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Commentary
WESLEYAN WISDOM: Where is Methodist voice? Donald W. Haynes, Mar 19, 2009
Donald W. Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
Since the early 20th century, Methodism has been so dedicated to ecumenical efforts that we have muted our own Wesleyan voice. Today, we must speak up, not for our institution’s sake, but to proclaim the essential nature of God!
The biblical witness is that God has revealed Himself in every generation in the history of humankind. More than that, we believe God has sought us both before and while we seek God! As Dean Inge of Canterbury said, “Humankind is incurably religious.” We must recover and proclaim a practical application of our doctrine of prevenient grace.
The first step in God’s way of salvation is not our sin, but God’s love. We must write more, blog more and preach more that every human being is a child of God. The message of Genesis 1:27 must be re-affirmed: “So God created humankind in his image; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”
God’s stubborn love
According to commentary in the Wesley Study Bible, this passage reveals “this stubborn nature of God’s love and God’s refusal to give up on humanity.” In his 1730 sermon “The Image of God,” Wesley insisted, “The substance of the biblical account is this: ‘God created man upright, but man found out to himself many inventions. . . Abusing liberty wherewith he was endowed, he rebelled against his Creator, and willfully change the image of . . . God into sin, misery, and corruption.”
Wesley says every one of us was endowed with “a power of distinguishing truth from falsehood.” God is never without His witness, even if the mission of the Christian church has failed to live out the Great Commandment!
William Paul Young writes in his popular novel, The Shack, “Judgment is not to destroy but to make right.” Salvation is not to be understood in such atonement theories as “Jesus’ payment of a ransom for our souls,” nor “Jesus buying off God’s wrath with the sacrifice of His life.”
As Paul insisted, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.” John’s Gospel is fundamental: “God so loved the world that God gave . . . ” Wesley considered our salvation as the “renewal of our souls in the image of God.” The essence of being saved is restoring the relationship that is strained to great extremity by our sin.
Let us share in every doctrinal conversation the hymn writer’s words: “We only know we cannot drift beyond God’s love and care.” God’s love is the essential teaching of the parable in Luke 15, which theologian Helmut Thielicke correctly called “The Parable of the Waiting Father.”
Does this mean that Wesleyan doctrine denies the power of sin? No! Wesley insisted that sin has corrupted, distorted and contaminated humanity. But the peculiar accent of Wesley was that sin has never destroyed the ability of the human soul to sense the convicting presence of the “still, small voice” of the Holy Spirit, calling us to “come home.” Sins abounds, but grace abounds much more!
Many lamps of light
United Methodism must counter the parochial voice that says God loves only Christians. God’s light shines from many lamps. James 1:17 calls God the “father of lights.” While a flickering flame from a candle might be rather pathetic when compared to a fluorescent light, they are both nevertheless light!
What then is our unique Christian witness? Whereas all people have an instinctive, natural revelation of God, only Jesus painted God’s portrait perfectly. Jesus tells a disciple, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.”
Other religions call their people to worship the same God we worship. The difference is they see God through the lenses of their history, culture, sacred scriptures and insights. The essence of the Christian understanding of God is that only Jesus revealed God as Father. Other religions know God as Creator, Judge and Redeemer, but nowhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Qur’an or the Bagadavita is God revealed as a Parent.
Only Jesus tells us that God is like a Father. That is what Jesus means when he says in John 14:6, “No one comes to the Father except by Me.” Do they come to God? Yes! But do they see God as Father or “Papa”? No. Only the Christian’s prayer begins with “Our Father.”
God chooses us
We have received the spirit of adoption. Adopting a baby is more an act of love than conceiving a baby. I can still see the president of my United Methodist Youth in 1962 telling the other kids she was adopted. Someone asked her how it felt, and I’ll never quit repeating her answer: “Your parents had to take what they got; mine chose me.”
God chooses us—every one of us. Universal salvation is not universalism; it is the implementation of God’s love for everyone.
So what does this adopted relationship mean? It means intimate, loving, forgiving relationship—the essence of Wesley’s experience at Aldersgate. It means we don’t have to stand off from a distance and call God “Architect of the Universe” or “Giver of Laws.” Rather we can say, “Abba.” And what does Abba mean? The Aramaic word means Papa.
Only Eugene Peterson in The Message gets it right: “It’s greeting God with a childlike, “What’s next, Papa?”
Most versions get the rest right: “God’s spirit touches our spirit and confirms who we are—children of God and if children then heirs, heirs of heirs, and joint heirs with Jesus.” We know who God is, and God knows who we are; so we go through life’s hardships and joys as Father and child.
If you know Jesus, you know God. Only in Jesus do we see the perfect portrait of God. John 14:6 is not an eternal sentence to hell for the Afghan, Vietnamese and Israeli children whose parents teach them the ways of Mohammad or Buddha or Moses. It is saying, “God’s light flickers from many lamps; it shines in all its revealed glory through Jesus.”
All light is from God.
Dr. Haynes is an instructor in United Methodist studies at Hood Theological Seminary. dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald W. Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes 
