Wesley gains new respect as 300th birthday approaches
5/29/2003 News media contact: Kathy Gilbert · (615) 742-5470 · Nashville, Tenn. NOTE: An artist's rendering of John Wesley is available at http://umns.umc.org/photos/headshots.html. By Alice M. Smith* ATLANTA
(UMNS) - John Wesley has always been a venerated name among Methodists,
but now he and the movement he founded are being accorded greater
respect on the U.S. side of the Atlantic Ocean - by other Christian
churches and religious historians.
That's the assessment of the
Rev. Russell Richey, dean of Emory University's Candler School of
Theology, as Methodists prepare to celebrate Wesley's 300th birthday.
Wesley was born June 17, 1703.
Wesley's increasing prominence is
largely due to a "rewriting of American religious history that
recognizes Methodism as a major force in the building of popular culture
and democratic institutions and a society that cohered around
significant values," says Richey, a church historian.
And as Methodism's star rises, so does that of its founder.
Wesley's
place in history has long been assured in England, where he lived all
his life, visiting the American colonies only once in 1736-37. The
evangelical revival and social movement he generated are widely credited
for saving England from a bloody uprising of the oppressed lower
classes similar to the French Revolution.
His importance in
England is underscored by the fact that in a major British Broadcasting
Corp. poll conducted late last year, Wesley was ranked No. 50 of the 100
"Greatest Britons" of all time.
But in America, where Methodism
has been a significant Protestant force since the establishment of the
U.S. church in 1784, religious history has been seen through the lens of
the reform Puritan experience, Richey says.
"Methodists have not been seen as that important."
Only
in the last decade or so have historians outside Methodism begun to
"recognize the incredible significance of Methodism as a movement that
really transformed American society," Richey says. He mentions
specifically scholars Nathan Hatch of Notre Dame, author of The
Democratization of American Christianity, and Mark Noll of Wheaton
College, who has written several books, including the recent History of
Christianity in the U.S. and Canada.
Accompanying this attention
in academic circles has been a series of Methodist dialogues with other
churches, including the Roman Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican
traditions, that have drawn attention to Wesley as he is placed beside
Martin Luther, John Calvin, the English reformers and Catholic
theologians such as Ignatius Loyola and Thomas Aquinas.
In such
comparisons, Wesley's distinctive emphases come to the forefront: the
importance of a lifestyle of holiness and discipline; the missional
understanding of the church; the obligation to works of mercy; the
significance of connection; and the nature of ministry as itinerant, as
being sent rather than called.
Part of Wesley's uniqueness was
his ability and desire to make Christian truth available to "plain folk"
- those who weren't well educated or lived some distance from the
church - a strong departure from the somewhat elitist Church of England
of that time.
A third reason Wesley's prominence is growing,
Richey says, is an emphasis during the last decade on the importance of
religious practices, the specific ways in which Christians live out
their faith.
"Wesley was the consummate theologian of religious
practices," Richey says. "Albert Outler (a Wesley scholar) called it
'folk theology.' The point is having a working theology that makes what
we believe practicable and practiced in Christian life. There are people
who can articulate a nice-sounding Christian utterance but whose lives
belie what they say, who don't live their own creed. What Wesley was
insistent upon was a disciplined life."
Wesley wasn't a systematic theologian, Richey notes.
"There
are persons - such as Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Paul Tillich or Karl
Barth - whose genius has been to envision coherent schemes of what
Christians believe and lay them out thematically and logically. That
wasn't Wesley. We look to other people for that."
In his efforts
to encourage ordinary people to lead a Christian life, Wesley wrote
study books and letters, published his own journal and created a
magazine.
"He was very interested in a person's growth as a whole
being, but he didn't think it was just a mind that needed to be
transformed. In order to be Christian, the whole person, including the
mind, had to be transformed."
Richey cited sanctification,
holiness and perfection as particular hallmarks of Wesleyan theology.
Further, he says, Wesley's emphasis upon the free grace of God and his
belief that Christ's death and resurrection were for all humankind was a
definite departure from thinking for his time.
"It's not an
atonement limited just to the elect, just to those who are predestined,"
Richey says. "It's a little hard to see that as a contribution now,
it's so much everybody's belief. But when Wesley wrote, a good portion
of the Protestant world held to the doctrine of predestination."
# # #
*Smith
is editor of the Wesleyan Christian Advocate, the newspaper of the
North and South Georgia annual conferences of the United Methodist
Church.
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