This book used to belong to Gordon S Wakefield. Gordon was one of a generation of Methodist scholars whose grasp of the history of Christian spirituality was broad and deep. I once spent a while with him over several days at a conference on Evangelical Spirituality, not long after his book on John Bunyan was published. We sat together a few times and talked about Evangelical spirituality and the comparative neglect of a large and influential tributary of the great river of Christian traditions. He was a lovely, gentle and sharp thinking man, and I'm so glad to own one of the books he owned and read.
But the book on Wesley is also important to me because I had read it while on a sabbatical break at St Deiniols Library, and was later delighted to find one second-hand. I'm reading it again as part of a larger study of affective theology, exploring the relations between Word and Spirit in the Christian's experience of divine initiative and activity, and human responsiveness in love and gratitude, in the inner renewal of the person before God.
What's fascinating in this book is the comparison of Puritan theology and piety and Wesleyan theology and spirituality. The Puritan influence on Wesley goes back to his mother Susannah. By the time he was editing his Christian Library he was ransacking many of the most popular Puritan works, editing and theologically re-shaping them, and making those chosen doctrinally curated texts available for the edification of those converted and continuing within the Methodist churches and societies. Wesley was expert in the art of precis and abridgement; he was also ruthless in excluding that which seemed to him doctrinally erroneous or practically unhelpful.
Monk's explanation of what Wesley was about is transparently honest: "A theologian's own allegiances — his interests and interpretations — serve to concentrate his attention on those elements of another man's writings which he considers important and to eliminate those aspects which he may consider erroneous or extraneous."
Wesley's theology was largely anti-Calvinist, whole-hearetedly embracing Arminian views of salvation, sanctification and election, and these often expressed polemically in sermons, letters, tracts and with particular polemical edge in Charles' hymns. The Puritans on the other hand were largely Calvinist in theology and considerably more restrictive in their understanding of the scope of salvation and the nature of the atonement.
John Wesley has been described as one whose spirituality reveals a 'devout eclecticism'; a less generous phrase may be to say Wesley was skilled at cherry-picking the best fruit from Christian theologians, ignoring or eliminating what did not meet his own Arminian leaning theological criteria. All of this is explored in Monk's book,which has done great service in explaining how the shelf life of many Calvinist Puritan works was extended, albeit by a method of theological cut-and-paste that would have scandalised the original authors.
My own interest in Wesley and the Puritans is quite specific. I'm currently engaged in a study of Richard Sibbes the Puritan, and looking for those places in the later traditions where Sibbes voice is heard, either as clearly articulated or as familiar echo. Reading some of Sibbes' writings on God's love, the mystery of grace, the intimacy of union with Christ, the work of the Spirit in justification and sanctification, it is hard to avoid the impression of similar sentiments and theological emphases in the verses of The Hymn Book for the People Called Methodists. We'll see, that's an evenue still to be explored.
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