The Joy of Wesleyan believing - By William H. Willimont

Some years ago, at a church in Salt Lake City, as I recall, I did my usual rant on what needs to be changed in the United Methodist Church—if only the church would let me change it. We had a great time whining about our failures.

Then a man stood and said, “I spent thirty years in a church of another denomination. Their name starts with “M” and it’s not Moravians. Then I became a Methodist. Until I got mixed up with Methodists, no one had ever told me about the devastatingly wonderful grace of God. In thirty years, no one had ever suggested that God’s grace was for me, even me. Sometimes you folks forget the fun of being the heirs of John and Charles Wesley.”

Sometimes I forget the joy of thinking like a Wesleyan. I get so mired in the responsibilities and the demands of discipleship that I forget how much fun it is to do theology. Recently, in preparing to write a book on our theology (Basic United Methodist Beliefs, Westminster/John Knox Press, forthcoming), I reread Wesley’s Journal, his Notes on the New Testament, and as many of his sermons as I could stand. Again, Wesley’s theology seized me and I was lifted from the tedium of United Methodist polity to the joy of United Methodist believing.

Contemporary Wesleyans don’t spend much effort in playing the game of “My beliefs are better than yours” or worry over guarding our doctrinal distinctiveness. Doctrinal posturing and hairsplitting held little interest for Wesley. And yet, we ought to stop trying to blend in with the doctrinal wallpaper around us. We have our wonderfully distinctive qualities when it comes to what we believe and how we believe it and we ought to flaunt it.

I’m concerned that too much that passes for evangelical preaching these days is theological minimalism—the faith reduced to a slogan on a bumper sticker, the gospel rendered into PowerPoint. The rich legacy of theology is reduced to a one-sentence message. Charles G. Finney is us all over. Wesley wanted to reach the masses for Christ, but he studiously avoided condescendingly simplifying the riches of Christian thought to what he thought the market could bear. Theology keeps our message as rich and difficult as it ought to be by sustained reflection upon the riches and the challenges of the messenger who is Jesus Christ.

Today, Wesley is praised as a great organizer of a movement to reform the church. But if you look at the body of work Wesley left us, and if you consider how he spent his time, he was mostly a theologian—a wonderfully practical theologian to be sure, but a theologian nonetheless. The very first question that Wesley asked his Annual Conference, before he allowed there to be any debate on what to do next, was the doctrinal, “What to teach?” I believe that the world is literally dying to think like Methodists.

In a 1742 essay, “The Character of a Methodist,” Wesley noted, “the distinguishing marks of a Methodist.” First mark? “A Methodist is one who has ‘the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost.’” Into that little statement is packed the most distinctively Wesleyan theological claims that continue to our day. Note the emphasis upon love. Wesley was into holiness of heart and life, but he was contemptuous of the exercise of spiritual disciplines and scriptural righteousness without love. I’ll admit that in a cultural milieu in which “love” is reduced to sappy sentimentalism, we need to be careful of the word. The Methodist movement gave substance and countercultural definition to “love,” stressing God’s love as transformative, risky, and resourceful, tied to the specifics of a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, and rose unexpectedly. We define “love” as Jesus Christ, what he did and what he said.

Wesleyan social activism arose out of the experience of a God who is active in Wesleyan hearts. God doesn’t sit back and say, “I love you as you are, promise me you’ll never change.” We know God’s love has us when our lives are transformed. Furthermore, what God does in the responding heart God intends to do in the whole world. In love, God intends to get back what belongs to God. Thus, Wesleyans have tended not to stress orthodoxy, abstract principles, or a set of extensively elaborated beliefs. Wesleyans stressed God’s love in motion—reaching, seeking, and working for the whole world for which Christ died. The whole world. “Practical divinity” is what Wesley called his theology. It was God’s love in action. If we Wesleyans are going to be “purpose driven” we want to be clear that it’s God’s purposes that ought to be driving us!

Note that Wesley is clear that the “love” that empowers us is the love of God. When United Methodist believing degenerates into a sort of sentimental, warm-hearted, humanistic do-good-ism—something just to the left of the Democrat Party (“Open hearts, Open minds, Open doors”!)—we do not believe like Wesleyans.

All of us need to re-read the Doctrinal Statement toward the beginning of our Discipline. Ironically, we first called our book, The Doctrine and Discipline of the Methodist Church. What does it tell you that we dropped the first part of the title? Nevertheless, before we begin with rules we begin with belief. The Doctrinal Statement, whose principle author is the Wesleyan scholar, Richard Heitzenreiter, is a marvel of succinct, Trinitarian theological reflection. We begin with God—with the God who has come to us peculiarly, decisively, and actively as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and we work from what we know of God in Jesus Christ toward implications for ourselves and the world. The “Open hearts, Open minds, Open doors” that first impress Wesleyans are God’s door, God’s heart. Well, you get the idea. Too often American evangelical Christianity, corrupted by a modernism that stresses individual choice and decision, has unintentionally tended to weight the need for our love, our decision, and our choice for God rather than God’s decision for us in Jesus Christ. In our much touted “prevenient grace” we are saying that in Jesus Christ, God didn’t just open a door to us; God pursued us, kicked in our locked doors, and grabbed us sinners in such a way that we can’t get loose (read Luke 15).

By the way, there’s not one mention in our Doctrinal Statement of any of the social issues that have recently caused our church such grief. Nor is there any mention of the care and feeding of clergy that has preoccupied us in the last decades. Go figure. We would all be better off, as United Methodists, if we disciplined ourselves doing what the Discipline tells each of us to do—to be theologians, loving God by thinking with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Wesley then says that this love is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. If we are able to say, “I believe,” and if we ever perform good and faithful work, and if we persevere as disciples, it is all a miraculous work of God in us in the power of the Holy Spirit. Grace. How sad that contemporary United Methodism sometimes slips into living by the law (our Discipline is about three times larger than it was just 50 years ago, thanks to the piling up of rules and regulations by a succession of General Conferences that would rather live by law than gospel).

In his magisterial Practical Divinity, my friend Tom Langford claims that the main reason Methodism never fell into biblical literalism or fundamentalism was our robust Pneumatology. In other words, we had a high doctrine of the Holy Spirit. We believed that what happened to John Wesley at an otherwise dull church meeting on Aldersgate Street happens again and again in us as we read Scripture, as we do God’s work in the world, as we stand up to the government, and as we reach to the poor and dispossessed. True, the Holy Spirit has had to drag us kicking and screaming into various areas of ministry, and we can have quite a fight among ourselves over whether we are following the Holy Spirit or merely the unholy spirit of the age. But at our best we’ve dared not only to believe in the Third Person of the Trinity, but to live like Trinitarians as well.

Wesley’s assertion that, “A Methodist is one who has ‘the love of God shed abroad in his heart by the Holy Ghost,’” was not self-generated. He only knew this thanks to the witness of Scripture and the saints. The point of United Methodist doctrine is a person changed by an encounter with something outside our subjectivity, religion of the heart formed and reformed by engagement of the mind that results in hands dedicated to work with Christ. But that encounter, that reformation and engagement is stoked, fueled, and funded by Scripture. God has spoken and God speaks. We don’t know God in the conventional modern means of rummaging about in our own subjectivity or by taking long walks in the woods and meditating upon a tree. When Wesleyans say “I believe,” we are saying considerably more than, “This is what seems personally right to me.”

If we’re going to use the much abused term “Wesleyan Quadrilateral” (Scripture, reason, tradition, experience), let’s be clear that it’s not equilateral (not all of our heritage from Anglicanism is beneficial). Scripture is primary and definitive. In love we submit to an ancient, Jewish book that we believe renders an agent—the living, speaking Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Wesley’s “heart warming experience” occurred in a study of a rather dull treatise on the Letter to the Romans. The Holy Spirit does some great converting work when we apply our minds to Scripture. All our believing is a form of prayer in which we receptively hold out empty hands asking God to give us what we can’t have by our own effort. So when we Wesleyans stand on a Sunday morning and say “I believe…,” we are gratefully acknowledging that God has shown us a truthful way to walk, has given us something that we, in our sin, didn’t deserve. This is thinking like Wesley. And it is joy.

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The Joy of Wesleyan believing By William H. Willimon

The Joy of Wesleyan believing
By William H. Willimon