a solution. There was no solution in America and he brought the problem home with him.
If you care to use Biblical language, it was the problem of faith and works; if you prefer, you can call it the problem of religion and ethics, but it was partly by thinking of it in these terms that Wesley got it wrong, and I prefer to avoid “religion,” as a word anyway. How do you come to terms with God, find peace with God, if we again may be biblical? By believing things, or doing things?
Wesley had tried that way of doing things. Few persons had done more. He emerged from the pious background of Epworth Rectory. Of course he would be ordained like his father, so he went to Oxford. Official Oxford was nothing like pious enough, so he found ways of making it more so, joined the Holy Club (previously founded by Charles, but led by John when he came back to Oxford in 1729) which met for study, devotion, and philanthropy. One’s first impression was that they were a crowd of quite insufferable young men; but why should they not have taken seriously what all Oxford professed to believe? And they visited the jail, and they gave sacrificially for the relief of the poor. And so it went on, across the Atlantic and back, another stream of good works.
Believing then: so far as this meant accepting the creeds there was no problem. Like a later figure in history, he would have signed not thirty-nine articles but forty if there had been another one. But was faith more than this? Some said it was, but Wesley was not impressed. It was later, I think, that he spoke of the “still brethren” the pietists3 who had fastened on the text “be still and know that I am God” and interpreted it to mean that one must not pray, receive communion, do good but just—be still. He did not trust that attitude; better surely to obey the commandments.
But what then did you do? I have continued a bit to make the point both clearly and briefly, but it was a desperately serious problem. Was there any way one could accept it with integrity? Put like that the question is one that faces many people today. Behind Wesley’s problem, we can see our own.
This was the point at which Luther came to Wesley’s help. Today someone will have to quote the famous words just once more, so let us get it done: it was on May 24th that Wesley went unwillingly to a meeting in Aldersgate Street where someone was reading Luther’s Preface to Romans.4 It was about 8:45 when he reached the vital passage, and from Wesley’s description there seems to be no difficulty in putting one’s finger on it. He was describing, says Wesley, the change God works in the heart by faith. Here it is:
Faith is a divine work in us, which changes us and gives us new birth from God (John 1.13), and kills the old Adam, makes us new beings in heart, will, mind and all our powers and brings the Holy Spirit with it. It is a living, busy, active powerful thing is faith, so that it is impossible that it should not incessantly be doing good. It does not ask whether good works should be done; before anyone asks it has done them, and is constantly so doing. Anyone who doesn’t do such works is simply without faith.
So the answer is not my painful religious striving, but faith. And out of faith comes more works and better works because I am not using them as a means to an end, but doing them because I want to do them, because God is making it possible for me to so forget myself that I spend all my time and all my energy in serving my neighbors.
How did Luther get there? What did Wesley learn from him? The core of it is in these words of Wesley which everyone knows: “I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone, for salvation.” It is the solus Christus of the Reformation. Faith can forget itself precisely because it is focused upon Christ. And it does forget itself. The piece of Wesley’s Journal that on the whole people do not remember is this—“The enemy suggested, ‘this cannot be faith; for where is thy joy?’ . . . after my return home I was much buffeted by temptations.” Notwithstanding Wesley’s “I felt” faith is not feeling but objective trust, the recognition that my fate and the world’s is not in my hands but in God’s. And there it rests, whether I am happy all the day or not.
So much, as I drafted my sermon comes under the heading—Introduction. It does not follow that the main bulk of the sermon is still to come, only that on this special occasion we are having a higher proportion of Introduction. But Wesley himself knew very well that preaching was not a matter either of historical analysis or of recounting one’s experience. It is the exposition and application of the Word of God in Scripture. But the Introduction may help us to see Romans in sharper focus. What does the chapter teach about faith?
First that faith leads to reconciliation, peace, righteousness. Perhaps we have already had enough about this. The peace is peace with God, the righteousness is a right relationship with God. They are near enough the same thing, but the latter gives a sharper edge to the former. In a fight, either party may be right, and merely to knock the other fellow down doesn’t prove that he was wrong, and peace may be—often is—a matter of reciprocal give and take, compromise. Righteousness (with Paul’s great word justification) puts the conflict in the Law court, and the judge, this Judge anyway, is always by definition right. I who stand in the dock am accused by the Law, proved to be in the wrong by witnesses, and maybe by my own confession too. Yet the Judge finds his own way, at his own cost, not of letting me off but of taking me in, restoring me to the fellowship of society and his own. This is the relationship with my Maker, for which my Maker made me; it is not an odd queer thing; only in it am I my own true self.
Secondly, faith leads to character. Paul sees it working out through tribulations; Wesley would do the same. These tribulations are our moral education in the world, and for the Christian they lead to endurance and tried character. There is nothing automatic about this. Consider how many times tribulations—annoyances, fears, being abandoned or done down by people you trusted, physical pain and weakness, loneliness, the loss of a loved one; make it real. Tribulation which has such an old-fashioned sound has led you into despair, bad temper, cowardice, retaliation, deceitfulness and the like. It is faith that gives it a positive outcome and enables you to glory in it. Apart from glorying in the Lord, there are only two kinds of glorying that Paul can tolerate. One is glorying in tribulations, the other is glorying in life, that is in the future, God’s future. These are both safe because by definition they mean I am not glorying in myself, in what I now am, in what I have now achieved. In tribulation, in life, I can only glory in God.
We forget this educational element in the Christian life at our peril. I suspect that Wesley over-simplified the notion of holiness, though he did not simplify it nearly as much as some people think he did. In any case, he was right to insist that becoming and being a Christian is a moral experience. There may be joy in it, or there may not, but if there is not love, love that is ever seeking to be perfect love, there is something wrong.
Thirdly, faith is for all. It is an offer to all. It is not restricted to the virtuous, the naturally religious, the intelligent. “It was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us.” The only qualification for the Gospel is sin, and all the unqualified may get up and go out. But you have already uttered the words yourselves:
Outcasts of men, to you I call,Harlots, and publicans, and thieves!He spreads His arms to embrace you all;Sinners alone His grace receives;No need of Him the righteous have;He came the lost to seek and save. (Charles Wesley)
I need not tell you that the Wesley exegesis and the Wesley poetry became the Wesley program. It is precisely at this point that we must be careful to live in the real world. I suppose there may be in the Elvet congregation a few people who work for the Inland Revenue—publicans in the biblical sense. I do not think there are any harlots or thieves here. Wesley would have been more comfortable in this fellowship if there had been a few. Let me quote the first lines in the Times for Good Friday of this year:
Modern Methodists would be wise to admit that their sharp edge has been blunted by two centuries of institutional religion. A modern Wesley would be as likely to lead a movement outside Methodism
