NOTES ON THE EXEGESIS OF JOHN WESLEY'S
"EXPLANATORY NOTES UPON THE NEW TESTAMENT"
by
Timothy L. Smith
Dr. Kenneth Grider's recent criticism of John Wesley's treatment
of the meaning of being baptized or filled with the Holy Spirit,1 in Wesley's Notes
on Acts, prompts the following comments. They are grounded in my belief that when seeking
to understand what eighteenth or nineteenth-century texts say, historical theologians
practice generally the same exegetical principles that guide students of the Old and New
Testaments.
The initial task in Wesleyan as in Biblical studies is to
establish the integrity of texts. In the case of the Notes, doing this does not require a
student to accept the conclusion which John Wesley came to early in life, and stated in
the preface, that the Bible comprises "one entire body," a "most solid and
precious system of divine truth." Clearly, Wesley also thought the central theme of
both the Old and the New Testaments to be God's promise to renew fallen humanity in the
divine image. Nor dc you need to chare his apparent conviction that in the New Testament
the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, standing together, proclaim in a saving
narrative exactly what the Epistles of Paul and the other apostles affirm, namely, that
"the kingdom of God," by whose sovereign grace we become partakers of the divine
nature, "is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." What is at issue
here is simply the integral character of what Wesley wrote in his Notes Upon The New
Testament.
Of this there should be no question. John Wesley composed the Notes
himself, with occasional help from his brother Charles. He borrowed much from John A.
Bengel, but also relied upon several other commentators whom he mentions in his preface.
Although he began the task in January 1754, Wesley did most of the writing in a space of
less than four months in the winter of 1755-56. To be sure, his revisions of the text of
the Scriptures themselves, many adopted from Bengel, rested on exegetical work he had done
across the three previous decades. But he certainly thought about all those revisions
during the period when he was writing the Notes. Revisions and notes, therefore,
comprise a single literary work that reflects Wesley's biblical convictions in a crucial
but brief period of his sixty-seven year ministry.
Modern New Testament scholars simply tear Wesley's text apart
when they impose upon it the mosaic of divisions they customarily observe when commenting
on the Scriptures. For example, separating his notes on the Acts from those he wrote on
John's Gospel ignore not only his conviction of their theological unity but the fact that
he probably finished his commentary on John only a few days before he began working on
Acts. His notes on John 14:15, 20 and 23 affirmed his belief that when, as on the day of
Pentecost, Father, Son and Holy Spirit come to "abide forever" in those who
believe in, love, and obey Christ, the event constitutes "such a large manifestation
of the divine presence and love that the former, in justification, is as nothing in
comparison of it." The notes on Jesus' prayer in John 17 for the sanctification of
all true believers, including His disciples then present and all who would later believe
on Him "through their word," made precisely the same point. And Wesley's
succeeding notes on John 20:22, 28 and 21:15 indicate clearly his view that whatever
spiritual 1099 the eleven apostles may have suffered from their denial and flight in the
face of the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ was fully recovered by the faith-inspiring
presence of the risen Lord.
Wesley's belief in the unity of the New Testament Scriptures, and
his assumption that his preachers would read the Notes with that unity in mind, are
sufficient reasons to explain why he did not find it necessary to comment at all upon the
meaning of being filled with the Spirit in Acts 2:4. Nor did he comment on Acts 4:31, the
text of his well-known last sermon at Oxford -- last precisely because he had shown that
verse to declare that all believers in all ages, and not simply the first apostles, were
to seek and expect to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and by that event to be perfected in
love.
Having established the authorship and unity of the text,
historians then turn, as biblical scholars do, to the historical setting of the work they
are dealing with. Wesley began writing the Notes four years after he had revised and
published his third volume of sermons. Included there were the last four of the majestic
series of thirteen on Christian perfection, as taught in the Sermon on the Mount; the one
on "Satan's Devices," which dealt so explicitly with the work of the Holy Spirit
in the life of the believer seeking the experience of perfect love; and the one entitled
"A Caution Against Bigotry." In the last, he described the experience of
Christian perfection, when the heart of a believer becomes "an habitation of God
through his Spirit." In that moment, Wesley wrote, "the energy of Satan ends,
and the Son of God destroys the works of the Devil . . . His desires are refined, his
affections purified; and, being filled with the Holy Ghost he grows in grace till he is
not only holy in heart, but in all manner of conversation." Within weeks of the
publication of the Notes he wrote his important letter "On Christian Perfection"
to the Reverend Mr. Dodd and a long Address to the Clergy of the Church of England.
Both of these gently but firmly called ministers to the experience of Christian holiness.
In the winter of 1757-58, two years after completing the Notes,
Wesley began to preach far more insistently about entire sanctification in his annual
visits to the Methodist societies in England and Ireland. The result was the awakening
that prompted Wesley to write in his journal for 28 October, 1762 that his Pentecost
"was now fully come." Texts that appear with great frequency in the sermon
register during the revival years include those of the major sermons on entire
sanctification published at its end, between 1760 and 1768: "Wandering Thoughts"
(1760); "On Sin in Believers" (1763); "Scripture Way of Salvation"
(1765); and "The Repentance of Believers" (1768). During the revival he also
carefully edited the Notes for a new edition; and in September, 1758, he wrote Thoughts
on Christian Perfection. In the latter work, a condensation of which formed a large
part of his Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766), Wesley equated being
"full of His Spirit" (Q. 32), "filled with pure love" (Q. 3, 7, 25),
"filled with the love of God" (Q. 6,18), and "filled with all the fullness
of God" (Q. 17) with having attained "scriptural perfection."2
The purpose of the Plain Account of course, was to demonstrate the consistency with
which Wesley had proclaimed, beginning in the year 1740, that a second moment of
sanctifying grace was crucial to the process by which God brought His children to full
inward and outward perfection.
This historical and theological setting of the Notes makes it
unlikely indeed that Wesley's surprising silences about not only the meaning of being
filled with the Spirit but about the second work of sanctifying grace generally are a
proper basis to judge his doctrine on those subjects. Indeed, a quick glance at the notes
he wrote on the great texts from which he characteristically preached both the general
doctrine of perfect love and the specific call to faith for the experience of it (for
example, Matt. 5:4, 6; John 15:12; 16:22; Rom. 6:6; 2 Cor. 3:17-18; Gal. 5:17; 6:15; Eph.
2:13; 4:24; 5:5; Col. 2:10; and 1 John 1:7; 2:13; 3:8; and 4:17) hardly indicates that he
had ever preached on those texts, much less proclaimed the promise of entire
sanctification from them. The more sensible conclusion is that he he did not intend in the
Notes to duplicate what he had already proclaimed from one end of the British Isles to the
other, in meetings great and small and in public print as well.
This brings us, logically, to the next step in the task of
exegesis, namely, establishing the primary and the important secondary purposes of the
text we are dealing with. Here, Wesley's preface to the Notes seems to reflect his
life-long habit of candor. His purpose, he said, was not to display his learning or pander
to that of others, but to "assist serious persons, who have not the advantage of
learning [that is, a knowledge of the original languages of Scripture], in understanding
the New Testament." "I have endeavored to make the notes as short as
possible," Wesley continued, "that the comment may not obscure or swallow up the
text; and as plain as possible, in pursuance of my main design, to assist the unlearned
reader." He believed he had not "written one line with a purpose of inflaming
the hearts of Christians against each other." He wished "that all the party
names and unscriptural phrases and forms which have divided the Christian world were
forgot, and that we might all agree to sit down together, as humble, loving disciples, at
the feet of our common Master, to hear His word, to imbibe His Spirit, and to transcribe
His life in our own." Christian theology, he declared, was set forth in the words of
Scripture itself. His preachers needed only to be able to read those words with precision.
The consistency of this statement of purpose with Wesley's
life-long reliance upon the "plain meanings" of Scripture to teach Christian
truth is apparent to anyone closely familiar with his major works. He had many times
declared that the doctrine of Christian perfection was nothing more than the common faith,
accessible to any who read the Bible with the aim of being fully renewed in the image of
God. Accordingly, he quoted Luther's definition of theology toward the end of the preface:
"Divinity is nothing but the grammar of the language of the Holy Ghost."
Indeed, Wesley's formal expositions of the theology of salvation,
grounded in his own life-long study and exegesis of Scripture, lay before the world
already in the three volumes of sermons he had published and in several others published
separately, such as the one on "Free Grace." All but one of these sermons dated
from after his discovery in the spring of 1738 that salvation by faith, in an instant of
grace, was the New Testament's promise. When he began work on the Notes, therefore, I
think he correctly assumed that his preachers and class leaders were acquainted both with
those published sermons and with his repeated preaching of them in their hearing, as he
traveled over the British Isles.
I find no evidence of any hidden agenda in Wesley's preparation
of the Notes. And I believe that his hundreds of revisions of the authorized
translation, which Herbert McGonigle is heroically laboring to sort out at the University
of Manchester, had precisely the same objective stated in his preface: to make the sense
of the original as clear as possible to readers having only an ordinary English education.
He was, of course, always certain that the Scriptures must be the authority for all
Christian belief. And he had long since been convinced that they declare the promise of
heart purity, of perfect love, to all believers, by grace alone, through faith. Far from
feeling constrained to labor the point in the Notes, he seemed content to let the plain
meanings of what he later called "The Scripture Way of Salvation" speak for
themselves. The truth he wanted his readers to grasp lay not in his comments but in the
Word of the Lord, illumined by the ever-faithful Holy Spirit.
Text, context, and governing purposes having been thus, in my
judgment, established, the student must next ponder the actual language used in the Notes
in the light of Wesley's repeated employment of the same words and phrases in the great
body of his prose and poetic writings. This is necessary to escape the tendency to impose
twentieth-century meanings upon compositions written in the eighteenth century, as well as
to identify such special theological meanings as John Wesley had developed for particular
words and phrases. This large task is somewhat simpler than it seems at the outset,
because Wesley's theological language, whether in sermons, hymns, or tracts, was
overwhelmingly biblical. And the definitions that he had assigned to certain terms had
been, by the time the Notes were published, set out in numerous paragraphs of scriptural
exegesis in his sermons and essays. His repeated use of them, when studied with ordinary
care, leaves little room for doubt as to their special meanings.
All of this can be demonstrated by reference to a phrase that
appears continuously in Wesley's writings between 1738 and the preparation of these notes,
namely, "fearing God and working righteousness." In the Aldersgate sermon,
"Salvation by Faith" (1738), and in a succession of other sermons on the new
birth, such as the early one on Romans 8:15, "The Spirit of Bondage and
Adoption" (1739), Wesley explained that to be awakened by the Holy Spirit to a sense
of conviction for sin is to know the fear of the Lord. But no person could, in the proper
scriptural sense, actually do good or righteous works before that fear was displaced by
his or her experience of the new life in Christ that comes in regeneration, or
"justification by faith." The phrase "fearing God and working
righteousness," therefore, like another favorite, "faith working by love,"
refers consistently in John Wesley's writings of these years to what is only possible to
those who have been "born of the Spirit" and experience saving grace. Even a
"babe in Christ," he rejoiced, has sufficient grace to overcome temptation to
sin. Such a person both fears God and works righteousness.
And what is the scriptural source of that phrase? It appears only
in the opening words of Peter's sermon at the house of Cornelius: "In every nation he
that feareth him and worketh righteousness is accepted by him (Acts 10:35)." Wesley's
strong note on it reads: "Is accepted of him -- through Christ, though he knows Him
not. The assertion is express, and admits of no exception. He is in the favor of God,
whether enjoying His written word and ordinances or not." No hint of this comment
appears in Bengel's work the ideas and the words seem to be entirely Wesley's.
Thus did Wesley declare, quite simply, that Cornelius was saved
by faith, even though his faith did not consist in actually knowing or explicitly trusting
in Jesus Christ as Lord. Wesley knew that such a declaration ran counter to the
preoccupation of his evangelical contemporaries with formulations of Christian words that
had to be known, believed, and recited before one could be saved. He and, later, John
Fletcher, following him, argued the contrary. From this and other scriptures they posited
a "dispensation of the Gentiles." And a dispensation, in their view, was not a
period of time but a relationship under which God dispensed the grace of salvation in a
particular way-to Gentiles, in one; to Jews, in another and much higher manner; and, after
Christ had come, to those who believed in Him in an even "more excellent way."
When Wesley came to the words in Acts 15:9, where Peter,
reporting on the events at the house of Cornelius, spoke of God "purifying their
hearts by faith," his brief note said only this: "Purifying-This word is
repeated from chapter x.15. Their hearts-The heart is the proper seat of purity. By
Faith-Without concerning themselves with the Mosaic law." The words are a succinct
reworking of Bengel's. But Wesley omitted Bengel's further comment that "he who hath
the Holy Spirit and faith . . . hath liberty and purity, and is no longer subject to the
law. " It contradicted his oft-expressed view that all believers "have" the
Holy Spirit, even those who do not yet enjoy liberty or purity from inbred sin, and that
when they do enjoy this second blessing they remain not only subject to the law but
gloriously able to fulfill it. One would scarcely suspect from this the significance of
Acts 15:9 to John Wesley's theology. In the long sequence of passages in sermons,
prefaces, and essays where, as in a litany, he piled Scripture upon Scripture to declare
the promise to believers of purity of heart and perfect love, the phrase that appears
almost as persistently as "full renewal in the divine image" is "purifying
their hearts by faith."
Wesley's observations on Acts 10:15 and 15:9, therefore, are not
theological comments at all, but exactly what the title of his work called them,
"explanatory notes." His preaching and published writings had long since made
clear what he thought these two verses affirmed about salvation theology: justification by
faith, in the one case, and the experience of heart purity, as in the experience of the
apostles at Pentecost, in the other.
A similar comparison of Wesley's use in other places of the words
in his note on Acts 1:5, "and so upon all true believers to the end of time,"
will yield parallel results. The note is in fact a nearly direct quotation from his early
sermon on "Christian Perfection," at the point where he discussed Jesus' promise
of the "sanctifying graces" to be poured out at Pentecost, as recorded in John
7:38-39. His notes on the latter verses, not foreshadowed by a syllable in Bengel, made
the same point as the sermon:
Whosoever doth come to Him by faith, his inmost soul shall be
filled with living water, with abundance of peace, joy, and love, which shall likewise
flow from him to others. As the scripture hath said-.... Here is a general reference to
all those scriptures which speak of the effusion of the Spirit by the Messiah, under the
similitude of pouring out water. The Holy Ghost was not yet given-That is, those fruits of
the Spirit were not yet given, even to true believers, in that full measure.
For those who had read these words, or who had read his sermons
and tracts and sung his and his brother Charles's hymns, the cryptic comment on Acts 1:5
distilled the essence of Wesleyan teaching about entire sanctification: it was God's
promise. He who had brought "true believers" to life in the Spirit was bound by
the New Covenant to answer the cry of their hearts to be filled with the Spirit. He would
sanctify them through and through. He would bless with all inward righteousness those who
in the "godly temper" of meekness hungered and thirsted after it.
The reliability of this "promise of the Father" was
crucial to John Wesley in a deeply personal way. For since his Oxford days he had been
certain that the hearts of Christians must be made pure before they could "see God.
"
Peter declared at the end of his Pentecost sermon that the full
benefit of that promise, and not simply their initiation by grace into it, was extended to
"as many as the Lord our God (hall call." But those who wished that benefit must
begin with repentance, faith and baptism. When Wesley came to Acts 2:38-39, he added to
Bengel's thin reference to its trinitarian significance his own unusually full comment:
Repent -- and hereby return to God. Be baptized, believing in the
name of Jesus . . . The gift of the Holy Ghost does not mean, in this place, the power of
speaking with tongues; for the promise of this was not given to all that were afar off in
distant ages and nations; but rather the constant fruits of faith, even righteousness, and
peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.
The last words, Methodist readers knew, were from one of his
favorite texts on regeneration. The word "constant" points to a hundred passages
of prose and poetry in which the Wesleys expounded the difference between receiving and
being fully renewed by the "abiding" Holy Spirit.
On the crucial word in Acts 2:4, however, "And they were all
filled with the Holy Spirit," Wesley made no comment in the Notes at all. Obviously,
this was not because he had no opinions upon it. Rather, I think, he was certain that in
the context of what he had preached for fifteen years and what he had already said in his
notes upon John 14:17-23 and other passages, his readers would understand without further
help the truth the text declared. That truth, he believed was as certain as God's promises
are true: the Holy Spirit, in His fully sanctifying grace, would, by faith, and without
omitting any, come "upon all true believers to the end of time."
Notes
1J. Kenneth Grider,
"Evaluation of Timothy Smith's Interpretation of Wesley," Wesleyan
Theological Journal, 15:2 (Fall 1980), pp. 64-69.
2The only readable edition of Thoughts
on Christian Perfection is in Albert C. Outler, ed., John Wesley (New York:
Oxford, 1964), 283-97.
Edited by George Lyons for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
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