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Ancient and Postmodern
This article was first publlished in Third Way in April 2003.
John Wesley - evangelist, church founder, and
all-round conundrum - cuts a surprisingly (post)modern
figure. In the month of his tercentenary, Steve Tomkins
looks at what this man before his time still has to teach us
about the messy, glorious business of being human.
John Wesley was a backslider. For those today who know him as a founding father of evangelicalism and a champion of the previously forgotten doctrine of justification by faith, his behaviour at the age of 67 at the 1770 Methodist Conference might be as sad a shock as it was to his contemporaries.
Having fervently preached against justification by works for thirty years, he had recently been having second thoughts. 'We have received it as a maxim that "a man is to do nothing in order to [attain] justification,"' he said. 'Nothing can be more false.… We are rewarded according to our works, yea, because of our works... [and even] as our works deserve.' If this was true, what had the Methodists been arguing about these thirty years with what he had called the 'almost Christians' of the Church of England? 'I am afraid,' concluded Wesley, 'about words.'
While his own preachers accepted this new development, the wider Methodist world was horrified. Rev. Augustus Toplady of 'Rock of Ages' fame, in a subtly nuanced rejoinder to Wesley's declaration, called him 'the most rancourous hater of the gospel system that ever appeared in England'. He had, to be fair, had a nasty experience of Wesley's unscrupulous polemical tactics recently, and it still smarted.
Wesley's old friend the Countess of Huntingdon, the leader of a Calvinistic Methodist affiliation, said she would go to the stake against the teaching, and dismissed Wesley's right-hand man as principal of her theological college. Later she persuaded Wesley to attend talks, where they agreed that there was both some truth and some inflammatory rhetoric in what he had said and issued a joint statement - which Wesley then failed to stick to. Less inclined to be reconciled, Toplady spent the rest of his life denouncing Wesley's religion as 'gross heathenism, Pelagianism, Mahometanism, popery, Manicheism, ranterism and antinomianism, culled, dried, and pulverised, and mingled with as much palpable atheism as you can scrape together'. 'Save from wrath and make me pure' indeed.
But that is how it is with labels. Their shorthand tempts us to reject - or commend - what we have not understood, judging people and opinions by association, blurring their individual complexities. 'Backslider', 'works', 'Calvinist', 'evangelical', 'Popery', 'antinomianism'.… Wesley provides a useful case study because of the bewildering variety of labels applied to him and the failure of any of them to fit him very well, with the possible exception of 'Wesleyan'. And because of his own happiness to slap them on others, to be fair.
We need to start by recognising the usefulness and necessity of labels. This is how the mind works. We categorise colours, species, musical styles, types of government. We need to be able to group things as well as seeing their individual characteristics. How else could we do botany, or sociology? How could we even communicate if we unable to deal in universals as well as particulars? It is perfectly sensible to describe Wesley as an 'Arminian', and a lot quicker than explaining his opinions on each of the related issues of election, grace, atonement, the will, etc.
But however vital, this tendency makes it hard for us to see human complexity and to do justice to the essential messiness of life. Take Wesley's 'evangelicalism'. As a founder and icon of the movement, the label 'evangelical' would stick quite well, you might assume. The emphasis on conversion and the orthodox theology are there. But we have already seen him retreat from its stark certainty of justification by faith alone, and that was never the whole picture for him anyway. His evangelical horror of trying to satisfy God with good works was always overshadowed by his greater horror of trying to satisfy God without good works. Neither grace nor faith was the real centre of his spirituality, but holy living. Faith, he said, was the door of religion; holiness, 'religion itself'.
He also had a thirst for the sacrament that was more Catholic than evangelical - in fact, he was widely 'known' to be an undercover Jesuit. The availability of communion was one of the main issues that made him countenance separation from the Church of England. This was quite out of step with his age, to the extent that one of his first protégés was (not fatally) strangled by his uncle, the Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, in an attempt to dissuade him from the fanaticism of weekly eucharist.
'Methodist' is another name you would assume was tailor-made for Wesley, as the Methodist church was his offspring and made in his image. Here again though he presents us with contradictions and complications. Wesley lived and died an aggressively fervent son of the Church of England. His only aim was to revive the Church - Methodism was supposed to be an Alpha course, really - and he insisted that his controversial teaching was merely the forgotten doctrines enshrined in the Articles and homilies. He forbade his societies to hold services at the same time as the Church or to call their leaders 'ministers'. 'When the Methodists leave the Church, God will leave them', he declared in his last decade - unfortunately in retrospect. 'To lose a thousand, yea ten thousand, of our people would be a less evil than this'.
And yet, while he could not go through it himself, it was Wesley who led the Methodists to the door of the Church, and in fact held it open for them. The very fact that he gathered 'real Christians' from the mass of baptised churchgoers into communities for proper teaching, worship and pastoral care put the movement fundamentally at odds with Anglican state church principles: he built a church within the Church; and considering the hostility of the Church to it, it was only a matter of time before it became a church outside the Church. So, labels of denomination and 'churchmanship' adhere to Wesley as poorly as they do to many of us today. The final irony is that if Wesley were to come again today he would find everything that he tried to achieve in the Methodist societies in a contemporary charismatic Anglican church.
Similar complications face attempts to pinpoint Wesley on any spectrum of thought. Politically, he was in most ways thoroughly conservative: he believed profoundly in social rank and ruled his people as an enlightened despot. But he despised the monied classes, and advocated - as he practised - the voluntary redistribution of all but the most basic wealth. By making workers and traders his travelling preachers and promoting them on merit, he gave a new voice to the aims, grievances and worldview of the lower classes. He has been hailed as the father of English socialism and reviled as a pioneer of capitalism - there is a very little truth on each side. He relentlessly challenged the complacency and convention of the establishment and championed that most disruptive of religious phenomena, charismatic gifts, while all the time abhorring disorder and innovation.
You might say that Wesley was an Enlightenment rationalist, utterly confident in the power of reason and observation to establish truth, convince doubters and justify his opinions (aka 'plain demonstrable fact'). And yet it was Wesley who reintroduced the religion of the heart into 18th-century England. Wesleyan Methodism was full of music and excitement, dreams and divine impulses, convulsions and miracles, emotional turmoil and mass fervour. Righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, he insisted 'must be felt, or they have no being'. Excluding such things from religion leaves it 'a dry, dead carcass'.
Wesley's resistance to such labels reminds us that it is a mistake to think we have understood someone when all we've done is categorise them. You could argue that the tendency is even more inappropriate in postmodernity, as it fits one to the kind of group identity that we rugged individualists are less happy to be subsumed under. But on the other hand, Wesley's example challenges the assumption that our forebears were any more unlikely to do their thinking by numbers than we.
The dangers of labelling are even greater when one is unsympathetic to the label or the person. It was because Huntingdon held Wesley in high esteem (and labelled him 'one of us', if you will) that she was able to overcome her horror of the label 'works' and hear his carefully nuanced, eminently sensible thinking on the issue. Toplady hated him, and therefore had less reason to make the intellectual effort necessary to realise that his image of Wesley the 'apostate miscreant' renouncing Protestantism was an oversimplification. How frustrating it can be, in debate with those we think hold indefensible positions, to discover their stance is rather more sensible than we assumed.
Wesley was just as apt to let a person's real opinions be obscured behind labels. Calvinism was his red rag. His sermon Free Grace, a purple-faced rant against those who 'represent God as worse than the devil', spends several paragraphs misguidedly labouring to convince the Calvinists about what they 'really believe'. His argument is that Calvinism destroys holiness, happiness, zeal, evangelism and belief in revelation - conspicuously ignoring the fact of Calvinists whom he knew very well who equalled him in all five, which rather gives the game away. His hatred of the label blinded him to the more complex reality behind it.
And this is precisely the tendency that he overcame in his notorious volte face about 'works', and was able to overcome in his more sympathetic critics like Huntingdon. Because it was not a volte face, still less apostasy, so much as it was letting in the light to show some more realistic colouring in an issue that had too often been seen in black and white. He realised, and I think he was absolutely right, that the polarities of 'faith' and 'works' are inadequate labels for the complicated business of human relationships with God. Few thinking Christians believe that we are justified solely by faith or by works, without some major qualification. The most fervent Protestant knows that no one is justified who does not do good works; the most Tridentine Catholic know that the forgiveness of God cannot be earned or achieved, merely asked and received. And if in real life faith and works are so inseparably intertwined, then one has to wonder whether the centuries of conflict over their division of labour have not been a monumental waste of time - not because the issues are unimportant, but because the disagreement in substance has been so small, and our passions too often enflamed over the clash of mere labels.
Placing Wesley on the moral spectrum is as problematic as the intellectual, and these problems are even more tempting to fudge. Moral labels are soothing on the brain. It takes a sometimes painful effort of the will to see moral complexity in people and situations when we would rather feel in terms of 'us' and 'them'. The reason one has seen so few placards saying 'The undoubted benefits of war in Iraq are unlikely to outweigh the human cost!' is not merely typographical.
Wesley's failings were quite serious, though pale beside many heroes of Christianity. The offence that Toplady so bitterly remembered was a malicious pseudepigraphy: he condensed and distorted Toplady's 134-page Calvinist apologia Absolute Predestination into a 12-page tract which concluded, 'The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate will be damned, do what they can. Reader believe this or be damned. Witness my hand, A. T. Conversely, Wesley had no scruples about plagiarism, most notoriously republishing Samuel Johnson's anti-American pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny under his own name.
'Pope John's' rule was resented as autocratic even by 18th-century standards and his spiritual demands could be somewhat unreasonable. He promised and required of his people a miraculously certain faith in God, a direct communion which he once confessed secretly to his brother he had never known himself. His puritanical streak placed harsh restrictions on those impoverished workers who most deserved some innocent diversion. He was capable of a stunning insensitivity: 'I believe the death of your children is a great instance of the goodness of God towards you,' he told his sister when she lost the last of her ten children. 'You have often mentioned to me how much of your time they took up. Now that time is restored to you, and you have nothing to do but serve the Lord without carefulness and without distraction.' His conflicts, both theological and matrimonial, could be savage.
And the women. Wesley suffered from a confusion between the romantic and pastoral which blighted his romances and cast a shadow over his pastoring. His conduct in his first great romance, as a missionary pastor in America, ended with him jumping parole and fleeing Georgia at night across swampland. The second nearly destroyed the Methodist movement when even his brother believed he was using his 'whole art and authority to seduce another man's wife'. ('Steal another man's fiancée' would have been more accurate.) His wife accused him of adultery. I think she was wrong, but his refusal to stop writing gushing and intimate letters to his circle of young female acolytes was hardly good matrimony.
This is not a particularly 'shocking exposé' of Wesley, of course, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that Wesley sinned and fell short of the glory of God. He was not Toplady's 'grey-headed enemy of all righteousness', but his weaknesses were just as essential threads of his personality and life as his strengths.
In fact his achievements in the field of goodness were phenomenal. He rode a good 250,000 miles across the British Isles in total, mainly on horseback, to preach more than 40,000 sermons. It was not unusual for him to preach four times a day, and he endured all weathers and many other hardships to do so. Only in his 80s did he slow down. He endured constant savage attacks, including beatings and stoning, with a powerful Christlike meekness - a significant factor, it seems to me, in the success of his message. He organised relief for the destitute, free loans for the hard up, and work for the unemployed. He ran schools for miners' children (at which he forbade them to play) and opened the first free medical dispensary in Britain. He sought out an abandoned and dangerous underclass with the lifechanging message of their acceptance by and value to God.
Like most of us, he was painfully aware of the power of money to corrupt the soul and dampen ardour. Unlike most of us he therefore gave away the great majority of it. Towards the end he was making up to £1400 a year from his books, but lived as ever on £30, a basic working wage. His total giving could have kept a gentleman for a decade.
And whatever his weaknesses where women were concerned, his appreciation of their gifts was a small triumph for the spirit of Christ over Christian tradition, not only letting some of them preach but making Methodist organisation depend upon female ministry almost as much as male.
Should our respect for such excellence make us pass over the less 'edifying' parts of Wesley's story? This has been the policy of many of his biographers, and it is as understandable as it is pernicious. It is a misunderstanding of human spirituality to see any of us as essentially good or evil, so that the other side of our nature can be discounted as accidental, superficial or in some way less relevant. We are each of us a confusion of heaven and hell, a Pauline battleground between two laws*; we speak with the tongues of angels and hold the hand of the Devil.
Hagiography, like so much of our worship, preaching and church life, presents us with images of the Christian life we cannot possibly live up to. I recently talked with someone in my church who was genuinely (and miserably) convinced they were the only person in church who sometimes didn't much feel like being there. Wesley was as guilty as anyone, his published Journal offering a picture of triumphant Christian living that is seriously qualified by his private letters. This lack of candour puts an intolerable burden on ordinary Christians (i.e. all of us) if we believe it and try to live up to it.
And just as unfortunately, it conceals from us the good news of the achievements and good works of compromised, weakwilled, misguided Christians. Airbrushed depictions of triumphant spiritual superheroes defraud us of our admiration; honest stories of those who did well on balance despite their failures and failings can offer genuine inspiration to ordinary people who would like to do well too. Wesley believed despite his unbelief; he spread brotherly love despite a weakness for fratricidal warfare; he told the truth despite sometimes concealing it; he upheld orthodoxy despite some thoroughly eccentric teaching; he helped many people despite hurting some; he succeeded despite his failures. The glory of Wesley's story is not that a great and wondrous man of God lived along time ago, but that real people can be heroes to.
hagiography presents us with images of the Christian life we cannot possibly live up to