E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
Sanders / Taylor Wesley on the Christian Life
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2487-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
The Heart Renewed in Love
E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten
Reihe: Theologians on the Christian Life
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2487-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
Fred Sanders (PhD, Graduate Theological Union) is professor of theology at the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. Sanders is the author of The Deep Things of God and blogs at fredfredfred.com.
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CHAPTER 1
JOHN WESLEY AS A SPIRITUAL GUIDE
John Wesley lived in a way that gave him credibility as a teacher on the Christian life. He has what students of rhetoric and public speaking call ethos: a power of persuasion based on his known character and his public accomplishments. When he spoke, forces were set in motion that changed the course of history. When we hear a quotation from Wesley, we are inclined to pay closer attention because of who said it. For example, consider the widely circulated “rule of Wesley”:
Do all the good you can,
by all the means you can,
in all the ways you can,
in all the places you can,
at all the times you can,
to all the people you can,
as long as you ever can.
This would be a fine anonymous exhortation, but it has more impact when attributed to John Wesley, who did so much good. Never mind that although “it sounds very Wesleyan,” expert witnesses are certain that “it is not to be found in Wesley.” 1 The fake quote gains gravitas from association with him. Why? Because Wesley has credibility to spare.
This chapter is a brief sketch of the biographical foundation of John Wesley’s credibility as a spiritual advisor. 2 It covers Wesley’s long life (1703–1791) in four broad movements: his early life, starting in his father’s Epworth parsonage; his evangelical conversion at Aldersgate; his role in the great revival in the 1740s; and his decades of work as the builder and organizer of the Methodist movement. Finally, it offers some insights into Wesley’s personality and character.
From Epworth
If you start John Wesley’s story as far back as two generations before his birth, it looks like it will be the story of English Puritanism because all four of his grandparents were nonconformists, or Dissenters from the established Church of England. His paternal grandfather, John Westley (1636–1678), was imprisoned for refusing to use the Book of Common Prayer in worship. His maternal grandfather, Samuel Annesley (1620–1696), not only was ejected from his pastorate by the Act of Uniformity, but also later had his property confiscated when he was caught ministering in a conventicle, or unofficial small group. So when John Wesley recommended and republished select Puritan spiritual writings for a wider audience (see chap. 9), he was raiding the family bookshelf, tapping directly into a vein of his own Puritan heritage. 3
But both of John Wesley’s parents, Samuel Wesley (1662–1735) and Susanna Annesley (1669–1742), left their dissenting homes and converted to the Church of England, persuaded that it was the most faithful way of being Christian in England. So John Wesley grew up Anglican, under parents who were in the established church not by accident, but by conviction and by adult conversion. Samuel was an Anglican pastor, the rector of the church of St. Andrew at Epworth in Lincolnshire, and a poet whose publications included the quirkily titled Maggots (not a best seller) and an epic poem on the life of Christ (“I sing the God, who, though enthroned on high, / In human nature deigned to live and die”). Susanna was a full-time mother, giving birth to nineteen children, nine of whom died in infancy. Of the ten who survived into adulthood, seven were daughters and three were sons. Susanna provided the daily discipline and home education for all the children, though the boys were sent off to boarding school as early as age ten.
Membership in the Church of England was apparently one of the few things that Samuel and Susanna agreed about. They had serious differences of opinion about everything from household management to politics, with one of their political disagreements even resulting in a brief separation. In a letter to John (or Jackey, as his family called him), Susanna admitted to her adult son that “it is an unhappiness almost peculiar to our family that your father and I seldom think alike.” 4 Still, Samuel was head of the household, and Susanna was a submissive eighteenth-century pastor’s wife in her own peculiar way.
What was her own peculiar way? One story strikingly captures the relational dynamic of the Epworth parsonage and displays the Wesley spirit. While Samuel was away on a long business trip in 1711, Susanna began to hold Sunday afternoon devotional reading services in her home. These services started with her children and servants but grew to include over two hundred people. They were meant to supplement the Sunday morning services, and were in line with the kind of “religious societies” that Samuel had long encouraged as a member of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Samuel’s pastoral assistant, however, felt threatened by these large audiences attending on a laywoman’s reading of printed sermons. He wrote to Samuel intimating that the Epworth parsonage was beginning to look like a conventicle, the kind of unofficial church frowned upon by Anglican church order. Samuel wrote home to Susanna, suggesting that she should probably disband the meetings (recall that Susanna’s father had been disciplined for holding an unsanctioned conventicle). Susanna replied that since the meetings were manifestly doing spiritual good to many souls in the village, and were directly edifying the church, it would be wrong to stop them. She agreed to submit to Samuel’s authority on the issue, but announced the terms of her obedience:
If after all this you think fit to dissolve this assembly, do not tell me you desire me to do it, for that will not satisfy my conscience; but send your positive command in such full and express terms as may absolve me from all guilt and punishment for neglecting this opportunity for doing good when you and I shall appear before the great and awful tribunal of our Lord Jesus Christ. 5
John Wesley was only eight years old at the time, but if he was paying attention to these intense debates about spiritual matters between his father and mother, he must have learned lessons that would serve him well in the evangelical awakening, when bishops suggested to him that his methods were perhaps inappropriate. The principle of “do not advise me, but command me to desist” has been called “a cornerstone of the future of Methodism.” 6
John was fifteenth in the large family’s birth order, and the middle boy between the much older Samuel (1690–1739) and the slightly younger Charles (1707–1788). Many of the Wesley children died in infancy; in fact, John was the third child to be given that name, the previous two Johns having perished early. So he was not the first John, though nobody ever called him Third John as far as I know. The most famous event from John’s childhood at Epworth was the fire that destroyed the home when he was five years old. John was the last of the children to be rescued from the second floor, escaping just before the roof collapsed. There is no evidence that John or his family thought of this rescue as the hand of providence marking out John Wesley for a special future, though later Methodists often told the story that way. But John would later see a parallel between how he was “a brand plucked from the burning” in his childhood and how he was a spiritual firebrand narrowly saved from perdition by God’s grace in his adulthood.
As a young boy, Wesley was one of those little household rationalists who needed to be given clear reasons for everything. Our first reported words from his lips are a sentence he uttered whenever he found himself in the difficult moral situation of being offered a snack between mealtimes: “I thank you, I will think of it.” His father once remarked to his mother, “I profess, sweetheart, I think our Jack would not attend to the most pressing necessities of nature unless he could give a reason for it.” Samuel also gave young John a warning about this unreasonable demand for reasonableness: “Child, you think to carry everything by dint of argument; but you will find how little is ever done in the world by close reasoning.” 7 Since John Wesley would go on to be famous for a certain emotional fervency in religion, it is worth noting that his basic temperament was more coolly reflective. In fact, the course of his life shows that Wesley was preeminently a man of reason, a planner, and an implementer of carefully considered decisions. When he emerged onto the world stage as a revivalist, it was partly because he had become rationally persuaded that the emotions were not being given their due consideration in religious life. Like his contemporary Jonathan Edwards, he was a man of reason whose reason told him he needed to cultivate his heart. He was smart enough to know that it’s not good enough to be smart enough.
Before he was eleven, John’s parents sent him to boarding school in London, where he studied until he was sixteen. He found his place in the school, wisely avoiding the older boys while assuming a leadership role among the younger. In his later estimation, it was a time of backsliding. Though he kept up the kind of devotional regimen that marked him as the offspring of Samuel and Susanna Wesley (“I still read the Scriptures and said my prayers morning and evening”), his behavior and his sentiments were entirely shaped by his social setting. It was at school that he learned to commit socially acceptable sins; the kind of sins that he knew were wrong, but which were not considered scandalous by his peers or even his teachers. He learned to judge everything on a sliding scale, comparing himself not to any...
