mr. Wesley speak for himself, again in “The Scripture Way of Salvation”: 8. “From time to time of our being ‘born again’ the gradual work of sanctification takes place. We are enabled ‘by the Spirit’ to ‘mortify the deeds of the body,’ of our evil nature. And as we are more and more dead to sin, we are more and more alive to God. We go on from grace to grace, while we are careful to ‘abstain from all appearance of evil,’ and are ‘zealous of good works,’ ‘as we have opportunity doing good to all men;’ while we walk in all his ordinances blameless, therein worshipping him in spirit and in truth; while we take up our cross and deny ourselves every pleasure that does not lead us to God. 9, “It is thus that we wait for entire sanctification, for a full salvation from all our sins, from pride, self-will, anger, unbelief, or, as the Apostle expresses it, ‘Go on to perfection’ But what is perfection? The word has various senses: Here it means perfect love. It is love excluding sin; love filling the heart, taking up the wholecapacity of the soul. It is love ‘rejoicing evermore, praying without ceasing, in everything giving thanks.’ . . . For as long as love takes up the whole heart, what room is there for sin therein?”
It has been aptly said that perfection for Wesley “is the fulfillment of faith’s desire to love God above all else and all else in God, so far as conscious will and deliberate action are concerned.” Wesley’s own words in his “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection” provide us with a succinct description impressively full of scriptural language: In one view, it is purity of intention, dedicating all the life to God. It is the giving God all our heart; it is one desire and design ruling all our tempers. It is the devoting, not a part, but all our soul, body, and substance to God. In another view, it is all the mind which was in Christ, enabling us to walk as Christ walked. It is the circumcision of the heart from all filthiness, all inward as well as outward pollution. It is a renewal of the heart in the whole image of God, the full likeness of Him that created it. In yet another, it is the loving God with all our heart, and our neighbour as ourselves. Now, take it in which of these views you please (for there is no material difference), and this is the whole and sole perfection, as a train of writings prove to a demonstration, which I have believed and taught for these forty years, from the year 1725 to the year 1765.
Albert Outler, in a most appealing way, sums up Wesley’s own Christian character in terms of the grace that he proclaimed: There is impressive testimony to the fact that he came finally to understand that Christian maturity is chiefly faith’s freedom to respond to God’s grace without fear of rejection or pride of possession. This was the positive and dynamic view of sanctification that explains, in part, at least, Wesley’s own unwearied and unanxious diligence, his stress upon the serene strenuousness of the Christian life.
For Wesley and for Wesleyans, it is ”Grace Free in All, and Grace Free for All!” Epitomized in the “Collect for Purity,” repeated by multitudes over the centuries in Christian worship, is the essence of Wesleyanism: Almighty God, to You all hearts are open, all desires known, and from You no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of Your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love You, and worthily magnify Your holy Name: Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
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This essay was first delivered as a talk at “A Wesley Festival: ‘Pilgrimage to Wholeness,’” a Faculty Chapel, Point Loma Nazarene College, February 19, 1993. The attempt was to set the stage for John Wesley himself to articulate the essence of Wesleyanism. The notes used for that brief presentation were put in prose form with documentation and some revision and published in The Preachers’ Magazine, June/July/August, 1996. See Kenneth Collins, Wesley on Salvation: A Study in the Standard Sermons (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury Press, 1989), 19f. Albert C. Outler, The Works of John Wesley, Volume 1 Sermons 1-33 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1984), 117. This is from his sermon “Salvation by Faith,’ preached at St. Mary’s, Oxford, June 11, 1738. The text was Ephesians 2:8, “By grace are ye saved through faith” (KJV), a favorite from which he spoke numerous times. Ibid., 117f. So Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 8-10. See his essay “John Wesley’s Interests in the Early Fathers of the Church,” first published in 1983, now in Thomas C. Oden and Leicester R. Longden, eds., The Wesleyan Theological Heritage: Collected Essays of Albert C. Outler (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1991), 97-110. See also Randy Maddox, “John Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy: Influences, Convergences, and Differences,” Asbury Seminary Journal, 45, No. 2 (Fall 1990), 29-53. The Wesleyan Theological. Journal 26, No. 1 Spring 1991), contains the articles from the 1990 society meeting, held at Nazarene Theological Seminary, that explores this relationship between Wesley and the Greek Fathers. Outler, John Wesley, 260, from the sermon “The Spirit of Bondage and Adoption.” Collins, Wesley on Salvation, 19. Outler, Works, 1:98-99. Outler’s complete statement is helpful: “The heart of Wesley’s gospel was always its lively sense of God’s grace at work at every level of creation and history in persons and communities. He took the ‘Protestant principle’ for granted: that God alone is God, with no rivals in creation save those idols that make human pride the primal font of sin and self-delusion. But he also cherished the Greek Christian heritage as a needful balance and, most especially, in its understanding of the Holy Spirit as the mediator of all graces—sufficient grace in all, irresistible grace in none. His ecclesiology turned on the conviction that all the means of grace are the Spirit’s gifts to the priesthood of all believers and, under the Spirit’s guidance, to a representative priesthood. The ‘catholic’ substance of Wesley’s theology is the theme of participation—the idea that all life is of grace and all grace is the mediation of Christ by the Holy Spirit. Wesley did not, of course, invent any of these ideas, but neither did he find them already compounded in the special syndrome that he struggled for and largely achieved.” H. Ray Dunning, Grace, Faith, and Holiness: A Wesleyan Systematic Theology (Kansas City, Missouri: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1988). Boldface is mine. Albert C. Outler, The Works of John Wesley, Volume III: Sermons 71-114 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1986), 207. The Works of John Wesley, 3rd ed., 14 vols. (Reprinted fro the 1872 edition issued by Wesleyan Methodist Book Room, London; Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1978-79), 8:285. Outler, Works, 3:544. Collins, Wesley on Salvation, 25. How to interpret this experience in Wesley’s personal “order of salvation” has been under debate in contemporary Wesleyan scholarship. See Outler, John Wesley, 13-16; Wesleyan Theological Journal, 24 (1989), 18-73; and Randy L. Maddox, ed., Aldersgate Reconsidered (Nashville: Kingswood Books, Abingdon Press, 1990).. For an account of this experience and its relation to John’s, see Philip S. Watson, The Message of the Wesleys” A Reader of Instruction and Devotion (New York: Macmillan Co., 1964), 6-7. A reading from Martin Luther’s Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians on 2:20 was crucial for Charles’ experience. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater, eds., The Works of John Wesley, Volume XVIII: Journal and Diaries I (1735-38) (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), 249-50. See 242-54 for Wesley’s explanatory comments leading to and following Aldersgate. Works of Martin Luther: Translated with Introductions and Notes (Philadelphia, 1932), 6:449ff. Quoted from Watson, 8. Albert C. Outler, ed., The Works of John Wesley, Volume II: Sermons 34-70 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985), 161-162. The scriptures quoted are Ephesians 4:4-6; Galatians 2:20; 1 John 5:10; Romans 8:16; and Galatians 4:6. On January 29, 1738, four months before Aldersgate, Wesley had written in his Journal The faith I want is (the faith of a son [added in errata, 1774]), “a sure trust and confidence in God, that through the merits of Christ my sins are forgiven, and I reconciled to the favour of God.” I want that faith which St. Paul recommends to all the world, especially in his Epistle to the Romans, that faith which enables everyone that hath it to cry out, “I live not, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” I want that faith which none can have without knowing that he hath it (although many imagine that they have it who have it not). For whosoever hath it is “freed from sin”; “the body of sin is destroyed” in him. He is freed from fear, “having peace with God through Christ, and rejoicing in hope of the glory of God.” And he is free from doubt, “having the love of God shed abroad in his heart through the Holy Ghost which is given unto him”; which “Spirit itself beareth witness with his spirit, that he is a child of God.” Ward and Heitzenrater, Works, 18:2215-16. The scriptures cited are Galatians 2:20; Romans 6:6; 5:1-2, 5; 8:16. Rudolf Bultmann, The Johannine Epistles, in Hermeneia, trans. R. Philip O’Hara, Lance C. McGaughy, and Robert W. Funk (Philadelphia: Fortress Pres, 1973), 80. This statement reflects Romans 5, which can be paraphrased, “And hope never disappoints, because God’s love for us in the cross of Christ has been brought all the way home to our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.” P. T. Forsyth, The Principle of Authority in Relation to Certainty, Sanctity and Society (London: Independent Press, 1913, 2nd ed. 1952), 43. Franz Hildebrandt, Oliver A. Breckerlegge, and James Dale, The Works of John Wesley, Volume VII: A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1983), 182-183). See the collection of the hymns of Charles Wesley on the assurance theme in Arthur S. Yates, The Doctrine of Assurance with Special Reference to John Wesley (London: Epworth Press, 1952), 82-102. The omitted verse reads as follows: O that the world might know The all-atoning Lamb! Spirit of faith, descend, and show The virtue of his name; The grace which all may find, The saving power impart, And testify to all mankind, And speak in every heart! Boldface type is mine. Outler, Works, 2:160, 167. The scriptures cited are Romans 8:13; 1 Thessalonians 5:22; Titus 2:14; Galatians 6:10; Luke 1:6; John 4:23-24; Hebrews 6:1; 1 Thessalonians5:16-18. Outler, John Wesley, 32. “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, as believed and taught by the Reverend Mr. John Wesley, from the year 1725, to the year 1777,” The Works of John Wesley (Reprint; Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1978-790, 11:444. See also John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1966), 117-118. A student, born and brought up in the Church of the Nazarene, wrote the following for me in a review of Wesley’s Plain Account: I was not familiar with the term “Christian Perfection” before this class. When I think of Christian Perfection, I think of saintly living. Some parts of the book were a little dry, but most of the time I was intrigued with what Wesley had to say. I realize that Christian Perfection is a lifestyle, but I have never heard it encouraged to live that lifestyle at church. The book was very uplifting and discouraging at the same time (Jody Smith, Life of Holiness, fall, 1993). How could this be! Outler, John Wesley, 29. This prayer is at least as early as the 11th century, found in “The Prayers of Leofric,” Bishop of Exeter, in England. The Book of Common Prayer (New York: The Seabury Press, 1979), 355. Wesley himself tied this collect closely to his understanding of Christian Perfection. See K. Steve McCormick, “Theosis in Chrysostom and Wesley: An Eastern Paradigm on Faith and Love,” Wesleyan Theological Journal, 26, No. 1 (Spring 1991), 54.