1 of 5
by John Munsey Turner Epworth Press, 2003 224 pp.; $22.95, paper
by John Kent Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002 236 pp.; $53 |
In May 1988, while on holiday in Cornwall, I was deeply stirred by hearing a Methodist choir sing the conversion hymn of the Wesleys. The haunting 18th-century tune was one I had never heard before, and the powerful words conveyed a sense of the raw experience of men newly entering on a hitherto unimagined spiritual world. "Where," asks Charles Wesley in the first line, "shall my wondering soul begin?" The freshly composed hymn was probably sung by his brother John on the day of his conversion, May 24, 1738. The choir was marking the 250th anniversary of that event, often taken to be the birth of Methodism. The decisive stage in the Christian pilgrimage of John Wesley was considered well worth celebrating.
Now, 15 years on, there is another reason to commemorate the great evangelist. The current year, 2003, is the tercentenary of Wesley's birth. To mark the occasion, several biographical studies have appeared. None has been able to draw on the final volume of Wesley's journal, issued earlier this year in the authoritative version edited by Reg Ward for The Works of John Wesley. Nor does any of them, including each of the titles reviewed here, supersede Henry Rack's life of Wesley, Reasonable Enthusiast (Epworth Press, 1989), published just after the earlier commemoration. The two books by John Kent and John Munsey Turner considered here are reinterpretations of Wesley rather than detailed accounts of his life. Neither is chronologically arranged; both encompass the rise of Methodism as well as the founder himself. The similarities do not end there, for the authors are both retired English Methodist ministers who were trained as historians at the University of Cambridge.
Yet the perspectives are very different. Whereas Turner adopts a professedly Methodist standpoint, seeing Wesley as the creator of the tradition in which he stands, Kent takes a much more detached view, eyeing the evangelist more as a figure in the history of world religions. Both attack Wesleyan myths. Turner deplores the hagiography that has ignored, for instance, the relief of some of the elderly autocrat's followers at his eventual death. Kent, however, takes the assault on received opinion much further. He denies the existence of a spiritual movement that had Wesley as one of its central figures. There was, he claims, "no large-scale eighteenth-century evangelical revival." Along with much of the other religious baggage surrounding Wesley, in Kent's view, the notion of a revival must be thrown overboard. What, more precisely, do these contrasting interpretations have to offer?
Turner, whose less revolutionary account may be taken first and more briefly, is critical of treatments of early Methodism as a "one person show." He therefore puts Wesley in the context of the whole Evangelical Revival (he entertains no doubts of its existence), stressing the pragmatism that led the evangelist to create a system of itinerancy for spreading the gospel round the British Isles. Wesley was a man of the 18th century, with the foibles of the age, such as aversion to the rebellion of the Americans against George III. Wesley is depicted as a loyal Anglican, a folk theologian (here Turner follows Albert Outler), and the co-author, with his brother, of what the author justly calls "the greatest body of devotional verse in the English language."
share this page
RSS Feed
