Posted on 02/14/2004 3:50:16 PM PST by Vernon
Glenwood Presbyterian Church, Glenwood Landing, NY
Meeting jointly with
The United Methodist Church of Sea Cliff, NY
August 2, 1998
With respect to the Christian life, most of what John Wesley said in the eighteenth century was in perfect agreement with what John Calvin had said two centuries previously during the time of the Reformation. In fact, on this topic, the comments of these two towering figures were very similar in many respects to what was said by many of the other well known devotional writers of history.
One of them, Martin Luther, had such a profound effect upon Wesley that Wesley said on a number of occasions that his conversion experience of May 24, 1738, the famous Aldersgate experience, was a direct result of the reading aloud of Luther's PREFACE TO THE EPISTLE OF ST. PAUL TO THE ROMANS. Here's what Wesley said about this: "In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death."
Luther's PREFACE to the book of Romans, is, of course, still extant, and it does say some things about the change that God works in the heart through faith in Christ. In this work, Luther wrote, "to fulfil the law, we must meet its requirements gladly and lovingly; [and] live virtuous and upright lives without the constraint of the law, . . . as if neither the law nor its penalties existed. But this joy, this unconstrained love, is put into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says in Chapter 5." Further on, Luther writes, "Faith, however, is something that God effects in us. It changes us, and we are reborn from God, John [chapter] 1." He goes on to say that faith is a confidence in God's grace which "makes us joyful, high-spirited, and eager in our relations with God and with all mankind. That is what the Holy Spirit effects through faith." For Luther, "righteousness . . . is God's gift, and shapes a man's nature to do his duty to all. . . . His own righteousness, which He confers through the medium of faith, is our only help."
It would appear from John Wesley's JOURNAL that at the society meeting at Aldersgate Street, God did bring about a change in Wesley's heart similar to what Luther describes in these passages from his PREFACE that were read at that meeting. There was, however, a theological difference. This became clear in 1740 when Wesley preached and published a protest against what he felt was an overemphasis upon predestination on George Whitefield's part. Wesley felt that Whitefield's Calvinistic emphasis constituted a denial of free will, and that it was an unnecessary encouragement to people to relax Christian discipline. This brought about what has been described as an irreparable breach between Wesley and Whitefield.
Interestingly enough, however, it was not Calvinism, so much as Lutheranism, that was vulnerable to the second of these two criticisms. Calvinism, in its understanding of the "third use of the law," did emphasize and successfully maintain Christian discipline in its effort to avoid criticisms of this very kind that had been brought to bear against Luther and the theology of the Reformation.
The first of these two concerns of Wesley's, with respect to the question of free will, was eloquently expressed by Wesley's mother, Susanna Wesley, who wrote to him in 1725 to the effect that if the individual has no choice as to whether he or she is a recipient of the saving grace of God which transforms the heart, and if, as a consequence, some people are irretrievably bound up in sinfulness, with the effect that they are predestined to hell, then, "it directly charges the most high God with being the author of sin, . . . For 'tis certainly inconsistent with the justice and goodness of God to lay any man under . . . a . . .necessity of committing sin, and then to punish him for doing it." For this reason, she felt that "the doctrine of predestination as maintained by the rigid Calvinists is very shocking, and ought utterly to be abhorred."
While the rigid Calvinists of the eighteenth century may have held such views, what about John Calvin himself? It is instructive to make careful comparisons between John Calvin and John Wesley on these issues, especially since Calvin is considered the fount and source of nearly all that is believed and practiced by Presbyterians, while Wesley was the founder of Methodism.
Calvin is often criticized for his stance on justification by faith alone, as though, according to his understanding, good works were irrelevant. However, Calvin states quite clearly in his INSTITUTES, Book III, Chapter 9, section 1, that "The faith by which alone, through the mercy of God, we obtain free justification, is not destitute of good works." This, of course, makes perfect sense, since the change that is wrought by God in the heart of man, if it is genuine, will normally result in acts of kindness, benevolence, and altruism.
On the other hand, Wesley is often criticized for an opposite stance on the same issue. It is often argued that Wesley believed that good works are necessary to justification, and that he therefore held to a form of "works-righteousness," according to which the individual must earn the right to justification by performing good works. However, Wesley's comments specifically indicate that good works are not always necessary to justification. For example, in a sermon entitled "The Scripture Way of Salvation," Part III, section 2, he wrote, "Therefore both repentance and fruits meet for repentance are in some sense necessary to justification. . . . Those fruits are only necessary conditionally, if there be time and opportunity for them." It would seem quite clear from these passages that both of them believed that justification is by faith alone, but that the faith that justifies is never alone whenever it is given the opportunity for expression in actions.
But what about the issue of predestination? Once again, the viewpoints of Wesley and Calvin are remarkably similar. In his sermon on Predestination, Wesley expresses sentiments which closely parallel Calvin's INSTITUTES, Book III, Chapter 21. In both of these works, there is a great deal of emphasis upon the importance of understanding that God's foreknowledge of who will be saved is not the cause of election. Wesley writes, "God foreknew those in every nation who would believe, from the beginning of the world to the consummation of all things. . . .All time, or rather all eternity . . . being present to Him at once, he does not know one thing before another, or one thing after another, but sees all things in one point of view, from everlasting to everlasting. . . . But observe: we must not think they ARE because he KNOWS them. NO; he knows them because they are. . . . What he knows, whether faith or unbelief, is in no wise caused by his knowledge. . . ." Then, in section 14 of the same sermon, Wesley writes, "As all that are called were predestinated, so all whom God has predestinated he foreknew. He knew, he saw them as believers, and as such predestinated them to salvation, according to his eternal decree."
In a similar vein, Calvin wrote, "The predestination by which God adopts some to the hope of life, and adjudges others to eternal death, no man who would be thought pious ventures simply to deny; but it is greatly cavilled at, especially by those who make prescience its cause. We indeed ascribe both prescience and predestination to God; but we say that it is absurd to make the latter subordinate to the former. When we attribute prescience to God, we mean that all things always were, and ever continue, under his eye; that to his knowledge there is no past or future, but all things are present, and indeed so present, that it is not merely the idea of them that is before him . . . but that he truly sees and contemplates them as actually under his immediate inspection."
Both Wesley and Calvin make it abundantly clear that they believe in predestination as it is taught in the Pauline epistles, and both understand that the foreknowledge of God does not cause this predestination.
Is there any real difference, then, between Wesley and Calvin on this issue? If there is a distinction to be made between them, then it would be that Wesley emphasized the freedom of the will while Calvin emphasized man's inability, in and of himself, to choose to repent and believe the gospel.
Wesley wrote, "Indeed if man were not free he could not be accountable either for his thoughts, words, or actions. If he were not free, he would not be capable either of reward or punishment. He would be incapable either of virtue or vice, of being either morally good or bad. If he had no more freedom than the sun, the moon, or the stars, he would be no more accountable than they. On supposition that he had no more freedom than they, the stones of the earth would be as capable of reward and as liable to punishment as man--one would be as accountable as the other. Yea, and it would be as absurd to ascribe either virtue or vice to him as to ascribe it to the stock of a tree."
But unlike many Calvinists, Calvin himself did believe in free will, but he felt that it was necessary to emphasize that we cannot make proper choices without supernatural help. In a work entitled "The Necessity of Reforming the Church," he wrote, "though we deny not that man acts spontaneously, and of free will, when he is guided by the Holy Spirit, [we] maintain that his whole nature is so imbued with depravity, that of himself he possesses no ability whatever to act aright."
What, then, did Wesley think about depravity as it is described here? In his sermon entitled "Original Sin," Wesley wrote that "the first, grand, distinguishing point between heathenism and Christianity" is that the heathen "knew not that all men were empty of all good, and filled with all manner of evil. They were wholly ignorant of the entire depravation of the whole human nature, of every man born into the world, in every faculty of his soul."
When all is said and done, we must be prepared for the likelihood that by and large, Wesley and Calvin were saying basically the same things. This should not come as a great shock to us if we remember that both of them carefully studied the Bible and church history and took both very seriously. Yes, there were differences in emphasis, but even within the sixty-six books of the Bible there are differences in emphasis.
So then, it should not be surprising to us if we find that John Wesley's sermon on "Self-Denial" bears a close resemblance to Calvin's INSTITUTES. In Book III, Chapter 7 of the INSTITUTES, Calvin states that "we are not to seek our own, but the Lord's will. . . . For when Scripture enjoins us to lay aside private regard to ourselves, it not only divests our minds of an excessive longing for wealth, or power, or human favor, but eradicates all ambition and thirst for worldly glory . . . ."
Wesley said it this way: "But what is self-denial? Wherein are we to deny ourselves? And whence does the necessity of this arise? I answer, the will of God is the supreme, unalterable rule for every intelligent creature."
There is no question that both Wesley and Calvin would have agreed that to be able to defer to the will of God in those cases in which it would seem to be to our disadvantage to do so would be an impossibility apart from the active work of God in our hearts and minds, causing us to be willing to do so.
May God grant that He might give us new hearts and put a new spirit within each of us; that He might remove the heart of stone from us and give us a heart of flesh, as the prophet Ezekiel says. May He put His Spirit within us and cause us to walk in His statutes, so that we will be careful to observe His ways. This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
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