The Way of the Wesleys

A Short Introduction

John R. Tyson

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780802869548
• eBook ISBN: 9781467443265
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Musica

Engaging, accessible survey of major Wesleyan theological themes
The Wesley brothers -- John (1703–1791) and Charles (1707–1788) -- are famous as the cofounders of the Wesleyan tradition and the Methodist family of churches. Their impact and legacy have been huge: what began as the excited outpouring of their conversion experiences grew into a transatlantic revival and became a vibrant and significant theological tradition. But what exactly did they believe and teach?
In this book John Tyson, an acknowledged authority on Methodist studies, offers a helpful introduction to the main teachings and practices of both John and Charles Wesley. The first book to show how Charles, the younger and lesser-known brother, contributed in particular to Wesleyan theology, The Way of the Wesleys takes readers through main theological points thematically. Tyson also includes suggestions for further reading and questions for reflection at the end of each chapter.
Lavishly documented from the Wesleys' own writings, this engaging, accessible book shows why the Wesleys remain relevant to the faith journey of Christians today.

Chapter One

We to the Sacred Standard Fly

The Bible

Let me be homo unius libri [a man of one book].

John Wesley, Preface, 1746 Sermons

John and Charles Wesley first encountered and absorbed the Bible in the little school that their mother, Susanna Annsley Wesley (1669-1742), conducted in their home in Epworth, England. All of the Wesley children were home-­schooled through the primary grades, due largely to financial necessity, and they were taught to read from the premier literary work in their house — the Bible. At the tender age of five, each child was taught to read, by beginning in Genesis and working their way through the Bible, under mother’s watchful eye and encouraging instruction. All the Wesley children were quick learners, including brothers John and Charles; by the end of his first day at school, young Charles could read the first chapter of Genesis quite well. The intervening years did nothing to dull their interest in and attention to the Bible.

John Wesley’s writings point to the year 1729 as a watershed year with respect to his spiritual pilgrimage. It was the year of the founding of the Oxford Holy Club, that small group of devout college students who met together to discover and live out what they considered to be vital Christianity. John subsequently wrote, “In the year 1729 I began to not only read, but to study the Bible as the one and the only standard of truth, and the only model of pure religion.” He made a similar point when recounting the history of the Methodist movement from the distance of many years: “What was their foundational doctrine? That the Bible is the whole and sole rule of both Christian faith and practice.” That their fellow students noticed the Holy Club’s attempts to adhere to biblical doctrines and practices was clear, since they reviled them with a barrage of nicknames: “supererogation men,” “Bible moths,” “Bible maggots” — and, of course, the one that stuck: “Methodists.” In John’s sermon “On God’s Vineyard,” he attributed the rise of the Oxford Methodists to their particular desire to be homo unius libri:

From the very beginning, from the time that four young men united together, each of them was homo unius libri — a man of one book. God taught them all to make his word “a lantern unto their feet, and a light in all their paths.” They had one and only one rule of judgment with regard to all their tempers, words, and actions; namely, the oracles of God. They were one and all determined to be Bible Christians. They were continually reproached for this very thing; some terming them in derision, Bible-­bigots, others Bible-­moths — feeding, they said, upon the Bible as moths do upon cloth, and indeed unto this day it is their constant endeavour to think and speak as [do] the oracles of God.

They were being lampooned for the way they sought to burrow into the Bible, to digest it methodically in order to live it out. Indeed, from those early days onwards, John Wesley professed that he wanted nothing more or less than to be a “Bible-­Christian,” who was part of a movement that was raised up by God to spread “Scriptural holiness across the land.”

The Oracles of God

Their favorite euphemism for the Scriptures was “the oracles of God.” The phrasing was borrowed from 1 Peter 4:11: “If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God.” The term appears more than seventy times in John’s published sermons and is seasoned throughout Charles’s hymns and sermons as well. It stresses the revelatory impact that the brothers felt in the Scriptures; in them they heard the voice of God. Because of the deep interconnection between the Word and Spirit of God these were “living oracles,” and a rule of faith by which doctrine, creed, and religious experience were all evaluated. As Charles wrote,

Doctrines, experiences to try,

We to the sacred standard fly,

Assured the Spirit of Our Lord

Can never contradict His word;

Whate’er His Spirit speaks in me,

Must within the written word agree;

If not — I cast it all aside,

As Satan’s voice, or nature’s pride.

The test of truth and righteousness,

O God, Thy records we confess,

And who Thine oracles gainsay

Have miss’d the right celestial way:

Their pardon sure they vainly boast,

In nature sunk, in darkness lost;

Or if they of perfection dream,

The light of grace is not in them.

In the preface to his famous Notes Upon the New Testament John described what he meant by the inspiration of the Scriptures. He saw God, through the Holy Spirit, as the primary author of the Bible:

In the language of the sacred writings, we may observe the utmost depth, together with the utmost ease. All the elegancies of human composures sink into nothing before it: God speaks not as man, but as God. His thoughts are very deep; and thence his words are of inexhaustible virtue. And the language of his messengers, also, is exact in the highest degree: for the words which are given them accurately answered for the impression made upon their minds: And hence Luther says, “Divinity is nothing but a grammar of the language of the Holy Ghost.”

After their conversion experiences in May 1738, neither Wesley brother was able to read the Bible in a lifeless, wooden sort of way. For both brothers the Bible was the story of God’s salvation, as lively and exciting now as in the ancient days of its first rendition. It was in this sense that John, who was an omnivorous reader in many fields, was willing to style himself as homo unius libri — “a man of one book.” As John wrote in the extensive preface to his 1746 collection of sermons:

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. O give me that Book! I have it. Here is enough knowledge for me. Let me be homo unius libri. Here I am far from the busy ways of men . . . only God is here. In his presence I open, I read his book, for this end, to find the way to heaven.

This Bible-­centered emphasis continued throughout the Wesleys’ lives and more than half a century in their ministry. As John wrote in his journal entry for June 2, 1766, “My ground is the Bible. Yea, I am a Bible-­bigot. I follow it in all things, both great and small.” Hence, Wesley’s theology of proclamation amounted to plainly saying what the Bible said: “God himself told us how to speak, both as to the matter and the manner. ‘If any man speak’ in the name of God ‘let him speak as the oracles of God.’ ”

It is hard to imagine anyone who has been as saturated with Scripture as the Wesley brothers were. Biblical phrases and allusions poured from them, not only in sermon and in song, but in the course of their casual speech and private writings. Hence, J. Ernest Rattenbury wryly observed in The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley’s Hymns, “a skillful man, if the Bible were lost, might easily reconstruct it from Wesley’s hymns. They contain the Bible in solution.” The same thing could easily said of the Wesleys’ sermons and letters. Their sermons are patchworks of biblical phrases and citations, and their ...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. We to the Sacred Standard Fly: The Bible
• 2. Purge the Foul Inbred Leprosy: Sin
• 3. My Chains Fell Off: The New Birth
• 4. Pure and Spotless Let Us Be: Holiness
• 5. His Pity No Exception Makes: Grace
• 6. The Promised Paraclete Is Given: The Holy Spirit
• 7. Risen with Healing in His Wings: Jesus Christ
• 8. He Breaks the Power of Canceled Sin: Christian Perfection
• 9. An Interest in My Savior’s Blood: The Atonement
• 10. One Glorious God in Persons Three: The Trinity
• 11. I in Thy Temple Wait: The Means of Grace
• 12. A Soul-Transporting Feast: The Lord’s Supper
• 13. Our Loving Labor: Life in the World
• 14. All United in Thy Name: An Ecumenical Spirit
• Conclusion: The Way of the Wesleys
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names and Subjects
• Index of First Lines of Hymns and Hymn Titles
• Index of Standard Sermons