Wesleyan Theological Journal Volume 26, 1991 Presidential Address: The Wesleyan Option for the Poor Donald W. Dayton 7 The Epworth-Canterbury-Constantinople Axis A. M. Alichin 23 Theosis in Chrysostom and Wesley: An Eastern Paradigm of Faith and Love K. Steve McCormick 38 John Wesley’s Exegetical Orientation: East or West? Troy W. Martin 104 Christian Virtue: John Wesley and the Alexandrian Tradition David Bundy 139 Editor Paul Merritt Bassett PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS: THE WESLEYAN OPTION FOR THE POOR by Donald W. Dayton “„To the poor the gospel is preached‟—Which is the greatest mercy, and the greatest miracle of all.” John Wesley, Explanatory Notes on the New Testament, commenting on the last phrase of Luke 7:22 Tonight, I would like to explore the theology of the Wesleyan tradition—in both its eighteenth and nineteenth century manifestations—in light of several questions posed by contemporary theological reflection. I have become increasingly convinced that one of the most important themes of contemporary theology is the growing claim that God‟s mercy contains an element of “divine partiality,” and that this element of “divine partiality” is an integral dimension of the Biblical witness which must find expression in the life of the church. To speak specifically, this claim is that God‟s impartiality and universal grace are qualified by a “preferential option for the poor.” It is “liberation theology” that has most forcibly brought this theme to our attention in the last couple of decades. And it was the 1979 Latin American Bishops‟ Conference (CELAM) in Puebla (Mexico) that issued its most controversial document under the title “A Preferential Option for the Poor.” But such concerns have also been advocated in more “evangelical” circles by, for example, Ronald J. Sider of the Brethren in Christ in Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger: A Biblical Study under the rubric of the “Biblical bias of God toward the poor.” Such themes also play an important part in one of the most influential recent interpretations of Biblical ethics: The Politics of Jesus by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. 7 The Biblical basis of this claim is perhaps seen most clearly in the Gospel of Luke. In recent years Luke 4:18-19 has come to play the clichéd role that John 3:16 plays in some circles as a summary of the gospel. But the Nazareth Sermon of Jesus with its quotation from Isaiah is clearly intended to signal the organizing motif of the book of Luke: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. These themes are anticipated in the Magnificat of Mary (chapter one) and are explicitly reaffirmed in the answer of Jesus to the disciples of John the Baptist sent to ask whether He is the Messiah (chapter seven). They find expression in Luke‟s version of the Sermon on the Mount or the Plain (chapter six), where the woes against the rich prevent us from a too easy spiritualization of the key text. Once this theme is brought into focus it is seen to be not only organizing for the gospel of Luke but pervasive throughout the gospels, present especially in the Epistle of James, the prophets, and the Psalms; and it is also to be discerned in the writings of Paul and elsewhere. This understanding of the texts has revolutionized our reading of the scriptures in the twentieth century and pushed the church toward new expressions of political and social engagement. Tonight, however, I would like to bracket the complex questions about the political implications of this reading of the Scripture and concentrate more fundamentally on the theological grounding of this claim of divine partiality. Many have noticed this “Biblical preferential option for the poor” and have attempted to find a praxis reflective of it, but fewer have articulated the theological grounding of this theme. One of the clearest of such theological articulations is to be found in various writings of Karl Barth beginning with the second decade of this century. Barth‟s Christology is deeply rooted in the “kenotic” text of the second chapter of the Epistle to the Philippians-and one of its most remarkable features is the careful integration of synoptic themes of the teachings of Jesus into the Pauline Christological motifs-thus bridging a gap that has bedeviled Protestant theology since the conflicts between the magisterial and radical wings of the Reformation. In Barth the gratuity of grace is grounded in the downward motion of the incarnation in a form of “condescension” that lies at the heart of the gospel. It is in the incarnation and especially in the movement of Jesus toward the poor that we see clearly the character and mercy of God: . almost to the point of prejudice-He [Jesus] ignored all those who are high and mighty and wealthy in the world in favor of the weak and meek and lowly. He did this even in the moral sphere, ignoring the just for sinners, and in the spiritual sphere, fmally ignoring Israel for the Gentiles. It was to the latter group and not the former that He found Himself called. It was among the latter and not the 8 former that He expected to find the eyes and ears that God had opened, and therefore the men of good-pleasure of Luke 2:14. It was in the latter and not the former that He saw His brethren. It was with the latter and not the former that His disciples were to range themselves according to His urgent counsel and command. Throughout the New Testament the kingdom of God, the Gospel and the man Jesus have a remarkable affinity, which is no mere egalitarianism, to all those who are in the shadows as far as concerns what men estimate to be fortune and possessions and success and even fellowship with God.2 Barth treats sanctification under the rubric “the direction of the Son,” arguing that we must allow our individual lives and the shape of our church life to be determined by this incarnational movement of Jesus. Thus The church is witness of the fact that the Son of man came to seek and to save the lost. And this implies that-casting all false impartiality aside-the Church must concentrate first on the lower and lowest levels of human society. The poor, the socially and economically weak and threatened, will always be the object of its primary and particular concern. 3 And Barth is willing to draw the negative implication of this position. “We do not really know Jesus (the Jesus of the New Testament) if we do not know Him as this poor man, as this (if we may risk the dangerous word) partisan of the poor. .”4 This last strong comment of Barth calls to mind another major theological controversy of recent years within those traditions rooted in the magisterial wing of the continental Reformation. It reminds us of those debates in the confessional traditions about whether ethical issues can ever have a status confessionis-that is, whether failure to take a particular position on a given social issue can ever constitute apostasy. Such conflicts have in recent years focused on the South African situation and the question of whether one might argue that support of the system of “apartheid” constitutes in and of itself “apostasy.” The World Alliance of Reformed Churches has been especially bitterly polarized over proposals to expel the South African Dutch Reformed Church for its failure to renounce the system of “apartheid.” For at least two reasons such debates about this status confessionis seem strange to Wesleyan ears. In the first place, the Wesleyan tradition has not been confessional in the same sense. In contrast to the continental Reformation with its emphasis on the theological virtue of “faith” (resulting in both Lutheran and Reformed traditions of “confessions of faith”), the Wesleyan tradition has seen faith as instrumental to love and sanctification. As a result the Wesleyan tradition has been more likely to leave a trail of acts of love than confessions of faith. Similarly, and in the second place, The Wesleyan tradition is more accustomed to patterns of “boundary maintenance” based on behavioral and ethical criteria. This could be illustrated at a number of points from the general rules to the debates 9 about slavery. Early American Methodism attempted to make liberation of slaves a condition of membership-and it was compromise on this issue that led to the founding of the Wesleyan Methodist Church and played a role in the emergence of the Free Methodist Church. At Oberlin College slaveholders were barred from the Lord‟s Supper, and the Wesleyans debated, somewhat like the second degree of separation of the Fundamentalists, not whether slaveholders could be admitted to communion (that was not at issue), but whether to admit those who remained in fellowship with slaveholders in churches that were not yet prepared to raise this issue to the level of status confessionis. But reference to these debates is a useful way to focus the question of whether there are such issues that are so central to the Biblical expression of the gospel that without them we do not have the Biblical gospel. Thus Barth in the quotation above insists that we do not know the real Jesus-the Jesus of the New Testament-if we do not know Him as this partisan of the poor.