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Spirit and Truth Spirit and Truth A Study of Susanna Wesley, John Wesley, and John Fletcher as Participants in the Stream of the Spirit’s Work Patrick Oden June 11, 2010 CH872: Readings in Church History Dr. James Bradley In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognize, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and florid) in François de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild frightening, Paradisial flavor, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne. In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safe—Law and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed ‘Paganism’ of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yet—after all—so unmistakably the same; recognizable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life: an air that kills From yon far country blows. (C.S. Lewis, On the Reading of Old Books) Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 2 The Stream of the Spirit in History .................................................................................................. 6 Luther, Protestants, and Protestants Protested ................................................................................. 9 Susanna Wesley .............................................................................................................................. 13 Letters ......................................................................................................................................... 17 John Wesley ................................................................................................................................... 24 Uses of Christian Antiquity ........................................................................................................ 26 A Christian Library .................................................................................................................... 29 Macarius ..................................................................................................................................... 32 Puritanism ................................................................................................................................... 36 The Society of Friends ............................................................................................................... 39 The Altogether Christian ............................................................................................................ 44 John Fletcher among Wesley’s Successors .................................................................................... 47 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 56 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 61 1 Introduction “Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth." (John 4:23-24) In late Spring of 1725, Susanna Wesley wrote a letter to her second oldest son, whom she called Jacky. After noting some particular frustrations experienced by his brother Charles on a recent journey, frustrations that involved his sister Hester, Susanna turns to more theological musings. John, it seems, included some quotes from Thomas à Kempis in a previous letter, and Susanna shared her opinion that à Kempis was “extremely wrong” to suggest that God “by an irreversible decree hath determined any man to be miserable in this world.”1 She goes on to write, “Our blessed Lord, who came from heaven to save us from our sins… did not intend by commanding us to ‘take up the cross’ that we should bid adieu to all joy and satisfaction [indefinitely], but he opens and extends our views beyond time to eternity. He directs us to place our joy that it may be durable as our being; not in gratifying but in retrenching our sensual appetites; not in obeying but correcting our irregular passions, bringing every appetite of the body and power of the soul under subjection to his laws, [if we would follow him to heaven].”2 We are to take up our cross, she writes to John, as a contrast to “our corrupt animality” in order to fight under “his banner against the flesh.” This fight is not an empty one, because “when by the divine grace we are so far conquerors as that we never willingly offend, but still press after greater degrees of Christian perfection… we shall then experience the truth of Solomon’s assertion, ‘The ways of virtue are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.’”3 After her brief theological insights, Susanna returns to the topic of à Kempis noting that she 1Charles Wallace, Jr., ed. Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings (New York: Oxford University Press,1997), 107. 2 Wallace, Susanna Wesley, 108. 3 Wallace, Susanna Wesley, 108. 2 takes “Kempis to have been an honest, weak man, that had more zeal than knowledge, by his condemning all mirth or pleasure as sinful.” Misery is seen as misery to Susanna, who acknowledges how it can be used by God, but is not itself the place God leads us. “We may and ought to rejoice that God has assured us he will never leave or forsake us; but if we continue faithful to him, he will take care to conduct us safely through all the changes and chances of this mortal life to those blessed regions of joy and immortality where sorrow and sin can never enter!” John received this letter when he was nearing his twenty-first birthday, a student at Oxford, and not too long before he was ordained as a deacon in the Church of England. I open with these extended quotes because it might be easy to gloss over the sometimes radical influence a parent has on a child, especially when this child grows up to be a great historical figure. We read the writings of such a figure, see their significant contributions, and in the case of religious leaders, we analyze their writings so as to formulate a systematic picture of their overall theology. Yet doing this often results in an ahistorical study that pulls the figure out of their context and, in doing this, robs their contributions of vitally important tools of interpretation. For people live and respond to specific contexts, not a generalized reality, and it is only in seeing a figure, a movement, or a mission within specific contexts that we can hope to develop a more accurate, and thus more helpful, understanding of the person and their contributions. It is with this in mind that I now consider John Wesley, seeing him not as a figure who suddenly erupted into this world great and wholly unique. Rather, he was a man whose extremely significant influence was partly a testimony of his own great passion and work ethic, but also very much in keeping with the tradition in which he was born, and in which he was raised. In an attempt to better understand his core interests and priorities, then, my plan is to begin a 3 study of Wesley’s influences and influence, hoping to, in effect, triangulate an understanding of John Wesley by looking more closely at those who participated in key ways in his development and ministry. As such, I will start off not with Wesley’s own era but with a brief survey of the Protestant impulse, as seen in Luther and then in later nonconformists leading up to the early eighteenth century. At this point we will turn more closely to Wesley’s own Puritan roots. Though he has Puritans on both sides of his family, I will choose to focus on his mother Susanna, as she likely was the more directly influential to John, as they shared a similar personality and approach to spirituality. Indeed, the passage I quoted above shows distinct similarity to John’s continued spiritual and theological interests, suggesting his approaches to God were in keeping with his earliest, and maybe most important, guides. Next, I will turn to look briefly at John Wesley himself, attempting to assess his contributions as wrestling with, developing, and clarifying the seeds that Susanna planted. I will argue that Wesley was, in effect, in line with his Puritan roots, though in a way that differs from the trajectory that Puritanism, in later Dissent, emphasized. Following looking at Susanna and then John Wesley himself, I will very briefly consider John Fletcher, a key figure who was influenced by John Wesley, and who, it seems, helped sharpen Wesley’s own considerations. Fletcher died before John Wesley did, so cannot be entirely considered a successor; however, he was an immensely influential follower whose highly developed insights and writing skill help to even better determine John Wesley’s own priorities. How much so is a question still hotly debated. Because of the immensity of such a study, I do not, by any means, hope to write a substantive, let alone comprehensive, study on any of these three figures. Rather, I have two goals in mind in this present work, a primary goal and a secondary goal.
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