In 2007, a number of important books were published to mark the 300th anniversary of the birth of Charles Wesley. Thankfully, careful attention to this Wesley, as more than just his brother John’s shadow and as still the evangelical movement’s greatest hymnwriter, is going strong, as illustrated by this noteworthy study from Joanna Cruickshank, who lectures in history at Australia’s Deakin University.
Pain, Passion and Faith: Revisiting the Place of Charles Wesley in Early Methodism (Pietist and Wesleyan Studies)
Scarecrow Press
202 pages
$82.00
The book’s central argument is that the experience of suffering was central for Charles Wesley’s life and theology, and that this centrality is the key to a great number of his hymns. To be sure, the popular canon of Wesley hymns that continue to be widely sung—for example, “O for a thousand tongues to sing,” “Hark, the herald angels sing,” “And can it be” —contains only hints about this concentration. But through diligent searching in the 9,000 hymns that Wesley composed throughout his incessantly poetic life, Cruickshank discovers a well-developed theology of suffering. There are, thus, Wesley hymns that depicted Christ’s suffering as foundational for the work of salvation, the believer’s suffering from the results of sin as key preparation for receiving God’s grace, the suffering of saints as essential for sanctification and as building bonds of community, and much more. Throughout, Cruickshank shows how much these themes reflected new attitudes toward “the person” in 18th-century British society and how influential they were in making Methodists alert to the lives of ordinary people.
It is not a complaint about Cruickshank’s careful scholarship to say that the best thing about this book is the wealth of unfamiliar Wesley hymns it quotes. Not every verse rings just right, but a remarkable proportion hit home with real force. Here are, for example, only two of the 18 verses from “A Passion Hymn”:
See how His back the scourges tear;
While to the bloody pillar bound!
The ploughers make long furrows there,
Till all His body is one wound. …
The earth could to her centre quake,
Convulsed, while her Creator died:
O, let my inmost nature shake,
And die with Jesus crucified!
By opening up the largely unexplored treasury of Wesley’s hymns, as well as offering edifying discussion of what is found therein, Pain, Passion, and Faith makes for compelling reading.
Mark Noll is Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author most recently of The New Shape of World Christianity: How American Experience Reflects Global Faith (InterVarsity Press).
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