"Lost in Wonder, Love, and Praise": The Witness of the Wesleys By Ralph C. Wood
[Dr. Ralph Wood is University Professor at Baylor. The article printed here was delivered at the Carleton-Willson Families Lecture at McMurry University, in Abilene, Texas on March 9, 2000.]
- I. The Wesleyan Revival
- II. Orthodoxy: Right-Believing Wonder
- III. Orthopraxy: Right-Acting Love
- IV. Orthopathy: Praiseworthy Feeling
- V. Conclusion
Occasions such as these are occasions for remembrance and thanksgiving. When we recall benefactors such as the Carleton and Willson families, we are made grateful that they have given so generously to a university like McMurry. And when the whole academic community is gathered–trustees and administrators, faculty and students–it is good to remember the tradition that has been handed down from the past. When we use the word "tradition," we mustn`t think of something stuffy and old-fashioned and oppressive. Rather we should think of tradition as Jaroslav Pelikan and G. K. Chesterton define it. Pelikan calls tradition "the living faith of the dead." "Traditionalism," he adds by way of warning, "is the dead faith of the living." G. K. Chesterton offered a similar reading of tradition. Whenever we honor our true tradition, he said, we enfranchise the dead: we grant voting rights to our ancestors. To remember and to recover the past is to admit that we who are living constitute but a tiny minority within the totality of the earth`s inhabitants, and that we are far from the most important people who have ever lived. To remember and give thanks for our tradition is, in short, a way of breaking bread with the dead.
The dead whose tradition I urge us gratefully to remember today are John and Charles Wesley. They sparked a reform movement in the 18“ century that shapes us still. Whether we are Methodist or Baptist, Catholic or Jew, Muslim or Hindu, pagan or atheist or none-of-theabove, we have all been touched by the Wesleyan revolution. It has left a permanent mark on American cultural and religious life. It is fair to say, in fact, that many of us would not be Christians if our forebears had not been converted during the 19th century revivals that swept frontier America under the impetus of the Wesleyan movement. McMurry University would not exist, we should add, if it had not been for these remarkable brothers. Though many of you know their story, let me briefly sketch it.
The Wesleyan Revival
John and Charles Wesley were born in 1703 and 1707 respectively, the 15th and 18th of Samuel and Susannah Wesley`s nineteen children. Wags have noted that, if birth control pills had been available in the 18th century, Methodism might not exist! Susannah Wesley was a woman of remarkable piety and keen mind, and she would influence her sons far more deeply than their father. Yet, as if to prophesy the future of his youngest sons, Samuel Wesley had a talent for stirring up trouble. He was the minister of the Anglican church in the village of Epworth, and he aroused such opposition that the town malcontents set the church rectory on fire as the Wesleys lay sleeping. The entire family managed to escape, all except 6-year old Johnnie who was seen at an upstairs window screaming. It was too late to get a ladder, and so a small man was set on the shoulders of larger man to rescue young John, just before the blazing roof collapsed. John would hark back this event all his life long. Even more literally than St. Paul, he regarded himself as "a brand plucked from the burning," a child mysteriously saved from death that, as a mature man, he might bring others to life.
The Wesley brothers were diligent students at Oxford. They mastered mathematics and logic and the other liberal arts. They also organized a group of students and faculty who met every evening for study of the Greek New Testament. This was a rigorously intellectual enterprise, not a trite and emotional "sharing," where everyone told what a particular Scripture passage meant "personally" to them. The Wesley brothers were nothing if not tough-minded. They studied the liturgy and theology of the ancient church, especially Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo, as well as more recent writers such as Thomas à Kempis and William Law. They and their band of Christian radicals took communion often, fasted frequently, and regularly visited condemned felons in Newgate prison. They also exercised mutual discipline, holding each other accountable for their moral and spiritual lives. Their aim, as they said, was to restore "the Church to its primitive dignity" and thus also to reform the entire English nation. Yet for all their effort and dedication, John and Charles` group earned the contempt of their colleagues. Their fellow students gave them derisive nicknames: the Holy Club, the Bible Moths, the Supererogation Men, the Enthusiasts, and most notoriously of all (because they emphasized a systematic and methodical observance of Christian discipline) they were called Methodists.
Rather than being daunted by such mockery, the Wesleys took it as a sign of honor, adopting the epithet as the name of their new movement. Yet it got off to a very slow start. John and Charles were appointed in 1735 as Church of England missionaries to bring the Gospel to America, specifically to the Indians located in the newly formed state of Georgia. Their venture was nothing less than a disaster. John was driven out of Georgia by the Savannah bailiff for jilting his daughter Sophia Hopkey. Yet on their way to America, the Wesleys had met a group of Moravians who left a permanent mark on them. Amidst a terrible sea storm, the Moravians sang hymns and prayed with such calm confidence that the Wesleys were hugely impressed. When John asked the Moravians to account for their extraordinary peace in the face of death, they replied, "Know ye not Christ?" John replied that he was an ordained Anglican minister, a professor at Lincoln College, Oxford, and thus that he knew all about Christ. "That wasn`t the question," replied the Moravians. "Know ye not Him?"
Haunted by the Moravians` serene piety as well as their troubling question, the Wesleys welcomed a visit by a Moravian minister named Peter Boehler when they returned to London in 1738. Boehler recommended that Charles read Martin Luther`s Commentary on Galatians. Charles was so deeply stirred by its message of salvation by grace alone through faith alone–and not through the legalistic doing of good works–that he underwent a dramatic conversion to evangelical faith on May 21, 1738. John read Luther`s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans and was similarly stirred. Three days later, on May 24, 1738, his 35th birthday, he underwent his own spiritual renewal at Aldersgate Chapel, where he felt his heart "strangely warmed." No longer would he base his faith on an austere life of self-denial, but rather on a constant awareness of God`s saving presence.
Inspired by the example of the evangelist George Whitefield, John Wesley was soon preaching in the open air to great masses of coal miners and industrial laborers, often 30,000 in number, whom the established church had failed to reach. His motto was "holiness of heart and life." When Joseph Butler, a prominent Anglican theologian and bishop, complained that it was unseemly to preach in the fields, John Wesley replied that Jesus himself had set the precedent by preaching his own Sermon on the Mount. Told by another critic that he should confine his ministry to his own parish, Wesley famously replied "The world is my parish." During the 52 years of his itinerant ministry, Wesley traveled more than 200,000 miles and preached more than 40,000 sermons. John accomplished such stunning evangelistic feats by riding in a special backward saddle, composing many of his sermons and books at a writing board that had been mounted on the horse`s rump, as his inkwell sloshed and as his quill jerked across the page.
Yet the enduring power of John Wesley`s reform movement would have been robbed of much of its power without the hymns of his brother. Charles Wesley was an artist schooled in the best poetry of his time–the poetry of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, for example. (It`s as if contemporary Christian song writers were steeped in the work of Seamus Heaney and Richard Wilbur). He had mastered the neo-classical technique of rhymed couplets and formal meters, of accent and rhythm and stress. His diction was so concise and clear, his images so vigorously biblical, that we employ his hymns still today: "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," "Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus," "Ye Servants of God, Your Master Proclaim," "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today." It is estimated that Charles Wesley wrote as many as 10,000 hymns, most of them eminently forgettable. Yet the ones which endure offer us a fine guide to Christian thought and practice in our time. Like John`s sermons, Charles` hymns are imbued with the three indispensable qualities of Methodism that I want to emphasize today: orthodoxy (right belief), orthopraxy (right practice), and orthopathy (true feeling). The first is rooted in wonder, the second in love, and the third in praise: hence my title taken from the last stanza of what may be Charles` finest hymn, "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling."
II. Orthodoxy: Right-Believing Wonder
The two Wesleys were especially concerned to honor the God of truth by maintaining true doctrine: orthodoxy. They knew that what we believe determines how we live. If we believe little or if we believe wrongly, we will be small-souled creatures who live wrong-headed lives. Without clarity and conviction about our foundational beliefs, the Gospel degenerates into mere moral striving, a sort of civic club Christianity. The Wesleys thus rejected the notion, now popular in certain evangelical circles, that believers ought to be brainless. On the contrary, they both regarded an unthoughtful Christian as an oxymoron, and perhaps just an ordinary moron. "It is a fundamental principle with us," John Wesley wrote, "that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion."
As I have said, Charles and John Wesley were first-rate students and scholars, the masters of books and languages and sciences. They were concerned that their followers be schooled in the best thought and art of their time. John Wesley thus wrote and published digests of several major Enlightenment thinkers, including David Hume and John Locke, in order that his followers would be able to engage their thought. He also sought to master the best science of his time, convinced that "the book of nature is written in a universal character, which every man may read in his own language." He urged his followers to study the natural order as it was being opened up by science: "Life subsisting in millions of different forms," John wrote, "shews the vast diffusion of [God`s] animating power, and death the infinite disproportion between [God] and every living thing." There is little doubt that, if the Wesleys had lived in the 19th century rather than the 18th, they would have engaged the evolutionary biology of Charle Darwin–just as they would have sought, in our century, to integrate the physics of Einstein and Heisenberg into their theology. For the Wesleys, an anti-intellectual faith and anti-scientific faith is no faith at all but a form of religious cowardice.
What reason and revelation both teach, the Wesleys agreed, is that God remains radically transcendent and utterly other to us. God is not our chum and buddy, a heavenly step-and-fetch-it, a sacred Santa Claus who rewards us when we are not naughty but nice. God is not one being among the world`s other beings, not even the Supreme Being: God is the God who alone can identify himself. The theologians of the Eastern church taught the Wesleys to understand God fundamentally as mystery and wonder. These words don`t point to an insoluble puzzle or intellectual conundrum but rather to God`s inexhaustible Reality. Hence our descriptions of God are fundamentally negative rather than positive: immortal, invisible, immutable, incorruptible, ineffable.
This means that all true doctrine must begin with the astonished wonder that the unknown God has made himself known to us in Jesus Christ. Orthodoxy thus values paradox in the precise sense defined by Chesterton. Paradox, said Chesterton, is truth standing on its head and waving its legs to get our attention. The more fully we comprehend the God who has revealed himself to us, it follows, the less we have truly comprehended Him. Charles Wesley`s rousing hymn "Rejoice, the Lord is King" gets at this central claim of Christian faith, which was also voiced by the prophet Isaiah: our ways are not God`s ways, and our thoughts not God`s thoughts. Nothing in heaven or on earth is to be worshipped. Like all things mortal, they are doomed to die. By refusing to make them our gods, we have real hope for victory:
Rejoice, the Lord is King! Your Lord and King adore;
Mortals, give thanks and sing, and triumph ever more.
Lift up your heart! Life up your voice!
Rejoice! Again, I say, rejoice!
Charles and John Wesley were struck with wonder at one truth above all others, and it lies at the heart of their orthodoxy. They helped restore this doctrine to prominence, not only among Methodists, but also among the many other Christians who were influenced by their revival. It is the doctrine of universal atonement. We may find it strange that many 18th century Protestants did not believe that Christ had died for the sins of everyone, but for the elect only. Yet the Calvinists had convinced many, including George Whitefield, that the atonement is limited to those whom God has predestined to salvation. John Wesley got into such a heated debate over the question of predestination that he and Whitefield had a serious falling out. Yet both Wesleys persisted in their conviction that the salvation wrought in the Cross is meant for every human being, not for a few.
We must be ever so clear about the Wesleys` staggering wonder before the fact of universal atonement. They never take it for granted. Much less do they read it as proof that God is too kind and fatherly a deity to bring just judgment upon the world. On the contrary, the Wesleys` shock at this great mystery derives precisely from their awareness of our human sinfulness, and thus of the divine wrath that we so fully deserve. It is the Wesleys` exhilarated wonder at the universality of Christ`s atonement that we have largely lost. The Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas has said that most American Christians have but two articles in their creed: (1) God`s kinda nice, and (2) we ought to be kinda nice also. Compare this pathetic heresy with the rich orthodoxy expressed in the very first line of Charles Wesley`s signature hymn. Charles seeks to startle us out of our shallow ease by resorting to biblical syntax. He does what every English teacher forbids us to do: he begins with a conjunction. He wants to isolate and to magnify the wonder of his own personal redemption, while at the same time showing that it belongs to the long chain of God`s redemptive acts–from the clothing of fallen and ashamed Adam and Eve all the way down to the saving of a local Welsh coal miner:
And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior`s blood!
Died he for me? who caused his pain! For me? who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Charles Wesley stands amazed before this unfathomable, mind-reeling wonder–that God himself has died, not for the righteous and the good, but for those who chased and hounded and drove Christ to his Cross. The only rhetorical device that can render it in words is paradox: the joining of radically opposed things that seem to contradict each other but finally do not. Charles thus stretches language to the point of breaking as he tries to get at the incomprehensible wonder that Christ dies for everyone, even the worst, even us. The one word that covers this wonder is Mercy, the Mercy that chases and hounds and finds us who crucified Him–not that He might punish, but rather than He might forgive us:
`Tis mystery all: th`Immortal dies! Who can explore his strange design?
In vain the first-born seraph tries to sound the depths of love divine.
`Tis mercy all! Let earth adore; let angel minds inquire no more.
`Tis mercy all, immense and free, for O my God, it found out me!
III. Orthopraxy: Right-Acting Love
If orthodoxy is the root of the Wesleyan witness, then orthopraxy is its fruit. The Wesleys taught that right doctrine issues in right practice. It is impossible to believe that we have been justified by Christ`s atoning death, they insisted, without living a sanctified life. If Christians are not imbued with a Christ-like holiness through the love of God and our neighbors, then we are not of his Kingdom. Both of the Wesleys were worried that too many Christians are converted without any noticeable result: we remain very much as we always were. We are guilty of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer would later call "cheap grace," a grace that justifies not the sinner but the sin. Such cheapened faith lets us live self-satisfied lives, as if Christ had died in order that we might persist in our complacency.
John Wesley believed that the change which Christ works in human life is so drastic that it must be called a second work of grace. Justification–Christ`s atoning death in our stead–is the first work of grace that makes us righteous before God. Sanctification–the Spirit`s indwelling power at work in us–is the second work of grace that makes us holy. Together, the two operations of grace make Christians into what St. Paul call "a new creation." John Wesley ventured a further and even more radical step. He took seriously Jesus` admonition that we are meant to be perfect even as God is perfect. And so he insisted that true Christians are cleansed from all Adamic corruption and given total newness of life. Wesley was not so naive as to believe that we will be free of all moral faults. On the contrary, our shortcomings will certainly remain. Yet Christians will not commit what John called "willful transgression of a known command of God." Once the Spirit dwells fully in believers, we do not deliberately, knowingly, consciously, defiantly violate God. Charles seeks deliberately to correct Luther`s contention that we remain infected with evil, even when we have been justified: Christ "breaks the power of cancelled sin."
Much mischief has been made of this Wesleyan doctrine of entire or complete sanctification. It has led to self-righteous moralism on the left and to self-righteous pietism on the right. Yet the abuse of a good thing does not take away its use. Rather than reject John Wesley`s teaching on Christian perfection, we ought to reclaim what is right about it. As a good Latinist, John knew that the word "perfection" comes from the verb perficere, which means to carry through, to accomplish, to do or to make thoroughly. What Wesley sought, therefore, was for Christians to live finished lives–for believers to be "made through," from the start all the way to the end. To turn back from this great task is to commit the most egregious of all sins: apostasy. Hence, the huge divide between John Wesley and his Calvinist opponents: Wesley believed that we can indeed fall from grace, backslide into willful sin, and thus relinquish our salvation. But if Calvinists were right to insist on the indelible character of divine grace-that salvation is a road with no u-turns-Wesley was also correct to claim that the life of faith is a demanding adventure in growth and progress, not an affair of flacid ease and static sameness. He insisted that God`s grace brings growth and progress, not static sameness. This is why, when students ask for my chief complaint against atheism, I reply that it is so bloody boring and utterly uninteresting. The only real interest, the only real excitement, and the only real adventure lie in following this divine and dangerous quest for wonder, love, and praise.
The Wesleys learned, to their pain, that the path of Christ-like love is strewn with hazards and threats. I suspect they would wince at hearing my evangelical students speak of their Christian "walk." Surely the more biblical metaphors for the Christian life are found in such words as "struggle," "contest," "battle," "warfare." "Soldiers of Christ, arise," Charles Wesley cries out in one of his best hymns, "and put your armor on." "Wrestle and fight and pray," he adds, "tread all the powers of darkness down and win the well-fought day." This call to Christian arms was no mere metaphor. The Wesleys repeatedly stirred up riots in the towns where they were preaching. In a place called Devizes, for example, the local Anglican ministers were so riled by their influence on the masses that they aroused a mob against them. These ruffians first stoned and then flooded with firehoses the house where the Wesleys were staying. The hooligans ripped off the shutters and drove the preachers` horses into a pond. Local Methodist leaders were ducked in the pond; others had bulldogs set upon them, their homes looted, their businesses ruined. Thus did the Wesleys understand the cost of being lost in Christ`s sanctifying love. As the Irish Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe starkly puts it: "If you do not love, you will not be alive;…if you do love, you will be killed."
Charles Wesley may have written one of his most remarkable hymns, "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," in response to the frightening incident at Devizes. It is a deeply mystical, even a spiritually erotic hymn; for it speaks openly of Jesus as the Christian`s spouse and lover. Yet there is nothing smarmy about such intimacy with Christ. Set to a minor key by Joseph Parry, it has a haunting quality that makes one tremble at the thought of fleeing to Christ`s breast as our only security in the midst of life`s floods and storms, whether they be human or natural. We are naked to evil, Charles confesses, unless Christ shields us:
Other refuge have I none, hangs my helpless soul on thee;
leave, ah! leave me not alone, still support and comfort me.
All my trust on thee is stayed; all my help from thee I bring;
cover my defenseless head with the shadow of thy wing.
Lest we think that a sanctified and perfected life has to do only with personal and private piety, we must remember John Wesley`s saying that "There is no holiness that is not a social holiness." The Wesleys were profoundly concerned with the amelioration of human suffering–poverty and illiteracy, sickness and criminality, hunger and homelessness. Yet they were not romantic about God`s "preferential option for the poor." Sin infects the poor no less than the rich, even if it does greater harm in the rich than the poor. Poverty can be the occasion for a terrible envy, just as wealth can induce a terrible complacency. Both rich and poor need saving. Charles Wesley`s hymn gets the matter exactly right: it is not the poor as such, but the "humble poor" who believe. Nor was it physical deprivation alone that the Wesleys cared about. John was so troubled by mental illness that he practiced an early form of electro-shock therapy.
At the Wesley Museum in London, one can still see the machine he devised for attaching electrodes to the temples and then turning a hand-cranked generator to try to silence the inner demons that plagued some of his followers. Some of Wesley`s home cures we now find funny, as in this remedy for baldness: "Rub the [bald] part morning and evening with Onions, `till it is red; and rub it afterwards with Honey."
It has often been said that the Wesleyan revival did so much to relieve human misery that, almost by themselves, the two Wesleys prevented a violent and destructive revolution from occurring in England such as happened in France in 1789. Yet while they were opposed to the American Revolution, the Wesleys were not political reactionaries. John especially abominated the institution of slavery. One of his last acts before dying was to call the social reformer William Wilberforce to his bedside and to encourage him in his battle against the slave trade. Two days before his death, Wesley called slavery "that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, of human nature….Reading this morning a tract…by a poor African [Wesley wrote in his journal] I was particularly struck by [the] circumstance that a man who has a black skin, being wronged and outraged by a white man, can have no redress; it being a law in our colonies that the oath of a black man against a white goes for nothing. What villainy this is!"
IV. Orthopathy: Praiseworthy Feeling
To be lost in the wonder of universal atonement is the only orthodoxy, and to be lost in the love of God and neighbor is the only orthopraxy, the true way to a finished and perfected life of holiness. Yet the Wesleys also believed that orthodoxy and orthopraxy are sustained by orthopathy: a true feeling for God`s presence. Here we come to what is surely the most controversial and dangerous aspect of the Wesleyan tradition: the insistence that conversion is sudden and dramatic and emotionally overwhelming. Notice that I end where the Wesleys began. They had felt their hearts strangely warmed in 1738, and their experience of radical personal renewal is what fired their mighty movement. George Whitefield joined them in making this call to supernatural rebirth: not to be born of blood alone like Nicodemus, but to be born again of water and the Spirit. Thousands heeded their call and were converted, both in England and America, in this great spiritual awakening
The danger inherent in this strong stress on feeling is that it can lead to a dreadful subjectivism. If our fundamental assurance of God`s reality lies solely or chiefly within our own feelings, how do we know that we have not fallen prey to auto-suggestion? How do we know that the God we feel is not our own invention? Surely this is a very real peril in our time. I know so-called Christians who have virtual contempt for the church as the body of Christ because they believe that their faith depends entirely on their personal feelings about Jesus. Because they have Jesus in their heart, they feel no need for the community of Christ. A secret atheism often lurks beneath the surface of such feeling-based religion. It makes one depend on spiritual binges and emotional orgies. Once these religious sprees are finished, they prove so unsatisfying that they then have to be ratcheted up to a new and higher level of intensity. Such emotionalism also leads to contempt for the life of the mind. A former bookstore manager tells me that many students at a certain Methodist seminary refuse to buy their textbooks because they regard theological learning as an obstacle to their intense emotional experience of Christ. Why learn Greek and study church history when you can get high on Jesus?
There was no such emotional self-indulgence at work in the Wesleys. Reading some of John`s sermons again recently, I was startled to see how often he employs Greek biblical phrases in the midst of ordinary discourse, not to show off his sophistication, but to deepen his people`s understanding of the Christian life. Nor did the Wesleys ever stop stressing the importance of what Whitefield called the "externals"–the ordinary (and often uninspiring) daily practice of self-denial, the routine doing of good for people in trouble, the sometime dutiful observance of prayer and fasting. Their deep religious feelings were thus founded on careful Christian discipline, not on emotional egotism.
We need also to notice that the Wesleys` orthopathy was profoundly sacramental. They knew that their feeling for God`s transforming presence was not self-generated precisely because it was rooted in objective sacramental acts that signaled God`s own prior act. For example, they never surrendered the practice of infant baptism. This came as a tremendous surprise, since most evangelists insist that only the converted should be baptized. The Wesleys indeed maintained that people who had been baptized as babies must confirm and claim as their own the deed that has once been done in their behalf. Yet their very call to a deeply felt conversion could be heard, the Wesleys also believed, because of the grace that had been instilled at baptism. In baptismal regeneration, they insisted, God enters children`s lives and makes a place for himself that can later be filled, whether instantly or gradually. The Wesleys also insisted on frequent observance of the Lord`s Supper. It was not for them a mere memorial for a dead hero, but a life-giving encounter with the living Lord in his very real presence through consecrated bread and wine.
The Wesleys` deepest source of feeling came from their conviction that faith is not something that can be earned or merited. Much less can it be chosen like another consumer item. The Wesleys were not decisionistic Pelagians. "It is not you who chose me," they often quoted Jesus` saying from the Fourth Gospel, "but I who chose you." John Wesley never tired of reiterating the point that "faith is the free gift of God." We cannot give ourselves faith, he said; it is the mysterious grant of the gracious God. "No man is able to work it in himself," wrote John Wesley. "It is a work of omnipotence. It requires no less power thus to quicken a dead soul than to raise a body that lies in a grave. It is a new creation; and none can create a new soul but He who at first created the heavens and the earth." That God has given us faith is the true occasion for joyful and grateful feeling. Such praise for the gift of faith made John Wesley declare that "every Christian, in the proper sense of the word, must be an enthusiast." And yet a single enthusiastic tongue is utterly inadequate to sing our great Redeemer`s praise.
"O For a Thousand Tongues" is, to my mind, the deepest expression of the Wesleys` orthopathy. It is no mindless praise-chorus: one word, two notes, three hours. It is, instead, a great hymn of praiseworthy feeling.
In Christ, your head, you then shall know, shall feel your sins forgiven;
anticipate your heaven below, and own that love is heaven.
The most stirring lines of all, for me at least, are the least politically correct. Most hymnals abandon them altogether, while the latest Methodist hymnal has an asterisk indicating that they may be omitted. I believe, by contrast that these lines constitute real orthopathy and thus must not be left out:
Hear him, ye deaf; his praise, ye dumb, your loosened tongues employ;
ye blind, behold your savior come, and leap, ye lame, for joy.
As the late Christopher Lasch reminded us in The Culture of Narcissism, we have virtually defined deformity out of existence with our lumbering euphemisms. We speak no longer of freaks and lunatics and spastics but of the mentally challenged and the temporarily disabled. What we have gained in sensitivity, Lasch notes, we have lost in true compassion. Charles Wesley truly cared about the deaf and the dumb, the blind and the lame. He knew that their grotesque condition is a sign of our own spiritual lack and want. We all learn to hear the Word of life when Christ unstops our ears. We all speak Truth when He loosens our stumbling tongues. We all see the eternal World when He lifts the scales from our blinded eyes. We all leap for true Joy when He heals our spiritually lame bodies and souls. This deep praise for the God of our redemption is the one unfailing orthopathy. Here is true and praiseworthy feeling because–grounded in the Alpha and Omega, the end of faith no less than its beginning–it sets our hearts at liberty.
V. Conclusion
This, as I understand it, is the enduring witness of John and Charles Wesley. Their theology was rooted in an orthodoxy centered upon sheer wonder before the redemption wrought by Jesus Christ`s atoning death for every human being. Their faith issued in an orthopraxy based on a social holiness to be lived through a life of sanctifying love of God and neighbor. Their Christianity, far from being an emotional orgy of good feelings, produced an orthopathy based on the praise of God for the free and utterly undeserved gift of faith. To be lost in wonder, love, and praise is not, therefore, to be set adrift from the ordinary concerns of life and wafted into a stratospheric spiritual realm. It is to be lost to mere self-interest and self-concern. But chiefly it is to be found by the God who, as St. Augustine said, grants what He demands: the best of our minds in true belief, the best of our wills in true action, the best of hearts in true feeling.
