the time are now the old favorites, sung more for nostalgia than for fervor.
The Church of England itself has begun to reclaim Wesley as one of its own—at last. That may be an ecumenical advance. But it is also a sign that modern Wesleyanism has lost its spikes and is now safe to embrace. Your minister is keen, and so am I, that we not use this service simply as a celebration of a fairly distant past. We must think about our own Church, in our own world, in our own day. What Paul says in Romans 5 is of eternal validity, so that is something. What else is there time to say?
We talk easily about Wesley’s conversion. Some people say that we ought not to use that word. It wasn’t a conversion. He didn’t change his beliefs. He was an orthodox Christian before and after. He did not give up an evil life; he did not have an evil life to give up—he had been too good to be true. Well there is some weight in that argument though for myself I continue to say conversion. What we can say is this. Before 1738, Wesley wasn’t bad but he was inhibited. He tried hard, but he could not find his feet. He served God, he said, as a servant; later he was to serve him as a son. It was only when he trusted Christ alone that he was free—free to be the man God always wanted John Wesley to be.
We do not belong to a bad Church. Of course it has its faults, fewer perhaps than most, but it is not a bad Church. I think I could make a case for saying it is an inhibited Church, that has not yet attained, or perhaps rather has lost, the freedom that belongs to faith and the Gospel. We are too concerned about what other people, people in other churches, people outside the church, will think about us. We are; I am. But though the Church will always have to think, to plan, to organize, it needs nothing so much as to lose its inhibitedness and enter into the freedom of the children of God. And that we achieve, as each one learns to find Christ, Christ alone. I’ll give you one more picture of what it means. I do so with an apology, for I have told this story in Elvet before; it was however on 6/23/57 and the two or three who were here, will be tolerant.
When Wesley travelled to America, it was not in the Concorde or on the Q.E. but in an 1712 cork-shell of a ship on which there were also a group of Moravians—a sort of Lutheran sect. There was a storm and Wesley was afraid, afraid to die. The Moravians he could see were not. He asked their leaders why. “They know whom they have believed.” To see a comparison you need to only read between the lines of Wesley’s report that the Moravians had certain humble practices and were laughed at by the English for doing so. There was not only danger of drowning; there was the reality of sea-sickness. There were of course no professional stewards and stewardesses so the Moravians cleaned things up. It seems to me that you need a good deal of the love of God in your heart to clean up other people’s stinking vomit, when you are more than a little queasy yourself and are being jeered at for doing so. They know who they have believed—Christ only. And out of that trust the practical love that cleans up the vile mess of the world. Wesley embraced both, and the world and God waits for us to do the same.
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3. Editor’s note—in this case, Moravians.
4. Editor’s Note: Actually on closer inspection what the sources really say is “on Nettleton Court off Aldersgate Street” but something about the phrase “the Nettleton Court experience” doesn’t quite roll naturally off the tongue.
“EVOLUTION”—Romans 5.12–21
[Preached once at Westminster, Oxford on 4/6/97]
To choose this text for this occasion might seem to be an intended provocation. “You may spend a couple of days talking about evolution, but at the end we are going back to the old story of creation—Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden. Away with Darwin and his evolution. We don’t have apes as our grandfathers.” Of course it is no such thing. It is probably true that Paul read the first chapters of Genesis in a rather different way from ours, read the story as a story, and with no reference to the Big Bang or anything of the kind. But anyone can see that in this paragraph Adam, whatever else he may have been, is primarily a theological or anthropological concept, comparable with and standing over against the other theological concept—Christ. Paul has no interest in telling a tale, passing on a legend of creation. He is talking about humanity, related as it is about the two poles, the two universal and representative human beings—Adam and Christ. It is not creation but how we get from creation to here, that he is dealing with, and that process is, more or less, evolution. How did human beings, and the non-human beings who are their neighbors, and their institutions and activities become what we know, we think we know, them to be now?
I am a theologian, and an ex-mathematician with no biology whatever, and it seems to me, on the outside, that evolutionary theory itself has evolved a great deal since Darwin’s time; certainly it has been applied, not always I think convincingly, in a great variety of fields. But I am beginning with what I understand is basic Darwinianism, by which I mean evolution proceeding by way of natural selection and with Paul’s guidance I hope to see its theological and practical significance. The basic proposition from which I begin is a demythologized version of the doctrine of Original Sin. But I had better define my term.
Original Sin means there is something wrong with the human race. Not just with this or that member of it, but with the race as a whole. Nothing makes what is wrong clearer than does the old myth of Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple. Adam and Eve wanted to possess the desirable object—the fruit was to be desired. They want it because they believe it is the way to power over their environment, power over God himself. Knowledge is what you need to give you power over your environment, knowledge of how to make a wheel, knowledge of how to use electromagnetic radiation, and control genetic processes. And said the snake, “eat and you will be like God on his level, no longer one of his subordinates.” So humankind has a will to power; no harm in that, if he will use it rightly and smartly. The snake persuades him to use it wrongly.
It can of course be abused, and constantly is abused in the realm of religion. That is why I asked that Genesis 4 be read instead of Genesis 3. Here are two brothers, Cain and Abel and they are both religious men, that is, they both want to be in with God. But one of them has found out that animal sacrifice works better than vegetables. So what is poor Cain to do? He wants to control his environment, his religious environment, and his brother is winning all the time. There is only one thing to do—put Abel out of the way. Religious people have been disposing of their brothers and sisters ever since, sometimes with Cain’s violence, sometimes in more respectable ways (e.g., just excommunicate them).
So there is a will to power in humanity, and unless somehow it can be controlled, it is a ruthless will to power. And wherever it comes from, it is born in us. Whoever sees an unselfish baby? Or a baby that looks as if it wants to say, “Dear Mother: I am terribly hungry, but I will not seek your heart until you have had another three hours sleep.” Unselfishness is something we have to learn.
Demythologizing does not mean getting rid of myths; it means understanding them. This is of course old stuff among students of the New Testament and I suspect with us all. Myths are not idle tales, they are ways, often profound ways of expressing truth, often profound truth, about God and our relation with him. For some purposes the myth will serve, for others it won’t, some must demythologize it, expressing the same truth in a different style compelled to use ugly, abstract nouns instead of the attractive pictures. You will notice I have been doing it in the last few minutes.
And what of the theory that evolution proceeds by way of natural selection? We know what it means. The giraffe with the longest neck gets the fruit at the top of the tree, and lives; the rest don’t get it and starve. And so long necks develop. The rhinoceros with the thickest skin charges through the thorn bushes and survives; the rest are torn to pieces and die. And so thick skins develop. The person with the best qualifications, or perhaps with the best act at interview, gets the job
