John Wesley for Today

By Earl G. Hunt Jr.

May/June 1993

Certain fundamental needs of our modern United Methodist Church can be met more satisfactorily by a contemporary reproduction of John Wesley’s emphases than by any other means available. The brief development of the idea I offer here is intended to be merely suggestive of further possibilities not mentioned.

 

A high doctrine of the Bible

It is the studied conviction of this writer that many maladies which characterize our denomination in this present day are traceable to the plain, simple, and extremely unfortunate fact that across the years, we have gradually compromised our original understanding of the Bible as God’s Word.

I am constantly grateful for the insights which reverent critics have brought to our understanding of the Bible since the end of the nineteenth century: Sir George Adam Smith, Professor S. R. Driver, Dr. James S. Stewart, and Professor Hugh Anderson. These scholars have been able, without intellectual dishonesty, to accept the gifts of sound biblical scholarship, and still embrace Scripture as being something infinitely higher than mere human writing.

An examination of the position of Mr. Wesley at this point would constitute overdue therapy for our church. Let me quote a single paragraph from him:

“I have thought, I am a creature of a day, passing through life, as an arrow through the air…. 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! O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me.”

Wesley was always homo unius libri (a man of one book). I unquestionably agree, and believe that it is time for his church today to become again a church of one Book.

 

Sound Arminian theology

John Wesley had no patience with theological aberrations, even when offered in the guise of academic respectability. The great doctrines generally associated with his preaching and teaching include prevenient grace, repentance and justification by faith, the atonement, the work of the Holy Spirit in the new birth and in assurance, the doctrine of the church, Christian perfection, and eschatological redemption. This is the catalogue of beliefs belonging uniquely in the Wesleyan tradition which former Yale Dean Colin W. Williams proposes in his book John Wesley’s Theology Today. Those beliefs offer an abundance of preaching material to last the lifetime of any faithful Wesleyan pulpiteer; and they constitute the kind of solid theological substance which, when served up intelligently and vividly, would surely inform the membership of our denomination, with new inspiration and commitment.

Wesley was not a systematic theologian. Dr. Albert Outler refers to him as an Anglican folk-theologian, “whose theological competence and creativity were dedicated to popular evangelism, Christian nurture, and reform, so that his theology could be evaluated more directly by his own stated (Anglican) norms: Scripture, reason, and Christian antiquity.” The plain fact is that many of our pulpits are offering an unfortunate and indefensible blend of Wesley with Karl Barth, Jurgen Moltmann, and the liberationists of Latin America. While it is always helpful to learn from other theological positions, the blending of these with the Wesleyan perspective only causes that perspective to lose its uniqueness and power. I am suggesting, without apology, that the modern United Methodist Church needs to accept again the components of sound Arminianism as the agenda for its theology.

 

Methodological flexibility

One of the thrilling practices of Wesley was his adoption of field preaching, which while actually abhorrent to him personally, he discovered to be effective in reaching the multitudes with the gospel. Wesley was able and willing to bend his own preferences to fit the demonstrated circumstances of his times. I am convinced he would do the same thing were he alive today. And so must we who are alive today. New methods, fresh, sometimes daring and bold, must be found to communicate the message of the Christian gospel. Times have changed; and the old approaches, successful in other days, may need to be honorably retired to make room for new approaches to be implemented.

 

Preaching

John Wesley was, indeed, a preacher. His plain preaching of plain truth captured the multitudes and resulted in countless conversions to Jesus Christ. It was fundamentally biblical in its construction, and depended entirely upon the work of the Holy Spirit to produce miracles of transformation in the lives of those who heard it. Contemporary United Methodism needs to recover once again its conviction about the centrality of the proclamation of the Word; and to realize anew that God’s Spirit does indeed work through faithful preaching, bringing to pass that which cannot otherwise occur. Our seminaries need to understand this, and communicate it to their students who will go forth into their annual conferences comprehending what preaching is all about, committing themselves to master its craft and art. The preaching event needs to loom large on the Christian horizon once more, and never again be relegated to a 10-to-12 minute slot in an intricately conceived liturgical pattern.

Strangely enough, John Wesley seemed to comprehend something of the importance of dialogical preaching as opposed to hortatory preaching. The deep and intense feeling with which he delivered his sermons and moved multitudes was never communicated by elevated voice and irresponsible declamation, but rather by impeccable logic, clear exposition, and a conscious effort to bring Divine resources to bear upon specific human problems. As a preacher, he was as modern as tomorrow morning. What a renaissance of vigor and vitality would visit United Methodism today if his quality of preaching could return to our pulpits!

 

Hope

Throughout the preaching of Mr. Wesley there resounds a message of undiminished hope. “His theology ends as it begins, with the optimism of grace triumphing over the pessimism of nature,” writes Colin Williams. He admonished his preachers never to proclaim sanctification in a way that would discourage those who had not attained that level of perfection. Moreover, throughout his preaching, there is a clear note about heaven and hell. He believed that the quality of life which a Christian may attain upon earth is a foretaste of the reality of another world. Jesus Christ will come again to judge both the quick and the dead, gathering believers into his perfect kingdom and completing the great salvation by his gift of a new heaven and a new earth. The dimension of eternity was constantly present in the sermons of Mr. Wesley, and Methodism was literally built upon both the assurance and the significance of that truth.

In a world of turmoil, it is inexcusable to enter the pulpit without a message of hope. The moral revolution, with its incredible devastation, can only be controlled when people recapture the conviction that life does not end with death, and that a human being, in the end, is responsible to Almighty God for his or her deeds in the flesh. More than any other lost ingredient of the gospel, our belief in the eternal dimension needs to be recovered. The eschatology of hope is a part of our Christian birthright, and we need it to restore glory and spiritual power to the contemporary church. John Wesley has much to teach us about this, which we would be wise to apply in the dangerous 1990s.

 

Among the prophets

Is it any wonder that the prestige of Wesley grows more dazzling with the passing years? He has broken out of the narrow, sectarian confines of a single denomination, and has been appropriated into a world view which ranks him with the major prophets, apostles, and saints of all time. In John Wesley’s Awakening, Dr. James Joy reminds us that “his tablet is in Westminster Abbey, with the memorials of monarchs, statesmen, empire-builders, philanthropists, and men of letters. The scholars of two continents have begun to recognize him as belonging in the grand succession of Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Martin Luther, and John Wesley – the great awakeners of the human soul-themselves awakened by the touch of God.”

When Wesley died in 1791, he had arranged for six poor men to carry him to his grave in the unconsecrated ground behind London’s City Chapel. Soon thereafter a well-intentioned, but innocently thoughtless preacher named John Pawson, burned a great portion of the Wesley papers in the fireplace of Mr. Wesley’s home. The smoke that curled out of the chimney bore with it treasures of knowledge the world will never have about the little Oxford don who flung his leg across the back of a horse and rode out to save Old England. But more important than this, we may only conjecture what he might have said about all that we who are his followers have done to the movement which he began.

 

Earl G. Hunt Jr., a retired United Methodist bishop, is the president of the Foundation for Evangelism, affiliate organization of the General Board of Discipleship, in Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.

 

This article was excerpted from Recovering the Sacred: Papers from the Sanctuary and the Academy (Jonathan Creek Press), a collection of sermons, speeches, and other writings of Bishop Earl G. Hunt Jr. The portion used above was taken by permission from the chapter entitled, “John Wesley: Our Historical Contemporary.”