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CONSIDER WESLEY

Our previous two columns considered the image of the “Evangelical Wesley” that developed in early Methodist lore, and the “High Church Wesley” that grew up in response to it. We now consider a rather different understanding of Wesley that came to full expression in the twentieth century, but had some earlier precedents. This is the image of the “Liberal Wesley.”

The truth is that many Reformed Christians suspected all along that Methodism harbored a liberal impulse. In Reformed parlance, the term “Arminian” is often taken as an equivalent for “rationalist” or “liberal.” Conservative Reformed theologians suspected Methodists (and later Holiness teachers) of rejecting the doctrine of election on the grounds of a commitment to inherent human goodness (like, inherent human “free will”) and on the grounds of overly optimistic claims about human perfectibility. R.E. Chiles’ study of Theological Transition in American Methodism, 1790-1935 (Abingdon, 1965) shows how Methodists in the nineteenth century gradually forgot Wesley’s insistence that “free will” itself was a gift of grace, and so oddly capitulated to the Reformed theologians’ claims.

Wesley was cited as a progressive thinker in the late-nineteenth-century American debates over premillennial and postmillennial eschatology. By the end of the nineteenth century, the postmillennial outlook that had been so popular in American Evangelicalism gave way to a surge of premillennial thought. Progressive Methodists (like H.F. Rall, Was John Wesley a Premillennialist? [Methodist Book & Publishing House, 1921]) cited Wesley against the Premillennialists. But Premillennialists could also cite Wesley. If this seems impossible, you may be a captive of contemporary schemas. Wesley himself (following J.A. Bengel) actually believed that there were two millennia described in Revelation 17: Christ’s second advent would come after (post-) the one but before (pre-) the other. This makes for a classic case of Wesley cited against himself.

With the flourishing of Liberalism in the early twentieth century, the quest was on to find a more progressive image of Wesley than had prevailed in the past. Just as the early twentieth-century “questers” after the historical Jesus “looked down a deep well” (as Schweitzer explained it) and saw the reflection of themselves there, many twentieth-century progressive Methodists looked to Wesley and saw a reflection of their own concerns. British Methodist H.B. Workman (in an influential lead article for the two-volume New History of British Methodism, 1909) and Southern Methodist U. Lee (John Wesley and Modern Religion, 1936) argued that Wesley’s emphasis on personal religious experience foreshadowed Schleiermacher’s epistemological grounding of religion in the “sense and taste of the infinite.” Methodist liberals of the Old School (I mean, in general, Liberalism prior to World War II) loved to cite Wesley’s “catholic spirit,” his social activism, and his generally optimistic outlook.

Before we rule the Liberal Wesley as a useless relic, we should realize that many aspects of this image hold more than a grain of truth. R. Matthews’s Harvard dissertation on “Religion and Reason Joined” (1986) illumined Wesley’s dependence on Locke, the Cambridge Platonists, and other modern philosophers. Wesley’s emphasis on religious experience as a true source of knowledge does indeed show a kind of empirical reasoning, which Wesley held in common with J. Edwards and others. Wesley’s “catholic spirit” insisted on common, ecumenical Christian principles, but also expressed the modern concept of religious toleration that had prevailed in Europe after the wars of religion. Although there are at least three Methodist heads of state in the world as I write (in Tonga, Macedonia, and the United States), Methodists have never really been a part of an establishment of religion, and Methodists share the voluntarist spirit that has characterized modern religion. Wesley’s public advocacy for the abolition of slavery, moreover, and his acts of compassion for the poor serve as a model for liberal service grounded in distinctively Christian ethics. We can say responsibly that Wesley was “liberal” in the basic sense of being “open minded.”

One of the problems of older forms of Liberalism was not so much what it taught as what it presupposed. American liberals of the early twentieth century seemed to have thought that because they were living in an essentially Christian society, they did not need to be publicly clear about the most central claims of Christian faith. That this was terribly wrong seems very clear now, and one of its terrible fruits is that Methodists became very unclear about the most basic claims of Christian faith and morality. I cannot imagine that Wesley could approve of Liberalism in this sense. It would be, I think, what he condemned as “speculative latitudinarianism” in his sermon on a “Catholic Spirit.” But we would do well to emulate Wesley’s example of open-minded service, grounded in the heartfelt experience of divine love.

Ted A. Campbell, Wesley Theological Seminary.