The Effective Doctrines of Methodism
What we have called the doctrinal secret of the Revival has already been discussed; but here we are describing the enduring historical result of the great movement, the Church into which it crystallised; and it may be asked what are the permanent characteristics in teaching and discipline, in belief and structure, of that Church? “My doctrines,” said Wesley himself, “are simply the common fundamental principles of Christianity.” Or, to use another of his phrases, “they are the plain old religion of the Church of England”; and that is perfectly true.
Wesley added no new province to theology. He invented no new doctrine, he slew no ancient heresy. Whatever may be Wesley’s title to fame, it is not that of a leader of men into new and unguessed realms of theological speculation. It is sometimes said that he set old doctrines in a new perspective. He changed the theological emphasis of the Thirty -nine Articles; and he did it in an enduring fashion, which makes it, so to speak, his signature on the theology of his Church to-day. As far as this is true, it applies to those doctrines which touch the central things of salvation — a divine redemption, a realised pardon, a present and conscious salvation from sin. At these points Wesley certainly drew into life and consciousness many forgotten truths in “the plain old religion of the Church of England.”
There is a real — though not always recognised — philosophy underlying the doctrinal teachings of Wesley. They constitute an interpretation of Christianity which may be judged of as a whole. To describe that teaching fully would be to write an entire system of theology, and cannot, of course, be attempted here. But it is worth while to offer in barest outline a statement of what may be called Wesley’s working creed.
Wesley sums this up himself in one familiar statement: — “Our maia doctrines, which include all the rest, are repentance, faith, and holiness. The first of these we account, as it were, the porch of religion; the next, the door; the third, religion itself.”’
But a whole theology cannot be condensed into a single metaphor in this fashion. Behind the metaphor stands a symmetrical and spacious creed.
Wesley began by a noble conception of the universe as built on a moral plan and existing for moral ends. Its ideal and law are found in the will of God, its Creator; but that will is not an arbitrary force. Goodness is not goodness because God chose to enact it. It is the reflex of an eternal necessity, a necessity lying in the very nature of God Himself. The moral law Wesley traced, in Southey’s words, “beyond the foundation of the world to that period, unknown indeed to men, but doubtless enrolled in the annals of eternity, when the morning stars sang together.” As Wesley himself put it: “The law of God is supreme, unchangeable reason; it is unalterable rectitude; it is the everlasting fitness of all things that are or ever were created.”
Man was created under this law, created that in him it might find its fulfilment. But obedience to that law must be the voluntary service of a free spirit. So Wesley believed profoundly in the doctrine of the freedom of the human will. It is this which constitutes man a moral agent. The denial of it makes goodness impossible. Set in man’s nature is an august faculty which carries with it measureless possibilities. It is the power to say “No,” even to God, and through the gate of that awful power sin comes into the world. But it is also the power to say “Yes” to God, and so to render Him a service impossible to suns and planets; a worship unknown to the whole material universe beside. Man, in Wesley’s words, was “not a clod of earth, a lump of clay .without sense or understanding, but a spirit like his Creator; a spirit endowed with a free will, the power of choosing good or evil, of directing his own affections and actions.”
And in his first choice man fell. He sinned; and he incurred the one inevitable penalty of sin — death. Death is a term which includes many meanings. It is not ex-
•Stevens, p. 327.
hausted by the divorce that rends the body and the undying spirit asunder. In the moment of sin man suffered that most dreadful of all deaths — separation from God. So he became liable to death eternal. And as he was the head of the human race, and the seeds and souls of all mankind were contained in him. the moral standing of the whole human race was affected by his act. ‘’Wesley did not, of course, believe in any transfer of personal guilt. If any man perishes it will be because he himself has broken God’s law, not because some one else — Adam, or any other — has broken it. The guilt of wrong-doing lies eternally and solely on the wrongdoer. The doctrine that the sin of Adam constitutes in any literal sense the guilt of any of his children was to Wesley, as it must be to the healthy reason of all men, abhorrent “Whatsoever,” says Wesley, “it hath pleased God to do of His sovereign pleasure as Creator, He will judge the world in righteousness, and every man therein according to the strictest justice. He will punish no man for doing anything which he could not possibly avoid, neither for omitting anything he could not possibly do.” Yet many of the consequences of wrongdoing visibly and necessarily extend to others than the one actually guilty of it. The child of the drunkard is not burdened with the guilt of drunkenness; but it has a partnership in the evil consequences that vice creates. Drunkenness in a father means hunger, rags, and misery for the child.
Now Wesley believed profoundly in the doctrine of the Fall. It is the clear teaching, he held, of Scripture. It is verified in the personal consciousness of each man. It is the one fact which explains the moral disorder and misery of the world. The evidence that the human race is implicated in what Newman calls “some terrible aboriginal calamity” is writ large not only on every page of history, but on every issue of the daily newspaper. But Wesley never separated the doctrine of man’s fall from the great twin doctrine of man’s redemption. When Adam sinned the terms of moral probation were changed for him and for the whole human race; and the new terms are those of redemption in Christ Jesus. Here is a sacrifice for sin, given in promise from the very moment of the Fall, which opens the gate to forgiveness. Here is a gift of divine grace through the Holy Spirit which makes a restored character and a holy life possible. And looking at the doctrine of the Fall through the lens of redemption, Wesley found in it that perpetual miracle of the divine love which turns moral failure itself into a new possibility of moral victory.
Man’s fall, in this sense, was not a defeat for God’s plans. It was the occasion of a new and more glorious evolution of them; and through Christ’s redemption man is enriched by the Fall. Southey summarises Wesley’s teaching on this point very happily: —
“If man had not fallen there must have been a blank in our faith and in our love. There could have been no such thing as faith in God ‘so loving the world that He gave His only Son for us men and for our salvation’; no faith in the Son of God, as loving us, and giving Himself for us; no faith in the Spirit of God, as renewing the image of God in our hearts, or raising us from the death of sin unto the life of righteousness. And the same blank must likewise have been in our love. We could not have loved the Father under the nearest and dearest relation, as delivering up His Son for us; we could not have loved the Son, as bearing our sins in His own body on the tree; we could not have loved the Holy Ghost, as revealing to us the Father and the Son, as opening the eyes of our understandings, bringing us out of darkness into His marvellous light, renewing the image of God in our soul, and sealing us unto the day of redemption.’”
On the atoning work of Jesus Christ, with its mysteries deep beyond all sounding and high above all vision, Wesley dwelt with constant emphasis, but always in the language of scripture. “Christ died for our offences and rose again for our justification.” “We have redemption in His blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” And the condition upon which all the measureless grace of that atonement becomes effective in human experience is simply faith. But faith, as Wesley understood it, is not some mood of intellectual assent; it is not a mere set of opinions. “A string of opinions,” he said, “is no more Christian faith than a string of beads is Christian holiness.” His description of faith has in it a certain glow of imagination not common in his writings.
“Faith is a power wrought by the Almighty in an immortal spirit inhabiting a house of clay, to see through that veil into the world of spirits, into things invisible and eternal. ... It is the eye of the new-born soul, whereby every true believer ‘seeth
‘Southey, ii. p. 53
Him who is invisible.’ It is the ear of the soul, whereby the sinner ‘hears the voice of the Son of God and lives’; the palate of the soul (if the expression may be allowed) whereby a believer ‘tastes the good Word of God and the powers of the world to come’; the feeling of the soul whereby ‘through the power of the Highest overshadowing him’ he perceives the Presence of Him in whom he lives and moves and has his being, and feels the love of God shed abroad in his heart. It is the internal evidence of Christianity, a perpetual revelation, equally strong, equally new, through all the centuries which have elapsed since the Incarnation, and passing now, even as it has done from the beginning, directly from God into the believing soul. ‘It is nigh thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, if thou believest in the Lord Jesua Christ.’
This definition of faith pleased an intellect at once so philosophical and so critical as that of Coleridge. “I venture,” he said, “to avow it as my conviction that either Christian faith is what Wesley here describes, or there is no meaning in the word.”
But this faith itself, Wesley held, is wrought by grace, and so is the gift of God.
“Can you give yourself this faith (asks Wesley). Is It In your power to see, or hear, or taste, or feel God; to raise In yourself any perception of God, or of an invisible world; to open an intercourse between yourself and the world of spirits; to discern either them or Him that created them; to burst the veil that is on your heart, and let in the light of eternity? You know it is not. You not only do not, but cannot (by your own strength), thus believe. The more you labour so to do the more you will be convinced it is the gift of God. His pardoning mercy supposes nothing in us but a sense of mere sin and misery; and to all who see and feel and own their wants, and their utter inability to remove them, God freely gives faith, for the sake of Him ‘in whom He is always well pleased.’”
The fruits of faith Wesley held to be two great concurrent changes. One is a change of nature in the believing soul itself — the great spiritual miracle of regeneration; the other is a change of relation to the divine law, known as justification, justification being the new standing in the moral universe the act of forgiveness creates. Attending these great changes, their witness and seal, is the grace of the Holy Spirit attesting their existence to the soul itself, and registering it in the consciousness by an endowment of divine peace.
‘Stevens, p. 331.
WESLEY AND HTS CENTURY
The doctrine of “assurance” through the witness of the Spirit is an integral part of religion. Scripture teaches it; reason demands it; the creeds of all the Christian Churches assert it. It is incredible that when God’s love in Christ has established its empire in the believing heart, and sin is forgiven, and all the ties of the spiritual order are restored, that this stupendous change should be unrealised. It is incredible that God should conceal His grace; that it can be His will that His pardoned child should live under the shadow of a lie.
But this gracious truth was, in Wesley’s day, one of the lost doctrines of Christianity. It was in the Thirty-nine Articles, but it had fadded out of human memory. It was no longer realised, nor even expected, in human experience. It had become a mere incredibility. Its rediscovery and reassertion are part of the great service Methodism has rendered to the general Christian faith. This is what Wesley says of it: —
“I observed, many years ago, that it is hard to find words in the language of men to explain the deep things of God. Indeed, there are none that will adequately express what the Spirit of God works in His children. But perhaps one might say (desiring any who are taught of God to correct, soften, or strengthen the expression), by the ‘testimony of the Spirit’ I mean an inward impression on the soul, whereby the Spirit of God immediately and directly witnesses to my spirit that I am a child of God; that ‘Jesus Christ hath loved me, and given Himself for me,’ that all my sins are blotted out, and I, even I, am reconciled to God. After twenty years’ further consideration, I see no cause to retract any part of this. Neither do I conceive how any of these expressions may be altered so as to make them more intelligible. Meantime, let it be observed, I do not mean hereby that the Spirit of God testifies this by any outward voice; no, nor always by an inward voice, although He may do this sometimes. Neither do I suppose that He always applies to the heart (though He often may) one or more texts of Scripture. But He so works upon the soul by His immediate influence, and by a strong, though inexplicable operation, that the stormy wind and troubled waves subside, and there is a sweet calm; the heart resting as in the arms of Jesus, and the sinner being clearly satisfied that all his ‘iniquities are forgiven, and his sins covered.’”
Another characteristic doctrine of Methodism is that which bears the highly controversial title of “perfection.” Wesley did not like that word, and seldom uses it, but in the doctrine for which it stands he believed profoundly.
Its proclamation, he held, was part of the mission of Methodism, and constitutes the secret of its success. Wherever its witness to the doctrine failed, there followed an instant arrest of all growth. But Wesley’s statement of the doctrine is marked by a wise sobriety. He believed in no angelic perfection; in no “perfection,” indeed, of any sort which lifted its possessor out of the reach of the limitations and infirmities which are the inevitable conditions under which men live. He was accustomed to define the doctrine in the language of Scripture: it is simply “loving God with all the heart nnd soul and mind and strength.” NVesley believed in this doctrine because the denial of it meant the assertion that God’s ideals for human character must for ever remain unattained, and Christ’s redemption itself must suffer defeat, even in those who accept it. But Wesley always linked the doctrine to conduct, and insisted that it should be tried by its effect on the conduct, and he sobered with tireless diligence and quenchless good sense the extravagant statements of some of his followers.
Perfect Christians “are not,” he says, “free from ignorance, no, nor from mistake. We are no more to expect any man to be infallible than to be omniscient. From infirmities none are perfectly freed till their spirits return to God; neither can we expect, till then, to be wholly freed from temptation; for ‘the servant is not above his Master.’ But neither in this sense is there any absolute perfection on earth. There is no perfection of degrees, none which does not admit of a continual increase.”
Sanctification, he thus taught, was the growth of the regenerated character into maturity and completeness; and the measure of that growth is determined by the faith and expectancy of its subject. So, while in ordinary cases it is a gradual process, in a sense, and under certain conditions, it might be in.-ta’itaiicons, though no stage can ever be reached which forbids further increase. And Wesley was never mightier as a preacher than when urging the instant acceptance of his doctrine. Here is an example of the appeals he was accustomed to make: —
“Thou, therefore, look for it every moment. Why not this hour? this moment? Certainly you may look for it now, if you believe it is by faith. And by this token you may surely know whether you seek it by faith or works. If by works, you want something to be done first, before you are sanctified. You think I must first be, or do, thus or thus. Then, you are seeking it by works unto this day. If you seek it by faith, expect it as you are, and expect it now. To deny one of them is to deny them all; to allow one is to allow them all. Do you believe we are sanctified by faith? Be true, then, to your principle, and look for this blessing just as you are, neither better nor worse; as a poor sinner that has nothing to pay, nothing to plead, but ‘Christ died.’ And if you look for it as you are, then expect it now. Stay for nothing! Why should you? Christ is ready, and He is all you want. He is waiting for you! He is at the door.”
There is uo need to dwell further on Wesley’s theology. It is to be seen, to-day, under every sky, crystallised into a great Church system — one of the most energetic and influential forms of Protestant Christianity the world knows. And no one who studies with a dispassionate mind We.sley’s theology can fail to see that it is a system which puts in true and striking perspective all the great doctrines of evangelical Christianity. It is a creed of hope for defeated and fallen men; a statement of truth which exactly suits the missionary and the evangelist. And yet in its symmetry, its reasonableness, its agreement with Scripture, and the verification it finds in human consciousness, it is a creed to satisfy the philosopher. And the explanation of it lies in the fact that it is intensely and supremely evangelical. It presents religion not as a scheme of ethics merely, but as a divine deliverance. And the ethics do not precede the deliverance and earn it; they follow it and are created by it.
It may be added that the secret of that curious doctrinal peace which marks the history of Methodism lies exactly at this point. The enduring controversies which have torn asunder the Christian Church lie in what may be called the realm of metaphysical theology. The mere recital of the great historic heresies will show this. And the working theology of Methodism, since it is supremely occupied with a great cluster of evangelical doctrines, has escaped these controversies.
But if Methodism is always supremely evangelical in its teaching, it is also intensely practical, and wisely sober. Its note is a certain equipoise and sanity; an abhorrence of exaggeration. Its theology keeps its feet on the solid earth. Its creed is always related to conduct; is valued as it produces conduct; is tried by its effect on conduct.
Through the whole of Wesley’s theology runs this characteristic note of equipoise betwixt ill-balanced extremes. The one great doctrinal controversy of Wesley’s life, for example, related to Calvinism. It is undeniable that in salvation there are two factors, the Divine will and man’s will. Religion con.sists in their harmony; heaven must be found in their eternal union. When the human will keeps time, time, time in a golden eternal music, with the Divine will, so that the soul loves what God loves, and hates what God hates, then all God’s ideals about man are realised. Now, Calvinism, as Whitefield at least held it, lost sight of that strange, perilous, yet most sublime thing in man — the root of all morality, and without which moral choice is impossible — a free, self-determining will. It put so much emphasis on the Divine will, that the human will disappeared. But Wesley saw both factors. He taught his Church to see and affirm both. And his Arminianism, while it affirms the dignity and freedom of man’s will, gives its just place to God’s will in all the processes of salvation.
Or take again that doctrine of “perfection” which has often been the reproach of Methodism, and is certainly its characteristic. The question here is. What is the ultimate ideal of religion; the ideal capable of being realised in human experience? There are two opposite schools of thought — the moralist on one side, who conceives religion as the perfection of outward conduct; and the mystic on the other side, who separates religion from conduct, or resolves it into a sort of Hindoo ecstasy. Wesley held a mid course betwixt these two extremes. As against the moralist, he held that religion is something more than a scheme of mechanical ethics. It is something more than even “morality touched with emotion.” It is a Divine deliverance! It is the entrance of supernatural forces into human character; a miracle of grace that lifts the human soul again to that place in the spiritual order from which sin has cast it.
But Wesley shunned the opposite extreme. He had a wise and profound dread of quietism. He defined perfection always, and with restrained sobriety, in the actual words of Scripture. It is simply “loving God with all the heart and soul and mind and strength.” And he rigorously tested the doctrine in those who claimed to have realised it by its effect on the conduct.
In things ceremonial, again, Wesley, in exactly the same way, shunned the falsehood of extremes. His teaching as to baptism may be taken as an example of this wise sobriety. There are three known modes of administering the rite of baptism, and over-emphasis on any one of them is the water-mark of the ritualist. And evangelicalism, it may be added, has its ritualists, as rigid in form, and not seldom as acrid in temper, as sacerdotalism itself. Wesley made no choice betwixt these rival modes. He held, and taught his Church to hold, the wise doctrine that all three modes are legitimate, and no one of them is imperative.
Methodism has produced two great theologians, Richard Watson and William Burt Pope. In many respects they are utterly unlike each other. Watson is inferior to Pope in scholarship and literary gifts. He knew little, for example, of the relation of human creeds to each other. The science of comparative theology was not yet born when Watson wrote. Yet, what sensible Methodist would not be willing to have the creed of his Church judged by Watson’s fine and luminous definitions?
Pope, on the other hand, had the garnered knowledge of a great scholar, with a strain of philosophical genius added, rare amongst theologians; and he keeps always in clear vision what may be called the inter-relations of human belief. But both writers have the characteristic note of Methodism; its wise sobriety; its intense evangelicalism, which yet shuns the characteristic perils of evangelicalism. It is a theology which links doctrine to conduct. It abhors fanaticism. It has the salt of reality. Here are doctrines realised in human experience and tested by that experience.
Methodism, as we have seen, puts a mood of the conscience, and not any doctrinal belief, as a condition of membership. But every Church must have a doctrinal test for its teachers, and the doctrinal tests of the Methodist ministry are characteristic. They consist of: (1) Wesley’s Notes on the New Testament; (2) his Fifty-three Sermons. No other Church has doctrinal tests of this type; yet they unconsciously, but most happily, reflect the peculiar genius of Methodism. Its theology is rooted directly in Scripture. The Bible, as a standard of doctrine, is assessed in very unlike terms by different
Churches. Romanism puts the Church above the Bible. The Church, it claims, is older than the Bible and greater. She is its guardian and interpreter. What the Bible means is only made articulate to human ears, and authoritative for the human conscience, by the voice of the Church. It is a dead book: she is a living entity. The sacerdotalist puts tradition beside the Bible as of equal authority.
Now Methodism is committed to no special theory as to the inspiration of Scripture; but it accepts the Bible as the one source of divine knowledge and the supreme test of all theology. Wesley, in a memorable passage, explains why he is homo unius lihri, and the passage expresses the whole attitude of his Church towards the Bible: —
“I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to Grod. Just hovering over the great gulf till, a few moments hence, I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing — the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God Himself has condescended to teach the way; for this very end He came from heaven. He hath written it down in a Book. Oh give me that Book! At any price, give me the Book of God! I have it. Here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius liiri. Here, then, I am, far from the busy ways of men. I sit down alone. Only God is here. In His presence I open, I read His Book; for this end, to find the way to heaven. Is there a doubt concerning the meaning of what I read? Does anything appear dark and intricate? I lift up my heart to the Father of Lights: ‘Lord, is it not Thy word, “If any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God”? Thou ‘givest liberally, and upbraidest not.’ Thou hast said, ‘If any be willing to do Thy will, he shall know.’ I am willing to do; let me know Thy will.’ I, then, search after and consider parallel passages of Scripture, ‘comparing spiritual things with spiritual.’ Immediate thereon with all the attention and earnestness of which my mind is capable. If any doubt still remains, I consult those who are experienced in the things of God; and then the writings whereby, being dead, they yet speak. And what I thus learn, that I teach.”
Wesley’s “Notes on the New Testament” is not, perhaps, a book for scholars; it is more fitted for hours of devotion than for study. It does not shine with ingenious subtleties of exposition, and it has no pretence to original research. It was written before the Higher Criticism was born, and written at high pressure, during a brief interval, when Wesley was resting on account of sickness. But it has a certain flavour of masculiue sense and healthy-minded reality which makes it a very nourishing bit of expository literature. Its spirit reflects the reverence, the simj)licity of faith, the solemn and almost passionate earnestness of the fine sentences about the Bible we have quoted. And that this book is one of the two doctrinal tests by which Methodism under all skies judges its ministry, shows what is its attitude towards the Word of God.
The second of the doctrinal tests of Methodism, the Fifty-three Sermons, is also happily characteristic. Here we have truth, not drawn out into metaphysical definitions and addressed to the intellect, but translated into practical terms. It is truth as it appeals to the conscience and affects conduct; truth clothed in forms intended to instantly influence conduct.