Wesley and Men Who Followed

Pithy statement of the day:

None can trust in the merits of Christ until they have renounced their own.

—John Wesley, quoted in Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 9.

After reading Spurgeon v. Hyper-Calvinism, I’m shifting my attention to the other end of the soteriological spectrum in another historical volume by Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed.

I know relatively little about John Wesley. My impression of him, from the little I have read about him, is that he was an Arminian unlike most Arminians I have known, and certainly unlike I was. I am eager to see if my impression is correct. If the following account of an exchange between Wesley and pseudonymous critic “John Smith” is any indication, it is.

‘You seem to me,’ wrote ‘Smith’, ‘to contend with great earnestness for the following system, viz., that faith (instead of being a rational assent and a moral virtue for the attainment of which men ought to yield the utmost attention and industry) is altogether a divine and supernatural illapse from heaven, the immediate gift of God, the mere work of omnipotence.’ With obvious qualification, this was what Wesley believed; faith is supernatural, ‘wrought in us (be it swiftly or slowly) by the Spirit of God’. He replied to ‘Smith’:

Supposing a man be now void of faith and hope and love, he cannot effect any degree of them in himself by any possible exertion of his understanding, and of any or all of his other natural faculties, though he should enjoy them to the utmost perfection. A distinct power from God, not implied in any of these, is indispensably necessary before it is possible that he should arrive at the very last degree of Christian faith, or love, or hope. In order to his having any of these (on which very consideration I suppose St. Paul terms “the fruits of the Spirit”) he must be created anew, thoroughly and inwardly changed by the operation of the Spirit of God, by a power equivalent to that which raises the dead, and which calls the things that were not as though they were.’

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 32–33.

John Wesley claimed to be “a man of one book.” Nevertheless, his system of thought, which became Methodism, was clearly molded by extra-biblical influences. Murray names these as “High Church divinity, Christian mysticism, and Moravian evangelicalism,” and adds, “It would be a mistake to suppose that the influence of the first two ended when he embraced the third.”

   High church thinking remained with him in more than one area. On baptism, for instance, he continued to believe that a decisive change occurs when a child receives the sacrament. Before that event original sin operates in its full power in all the sons of Adam, but in baptism the merit of Christ’s death begins to be applied to all and there is a general giving of the Holy Spirit sufficient to enable a response to the gospel. This was his teaching on ‘prevenient grace’. He also believed that the Lord’s Supper could be viewed as a means of conversion. His ‘High’ beliefs about the sacraments likewise may have entered into his readiness to allow unordained preachers to expound Scripture, whereas they were not to baptize or to administer the Lord’s Supper.
   From this same High Church came what can only be called a form of ‘asceticism’ which remained in Wesley’s thinking. High Church and mystical writers majored on self-denial. Certainly, self-denial is a Christian duty, and it was to contribute largely to the spirituality and vigour which would characterize Methodists. In Wesley, however, it could pass into asceticism, not simply in such things as early rising and abstinence from tea-drinking but, more seriously, in his whole view of marriage. To a young preacher who nearly fell into matrimony he could write, ‘I congratulate you on your deliverance . . . remember the wise direction of à Kempis, “Avoid good women, and commend them to God.”’ . . . [Wesley’s own] marriage was a disaster. This might have been the case whoever he had married, given his estimation that celibacy remained a higher state, and that marrying for happiness was somehow beneath a Christian: ‘I married because I needed a home’, he tells a correspondent, ‘in order to recover my health; and I did recover it. But I did not seek happiness thereby, and I did not find it.’ Who can be surprised?
   . . .
   Asceticism is not a charge which Wesley would have recognized, but there was another strand in his thinking that he willingly attributed to his early reading of High Church authors and the mystics. This was his teaching on ‘Christian perfection’ . . . in its final form his teaching, in brief, was that the mature or ‘perfect’ Christian . . . can attain to loving God with heart and soul and strength before death, and so overcome all inbred sin that sinning may be said to have ceased. To describe this attainment he used several terms, ‘full sanctification’, ‘pure love’, ‘Christian perfection’, and less commonly, the ‘second blessing’. This condition might be received by faith in an instant. ‘Full deliverance from sin, I believe, is always instantaneous.’ . . .
   . . . it is no conjecture to believe that Wesley’s ‘evidence’ for the opinion rested quite as much upon alleged experiences as upon any interpretation of Scripture . . . although Wesley criticized the mystic writers with the words, ‘each of them makes his own experience the standard of religion’, a propensity to depend on experience as a guide to truth also remained with him. For example, to support his assertion, given above, that full deliverance from sin, I believe, is always instantaneous’, he adds, ‘at least, I never yet knew an exception.’

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 44–48.

In a Previous post on Wesley and Men Who Followed, I offered my impression of John Wesley as “an Arminian unlike most Arminians I have known.” The “men who followed” seem to fit that description as well. Among those men was William Bramwell (1759–1818). Bramwell was zealous for the purity of the church, and lamented the fact that, in some instances, individuals were being received into membership without having proven the genuineness of their conversion. He deplored such lack of discipline, and avoided practices which might encourage false professions of faith.

   In regard to seekers and the distressed there is a significant difference between Bramwell’s practice and that of a later generation. Whereas he would sometimes invite the awakened and the concerned to meet with him separately for spiritual advice, there is no record of his calling people to meet at the communion rail or ‘the penitent’s bench’ at the end of a service. When the latter practice was first adopted by the Methodists it was only as a means to make counseling more easy and immediately available; but this was to prove a half-way to the practice of making coming to the front necessary for securing immediate professions of conversion. When that final stage came, the prevailing understanding of evangelism was very different from that of Bramwell’s generation. And the final development encouraged the very danger of a premature profession that the earlier generation had tried to avoid. Bramwell’s generation wanted to see repentance resulting in a changed life before they accepted any Christian profession.

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 124–125.

When John Wesley arrived in Ireland, he discovered a situation similar to ours in the United States. Substitute “secular humanist” for “Roman Catholic,” and “evangelical” for “protestant,” and see if you don’t agree.

[Wesley] described his first contacts in Dublin as people who exceeded all he knew for their ‘sweetness of temper, courtesy and hospitality,’ but they were ‘English transplanted into another soil.’ They belonged to the Protestant establishment and it was from their number that the members of his first Society in Dublin came. Noticeably absent from the Society were the native Irish-speaking people, of whom Wesley said, ‘At least ninety-nine in a hundred remain in the religion of their forefathers.’ For this sullen majority he had genuine sympathy and regarded it as no surprise that they should live and die as Roman Catholics ‘when the protestants can find no better ways to convert them than penal laws and act of parliament’.

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 139.

Among the early Methodists used by God to cultivate the hard ground of Catholic Ireland was Gideon Ouseley (1762–1839). Ousely serves as an example to those of us who would, because we lack great abilities or knowledge, do nothing. Iain Murray writes:

In a lonely part of Ireland [Ouseley] acted simply because he was constrained to do so. In some respects he lacked the knowledge that was needed, and he was aware of it, but when the lack prompted him to stay silent other thoughts compelled him. He would say to himself, ‘Do you not know the disease? And do you not know the cure?’ And his conclusion had a divine authority about it, ‘go then and tell them these two things, the disease and the cure; never mind the rest.’

—Iain Murray, Wesley and Men Who Followed (Banner of Truth, 2003), 166–167.