JOHN WESLEY (1703-1791)
In the final article for this series, we turn our attention to the Reverend John Wesley, the beloved founder of the Methodist movement. Unlike some of the Christian thinkers we have discussed, whose bibliographies are often far more interesting than their biographies, John Wesley’s profound and prolific writings are matched by his long life and extremely fruitful ministry. Born in Epworth in 1703, John Wesley was the fifteenth child of Samuel and Susanna Wesley. He was ordained deacon in 1725 despite torturous and almost crippling personal struggles about his unpreparedness to be a man of the cloth. In 1735, John and his brother Charles set sail on The Simmonds from Kent to Savannah in the Province of Georgia in America. In a telling entry in his journal, Wesley disclosed his conflicted reasons for making this journey: ‘My chief motive to which all rest are subordinate is the hope of saving my soul. I hope to learn the true sense of the Gospel of Christ by preaching it to the heathen’.
However, his ministry in Georgia did not turn out as he had expected. After an unsuccessful mission and a failed romance, Wesley suddenly left Georgia for England in 1738 emotionally devastated and drained. In a journal entry, Wesley confessed: ‘I have no heart, no vigour, no zeal in obeying: continually doubting whether I was right or wrong. I could do nothing for four days’. To cut the long – and extremely interesting – story short, on 24 May 1738, Wesley attended a Moravian meeting at London’s Aldersgate Street where upon listening to the reading of Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, he had a deep spiritual experience that radically changed his life and ministry forever. Reflecting on his experience on that evening in the Spring of 1738, Wesley famously wrote: ‘About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation: and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death’.
Leisure and Wesley soon parted company. ‘Never be unemployed for a minute. Never be triflingly employed. Never wile away time’ became his motto. Wesley’s life soon fell into a pattern that was to characterise it for the next fifty years. He would routinely wake up at four in the morning for prayers and reflection and preach at the town centre at five, so that men could attend before beginning their day’s work. He would be on the road at six to the next village or town. Wesley preached around 800 sermons a year to crowds that sometimes exceeded 20,000. He rode up to 20,000 miles a year on horseback, preaching from village to village and from town to town. These legendary statistics point to a man with a clear mission, consumed by his burning desire to proclaim the beautiful name of Jesus and his Gospel of salvation.
It is not an exaggeration to rank Wesley with the great Fathers of the Faith because not only was Wesley one of the most erudite clerics in the eighteenth century, he was also one of its most insightful theologians. Many, however, would object to that description. After all, Wesley did not teach theology professionally at a university. Neither did he write a systematic theology expounding the great tenets of the Christian faith like John Calvin’s celebrated Institutes of the Christian Religion or Philipp Melanchthon’s groundbreaking Loci Communes. Wesley’s theological insights, however, are found in his numerous sermons, treatises, letters and even journal entries. Throughout his life, Wesley’s theological vision was nourished by the rich tradition shaped by the great Protestant and Anglican heritage, whose roots can be traced to the patristic writers and the great creeds of the Catholic Church.
Following the model of the Anglican divines, Wesley presented his theology in solid, doctrinal sermons instead of in the rococo tomes of the Protestant Scholastics who wrote a century earlier. A thorough survey of Wesley’s entire oeuvre would show that almost every major theological theme in the Christian system is addressed, albeit at varying lengths. This means that the Wesleyan tradition does not only take the theology and doctrine of the Church seriously, but emphasises, in a unique way, their ‘preachability’. Theology is for every Christian, not just for the clergy and the professional theologian. Thus, we find in the collection of Wesley’s sermons the ‘whole compass of divinity’, with detailed expositions of important tenets of the Christian faith like justification, regeneration, sanctification, grace, etc. Throughout his ministry, Wesley opposed the sort of preaching that appeals only to the emotions and arouses a superficial religious sentimentalism. According to Wesley such preachers ‘corrupt their hearers; they vitiate their taste, so that they cannot relish sound doctrine; and spoil their appetite, so that they cannot turn it into nourishment; they as it were, feed them with sweatmeats, till the genuine wine of the kingdom seems quite insipid to them’.
The breath of the direct and indirect influence of John Wesley and the Methodist movement on the wider church is very difficult to trace with precision. Of course, the Wesleyan revivals in England have spawned the many Methodist Churches in different parts of the world. But John Wesley, and the theological, spiritual and moral tradition that he inspired, have influenced churches and movements beyond the Methodist denomination. Arguably, its impact can be discerned in denominations as diverse as the Church of the Nazarene, the Salvation Army, and many charismatic and Pentecostal churches. As Thomas Oden, one of the most important interpreters of Wesley in our time, has put it: ‘No serious account of the history of world evangelical thought could omit Wesley’.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor of Christian Doctrine at Trinity Theological College. He worships at the Fairfield Preaching Point in Woodlands.