What is Catalyst?
Four issues of Catalyst are mailed each academic year to some 5,000 UM theological students in more than 100 seminaries in the U.S.A.

AFTE
Catalyst is a project of A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE).

What is the John Wesley Fellowship Program?
Each year AFTE awards up to five John Wesley Fellowships to assist gifted United Methodists in their doctoral studies at the finest universities.

Back Issues
Several back issues of Catalyst are now available on-line.

Subscriptions
Subscription is free for UM seminarians, and is available to all others for $5 per year.

CONSIDER WESLEY

Our previous column considered the “High Church” image of John Wesley that developed late in the nineteenth century and was advocated by Anglicans, at first, and then by many Methodists. This “High Church” image of Wesley emerged as a corrective to an earlier impression that Methodists had treasured, and this was the image of Wesley as the prototypical Evangelical, whose life story was largely the story of a conversion experience (Aldersgate) and the far-reaching implications of that experience. In this column we consider this Evangelical image of John Wesley.

John Wesley himself did much to foster this Evangelical image, especially in telling his own experience in his Journal, which became the basis of most accounts of his life. The first published fascicle of the Journal gave an account of Wesley’s Georgia voyage, and concluded with the claim that Wesley did not consider himself to have been “converted unto God” at the time of the Georgia trip (Journal for 1 February 1738; in the edition of Ward and Heitzenrater, 1:214). Careful students of Wesley will know that he later qualified this claim by notes added to the text of the Journal, but the placement of this claim at the end of the first fascicle, followed by the extended account of the Aldersgate Street experience at the beginning of the next fascicle, created the dramatic impression of Aldersgate as the watershed event in Wesley’s own career.

After John Wesley’s death in 1791, there ensued a politically charged process in which Methodists produced a number of biographies of John Wesley. Early biographies by Thomas Coke and Henry Moore (1792) and John Whitehead (2 vols., 1793/1796) set the pattern for biographical works to come, with Aldersgate seen as the crucial turning point in Wesley’s career (though Whitehead’s account did allow that Aldersgate was part of a longer process of change in Wesley’s outlook). In the Victorian era, Methodist Luke Tyerman responded to Anglican claims about Wesley in an extensive biography (3 vols.; 1870), defending the Methodist image of Wesley. Tyerman’s work begins with the question, “Is it not a truth that Methodism is the greatest fact in the history of the church of Christ?” The correct answer is “Yes,” and Tyerman’s work depicts the heroic life of Wesley, with Aldersgate as the fountainhead of this “greatest fact” in Christian history (the quotation is cited from Heitzenrater’s The Elusive Mr. Wesley [Abingdon, 1994] 2:187; Heitzenrater’s work gives an extended account of the controversies over Wesley’s biography, 2:168-207). Many later accounts of Wesley’s life proceed chronologically up to 1738, then topically after Aldersgate, implying that Wesley’s development was essentially complete by that time.

Assessments of the role of Aldersgate in Wesley’s life have differed in the twentieth century. There was a flurry of interest around the 200th anniversary of Aldersgate in 1938, although Jean Miller Schmidt suggests that this seems to have been motivated by a kind of nostalgia among Methodists for the old tradition of personal religious experience that they found waning in the early twentieth century. By the 250th anniversary of Aldersgate in 1988, some scholars altogether dismissed the centrality of Aldersgate for Wesley (see the range of opinions offered in a volume edited by Randy Maddox entitled Aldersgate Reconsidered [Abingdon, 1990]).

The Evangelical image of Wesley has indeed created a number of problems. The Aldersgate narrative became a ground for Methodist triumphalism in the nineteenth century, as the quotation from Tyerman shows. In the twentieth century, disparate aspects of “Evangelicalism,” such as anti-sacramentalism, could be written back into Wesley, leading to such claims as that of John Baillie that “Wesley altogether dissociated regeneration from baptism, being the first clearly to do so” (cited in Bernard G. Holland, Baptism in Early Methodism [Epworth, 1970] 9). This is a demonstrably false claim, but it shows how a thoroughgoing Evangelical image of Wesley can flatten the nuances of (and developments in) Wesley’s own thought.

Yet, there is a sense in which the story of Wesley can hardly be told without reference to his Evangelical experience. Recent biographical studies, such as those of Henry Rack, Richard Heitzenrater, and Kenneth Collins all take seriously the complex of events in Wesley’s life from 1738 through 1739 that included his experience of “assurance” at Aldersgate, his visit to Moravians and Lutheran Pietists in Germany, and his initial field preaching. I am inclined to say that there is something ineradicably Evangelical about John Wesley. That is, if a definition of “Evangelical” cannot comprehend Wesley in all of his complexity, it presents more of a problem with that definition of “Evangelical” than with the understanding of John Wesley himself.

Ted A. Campbell