Lessons from Wesley’s Experience

It has been shrewdly said that true greatness grows. It not only endures, but actually increases. The stature of those whose greatness springs from goodness (as the highest always does) is enhanced as the years go by, and succeeding generations recognize more and more of significance in their character and influence. This is a principle clearly distinguishable in the case of those whom God has chosen to be lights of the world in their several generations. “The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (Prov. 4:18). It is so for him, as that Scripture suggests, but where greatness is allied to righteousness it seems as if that illumination is conveyed to after-ages.

Certainly this has happened with John Wesley. He has always been known as an outstanding figure in the history of the Christian church. But his stock improves as the march of time takes us further from his century, and it can be said that never was he more appreciated than today. We are beginning to realize the measure of his greatness. The judgment of Augustine Birrell that he was “the greatest force of the eighteenth century” is widely accepted. A recent editorial in The Times Literary Supplement has reaffirmed this conviction. “No historian can miss the immense raising of the nation’s spiritual temper by Wesley in his own movement and through its effects in the Church of England. When we review the nineteenth century we find the evils which we criticize in our own, sometimes in worse shapes, but we see a high seriousness and far less confusion of mind. The recovery of the national mind and character started with Wesley.”

This acclaim is not confined to Great Britain, of course. Wesley’s fame is universal. In the language of Gladstone, his “life and acts have taken their place in the religious history not only of England, but of Christendom.” It is from this broad standpoint that Professor Martin Schmidt has penned the latest biography. He sees in Wesley a man who lived and acted as an ecumenical Christian. He regards him as belonging to the whole of Christendom, since the last of the major ecclesiastical organizations to have come into being in the development of Christianity originated with him.

Amidst this deepening volume of applause, we must not overlook the fact that Wesley became the man he is now hailed as being through the intervention of God. No doubt many of his qualities already lay hidden within his personality, but it was only at the touch of the Spirit that they sprang to life and received their necessary integration. All that Wesley was and did can be traced back to a transforming experience on a never-to-be-forgotten day. If the Damascus road explains Paul the Apostle, if the Milanese garden accounts for Augustine of Hippo, if the Black Tower at Wittenberg gave birth to Martin Luther as the pioneer reformer, then Aldersgate Street, London, produced John Wesley as the world knows him today.

On May 24, 1738, as a young Anglican clergyman in much distress of soul, Wesley went very unwillingly, like Shakespeare to school, to a predominantly Moravian society meeting. There someone (probably William Holland) was reading from Luther’s preface to Romans. “About a quarter before nine,” recorded Wesley in his famous journal, “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 my 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.”

Dr. Henry Bett succeeded in tracing the precise passage from Luther’s introduction to Romans which must have so warmed Wesley’s heart. Here is how it runs: “Wherefore let us conclude that faith alone justifies, and that faith alone fulfills the law. For faith through the merit of Christ obtains the Holy Spirit, which Spirit makes us new hearts, exhilarates, excites and influences our heart, so that it may do those things willingly of love, which the law commands.”

It was the signal contribution of Wesley to the age in which he lived that he set experience in the foreground of Christianity. It is virtually a new term in the theology as it appears in his writings. He restored the element to the primacy it occupies in the Scriptures. “Wesley brought the whole Christian world back to religion as experience,” declares Professor George Croft Cell; “in religion, experience and reality come to the same thing.”

Some Significant Emphases

It must not hastily be supposed, however, that Wesley’s emphasis upon experience amounted to mere subjectivism or that he can rightly be regarded as the precursor of Schleiermacher and his school in this respect. Wesley was too scriptural to fall into such imbalance. His experiential theology was safeguarded at every point from subjectivistic deviation by counteracting features which derived from his own dramatic conversion in Aldersgate Street.

1. Experience was interpreted in terms of a divine-human confrontation. For Wesley, experience stood at the receiving end, so to speak, of God’s sovereign grace. He insisted, as much as Calvin ever did, that the divine will and the divine deed are alone determinative of man’s salvation. God takes the initiative. “It is plain that God begins His work at the heart. God begins His work in man by enabling us to believe in Him. Out of darkness He commands the light to shine.”

It is at the heart that God begins and continues his work, and not in a vacuum. He deals with sinners, and all Wesley means by experience is the reaction produced in the personality when God quickens it through his Spirit. It is his way of describing the new birth leading to the new life. Wesley preached regeneration as unremittingly as Whitefield. “It is the great change which God works in the soul when He brings it into life; when He raises it from the death of sin to the life of righteousness. It is the change wrought in the whole soul by the almighty Spirit of God when it is ‘created anew in Christ Jesus.’ ”

2. Experience was never divorced from the authoritative Word of God. Wesley was homo unius libri. The Bible was his criterion. A thorough study of his doctrine of Scripture has yet to be made, though in differing contexts both Professor G. A. Turner and Dr. H. D. MacDonald have made excursions into this field. Concerning the Scriptures, Wesley wrote: “Every part thereof is worthy of God; and all together are one entire body, wherein is no defect, no excess.” And again: “According to the light we have, we cannot but believe the Scripture is of God; and … [thus] we dare not turn aside from it, to the right hand or to the left.”

It is significant that the Word of God, through the exposition of Romans, was instrumental in Wesley’s conversion. He could conceive of no Christian experience apart from the Bible. As Colin Williams has correctly observed, “in Wesley experience is not the test of truth, but truth the test of experience,” and that truth is equated with the revelation of Scripture.

3. Experience was regarded not as static but as a growth in grace. Determinative and seminal as was the Aldersgate Street conversion in Wesley’s spiritual biography, he refused to fix experience at this single point. Rather he saw it as the bursting of the rock from which the life-giving stream was to flow throughout the remainder of his career. With justification there came assurance, though Wesley recognized that this simultaneity is not apparent in every case. The witness of the Spirit is not always immediately realized. But this phenomenon is a factor of Christian experience, nevertheless, at some point, and normally not far removed, if at all, from conversion.

But for Wesley assurance itself was only a step on the highway of holiness. “Let none ever presume to rest in any supposed testimony of the Spirit, which is separate from the fruit of it.” The major objective was holiness of heart and life, and Wesley made it the main plank in his platform. “This doctrine is the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly He appeared to have raised us up.” Although Wesley left room for a crisis in spiritual experience beyond regeneration in which a more complete consecration allowed a more conscious appropriation of the Spirit, he was careful to insist on the relativity of such expressions. Sanctification is basically a process extending from the moment of new birth to the redemption of the body. “Sanctification begins when we begin to believe,” he said, “and in proportion as our faith increases, our holiness increases also.” But the expansion of faith is itself a work of the Spirit; hence Charles Wesley’s prayer, which is always relevant: “Stretch my faith’s capacity.”

“All that the Wesleys said of permanent value to the human race came out of their evangelical experience,” affirmed Dr. J. E. Rattenbury. “All their distinctive doctrine was discovered in that realm of the Spirit—which had been supernaturally revealed to them in May 1738.” But this vital theology of experience was not disconnected from its essential rootage in the sovereignty of God, the authority of Scripture, and the energizing of the Spirit which has as its goal the reproduction of Christ’s image in the heart. As such it is relevant to our situation today as we seek to steer an evangelical course between the Scylla of synergistic subjectivism and the Charybdis of formalized orthodoxy.

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