WESLEYAN WISDOM: Key Wesleyan fundamental: holiness of life and heart Donald W. Haynes, Sep 30, 2009
Donald Haynes
By Donald W. Haynes UMR Columnist
Editor’s note: This is the fourth column in a series about Methodist fundamentals. See part one here, part two here, and part three here.
Question: Who has heard of Hidayet Tuksal, and what does she have in common with Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams and United Methodist Bishop Larry Goodpaster?
Answer: All are seeking “middle ground” as they try to hold religious extremes together within their global faith communities, even as religion around the globe is tending toward polarization.
Hidayet Tuksal is a Muslim in Turkey seeking some middle ground between women’s rights and fundamentalist Islam across the globe. As a feminist, she wears the traditional headscarf to retain her “place at the table.”
Rowan Williams is trying to hold together the 80 million-member Anglican Communion, which ranges from conservative African dioceses to the Episcopal Church in America, which has elected openly gay bishops.
Larry Goodpaster is the president-elect of the United Methodist Council of Bishops, ready to lead the denomination with its extremes on the left and the right! We are another “middle ground” church feeling our way into “Rethink Church.”
The bad news is that the moderates are losing ground in Christianity, in Islam, in Buddhism and in Hinduism. Those who demand more discipline of members and converts are growing. Methodism, on the other hand, has adapted to modernity by adopting a large theological umbrella and a large measure of cultural accommodation.
Can we “re-think” our identity amid the rumble of a seismic shift in American religion? We cannot ignore the need for teaching our fundamentals. If we are faithful to God’s vision for United Methodism, we must affirm who we are, determine what we have to say and to do, and truly re-think United Methodism! We must discover anew what our message is.
What are the fundamentals, then, of United Methodism?
Thomas A. Langford pointed out in his historical overview of developing theology in Wesleyan scholarship that it’s much easier to demonstrate tolerance and pluralism in Wesleyan theology “than it is to track down its distinctive characteristics which promised . . . to provide a concrete shaping power for the future of theology, church, and world.”
I have attempted in this series to enunciate the fundamentals that make United Methodists both a part of the Christian communion and also a distinctive and unique denomination with elements that are quite precious to our identity.
I have already outlined the following as Methodist fundamentals (in omitting the word “United” we do not denigrate the important contribution of the Evangelical United Brethren tradition, but rather seek to reflect a pan-Methodist posture):
1. God’s is a never-ending love; 2. God’s is a proactive, seeking love; 3. Every child of God has fallen short of the beauty of God’s plan; 4. Every child of God has a quickening, awakening “kairos” moment; 5. Convicted of our sin, awakened to our true selfhood, we can repent; 6. We can know our sins are forgiven.
Now comes the seventh fundamental: We must practice “holiness of life and heart.”
Theologian Albert Outler wrote, “Wesley’s irreducible minimum of Christian fundamentals were three: the self knowledge of one’s sin and need for repentance; pardon and assurance; and “holiness of heart and life.” The latter fundamental defines a “holiness without which no one shall see the Lord.”
Emotional experience must be followed by holy living. In his spiritual journey, Wesley’s disciplined spiritual life preceded his experience of “the strangely warmed heart.” As he later detailed the “way of salvation,” he recognized that most people first come to Christ in some experience of saving grace, which Wesley called the “threshold” of salvation, and then move into perfecting grace, which, for Wesley, was God’s taking us “room by room” through our thoughts, words, deeds and attitudes.
After his years at Oxford leading the “Holy Club,” Wesley preached in the various colleges of Oxford and went on to become a missionary in Georgia. The Moravians became his mentors, leading to his quiet but certain confidence that his sins were forgiven.
In the aftermath of Aldersgate, he immediately spent the summer with the Moravians in Herrnhut, Germany. He left deeply impressed by their assurance of their salvation and permanently convinced that even unlettered men like Christian David could be spiritual directors, but his in-bred Anglicanism was troubled by their doctrine of “stillness.”
Back in London, he pushed them on the relationship of “weak faith” to “maturing faith,” the necessity of good works and the use of the Church’s “means of grace” as disciplines through which we grow. Wesley was deeply disturbed when a Mrs. Turner reported that her Moravian mentor advised her to “be still” and “cease any outward works.” A Mr. Bray spoke of the “folly of people that keep running about to church and sacrament.” At Society meeting, Wesley heard one Moravian brother admonish all present to “look to Jesus, lying still in his hand.” Others spoke of “ceasing from their own works” and “lying still at Jesus’ feet.”
This brand of pietism was more than Wesley could take! On New Year’s Eve in 1739, he wrote to the Moravians from whom he was separating: “Much hurt has been done by the doctrine of false, unscriptural ‘stillness.’ Many who were beginning to build holiness and good works on the true foundation of faith in Jesus, are now wholly unsettled and lost . . . ”
Wesley re-claimed the formative years of his own spiritual journey. As a child in Epworth, and as a student and a teaching fellow at Oxford, he had deeply internalized books like Thomas á Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. From these, Wesley developed a lifelong conviction that every action has moral value, good or evil.
He gave prominence to his 1733 sermon “Circumcision of the Heart,” which he preached to the Oxford faculty and townspeople. Wesley insisted that the heart be “circumcised” by “refusing to be led any longer by his senses, appetites and passions.” He reminded his congregation that Jesus calls us to “take up our cross daily,” and all of St. Paul’s virtues would be “insecure, even with his salvation in danger” had Paul not practiced “constant self-denial.”
Of his 52 standard sermons—the essence of Methodist doctrine—13 are on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Wesley would not disconnect the love of God from the love of neighbor. For Wesley and his progeny, being a Christian means more than doctrinal affirmation.
Wesley argued with the Moravians that we can indeed have weak faith—“not yet having been purified in heart”—before we have mature faith. He believed we are always subject to slipping from “peace with God” into “weak faith.” Wesley confessed in his letters that we have a “dark night of the soul” or “walk through the shadows.” Methodists were therefore not shocked when Mother Teresa confessed this same spiritual phenomenon.
The antidote to slipping away from what Psalm 51 calls the “joy of our first salvation” is the spiritually disciplined life, which Wesley called “holiness of heart and life.” From his days at Oxford, Wesley insisted on acts of mercy, love of neighbor, charitable ministries and continuing expressions of what he called “social holiness.”
Early Methodism was intricately interwoven with the problems of the poor—clothing, food, housing, child labor, sickness and what we could simply call “welfare.” Wesley set up a cottage industry for women to knit. Clothing was distributed to those in need. He organized what we would call a “child development center” for children who roamed the streets while their parents worked.
Holy living carried moral responsibility and the imperative of acts of love, mercy and grace. In Bristol, the society fed up to 150 people a day—“those who were reduced to the last extremity.” The Foundry in London featured a “clothing ministry” through which in a two-month period in 1744 he provided 360 people with “needful clothing.”
In his famous tract, “The Character of a Methodist,” Wesley defined genuine Christianity as “simply love of God and love of neighbor.”
According to Wesleyan scholar Richard Heitzenrater, Wesley’s goal was a Methodism that moved “beyond a lifeless, formalized religion to one worthy of God, and that is love—love of God and love of neighbor, seated in the heart and showing its fruits in virtue and happiness.” Dr. Heitzenrater says Wesley “pressed hard on the question of holy living.” That is a Methodist fundamental!
As Outler wrote, “I take comfort and courage in the undeniable fact that John Wesley believed and taught an explicit doctrine of ‘holiness’ as the goal and crown of the Christian life, and if this gives you trouble, the burden of proof shifts over to your side (if you claim to be Wesleyan at all) to explain why you are prepared to reject or ignore what he regarded as not only essential but climactic. . . . He rang the changes on this theme throughout his whole evangelistic career, insisting that it was the special mission of the Methodists to hold and ‘to spread this doctrine of scriptural holiness over the land.’”
Though the intent for this series was to have four columns, we cannot stop short of naming “perfecting grace” as a Wesleyan fundamental. That will be the topic of the next column. Then we will gather up some of your questions, criticisms and comments and respond to them.
Dr. Haynes is an instructor in United Methodist studies at Hood Theological Seminary. dhaynes11@triad.rr.com.
Donald Haynes
Theologian Albert Outler wrote, “Wesley’s irreducible minimum of Christian fundamentals were three: the self knowledge of one’s sin and need for repentance; pardon and assurance; and “holiness of heart and life.” The latter fundamental defines a “holiness without which no one shall see the Lord.” 
 12-09.gif)