John Wesley

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.

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.

The twentieth century conflict between evangelicals and anglo-catholics in the Church of England was not the first of its kind. Two hundred years earlier, George Whitefield and John Wesley had preached the necessity of conversion, and defined the word “Christian” in specific terms. It did not go over well with their Anglican colleagues. Iain Murray wrote:

   The clergy immediately complained that such preaching was disturbing the baptized members of the church. As early as May 1742 Wesley and Whitefield were required to present themselves before the Archbishop of Canterbury. Despite their attempts to avoid causing needless offense, this was only the beginning of the trouble. Given the situation, they knew that opposition was inevitable. Whitefield believed: ‘It is every minister’s duty to declare against the corruption of that church to which they belong.’ Thus when the Bishop of London accused him of saying that he preached ‘a new gospel unknown to the generality of ministers and people’, far from modifying his words, Whitefield replied:

’Tis true, My Lord, in one sense, mine is a new gospel, and will always be to the generality of ministers and people, even in a christian country, if your Lordship’s clergy follow your Lordship’s directions.

Whitfield then went on to quote the bishop’s counsel that a preacher should ‘leave no doubt’ in their [sic] hearers ‘whether good works are a necessary condition of your being justified in the sight of God’.

Was the great apostle of the Gentiles now living, what anathemas would he pronounce against such Judaizing doctrine? . . . This is the great fundamental point in which we differ from the church of Rome. This is the grand point of contention between the generality of the established clergy and the Methodist preachers: we plead for free justification in the sight of God, by faith alone, in the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ, without any regard to works past, present, or to come.

   In Whitefield’s eyes the bishop’s counsel on the need for good works was as needless as it was false, and not surprisingly, for ‘our pulpits ring of nothing more than doing no one any harm, living honestly, loving your neighbor as yourselves, and to do what you can and then Christ is to make up the deficiency.’

—Iain Murray, Evangelicalism Divided (Banner of Truth, 2000), 159–160.

The Archbishop of York went as far as to quote the Council of Trent against the evangelists: “If any man shall say that justifying faith is nothing else but a confidence in the divine mercy, remitting sins for Christ’s sake, and that this confidence is that alone by which we are justified, let him be accursed. ” The response of Whitefield and Wesley stands in stark contrast to that of Packer and Stott. Rather than enter into dialogue with enemies of the gospel, they stuck by their guns and, with direct confrontation, did not allow the fundamental issues to be obscured.

   Neither Wesley nor Whitefield would be drawn into a general debate on the theology of the sacraments. Nor did they attempt to explain how the teaching of the Articles was consistent with the language of other parts of the Prayer Book. They simply stuck to their witness as evangelists and scorned the idea that baptism was enough to identify a Christian. Wesley writes:

I tell a sinner, ‘You must be born again.’ ‘No,’ says you: ‘He was born again in baptism. Therefore, he cannot be born again now.’ Alas, what trifling this is! What, if he was then a child of God? He is now manifestly a child of the devil; for the works of his father he doeth. Therefore do not play upon words. He must go through an entire change of heart. In one not yet baptized, you yourself would call that change, the new birth. In him, call it what you will; but remember, meantime, that if either he or you will die without it, your baptism will be so far from profiting you, that it will greatly increase your damnation.

—Ibid., 163.

Iain Murray offers one of the reasons he believes evangelicals of the twentieth century have not followed in the footsteps of the Whitefields and Wesleys two centuries prior:

There is a prominent feature in the evangelical history of the eighteenth century which may explain why many evangelicals in Britain and the United States have taken a different course in these last fifty years. As we have seen, evangelical leadership today has been much concerned with a matter about which their predecessors took a very different view, that is, the approval and support of non-evangelical clergy and denominational leaders. Wesley and Whitefield lost any possibility of gaining the good opinion of their peers at the very outset of their work. But far from moderating themselves in an attempt to win it back, they regarded the very idea as a temptation to be resisted. In the midst of a worldly church they saw the bearing of reproach as a necessary part of being a Christian. ‘In our days,’ said Whitefield, ‘to be a true Christian, is really to become a scandal.’
   The church leaders of the eighteenth century did their utmost to hinder other clergy from turning evangelical and one of the principal threats was the certain loss of reputation and preferment. Wesley said the ‘great pains were taken’ to keep the number willing to take a bold stand few in number. Anyone who did so ‘could give up at once all thought of preferment either in Church or State; nay, all hope of even a Fellowship, or a poor scholarship, in either University’.
   For Wesley and Whitefield resistance to such threats was the duty of all who did not live for the approval of man. To clergy who failed to make such a stand a Scripture commands, Wesley said: ‘You dare not: because you have respect of persons. You fear the faces of men. You cannot; because you have not overcome the world. You are not above the desire of earthly things. And it is impossible . . . till you desire nothing more than God.’

—Iain Murray, Evangelicalism Divided (Banner of Truth, 2000), 169–170.