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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: Let’s not put social justice emphasis before Aldersgate experience Donald W. Haynes, Dec 9, 2009
Donald Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
Halford Luccock, distinguished Congregationalist preacher and 20th-century author, loved to regale Methodist congregations by saying that Catholics have crucifixes on their churches to emphasize the crucifixion, Episcopalians have empty crosses to symbolize the Resurrection, Congregationalists have weather vanes as tokens of their democratic convictions, and Methodists have lightning rods, to remind ourselves that lightning already struck once and we have to protect ourselves from having it strike again!
His satire has enough truth to make us say, “Ouch!”
John Wesley’s favorite preaching text in the first six months after his “strangely warmed” heart experience of God’s grace was from Paul’s letter to the Christian in Corinth: “So that no one might boast in the presence of God. God is the source of your life in Christ Jesus who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.” We know that Wesley preached on I Corinthians 1:30 at least 72 times!
He was motivated by his conviction that we are God’s children, made in God’s image, in bondage through sin and in need of deliverance, healing and wholeness. He repeatedly asked, “Who shall deliver us from this bondage?” His answer, according to Albert Outler and subsequent Wesley scholars, was based on his discovery at Aldersgate: “an unwavering, revolutionary conviction that the essence of Christian experience is trusting Christ, Christ alone, for salvation, a trust that generates an inward assurance that ‘Christ has taken away my sins, even mine, and has saved me from the law of sin and death.’”
This was the “lightning strike” that ignited in the man the spirit and power and motivation of the movement we know as Methodism.
Faith must express itself in Christian discipleship. If I say on Monday morning, “I got saved last night,” my coworkers have the right to say, “Great, but what difference will we see in you here at the office? What changes can we expect in your morals, your language, your mean sarcasm, your chewing people out and your racially insinuative jokes?”
Many years ago in his book The Taste of New Wine, author Keith Miller said the only way his wife took his conversion seriously was when he did something he had always refused to do—take out the trash! When he came in from the garage, his wife was standing in the kitchen weeping, her heart overflowing with love! She had seen evidence of what saving grace had done to change Keith.
In Wesley’s pre-Aldersgate journey, we see much of his father’s rigidity: His religion was a burden, not a blessing. It was a religion “under the law,” not in response to grace. Victorian moralism of the late 19th century followed this same course—a creed of taboos, all beginning with “don’t.” Rigid moralism has no heart. When done in the name of Christ, such moral rectitude was harsh, unrelentingly judgmental and emotionally cruel.
To his credit, Wesley kept “listening to his soul.” He found himself still searching, even in the “social holiness” of his Oxford years and his missional service in Georgia. His spiritual regimen did not fulfill his spiritual need. In a little-known sermon, “The Lord Our Righteousness,” Wesley preached, “We must cut ourselves off from dependency on ourselves . . . we must cast away all confidence in our own righteousness. . . Till we are delivered from trusting in anything that we do, we cannot trust in what he has done.”
Rupert Davies, a British Methodist and Wesley scholar, tells us, “When we read that his ‘heart was strangely warmed,’ we must understand that the conscious emotion that accompanied the great deliverance was strange to him, for he was not an emotional man.” Religious enthusiasm went “against the grain” for a man of Wesley’s temperament.
But in 1738 at age 35, Moravian pietism led Wesley to trust in “Christ, Christ alone” for salvation. “The Germans,” as he called them, must be credited with being the midwife who led Wesley through the process of being a rigid Anglican priest to becoming a grace-filled Methodist evangelist preaching out of doors! Aldersgate was the warming of Wesley’s rigidified, moralistic and judgmental religion.
If we ignore this confidence that “Christ has taken away my sins, even mine,” we have thrown the “secret” of Methodism under the bus.
Our modern socio-psychological orientation to evangelical Christianity has been incomplete and unrealistic. Theologian Outler became a voice in the wilderness in 1974. In his “Theology In the Wesleyan Spirit,” Outler tracked naïve liberalism to its philosophical lair: Paul Tillich’s widely praised sermon, “You Are Accepted,” which does not mention Christ anywhere! This was in no way Wesleyan theology!
Though Martin Luther would have been aghast, Tillich led the theological parade of the 20th century that took the Reformation leader’s doctrine of “justification by faith alone” to its logical extreme—antinomianism (“anything goes; love God and do as you please”).
Wesley, on the other hand, saw humankind as created in God’s image, but fallen through original sin. God’s love accepts us just as a doctor accepts a very sick patient. The doctor’s acceptance does not mean that our disease is treated with a pat on the back and a sugar pill. Instead, the doctor accepts us because we are sick and need healing. God’s acceptance is a therapeutic, restorative, healing, redeeming, sanctifying love—just as Paul insisted in his Corinthian letter.
Many of us modern Methodists, however, adopted some version of Tillich’s acceptance being rooted not in God’s love but in Christian humanism. Tillich’s “acceptance” lacks what Duke Divinity School professor Randy Maddox calls “responsible grace.” In experiencing forgiving grace at Aldersgate, Wesley never abandoned his earlier insistence of what he called “circumcision of the heart.” Namely, that being saved carries with it the corollary of a disciplined life.
Conversion leads to clean living, not to cultural conformity. Note I Corinthians 1:30 again: “He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus.”
The balancing act that Wesley wove into the fabric of Methodism is that there is a synergism between saving grace and sequential self-discipline. As British Methodist Davies puts it: “He had spent most of his life brooding upon the state of his soul and trying to improve it. Now those energies were released, and immediately directed outward to his fellow human beings who needed the same liberation he had received.”
To this end, the missiology of Methodism was motivated by the message of life-changing grace that resulted in a new life.
Yet in the 20th century, Methodism—perhaps more than the Evangelical United Brethren children of Wesley—abandoned the need for converting grace and replaced it with moral gradualism. Focused on the insights of “self-realization psychology,” we ignored the imprimatur of sin. For a generation, our Sunday school morality consisted of a bland “do-goodism.”
Still ignoring the need for a transforming work of the Holy Spirit to a new life of “responsible grace,” we added in the 1960s an overlay of social justice. The result was often “moralism on steroids.” Our preaching continued to be denunciation, negativism and guilt-tripping that moved us from personal morality to social justice. We accented Wesley’s Oxford Methodism to the detriment of his Aldersgate Methodism.
The response to our mainstream Protestant insistence that un-transformed people should ratchet up their morality to a higher level produced much spiritual fatigue and some angry resistance. Sadly, it resulted in launching a quiet exodus: Many people left United Methodism; young adults and wearied seekers drifted to neo-evangelical Calvinism.
The moral of the story: Perfecting grace cannot precede saving grace. First, we follow Jesus; only then are we motivated to “let the mind be in you that was in Christ.”
The essence of grace theology is the lifeblood of Methodism. We still have a message of preparing grace, saving grace and perfecting grace that was the driving spirit of early Methodism. We cannot return to the past. We can however, look again where Wesley looked over and over again in I Corinthians 1:30: “God is the source of your life in Christ Jesus.”
The net result Paul makes clear: “wisdom from God, righteousness, redemption and sanctification.” These are our “wine for the wilderness, bread for the journey.”
And in the words of emerging church movement leader Brian McLaren, young people today “are more ready than we realize” to receive this message.
“O God of hosts, be with us yet; lest we forget, lest we forget.”
Dr. Haynes is an instructor in United Methodist studies at Hood Theological Seminary. dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald Haynes
