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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Our language matters Andrew C. Thompson, Aug 20, 2008
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Let’s talk about some language matters.
My mother, a former teacher, used to complain about the overuse of trendy words in education. Some years ago, all anyone wanted to talk about were “paradigm shifts” in educational theory. Instead of using the more mundane “model” or “approach,” it was as if all educators in America had discovered the word “paradigm” and were bound to use it every chance they got, if only to demonstrate their cutting-edge thinking.
Christians do this today with the word “radical.” We can’t just practice hospitality, it’s got to be radical hospitality. Jesus doesn’t just call us to be disciples, we’ve got to be radical disciples. All of which begs the question, if everything is radical, is there anything really radical at all?
In Methodist conversations, the trendiest thing on the block is John Wesley himself.
Wesley and things Wesleyan have become shibboleths for us. It doesn’t really matter if you know much about Wesley, only that you can trot out a Wesley quote here or there to bolster an argument.
Perhaps the biggest Wesley shibboleth of all is his phrase, “social holiness.” It’s hard to read or hear anything about social outreach and social justice efforts made by Methodists without coming across someone saying, “You know, Wesley always told us to practice social holiness.”
There’s only one problem with that use of social holiness. It’s not what Wesley meant by the phrase.
The two places where Wesley uses the phrase “social holiness” in a descriptive way are the Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739) and the sermon, “Upon Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount (IV)” (1748). It is clear in both places that he is making a point about the way sanctification happens in the lives of Christian believers. But social holiness as described here is not about going out into the world to build Habitat houses or feed the hungry. Instead it’s about the communal nature of Christian discipleship.
In the Preface, Wesley says, “‘Holy solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness.”
He’s opposing the hermit-like mentality that says one should retreat from others to purify the soul. Wesley believes that such a sentiment is anti-gospel. According to him, Christianity is fundamentally social in the sense that, as he says in the sermon, “it cannot subsist at all without society, without living and conversing with other men.”
To Wesley, discipleship formation (what he would simply call “sanctification”) must happen in community. This is about our worship and devotional lives, and it is about how we “watch over one another in love” through small group accountability.
But it is not about social justice.
Wesley certainly cared about compassion toward the poor. It was a central part of his ministry and teaching. He called such social outreach works of mercy.
Like social holiness, Wesley believed works of mercy are an essential part of faithful discipleship. His own commitments included care for orphans and widows, dispensing medicine to the poor, education for the disadvantaged, and addressing substance abuse. He set an ideal example for how we might engage in ministry with the poor today.
There is even evidence that, later in life, Wesley was beginning to understand that works of mercy included the kinds of large-scale, systemic efforts that we would call social justice.
But it is misleading for us to take a phrase like social holiness, which already has an important meaning, and simply change it to fit our own tastes.
Practicing discipline in the use of our historic language is important. It could even help the church fulfill its stated mission—to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Because in a Wesleyan sense, we have to realize that we won’t do any good transforming the world until we ourselves have been transformed from within.
That can happen to each of us through God’s grace, and it always happens in community.
Andrew C. Thompson
