The Future of John Wesley’s Theology: Back to the Future with the Apostle Paul

Preface

I was a second-year student in seminary reading a theological text on justification by faith through grace. I had heard those words many, many times, but quite frankly they had flowed over me without ever having been heard, at least not in a way that would have concrete impact. They were words. I knew that I was supposed to believe them, and I did! They just had no gravity, no traction. They did not address who I was, what I did, or provide any rationale for why I was in the world, why I was going into the ministry, or what I was doing in the church. My reasons for all these things lay elsewhere.

Suddenly, as I read that theological text, it dawned on me that God loved me and that, initially, I did not have to do anything to deserve that love. In fact, I realized that all I had to do was just to trust God, to accept the fact that God loves me, and to claim the abundant grace and care of God. Suddenly, my self-esteem rose. I could feel a warmth of care and love that embraced me. Faith for me then became a matter of trust and acceptance, and justification was God reaching out to me in Christ to tell me that I was valuable and beloved. God’s grace was the unmerited love displayed for me in Christ on the cross.

I had been a psychology major in college and found it extremely helpful to think about these things in terms of self-esteem, psychological health, and self-realization. Later, without understanding what he meant, I heard Tillich’s language of you are accepted as powerful confirmation of my new understanding and my new status before God.

This new view of justification by faith through grace helped me a great deal to understand and appropriate John Wesley, at least as I understood him. I simply translated Wesley into my point of view. It helped me that I could claim to be a Wesleyan, especially since I was a Methodist! So I began to read Wesley in these terms, with justification understood in terms of self-esteem. I found that this new understanding of mine also helped me a great deal with Wesley’s talk of sanctification. I took his language of perfection and read it as psychological self-realization. I understood maturity in Christ in these terms. I began to sense the powerful ways in which Wesley had so anticipated the scientifically established psychologies of self-esteem and self-realization.

At last, I had something I could defend in discussions with my secular friends and that integrated well with my work in psychology, or so I thought. I could actually talk two languages now: one of Wesley in terms of justification and sanctification, as I understood him, and the other a contemporary pop psychology, which undergirded my appreciation for Wesley and gave me the means for making sense of him. In fact, I remember my excitement about the confluence of Wesley’s theological language and these psychological concepts, which reigned supreme in my view. Little did I know how much I would later cringe at these claims and how painful it is now to report them.

Faith in Jesus Christ, really trusting him, and God’s love as displayed for us in Christ on the cross became central for me. Even growing up I had rejected the substitutionary atonement taught by so many of the fundamentalist churches I knew, and, on occasion, even in the Methodist Church. That never made sense to me, and it does not now. But back then the notion of God’s love, displayed so powerfully on the cross, was an offer of self-ratification and justification. For whatever kinds of reasons, I was not personally burdened with deep guilt, and my issue was not centrally that of forgiveness. Oh, I certainly had times of guilt, but they were more often about matters growing out of self-absorption and personal failures. Growing up, I had never done the hard drinking, the carousing, the womanizing, or engaged in adolescent theft or other acts of that kind. I was a good boy.

In those early years I suppose I had a crude moral influence theory of God’s act in Christ on the cross. Basically it was a display of God’s love. It did not go much further than that. I do not remember having any strong sense of God acting in history on the cross, and certainly no sense of God having changed history. I was completely unaware of the translation issue about whether instances in the RSV of faith in Christ might be better translated as the faith of Christ. That simply was no issue for me. That is, I saw faith in Christ as trust in God’s love, but I did not think of the faith of Christ as obedience to God, which models our response to the cross and the very character of Christian love. I was so swept up in a kind of pop psychology based in self-esteem and self-realization that I could not hear the more radical implications of the New Testament. It was not so much a matter of fear, but rather a matter of the question posed in that way never coming up. To be sure, I knew that the language of obedience was in the text, but I read the text in terms of a pop psychology that did not require a more careful delving into faith as the obedience exemplified in Christ, and one in which we are called to participation. But I get ahead of myself.

By the time I finished college, and certainly in theological school, I had a far more vigorous sense of my participation in collective guilt. I began to see with much greater clarity the suffocating, entrenched racism in which I was raised in the segregated society of Mississippi. In an elementary way I was seeking to name the way in which that racism penetrated me and operated in me even in times when I had changed my overt behavior. I knew what kind of an entrapment—it was really a captivity—in which I was gripped. It was not so much a matter of personal choice, though I would not exonerate myself from that, as it was a matter of having been formed and shaped in language, in thought, and in practice in a racist world. I do not mean here the kinds of thought and practice that characterized the Ku Klux Klan or the white segregationist groups. I mean a far more subtle form of racism, more embodied, one that crept into the crevices of language and nuanced practices in ways that I was only partially aware.

I knew of no way to address this kind of captivity except to continue to study and learn and to join in action groups for racial justice. But there was always a kind of a disconnect between this kind of captivity and my gospel of trust/self-esteem/self-realization. To be sure, I went to a fine theological school, and the longer I attended there, the richer my theological appropriation became. I read important theologians, and they certainly helped, and I left much of the kind of psychological appropriation of the faith that persuaded me in my midyear of seminary.

Still, I struggled with how one moves from the way the Gospel addresses the individual to the way the prophets and Jesus addressed social issues. I remember distinctly attempting to move from the individual to the social. I worked hard at moving from justification by faith through grace, which I still interpreted in individual terms, to justice, which I understood in far more social terms.

It would be years, however, before I realized that the individual/social dialectic was itself a captivity. It was not some concept that simply characterized some binary opposition in reality. The concept itself had a history, a beginning and an ongoing story. In fact, that very story had so shaped me that I could not see that it, too, was historically and socially constructed, and that it had me in its grips. I did not understand then how the individual/social duality had emerged with the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century, and how much that concept had framed the way that I addressed issues in my personal and family life, but also the capacity of that concept to form and direct my thought about the Christian faith and about the mission of the church.

Early in my theological training I dismissed the concept of the principalities and powers in the New Testament. The notion smacked too much of supernatural demons and spirits to be taken literally. At most, I understood them metaphorically and made little connection between the powers and, for example, the way in which the individual/social duality held me in its grip.

Or, let me use another example. In preparation for four doctoral exams, I read and outlined more than one hundred books on Western ethics and social philosophy, ecumenical social ethics, sociology of religion, and social theory. I did my dissertation on Norman Thomas, the six-time Socialist candidate for president in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. He was a great man, and he addressed virtually every social issue before our society in his long career. In my research on his life and thought, I read and outlined the twenty-plus books that he wrote. I worked my way through 115 boxes of his papers at the New York Public Library. I also read significantly in the history of socialism, commentators on Thomas’ life and work, and the history of the United States during his time. I had immersed myself in the great social issues of the first two thirds of the twentieth century.

When I finished my PhD in 1964, however, I had never heard the word sexism, not to mention the word heterosexism. While I had extraordinary teachers who were quite sensitive to issues like the just wage for everyone, including women, the systemic pervasiveness of sexism was simply not on my intellectual map (or that of graduate schools around the United States to my knowledge). I had heard about a book titled The Feminine Mystique, but I had not read it and would not do so for several years to come.

I was actively involved in the civil rights movement, but I was virtually insensitive to the kind of sexism that operated within it. My point is that I was in captivity to the powers of sexism that I could not even name, and in whose grip I was virtually unaware. Even more personally, my mother at that very time was a skilled worker in a factory for which she received the minimum wage. She would work in that factory for twenty years and never make more than the minimum wage. I do not mean to suggest that sexism is limited only to work and wages for women; my point is rather to indicate how pervasive, even intimate, such powers can be and not show up even on our personal screens about those we love the most.

The point is, the issues of justification and sanctification, faith in/of Christ, the powers, the individual/social duality, and the issues of love and justice have occupied me for the entirety of my academic life. New Testament scholarship over the past three decades on the Apostle Paul brought an approach to these issues that evaded me over the first half of my career. This relatively new research brought a clarity and an excitement about the Gospel that I have never known before, although I have found the Gospel life altering and life changing throughout my adult life. But I am so grateful for the renewed clarity and inspiration in my life and thought engendered by the work of the Apostle Paul.

Furthermore, I have been interested in Wesley all of my adult life, and I have been heavily engaged in the United Methodist Church. Yet, my recent extended study of the Apostle Paul clarified significant differences between Paul and John Wesley. In some cases I felt a renewed appreciation for Wesley and the ways in which he extended our understanding of the faith, the church, and its mission. But I also became aware of places where Wesley needed to be corrected by Paul, especially around the issues I named above. Working through these differences between Paul and Wesley became very important and took on a basic reshaping of my understanding of the faith.

This book attempts to report the results of that reflection in terms of making connections between these two great men and the issues of justification and sanctification, faith in/of Christ, the individual/social duality, the powers, and the relations of love and justice. This recent research on Paul has important implications for our work with Wesley and for the work of the church today. We turn to the results of these reflections in the introduction.

Acknowledgments

I am one of those people who have better friends than he deserves. This fact has been demonstrated again in the writing of this book. My former colleagues Henry H. Knight III and William K. McElvaney gave the manuscript a very careful reading, saving me from a number of errors and forcing me to develop ideas I had not considered. I am very much in their debt. Bishop Kenneth Carder also read the manuscript and provided me with substantive material that I then included in later drafts. It was also through his good offices that I