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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.

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

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

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CONSIDER WESLEY

John Wesley was a leader in a great transatlantic religious awakening. While most of the names associated with the awakening—G. Whitefield, J. Edwards, H. Harris, and the like—were Calvinists, Wesley had an Arminian theology. This made his theology and practice distinct from the others. Many Calvinists were concerned that by giving a role to human freedom Wesley devalued God’s sovereign glory. Actually, Wesley elevates God’s power and freedom even as he redefines how that power operates. We see this in his understanding of both salvation and religious awakenings.

In terms of salvation, he is distinguished from his Calvinist colleagues by his confidence in God’s prevenient grace, which enabled every person to respond to the proclamation of Jesus Christ. This is itself a transforming act of God’s power, creating a possibility of response that without grace would not exist.

Because humanity is enabled, but not compelled to respond to God, we can see why Wesley’s wing of the awakening enrolled persons in small groups whose participants sought to keep a spiritual discipline. The point of such spiritual practices was not to earn salvation but to maintain openness to an ongoing relationship with God as well as a concern for one’s neighbor. It is as we engage in these practices that the Holy Spirit works to transform our lives.

While Wesley takes full account of grace-given human freedom, he never loses his focus on God’s power and purpose. In his sermon, The General Spread of the Gospel, Wesley depicts the result of the awakening as the renewal of the church, followed by global evangelism. In the end, he predicts, the “loving knowledge of God, producing uniform, uninterrupted holiness and happiness, shall cover the earth, shall fill every soul of man” (§8). God’s purpose—what we today would call God’s mission—goes far beyond forgiveness of sins and salvation from hell. It involves the renewal of the creation itself in love, and the offer of new life to every person.

None of this can occur without the transforming power of God. In fact, given Wesley’s insistence that God seeks to perfect us in love in this life, he has a stronger view of what God’s power can accomplish than his Calvinist contemporaries.

Wesley also sees the power of God working in the awakening itself. Wesley observed that wherever the truths of the gospel, “justification by faith in particular—were declared in any large town, after a few days or weeks there came suddenly on the great congregation…a violent and impetuous power” (§15), a “torrent of grace” (§17). This outpouring of God’s power might continue “with shorter or longer intervals, for several weeks or months” (§15). Yet it would gradually subside, “and then the work of God” would be “carried on by gentle degrees” (§15). The kingdom of God “will silently increase wherever it is set up, and spread from heart to heart, from house to house, from town to town, and from one kingdom to another” (§17).

There would be a mighty experience of God’s gracious love at the beginning, which would serve as a catalyst for the larger, quieter, long-term work of Christians sharing their faith with others. Here again we see human activity: proclamation, testimony, faith-sharing, coupled of course with actions designed to meet a wide range of human needs. Yet it is all due to the power of God, who convicts, converts, sanctifies, and perfects, as well as empowers for service.

Some then, as well as today, see God’s activity as dramatic—the sudden conversion or the outpouring of the spirit in an awakening accompanied by unusual manifestations. To these Wesley points to the quieter, yet more common, form of divine activity: the daily growth in the knowledge and love of God through prayer, searching the Scriptures, the Lord’s Supper, acts of mercy, and other means of grace; and the faithful sharing of the gospel by word and deed from one person to another. It is through these gradual works that most spiritual formation occurs and the kingdom of God is most readily spread.

Others just as strongly deny the instantaneous works in favor of the gradual. To those Wesley insists that it is solely God’s transformation of the heart that lays a new foundation in our lives, and that an outpouring of the Spirit is the catalyst of a great awakening. God acts to make new possibilities where none heretofore existed. Wesley’s conjoining of the “instantaneous” and “gradual” offers a balanced approach to how we understand the work of God in salvation and in awakenings.

By Dr. Henry H. Knight III, Associate Professor of Evangelism, Saint Paul School of Theology.