150 - John Wesley: Folk-Theologian

John Wesley: Folk-Theologian
By Albert C. Outler

"Wesley can be read, and usually has been read, without the broad and intricate tapestry of his sources unfolded as a background for interpretation. This was part of the price he paid for self divestiture of his theological apparatus. Even so, it is just as this background is recovered and reevaluated that Wesley emerges as a more interesting and impressive theologian than his stereotypes have presented-precisely because he was a folk theologian."

IT is a commonplace that the history of Christian thought has been mostly concerned with the influence of theologians' theologians, those whose learning and speculative gifts marked off new stages of doctrinal development. By contrast, most of the folk-theologians whom we can identify (those not already sunk into history's limbo) have seen as their special task the simplification of the great issues (typically controversial) on behalf of the common people.

I have come to believe that the label "folk-theologian" fits John Wesley far more accurately than most conventional interpretations of this remarkable and many-sided religious progenitor.

It is bootless to ask if Wesley might have been a theologians' theologian had he so chosen. It is more useful to survey the largely unexplored range of his sources, tools, and theological culture so that his stature as a folk-theologian may be assayed somewhat more carefully than has, so far, been possible.¹

Albert C. Outler is Research Professor of Theology, Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas. Widely regarded as the foremost theologian of the Methodist persuasion, Dr. Outler is also known for his scholarly contributions to the study of Augustine (translation of Confessions and Enchiridion, Vol. VII in the Library of Christian Classics, 1954), his early interest in psychoanalysis (Psychotherapy and the Christian Message, 1954), and his enthusiastic support of the ecumenical movement at all levels (The Christian Tradition and the Unity We Seek, 1957). This article on Wesley as folk-theologian grows out of Dr. Outler's life-long involvement with the sources of Wesley's doctrinal emphases, and it anticipates his forthcoming critical edition of Wesley's sermons soon to be published in the Oxford Edition of Wesley's Works.
¹ The task has already been begun, e.g., Martin Schmidt, John Wesley: A Theological Biography (1963, 1972, 1973); Albert C. Outler (ed.), John Wesley (in A Library of Protestant Thought 1964); Gerald Cragg (ed.), Doctrinal Writings: The Appeals (in The Oxford Edition of Wesley's Works, Vol. 11, 1975); Wesley's Sermons will be Vols. 1 4, edited by Albert C. Outler; see also Kenneth E. Rowe (ed.), The Place of Wesley in the Christian Tradition (1976).

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I

The crucial fact is that after a shaky start in quest of his true vocation, Wesley became a folk-theologian on purpose. In his father's library at Epworth, there was a copy of Bishop Robert Sanderson's Thirty-Six Sermons (1689), of which 16 were addressed ad aulam (to his peers), 6 to ad clerurn (to the clergy), 6 to ad magistratum (to a court or civil official), and 8 ad populum (to the people).² Wesley adopted Sanderson's schema but altered its proportions. In his own written sermons (150 of them), there were 10 to his peers, 1 to civil officials, 1 to the clergy; all the rest were designedly ad populum (to the common people). As Wesley put it:

I write as I generally speak, ad populum-to the bulk of mankind-to those who neither relish nor understand the art of speaking . . . I design plain words for plain people; therefore, of set purpose, I abstain from all nice and philosophical speculations, from perplexed and intricate reasonings; and, as far as possible, from even the show of learning . . . My design is, in some sense, to forget all that ever I have read. . . In the following sermons . . . I have endeavoured to describe the true, the scriptural, experimental religion, so as to omit nothing which is a real part thereof and to add nothing thereto which is not.³

What is more, he stuck to this program throughout his five-decade career. Most of the quotations in Wesley's writings are uncited (and rarely verbatim). Most of his allusions are unidentified. It is as if he never expected to have a critical edition of his works. What is unmistakable, however, is the erstwhile don turned popularizer, a truly learned man who had voluntarily identified himself with Christ's poor in Britain's slums and mines and fields. "I love the poor," he wrote in 1757; "in many of them I find pure, genuine grace, unmixed with paint, folly, and affectation."⁴

His first religious society in London had been inside "the City" (in Fetter Lane). And yet, for decades after 1739, not a single Methodist society was located in any affluent quarter in any English city or town. Wesley kept a few friends and acquaintances among the middle and upper classes; he often preached in their churches (after the Revival had become "respectable"). But his self-chosen constituency was the poor and the laboring classes; his self-chosen role was as their pastor, spiritual director, and theologian.

It was, therefore, inevitable that, in such an enterprise, the breadth and depth of his theological competence was concealed both from his

² The names of Samuel Wesley, Sr., and Samuel Wesley, Jr. appear in the list of "The Subscribers."
³ "The Preface" to Sermons on Several Occasions (1746)¶ 2-6.
⁴ Cf. his letter to Dorothy Furley, September 25, 1757. On September 20, 1764, he told a friend, "I bear the rich, and love the poor; therefore I spend almost all my time with them" (Letters, VIII, 267). See also, his comment in a letter to one of his more sophisticated friends, Brian Bury Collins, June 14, 1780: "You have seen very little of the choicest part of London society: I mean the poor. Go with me into their cellars and garnrets and then you will taste their [gracious] spirits."

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followers and his critics alike. His theological education had begun at Epworth and went on apace over the course of eight busy decades. His mother was his first tutor and her eclectic views are reflected in her son's at many levels thereafter. Here is a typical passage (from a letter to John in Oxford, 1732):

The Life of God in the Soul of Man is a good book, and was an acquaintance of mine many years ago. . . There are many good things in Castaniza; more in Baxter. Yet are neither without faults, which I overlook for the sake of their virtues. Nor can I say of all the books of divinity I have read, which is the best. One is best at one time, one at another according to the temper and disposition of the mind.⁵

Wesley lived with the classics, quoting them carelessly from memory (who was there to check his texts?) and yet rarely off target. His immersion in Scripture was so thorough that his language is overlaid with quotations; it is not unusual to find whole paragraphs that are scarcely more than graceful interweavings of Scripture texts.⁶ His readings in the history of Christian thought range over the centuries, East and West-with many figures and volumes so obscure that one wonders where he found them all. His own recorded bibliography runs to more than fourteen hundred different authors, with nearly three thousand separate items from them (ranging from pamphlets to twelve-volume sets). In the Sermons alone, we have listed more than twenty-five hundred quotations and allusions worth checking (not to mention the innumerable quotations from Scripture which crowd his pages).⁷

II

Out of these incessant readings and reflections, and out of the controversies which he professed to abhor but in which he was constantly engaged, Wesley wrought out a folk-theology that goes a long way in accounting for his immense influence. Its heart and center was "the gospel": a call to repentance, faith, justification, regeneration, and "holy living." He was, after all, an evangelist; soteriology is the intense focus of more than half his sermons. There are dozens of characteristic summaries of this "gospel" scattered through his writings, like this one to John Fletcher (March 22, 1771):

I always did-for between these thirty and forty years-clearly assert the total fall of man and his utter inability to do any good of himself, the absolute necessity of the grace and Spirit of God to raise even a good thought or desire in our hearts; the Lord's rewarding no work and accepting

⁵ The title of a famous devotional classic by Henry Scougal (1677). In the eighteenth century, Lorenzo Scupoli's Spiritual Combat (1599) was widely attributed to Juan de Castaniza; see John Newton, Susanna Wesley and the Puritan Tradition in Methodism (1968), pp.136-38.
⁶ Cf. 4 in "Original Sin": eleven different texts from six different books in twenty-one lines.
⁷ Cf. "Plundering the Egyptians," in Albert C. Outler, Theology in the Wesleyan Spirit (1975), chap. 1,

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of none but so far as they proceed from his preventing, convincing, and converting grace through the Beloved; the blood and righteousness of Christ being the sole meritorious cause of our salvation. Who is there in England that has asserted these things more strongly and steadily than I have done?

Upon this foundation, Wesley developed a full-orbed theology (with special emphases on Christian morality and culture) that may be fitly described as both "evangelical" and "catholic"-viz. a Protestant soteriology fully integrated with a catholic doctrine of grace ("holiness of heart and life"). There are Puritan elements in the synthesis (the primacy and perspicuity of Scripture, substitutionary atonement, sola fide as the articulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesiae,⁸ the work ethic of thrift, industry and sobriety), but there was also a catholic preference for "prevenience" instead of "election" as a code-word for the divine initiative, specifically as the activity of the Holy Spirit. There is also a consistent denial of irresistible grace and "final perseverance." Wesley's doctrine of "assurance" ("the inner witness of the Spirit") was mystical, but it was also closely linked with "good works"-"faith working by love."⁹ From 1738 onwards, his doctrine of justification (so he claimed) "differed not a hair's breadth from Calvin's"¹⁰ and yet even here he seems closer to John Goodwin¹¹ and Richard Baxter¹² than to any of the English Calvinists (whether "hardliners" like Whitaker, or "moderates" like Davenant). As a hermeneutical rule, he held to the literal sense of Scripture, except where literalism leads to an "absurdity,"¹³ and he had picked up Thomas Drayton's idea that every "command" in Scripture should also be construed as "a covered promise."¹⁴

Wesley had a vast repertoire of obscure lore on which he drew almost casually. For example, in "On Attending the Church Service" ¶ I, he mentions "St. John's removal from the earth." This was unknown to Polycarp, Irenaeus, or Jerome; only in a few inferior Greek manuscripts is there an "appendix" to the effect that St. John had been translated, like Enoch.¹⁵ Or, again, in "The Good Steward," he refers

⁸ "[The doctrine] by which the church stands or falls." Cf. Friedrich Loofs' analysis of the curious history of this aphorism (often but mistakenly attributed to Luther) in Theologische Studien und Kriliken (1917), vol. 90, 323-420. In English theology, it appears in Michael Harrison, Christ's Righteousness Imputed (c. 1690), p. 1, and in John Havel's Planelogia(1691), p. 318 (where it is mistakenly attributed to Chemnitz).
⁹ Gal. 5:6. A favorite text, quoted twenty-one times in the sermons alone.
¹⁰ Cf. "Minutes of the Second Annual Conference, Bristol, Thursday, August 1, 1745," Question 22 ff. in LPT Wesley, op. cit., pp. 151-52. See also Wesley's letter to John Newton, May 14,1765.
¹¹ Imputatio Fidei (1642).
¹² He abridged and published Baxter's Aphorisms on Justification (1640) in 1765, after Baxter had retracted them, in form if not in substance. Cf. Baxter's Confession of My Faith (1655).
¹³ Cf. "A Call to Backsliders," 1.2.(4).
¹⁴ Cf. Drayton's The Proviso or Condition of the Promises (1657), pp. 1-2. Cf. also Wesley's Sermon on the Mount, V," II.2; "Sermon on the Mount, VII," II.12; and "On Perfection," II.1, 2, 12.
¹⁵ Cf. "The Acts of John,"¶ 115, in The Apocryphal New Testament tr. by M. R. James (1953), p. 270.

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to "an ingenious man who has lately made a discovery that [the dead] are in a deep sleep from death to the resurrection." This was the iceberg tip of an extended controversy 16 and not a minor point with Wesley. His lively discussions of "the intermediate state" are integral to his eschatology as a whole.¹⁷ Our point here is his habit of offhand allusion, without citation.

Wesley was fascinated by the scientific developments that were making his century famous in the history of science. As early as 1747, he "went with two or three friends to see what are called electrical experiments,"¹⁸ and as he became more knowledgeable, he also became a pioneer in electric shock therapy which he provided for his people (and used himself).¹⁹ His Primitive Physick is a hodge-podge of folk-medicine and quackery, but its twenty-three editions in his lifetime prove its popularity and, indeed, its usefulness. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was published in 1776; Wesley's counterattack against Smith's defense of surplus accumulation was prompt and vigorous-even strident.²⁰

III

One is entitled to suspect that Wesley's wide-ranging eclecticism would amount to the same sort of superficial or specious learning with which we are all too familiar in our own standard-brand popularizers. Such suspicions may be tested by a brief analysis of two of Wesley's special interests (justification and "perfection") and their sources.

In an important (if also tendentious) survey, The Rise of Moralism (1966), C. F. Allison has traced the polarization in English theology between "faith alone" and "holy living . . . . from Hooker to Baxter." His own Tendenz is for the Calvinist syndrome of "single justification" and for Christ's atoning death taken as "the formal cause" of justification-as in Davenant, Downame, Bunyan, et al. He sets this over against the tradition of "holy living" as evident in Jeremy Taylor, Henry Hammond, George Bull-and Richard Baxter! It was a tangled controversy-even more complicated than Professor Allison makes out-and Wesley knew it, twist by turn.

At least three interdependent issues were entwined: (1) "single"

¹⁶ Who among his readers would have identified this "ingenious man" as Edmund Law, Archdeacon of Carlisle, who (in a D.D. exercise at Cambridge in 1754, published as an "Appendix" to the third edition of The Theory of Religion [1755]) had revived the Anabaptist theory of "soul sleep"? How many more would have known Calvin's very early denunciation of "soul sleep" in his Psychopannychia (1545)?
¹⁷ Cf., e.g., his sermon "Of Hell," 1.4; "The Trouble and Rest of Good Men," Proem., II.6; "The Rich Man and Lazarus," 1.3; "On Worldly Folly," II.6; "On Faith" (Heb. 11:1),¶ 4.
¹⁸ Cf. the Journal for October 16, 1747.
¹⁹ Ibid., February 17, 1753; November 9, 1756; and December 26, 1765.
²⁰ Cf. the following sermons written between 1776-1790: "The Wisdom of God's Counsels," 16; "on Friendship With the World,"¶ 3; "The Danger of Riches," 1. 19, II.1 ff.; "The More Excellent Way," VI:4; "An Israelite Indeed," 1.1; "On Family Religion," ¶16, 17; "On Riches,"¶ 4; "Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity,"¶ 12; "On Worldly Folly," 1.4,II.8; and "The Danger of Increasing Riches," passim.

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versus "double" justification, which involves (2) the role of human participation in God's gift of pardon (the essence of justification)²¹ and this, in turn, decides (3) whether the imputation of Christ's righteousness is to be regarded as the "formal" or the "meritorious" cause of a sinner's justification.²² Wesley also understood what Allison ignored, namely, that all doctrines of "formal cause" logically entail a corresponding doctrine of election or predestination.²³ Moreover, he had mastered what Allison left unexplored: that rich tradition in Anglican theology which upheld the sola fide in terms of both a double justification (implying the fides formata caritate of Gal. 5:6) and the doctrine of "meritorious cause." This tradition stemmed from Erasmus and Johann Gropper, but Wesley knew it best in Cranmer,²⁴ John Goodwin, William Allen,²⁵ Richard Baxter, Benjamin Kidder, John Reynolds, John Kettlewell (even Thomas Sherlock).

After Wesley's realization that his own post-Aldersgate doctrine of justification was Anglican, after all,²⁶ he proceeded to develop this special perspective-trying to avoid a break with the Calvinists on his pluralistic principle that, with respect to nonessential points, Christians should "think and let think."²⁷ After a couple of decades of tension (with Wesley providing his own fair share of provocation), he finally came out in print on the side of "meritorious cause"²⁸ (his actual view all along).²⁹ This was the opening skirmish in what turned into a full scale war in 1770,³⁰ which continued to rage throughout Wesley's

²¹ Cf. the sermon, "Justification by Faith," 11.5: "The plain scriptural notion of justification is pardon."
²² Cf. Trent's references to the five "causes" of justification in Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, Vol. II, pp. 94-95. This was John Davenant's target in his Treatise of Justfication (1631).
²³ The debate on this point runs back at least to Frith and Gardiner, Cartwright and Hooker, Whitaker and Baro, Davenant and Thomas Jackson, et al.
²⁴ See his abridgment of Homilies I-IV in The Doctrine of Salvation, Faith and Good Works (LPT Wesley, op. cit., pp. 123ff)..
²⁵ A "General Baptist" who wrote A Glass of Justification; or the Work of Faith with Power in 1658. He later "conformed" and became vicar of Bridgewater.
²⁶ Cf. Journal for November 12, 1738: "in the following week I began more narrowly to inquire what the doctrine of the Church of England is concerning the much-controverted point of justification by faith; and the sum of what I found in the Homilies I extracted and printed for the use of others." See above, note 24.
²⁷ An oft-repeated slogan for theological pluralism; cf., e.g., "The Lord Our Righteousness," 11.20; "The Nature of Enthusiasm," ¶36. See also his "Character of a Methodist,"¶ 1 (Works, VIII, 340), and "Some Observations on Liberty,"¶ 1 (Works, XI, 91) -and at least fifteen other instances.
²⁸ In "The Lord Our Righteousness" (1766).
²⁹ This is confirmed in a Latin fragment, recently discovered by Professor Richard Heitzenrater. It has a series of notes for responsiones in what must have been an Oxford disputation-on justification!
³⁰ Cf. Minutes of Several Conversations Between Mr. Wesley and Others From the Year 1744, to the Year 1789, Question 77, Ans. #3 (5-6), in Works, VIII, 337-38: "We have received it as a maxim that 'a man is to do nothing in order to justification.' Nothing can be more false. Whoever desires to find favour with God, should 'cease from evil, and learn to do well.' So God himself teaches by the Prophet Isaiah. Whoever repents should 'do works meet for repentance.' And if this is not in order to find favour, what does he do them for? . . . (5.) What have we then been disputing about for these thirty years?

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remaining years. From 1778 till his death much of his energies and talent were invested in The Arminian Magazine ³¹ and this became another curious showcase of his theological erudition and range-without ever being advertised as such.³²

A crucial issue in any discussion of justification is the meaning and function of repentance. Given a doctrine of "formal cause" and election, repentance can have no antecedent, conditional role in God's "drawing and pardoning" grace. It is the part of the elect to confess their sins and rely on Christ's atoning work as "formal cause." Wesley agreed that repentance cannot be a necessary condition of justification (only faith is that);³³ repentance is not a "good work." But by nuancing the meaning of repentance, he found a crucial place for it in faith's preparation for pardon. Metanoia ("change of mind") for Wesley is much less a "sorrow for sin" than it is an altered consciousness of one's actual human condition (that is, the lusts and the pride³⁴ that motivate our other sins). True repentance, therefore, is the surrender of one's self-sufficiency and the acknowledgment of one's radical need of grace. This is a different notion of the "conditions" of justification than in conventional Calvinism or in the Anglican gospel of moral rectitude. It is an interesting idea in its own right.

Wesley also sought a third alternative to the Calvinist and Anglican polarities by insisting that justification involves both a "real" as well as a "relative" change.³⁵ From this it followed that sanctification begins with justification (more precisely, with "regeneration"), and that it involves a life process-which is always to say, for Wesley, "holy living" springing from the love of God and neighbor. It was this processive idea of salvation-rooted always in faith-that helped Wesley avoid "antinomianism" (his most vivid aversion) and achieve a dynamic equilibrium between the priority of faith (justification) and the harvests of love (sanctification).³⁶

afraid about words . . . (6.) As to merit itself, of which we have been so dreadfully afraid: We are rewarded according to our works, yea, because of our works. How does this differ from, 'for the sake of our works'? And how differs this from secundum merita operum? which is no more than 'as our works deserve.' Can you split this hair? I doubt I cannot."
³¹ He had accepted the label "Arminian" as reluctantly as he had taken on the nickname Methodist." But in all his extensive abridgments of theological writings supporting "universal redemption," nothing from Arminius himself appeared in this magazine.
³² For example, he produced the only English translation of Sebastian Castellio's "Dialogues on Predestination, Election, and Free Will" (1st ed., 1578), in Vols. IV and V (1781, 1782). This was a rare book even in Wesley's time; cf. Ferdinand Buisson, Sébastien Castellion: sa Vie et son Oeuvre (1515-1563), 1964, Appendice, Piéces Inédites, cxviii, Vol. II, pp. 498-99.
³³ Cf. "Justification by Faith," IV. I f. and "The Scripture Way of Salvation," III.2, 5.
³⁴ I John 2:16 is another Wesley favorite.
³⁵ Cf. "The Scripture Way of Salvation," 1.4: "In that instant [of justification], we are born again … born of the Spirit: there is a real as well as a relative change. We are inwardly renewed by the power of God."
³⁶ Cf. "On God's Vineyard," 1.5, for a triumphalist claim that the Methodists' doctrine of justification surpasses Luther's one-sided stress, just as their doctrine of sanctification was more amply balanced than that of the Catholics.

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IV

It is common knowledge that the most readily misunderstood of all the Wesleyan doctrines was "Christian perfection," the claim that Christians may-and ought to expect--to be made perfect in love in this life." Our concern here is less important to expound the doctrine than to show how source-criticism can illustrate its development.³⁷ No Christian has ever denied that "perfection," in some sense or other, is the goal and crown of the Christian life. But there have been unholy quarrels over the proper terms of its "expectation."

The nominalists (Gabriel Biel) with their notions of indomitable concupiscence, Luther (and the Lutherans) with their simul justus et peccator, Calvinists (with their idea of the massa damnationis) all tended to construe the gospel imperative to "perfection" (Matt. 5:48) as eschatological. The Westminster Confession of Faith looks forward to it, for the elect, "in the state of glory."³⁸ On the other side, the Catholic tradition has tended to correlate sanctification with the inherent righteousness imparted in justification.³⁹ All of these, however, discouraged anything like an expectation of such "perfection" in this life.⁴⁰ This is why the "canonization" of "saints" is always retrospective.

The logic here turns upon the common meaning of perfectus (and its vernacular cognates) in Latin Christianity. Typically, this has meant some sort of ne plus ultra. In any such sense, perfection is impossible as long as the roots of sin (fomes peccati) remain. Such a doctrine of "perfection" would therefore imply "sinless perfection," and most Christians reject this out of hand as presumptuous. The Calvinists avoided such presumptions with their doctrines of election and final perseverance which Wesley, in turn, regarded as inlets to antinomianism.

What matters is that Wesley was much more fully aware of such complications than has been realized.⁴¹ He comes close, more than once, to expressions which tilt toward sinless perfection .⁴² But whenever he was confronted with an explicit argument for sinless-and

³⁷ Cf. Harald Lindström's admirable analysis, Wesley and Sanctification (1946), and R.Newton Flew's historical survey, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology (1934), ch.XIX.
³⁸ Chap. IX,¶ v.
³⁹ Cf. The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Session Six, Canon XXXII.
⁴⁰ Cf. St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae,II-II, Q.184, Art. 2: "Perfection . . . is not possible so long as we are in via, but we shall have it in heaven (sed erit in patria)." Wesley had found this, in its mystical dress, in William Law, A Treatise on Christian Perfection (1729), read first in 1730.
⁴¹ For example, in Flew, op. cit., and in R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (1950), Chap. XVIII, pp. 422-58.
⁴² Cf. "The Trouble and Rest of Good Men," II.4. See also, the "Prefaces" to the earliest editions of Hymns and Sacred Poems which contain some of the strongest, least nuanced statements on "sinless" perfection in the Wesley corpus (Works, XIV, 319-30). Cf. also his letters to the Rev. Mr. Plenderlieth, May 23, 1768, and to Thomas Olivers, March 24, 1757.

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guiltless-perfection (as in William Cudworth or James Relly), he recoiled and proposed a set of careful qualifications.⁴³

The crucial term for Wesley was not perfectus but teleios-a dynamic understanding of "perfecting" that had come to him from early and Eastern spirituality, such as Clement, Gregory of Nyssa, Macarius, Ephrem Syrus, et al. In this view, "perfection" may be "realized" in a given moment (always as a gift from God, received by trusting faith), yet never as a finished state. "Perfection" connotes two conjoining "powers": (1) the power to love God wholeheartedly, and (2) the power not to commit sin voluntarily ("sin properly so-called," which Wesley consistently defined as "a violation of a known law of God").⁴⁴ "Perfection" thus gained might also be lost if ever one's love of God cooled, or if, falling into a "sin of surprise,⁴⁵ one failed to repent forthwith and claim God's mercy.

Everything turns here on the validity of the distinction between voluntary and involuntary sins. If "perfection" is purity of intention (as it is in this doctrine), then what of the remains of sin and their corrupting influences upon our best intentions? Thus, even when more carefully qualified (as in Wesley's second sermon "On Perfection" and elsewhere), such a vision of love as a gracious intention triumphant over human passion (even by God's grace) has seemed somewhat reckless to orthodox Protestants.⁴⁶ Moreover, their fears have often been justified in the further oversimplifications that turned up in later Methodist "holiness movements"-with their doctrines of "entire sanctification as a second and separate work of grace."⁴⁷

Again, for our purpose here, it is less important to argue for or against this doctrine of sanctification than to understand its background. We have spoken of its Eastern sources-and also of Taylor and Law (add also á Kempis). Another root reaches back into a rich subsoil of English mysticism, as in Richard Rolle of Hampole. More specifically, one can point to Robert Gell's Essay Toward the Amendment of the Last English Translation of the Bible (1659) which Wesley had read as early as 1741.⁴⁸ This is a sprawling monument of erudition and piety; I have yet to see it in a modern bibliography. Its importance for us appears in its "Appendix" (pp. 785 ff.), where Gell adds a sermon on the possibility of Christian perfection in terms of pure intention.⁴⁹ Equally interesting are Gell's references to a then familiar con-

⁴³ As in "On Sin in Believers," "The Repentance of Believers," "Wandering Thoughts," etc.
⁴⁴ Cf. "Sermon on the Mount, XI," 1.5; "On Perfection," III.9; letter to John Hosmer, June 7, 176 1, and to Mrs, Bennis, June 16, 1772.
⁴⁵ Cf. "The First-Fruits of the Spirit," II. 11- 13, III.6. Cf. also William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729), p. 21, and Benjamin Kidder, A Discourse Concerning Sins of Infirmity and Wilful Sins (1704), p. 10.
⁴⁶ See Cautions and Directions Given to the Greatest Professors in the Methodist Societies (1762).
⁴⁷ Cf. J. L. Peters, Christian Perfection and American Methodism (1956).
⁴⁸ "Surely [Gell] was a man mighty in the Scriptures and well acquainted with the work of God in the soul"; cf. Journal for February 3 and July 19, 1741; see also, April 17, 1777.
⁴⁹ "Some Saints Not Without Sin for a Season."

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troversy in which Thomas Drayton and William Palmer had been condemned for their teachings of perfection in this life.⁵⁰

Such an obscure slice of history is matched by other snippets of evidence of a tradition in English divinity that had correlated the terms "Methodist" and "Methodism" with perfection long before Wesley.⁵¹ Besides these, there is a curious little pamphlet entitled "A War Among the Angels of the Churches" (1693), by "A Country Professor of Jesus Christ."⁵² In it, a "sect" labelled "the New Methodists" is denounced for its heterodoxies, such as holy living and perfection. John Goodwin turns out to be one of the author's main targets, the same John Goodwin whose doctrine of justification had so strongly influenced Wesley. It is not recorded that Wesley had ever read this pamphlet. But others had-nor is it a merely fanciful conjecture that the Oxford comics who provided the Holy Club with its unwelcome nickname, "Methodists," had something of this folklore in mind.

V

Obviously, Wesley can be read, and usually has been read, without the broad and intricate tapestry of his sources unfolded as a background for interpretation. This was part of the price he paid for self-divestiture of his theological apparatus. Even so, it is just as this background is recovered and re-evaluated that Wesley emerges as a more interesting and impressive theologian than his stereotypes have presented-precisely because he was a folk-theologian.

Nor are these gropings for Wesley's sources merely a pedantic exercise. For now that the old quarrels between Protestants and Catholics (and between Protestants and Protestants) are in process of transvaluation, urgent "new" questions about thorny old problems (like "justification" and "sanctification") are being raised in new contexts of ecumenical dialogue. Such questions have an urgent, equally contemporary correlate: what ought Christians to be urged realistically to expect, and therefore to seek, in this life?

Such questions are no longer "denominational" in their contexts. Theological pluralism is now the actual state of affairs, probably irreversible. We have come to take ecumenical theologizing for granted and thus are closer to Wesley's "catholic spirit" than we have realized.

The problems of our times have no easy answers. But they may be illumined by insights generated by thoughtful transvaluations of our several heritages. In such transvaluations, the contributions of the folk-theologians had best be included along with the rest. And, in any

⁵⁰ Cf. p. 797, where he cites "Dr. Thomas Drayton . . . and Mr. William Palmer who have published a treatise [on perfection] entitled, A Revindication of the Possibility of a Total Mortification of Sin in This Life; And of the Saints'Perfect Obedience to the Law of God, to be the Orthodox Protestant Doctrine, etc."
⁵¹ Cf. OED, loc cit.: Robert Traill (1692): "The new Methodists about the grace of God [i.e., the Amyraldeans of Saumur] had too great an increase in the French churches." William Wake (1686): "Our new Methodists . . ." (i.e., catholic apologists for "holy living").
⁵² In the McAlpin Collection (Supplemental Catalogue), Union Theological Seminary Library, N.Y.

160 - John Wesley: Folk-Theologian

such new perspective, John Wesley may yet turn out to be surprisingly relevant, precisely as folk-theologian. His mind was prone to oversimplifications, to be sure, but it was richly furnished from all parts of the Christian tradition and he had a special gift for finding constructive third alternatives to barren polarities. All this entitles him to the sort of consideration he has never yet received-alongside other fruitful "doctors of the church," greater and less.