• Wesley Project

    “The world wide web is my parish.” Slowly working through John Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions.

    a few Wesleyan hurdles: inner/outer, ‘heart’

    by  • December 2, 2011 • Theology, Wesley Project • 0 Comments

    Writing about Wesley is hard. He uses a lot of expressions that I find archaic, and the ways he deals with some concepts rubs me the wrong way. Two related examples. First, his usage of ‘heart’ is difficult for me because I’m worried about how it might be participating in the popular dichotomy between “head” and “heart” – between emotion and cognition – that I find troubling because of the ways that it ignores desire’s essential involvement in how and why and what we think (and all of that’s involvement in how and why and what we do).

    Second, Wesley employs concepts of “outward religion” and “inward religion”, a dichotomy that is easy enough to understand but arguably more troublesome than the aforementioned. My fear here is that the inward will become the realm of Christianity and the outward, ‘more serious’ stuff will become the responsibility of some other more ‘practical’ power, be it politics, pocketbook, personal preference, etc. We can tuck God safely away in a little ‘inward’ box and justify some pretty un-Christlike things. See pretty much anything written by JH Yoder or Michael Gorman if you’re not sure what I mean. The gospel isn’t ‘fire insurance’ it’s a whole new life – a new creation – here and now. And that’s radical, disruptive stuff.

    But my concerns are pretty contemporary, and Wesley is not a 21st century man, he is a 18th century man. And so I think he largely predates these misconceptions, at least in their modern form. In fact, I think these misconceptions actually came out of the mixture of Wesley’s language, along with parallel language coming from other quarters, and later (and a few concurrent) philosophical developments and fashions.

    This claim is bolstered by the fact that much of his energies are spent holding inward and outward religion together, employing the distinction to undercut the distance between the two. For Wesley, inward religion necessarily breeds outward religions, and outward religion fosters and deepens inward religion. The two are of a piece, and can’t be separated without doing violence to both.

    Furthermore, for Wesley the ‘heart’ isn’t too separate a thing either. The Oxford Fellow just means to point out that our human desires are exactly where God wants to go to work on us. God wants to transform and reform us where we love. Moreover, Wesley is also no adherent of Deb from Napoleon Dynamite‘s “follow your heart” philosophy (yeah, I just went there).

    I noticed these ‘hurdles’ (and other similar concerns) over the summer as well, but the more I read Wesley the more I am convinced that Wesley is merely a victim of a changing conversation, and that he is not guilty of these modern philosophical and theological crimes.

    1. “Salvation by Faith”

    by  • November 15, 2011 • Theology, Wesley Project • 0 Comments

    John Wesley“All the blessings which God hath bestowed upon man are of his mere grace, bounty, or favor…” Everything we have is from God’s grace, and grace alone. Our existence, the image of God, the fact that we’re alive right now, and even our good works are all only by God’s grace.

    This is a helpful reminder for today, when we live in a theological climate in which people sometimes use creation, the image of God, our present experiences and our good deeds as ways to hide from God’s grace. Contrariwise, John Wesley firmly believes that all of these things hold together only by grace, only by God’s gift. I take that to mean that such things as these can’t be thought of independently of the action of a grace-ing God. The good that we have we have only by grace, though we really do have it.

    For instance, our good works aren’t really good, but are tainted by our sinfulness. And if they are genuinely good, credit is due to God, not to us.

    So what of salvation? It has to be only by grace. But anyone who knows even a little about John Wesley knows that his understanding of salvation takes up our agency as well, engages and invites our action, if only by God’s own primary primal action. God alone by grace does the saving, but God also graciously calls out our involvement. This place where God’s action meets our action is called faith (or faithfulness). In other words (Wesley’s words from “Sermon 1: Salvation by Faith”): “Grace is the source, faith the condition, of salvation.”

    This faith is a faith in Christ, especially in his cross and resurrection, and this faith goes much deeper than mental assent, but is a “disposition of the heart” (which, it should be noted, is itself also much deeper than a mere emotional assent). Salvation by Faith doesn’t discourage holiness and good works, but requires them; Salvation by Faith doesn’t lend itself to pride but necessarily excludes it; Salvation by Faith doesn’t encourage sin but rules it out; Salvation by Faith isn’t an uncomfortable doctrine – it’s the only comfortable one.

    Wesley’s underlying assumptions about total depravity on the one hand and God’s grace and mercy on the other shine through in a big way throughout this sermon. There’s a real gift there. Sometimes people today try to understand grace while forgetting that to be human in God’s world is to be in an overwhelmingly humble position. This leads to a cheap understanding of grace. Then others make the opposite mistake. In an effort to take sin seriously, grace becomes a mere footnote. Wesley talking about these topics in this sermons seems more like a feedback loop. In saying something serious about sin, Wesley can’t help but talk about grace. And grace necessarily reminds Wesley of human sin.

    And then faith and salvation: because they are what happens when God’s grace meets up with sinful humanity.

    Wesley on Several Occasions

    by  • November 7, 2011 • Theology, Wesley Project • 0 Comments

    I really enjoyed auditing a class on Methodist theology this past summer (“We have a theology?” I joked more than once). But I still don’t feel as conversant as I’d like to be in John Wesley’s thought. On top of that, the Barth project is on hiatus, and my leisure reading could use some focus and structure. Not to mention a change of pace, and Wesley is certainly that compared to Barth.

    So, I have a new goal: read all of John Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions. Side goal: write the occasional blog post on the experience. Here goes.

    Sermons on Several Occasions consists of 141 of them. Sermons, I mean. The title is very descriptive of the content. So I’ll leap right into the Preface to the first series (sermons 1-53). Here John Wesley introduces the sermons to follow and their general overarching theme: the way of salvation. I’ve picked out a few features of this preface that seem to be of note.

    First, his sermons are sermons, designed for the preaching of the gospel to the people (ad populum); they are not designed as systematic treatises, nor are they written for theologians. They are written to be “plain truth for plain people.” If he’s a theologian he’s clearly doing what Barth called “irregular theology,” but his priorities are such that it may be unfair to label him as a theologian at all. He’s much more of a pastor, albeit a pastor who understands that discipleship is a deep responsibility, and so worth the critical care and precision of articulation we tend to call theology. But even with that Word-care and precise articulation, he makes it clear that he’s trying as hard as he can to be unpretentious.

    Second, John Wesley is an evangelical. (If the previous sentence offends you, try it again with the prefix “proto-” in front of the ‘e’ word. If that didn’t help, I’m afraid that’s all I can do for you.) He says things like, “I want to know one thing, — the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way: For this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book.” Wesley cares a lot about salvation and how it ‘works.’ For him it works only because of Jesus, and he aspires to be a homo units libri — a man of one book (the Bible, of course). The salvation way of Jesus, disclosed in the Bible, is distinguished from all other ways, is before all other ways.

    Of course Wesley is not a contemporary North American evangelical. But while he never handed out a single “Have you heard of the Four Spiritual Laws?” booklet, he is heavily preoccupied with salvation. And while he gets somewhat heavy handed with “heart” language, he very much thinks that Christianity can’t really separate the ‘interior’ from the ‘exterior.’ And while calling him an inerrantist would be anachronistic at best, he does lean heavily on the Scriptures and treats them as primary and authoritative. While it would be irresponsible to read Wesley and hear in him the words of our fundamentalist neighbors, it would be just as irresponsible to read Wesley and not hear some room for rapprochement with them. God has acted to save the world, and Wesley is trying to take that very seriously.

    Third, Wesley knew there were other people who knew more than him, and even offered them advice on how they might change his mind (plain proof of Scripture + kind patience). And then he went so far as to say that truth is not the primary determinative category for Christian discipleship — love is: “For, how far is love, even with many wrong opinions, to be preferred before truth itself without love!” But if Wesley isn’t a contemporary North American evangelical, neither is he saying that it doesn’t matter what we believe or think as long as our ‘heart’ is in the right place. I read him here as being in the same line as James Smith’s argument in Desiring the Kingdom: people are not primarily thinking things, but desiring — loving — animals. It’s not that our minds don’t matter, it’s just that they aren’t in charge. Wesley is concerned with the love of God for us, and our love back to God. Because that’s where the action is.

    “The God of love forbid we should ever make the trial!  May he prepare us for the knowledge of all truth, by filling our hearts with his love, and with all joy and peace in believing!”

    Next up: Sermon 1, “Salvation by Faith.”