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CONSIDER WESLEY

Our previous columns this year considered the image of the “Evangelical Wesley” that developed in early Methodist lore, a “High Church” image of John Wesley that grew up in response to it, and the “Liberal” image of Wesley that emerged in Methodist circles in the early twentieth century. We now consider a fourth understanding of Wesley that developed in the mid-twentieth century, and that is the image of “the Ecumenical Wesley.”

The Ecumenical Movement of the twentieth century presupposed the spiritual unity of Christians, and sought the visible expression of that inner unity, in contrast to the visible divisions of the churches that are all too apparent to the world. It should come as little surprise that Methodists involved in the Ecumenical Movement would prize Wesley’s spirit of ecumenical openness. What is somewhat more surprising is that ecumenical contact in the twentieth century was one of the strongest forces leading Methodists to rediscover their own Wesleyan heritage, and this can be seen in a generation of ecumenically-minded Methodist leaders in the period after the Second World War.

Australian-born Methodist scholar C. Williams, who served as President of Yale University, wrote his influential study of John Wesley and Christian Antiquity (1960) in response to ecumenical discussions (see the introduction to the book) in which Methodists felt they had little scholarship to ground claims about their own tradition in dialog with others. This book formed a whole generation of Methodist scholars, and offered one of the first critical overviews of J. Wesley’s thought. British Methodist scholar F. Baker wrote his detailed study of John Wesley and Christian Antiquity (1970) in the context of on-going negotiations for union between British Methodists and Anglicans (later rejected by Anglican bishops). Baker’s own collections of Wesleyana and Wesley bibliographical materials (now housed at Duke Divinity School), coupled with his precise standards for documentation, would contribute immensely to the Wesley Works Project.

Perhaps no one person symbolizes scholarship on the “Ecumenical Wesley” better than A.C. Outler. Reared in a Georgia parsonage and trained in patristic studies at Yale under R.L. Calhoun, Outler set out to place Wesley within Wesley’s own ecumenical context as a way to help Methodists understand their own faith traditions in the light of ecumenical Christianity. Against strenuous objections, Outler argued to the Oxford University Press that Wesley was a serious theologian whose works should be included in the Press’s “Library of Protestant Thought.” A volume of John Wesley materials edited by Outler came out in 1964 in this series and included detailed notes on the varied sources of Wesley’s thought, showing Wesley’s indebtedness to a very broad range of Eastern and Western Christian sources as well as Protestant thought. Outler came to argue that Wesley bore special ecumenical relevance in combining the typically Protestant concern for justification by faith alone with a more Catholic (or perhaps, more Orthodox) understanding of sanctification. Outler and Baker would later collaborate in promoting the Wesley Works project, by far the largest enterprise ever undertaken in Wesleyan scholarship, still ongoing.

The image of the “Ecumenical Wesley” opened up some new ways of understanding Wesley’s contributions. Perhaps most importantly, it offered a much richer and more complex analysis of Wesley’s context than previous Wesley scholarship had offered. It also showed how Methodists could relate themselves to broader ecumenical traditions of Christian faith by re-learning their own distinctive tradition.

Like all the views of Wesley we have considered, however, the image of the “Ecumenical Wesley” had some drawbacks. It could lead some to the extreme conclusion that, because of the immense variety of Wesley’s sources, virtually any view or opinion could be found somewhere in Wesleyan materials. It could lead to over-easy conclusions about the similarity between Wesley’s thought and that of other Christian traditions. My own doctoral thesis, for example, raised some questions about the extent to which one could say that Wesley’s understanding of sanctification was grounded in Eastern Christian sources. Moreover, there is some evidence that in his later years Wesley became in fact more sectarian in relation to the Church of England. F. Baker suggested this in John Wesley and the Church of England (Abingdon, 1970); for example, by the end of his life Wesley allowed ordained Methodist ministers in England to celebrate Eucharist at the same hour as local Anglican parish churches. It is my view that recent scholarship by L.W. Wood on Wesley’s use of Pentecost imagery and language in the 1770s and later tends to confirm the sectarian tendencies in Wesley’s later life, although I must note that this is not the conclusion that Wood reaches on the basis of his discoveries.

The image of the “Ecumenical Wesley” serves to remind us of the complex figure that Wesley was. If the real Wesley were to stand up, I think that we would find an eccentric and endearing High-Church Anglican who became an Evangelical, yet retained much of the sacramental tradition of his church, maintained an open attitude toward other Christians and scientific discoveries, and reflected a fondness for a remarkable variety of Christian sources. I suspect that the “real Wesley” would not be easily placed in any of our categories. So consider Wesley, drink deeply at the fountains of Christian wisdom, and keep the faith.

By Ted A. Campbell.