JOHN WESLEY:
DISCIPLE OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY

by
Luke L. Keefer, Jr.

Memorial inscriptions frequently attempt to sum up the essence of an individual's life. Two such inscriptions associated with Wesley's City Road Chapel in London are instructive in this regard. The significant excerpt from his tombstone reads:

The commemorative tablet in the chapel speaks of Wesley as

Should these early assessments of Wesley be dismissed as the hyperbolic extravagance of sentimental Methodists? Or do they have a justifiable basis in the factual materials documenting Wesley's life and labors? What did he say and do that would warrant such a conclusion? More importantly, what was his own self-conscious assessment of his role in Christian history? These are the questions that lead us to a study of the primitivistic 3 motif in Wesley's life.

Taught by his father to revere the patristic age as containing the best commentaries upon the apostolic writings and schooled at Charterhouse in the classics, Wesley arrived at Oxford University at a propitious time. The patristic revival of the previous century at both Oxford and Cambridge had made numerous writings of the early church available to the serious student. The record of Wesley's reading at Oxford shows that he availed himself of this privilege and read much of the Fathers, especially after his decision to become a clergyman.

Two additional influences played key roles in Wesley's developing primitivism during his Oxford years. The Holy Club was an experiment in early Christianity in many respects. As Wesley noted late in life, the Holy Club practiced the community of goods modeled in Acts 2 and 4. The group's charities were in imitation of the earthly ministry of Christ to the needy. The more serious members were instant in prayer and the study of the Scriptures. They made virtues of fasting and frequent attendance at the Lord's Supper. The persecution they suffered for being "righteous overmuch" was reconciled in terms of the eighth beatitude. Wesley's rejoinder to his critics in these matters was the query: "Ought not the disciple to be like his Lord in all things?"

In his last years at Oxford, Wesley was in extreme debt to the Non-Jurors of the Anglican tradition. They turned his interests to early ecclesiastical tradition, especially its liturgical and sacramental features. Wesley adopted the Non-Jurors' assessment of the so-called Apostolic Constitutions and the Apostolic Canons, for they held them to be the authentic collection of apostolic teaching concerning proper church order.

Wesley went out to Georgia as a missionary inspired with this vision of the ancient church. The Georgia colonists showed little inclination to their pastor's ecclesiastical primitivism so carefully culled from the Apostolic Constitutions and other treatises on the primitive church. His insistence upon the immersion of infants, early morning worship services, water mixed with the communion wine, and other ancient practices had them mystified. They suspected he was a Roman Catholic in disguise, and fervently wished he would establish his new Jerusalem in some other parish, preferably on the other side of the Jordan.

His first attempt to restore primitive Christianity had been a failure. It was mitigated, however, by several redeeming factors. His reading of Bishop Beveridge corrected his views of the primitive church imbibed from the Non-Jurors. He discovered that he had extended the primitive era too late into Christian history. Also, he had accorded too much weight to the ecclesiastical decisions of the early councils, giving them a universal authority that should pertain to Scripture alone. Henceforth, he would date the end of the primitive church with Constantine's rise to power, would consider the Apostolic Constitutions and Canons to be sub-apostolic, and would be a faithful "homo unius libri," allowing no authority to approach that of Scripture. In the process Wesley had moved to a new understanding of the early church, but it would be nearly a decade before that became obvious to himself and to others.

At the same time Wesley was attracted by the evangelical primitivism of the Moravians. It was their piety that first caught his eye, but it was not long before he was probing them with questions about their doctrine and discipline. He was favorably impressed by the primitive character of their movement in these areas. Having been an observer of their election and consecration of Bishop Anton Seifert, he imagined himself carried back through the centuries to the primitive Christian assembly, where leaders were called to their task with true simplicity. The Moravian revival of the primitive agape also captivated his spirit. In short, he saw the Moravians as those who had recovered more of the primitive Christian religion than those like himself who had devoted themselves to ancient ecclesiastical practices. Undoubtedly Wesley was prepared by the Moravians' demonstration of genuine Christian primitivism to be instructed by them concerning justifying faith.

The years 1738 and 1739 were crucial in the development of Wesley's primitivism. They were also symbolic in that Aldersgate and Bristol serve as significant code names for the soteriology and ecclesiology that marked the rest of his career.

One must first note the relationship of Aldersgate to Wesley's vision of a repristinated Christianity. Some nineteenth century Methodist writers gave the impression that Aldersgate was the termination of the primitivistic nonsense that marked Wesley's life at Oxford and Georgia. This is a most unfortunate misconception. Quite he contrary, Wesley found his true link to the primitive faith at Aldersgate, namely, conversion as a conscious work of the Holy Spirit.

He found his way to Aldersgate precisely because he agreed with Bohler to rest the case upon Scripture and experience. His study of the book of Acts convinced him that conversion was an instantaneous work of the Holy Spirit. The testimonies of eighteenth century Englishmen convinced him that God's work of salvation was identical in all centuries. Suddenly the door to primitive Christianity was open to him, a door he had searched for in vain among the ecclesiastical practices of the ancient church. Aldersgate, then, refocused Wesley's primitivism from ecclesiology to soteriology.

The wedding of soteriology and primitivism is pervasive throughout the entire course of Wesley's subsequent writings. It is the general perspective in the doctrinal standards of Methodism: his Standard Sermons and the Notes Upon the New Testament. However, a few specific examples from his writings might help to grasp the point. In Wesley's last sermon before Oxford University, he preached on Acts 4:31: "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost." His description of salvation in the early church is Aldersgate theology through and through. He offended his polite audience in the extreme by holding them to this standard of the primitive faith and asking them if their Christian profession measured up to it. Bishop Gibson's handwritten summary of what he felt Wesley was saying in this sermon indicates that he understood Wesley's clear implication that apostolic faith was being restored in Methodist evangelism.4

Wesley's first Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion (1743) is a careful defense of Methodist doctrine and methods. Since it was directed primarily to Anglicans, he made frequent appeals to the doctrinal formularies of the English Church. However, his ultimate appeal was to Scripture and the testimony of the primitive church, for he portrayed the Methodist revival as a restoration of primitive Christianity. If any missed the point in his narrative, his brother's thirty verse poem on Primitive Christianity, appended to the end of the treatise, should have established the fact.5 For Wesley experiential salvation and primitive Christianity were now synonymous.

The last example comes from Wesley's Christian Library, his fifty volumes of abridged selections of the best treatises on practical divinity available to English readers. His first volume was most instructive. After extracts of Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Macarius, which he felt best represented the Christianity of the sub-apostolic period, he skipped over more than a millennium of history and next presented John Arndt's True Christianity. Arndt was considered by many to be the John the Baptist of Pietism. Under the term "mystical Christianity," Arndt called people to an experiential knowledge of salvation. Thus, in the clearest possible way, Wesley was saying that the new birth, as Pietism understood it, was the connecting link to the piety of the early church. He gives us a strong hint here about his understanding of his own conversion under the influence of Moravian Pietism.

For Wesley the path from Aldersgate to Bristol was one of his shorter journeys. Bristol was the historical location where the implications of Aldersgate broke through into Wesley's churchmanship. Thus it serves as the appropriate code name for the inevitable ecclesiological readjustment brought on by Wesley's shift to soteriological primitivism.

In the early years of the revival Wesley came to a new understanding of the church. He perceived now what he first glimpsed uncertainly in reading Bishop Beveridge. His misguided ecclesiology at Oxford and Georgia was due to a static view of the ancient church. He mistakenly attributed universal value to church practices which were simply fitted to the cultural conditions of the early Christian era. His study of the church in Acts revealed a dynamic concept of the church. The Spirit providentially led the church to forms of government and ministry that enhanced the spread of the gospel. This fitted exactly with Wesley's own revival experiences at Bristol and elsewhere, where he was led to innovative measures to spread the revival.

In the first place, this meant that the true church was a missionary church as was the primitive church. Wesley told his preachers their chief task was to save souls. Parish boundaries established by centuries of ecclesiastical tradition would not be observed. Like the early apostles the Methodists would go anywhere the Spirit led to announce the joyful news of salvation. Moreover, Methodism repudiated the sacramental theology which saw salvation as conferred upon the entire community through the rites of the church. Christianity for the Methodists was not a matter of territory or ceremony; it was a personal matter of conversion.

Secondly, church government and practice now became purely functional issues for Wesley, though they had been absolutely formal issues for him at Oxford and in Georgia. Now, the determinative question regarding ecclesiastical practices was the degree to which they contributed to or detracted from the missionary task of the church. Wesley's reply to "John Smith" said it best.

One senses the implications of these words when he discovers the phenomenal changes Wesley was making in his ecclesiology during the 1740's. He abandoned his prior belief in apostolic succession, the threefold order of ministry, and the divine right of the episcopal form of government in the church. Books on the early church by Bishop Stillingfleet and Lord Peter King were influential in these areas. Their impact was the greater because they confirmed Wesley's experiences in the Methodist revival. The Established Church, which held these ecclesiastical matters to be of supreme importance, was not winning souls in Wesley's estimation. In fact its very insistence upon these structures hindered the work of evangelism. Meanwhile, Methodism's lay preaching, field preaching, and itinerant ministry were fulfilling the church's evangelistic mandate.

Armed by the Biblical and patristic support for a dynamic, functional view of ecclesiology, Wesley took some rather decisive stands. The minutes of the Methodist Conferences for the years 1745-1749 demonstrate the extent to which Wesley was prepared to go.7 One is struck by his account of the functional development of offices in the early church. His description of the office of bishop is so obviously autobiographic in its overtones that one understands his statements, later, that from this point onward he considered himself to be a true, scriptural "episkopos." His measures to ensure the continuity of Methodism taken near the end of his life, especially his ordination of Methodist preachers, find their roots here in the first decade of the revival.

Aldersgate and Bristol served as twin prisms through which Wesley's view of the early church was refocused. He was a different primitivist thereafter, but he was no less a primitivist. If one doubts Wesley's continuing interest in the early church after Aldersgate, he should peruse his letter to Vincent Perronet in which he explained the entire Methodist system as it existed in 1748. He explained the functions of the society, the classes, the bands, the penitents' group, and the visitors of the sick. His account also reflected upon the Methodists' watchnight and lovefeast services, their practice of discipline, their charities, and the foundation of their schools. While he acknowledged that each of these features developed to meet pressing needs, following only the Scripture and common sense, he noted with obvious pleasure the correspondence of these features with similar institutions in Christian antiquity. So confident was he that Methodism had revived significant aspects of the apostolic age that he wrote: "I can now say to all the world, 'come and see how these Christians love one another!'"8

To the very end of his life Wesley's actions regarding Methodism, as well as his support for certain features of it, are best explained in terms of his primitivism. Thus he pressed for the separate seating of men and women in the services, the continuation of early morning services (preferably at 5 a.m.), and the practice of regular fasting. The role of women in the spiritual ministries of Methodism was justified on the basis of the deaconesses in the early church, and the role of the Methodist stewards was compared to the New Testament deacons. When he prepared the doctrinal articles and the service book for the American Methodists in 1784, he did so with the urging of John Fletcher that he purge the articles and the liturgy of the English Church according to the purity of the primitive church.9

Wesley came to the end of his career with the conviction that Methodist doctrine and discipline, evaluated comprehensively, came nearer the primitive pattern of the church than any ecclesiastical organization that he knew. In his declining years he frequently marveled at the Methodist revival. In the swiftness of its growth, the extensiveness of its influence, and the depth of its piety, he could find no equal since the first age of the church. He died with the satisfaction that primitive Christianity was being restored in his day, believing that the eschaton could not be long in coming.10 When his followers, therefore, compared Methodism to the primitive Church, they were merely taking their cue from Wesley himself.

A feature common to Christian primitivists is a view of history that divides time into three periods: a golden age, a fall, and a restoration. Wesley shared this general scheme of ecclesiastical history. One of the best expressions of this periodization is found in a cluster of sermons he published in 1788.11 Our interest here is in Wesley's unique perceptions of each of these periods.

For Wesley the golden age of the church extended from Christ's incarnation to the coronation of Constantine. His golden age, however, was arranged hierarchically in a series of concentric circles. An analogy to the Biblical temple might illustrate his understanding. The sub-apostolic age was the temple courtyard. The New Testament era was the holy place and thus qualitatively distinct from the second and third centuries. Within the New Testament era, the church of the first four chapters of Acts constituted the holy of holies. The Jerusalem Church was Wesley's supreme model of primitive Christianity.

The "mystery of iniquity" forms the core of Wesley's understanding of the fall. It existed already in the New Testament, tarnishing the image of the Jerusalem Church itself. Coveteousness (Acts 5), partiality (Act 6), and prejudice (Acts 15) troubled even the golden age. The apostolic epistles reflect various defects in the church. Wesley believed these defects gradually increased in the second and third centuries, offset by periodic revivals, and culminated in an abysmal plunge when Constantine tried to Christianize the empire. Wesley believed the restoration of the church began in the Protestant Reformation. It was, however, a reformation that was both inadequate and incomplete. Wesley credited the reformers with purging the church in doctrine and worship, but for him these were not the essential issues. Purifying the church of Romanism did not remove the errors of Constantinianism. Until people were reformed in heart and life, a less Roman church was still not a primitive church. A facelift could give the appearance of youth, but it could not restore the vigor nor the vision of the youthful church in Acts.

This suggests clearly that the word "reformation" is not radical enough to characterize Wesley's conception of repristinated Christianity. While he stands very close to the restitutionist vision, on the other hand, he differs from it, also, in several areas. This is quite evident when, for example, he is compared to the Anabaptists. It should be noted parenthetically that Wesley's knowledge of the Anabaptists was both meager and second-handed. This obviously conditioned his criticisms of restitutionism.

First, Wesley believed restitutionists viewed the golden age of the church too naively. They imposed upon it an artificial purity and did not credit sufficiently the detrimental influence of the "mystery of iniquity." This meant that restitutionist groups proliferated successionist movements, each intent upon establishing the absolutely pure church.

Secondly, Wesley's identification of the Constantinian error differed from many of the radical reformers. The fall of the church for Wesley was not the merging of the church and state per se. To the end of his life Wesley could tolerate an established church, and he felt Christians could be civil servants, including the use of legal oaths and the use of the sword. The Moravians were not able to bring him to a different conclusion regarding these matters in the primitive church. Constantine's damage, in Wesley's eyes, was that he "poured in a flood of riches, honours, and power, upon the Christians; more especially upon the Clergy."12 Thus the church lost the riches of saving grace, the honor of suffering for Christ's sake, the power of the Holy Spirit, and the love demonstrated in the community of shared material goods.

Thirdly, Wesley criticized Anabaptistic groups for their separatistic tendencies. Here he spoke more from the English context, thinking of the Puritans and Quakers a century after their most notable accomplishments. Such groups, he charged, became proud of their purity and thus lost the power of the Spirit that once invigorated them. In standing aloof from other communions they cut themselves off from the very people they needed to evangelize. Hence they never became a missionary force capable of reforming the nation.

If Wesley, then, cannot fit comfortably with restitutionism, especially the historic manifestations of it known to him, what word can describe his primitivism? This paper would suggest the word "revival." Revival sits well with the earlier comments about Wesley's soteriological primitivism and the centrality of Aldersgate to his life and career. It also works much better with his refocused ecclesiology. Wesley shied away from restitutionism precisely because he felt it made ecclesiology-a particular form of the church-more important than soteriology.

Wesley's reaction here was in terms of his own experience. His experiment at Oxford and Georgia with ecclesiastical primitivism ended in failure. Ecclesiology at best could produce Christians only in form. The New Testament Church owed its very life to the dynamic working of the Holy Spirit. Pentecost was the birthday of the church, and unless the Spirit was present in his saving work, one could never have an authentic church according to the primitive model. Soteriology led inevitably to ecclesiology, but it always preceded it.

Wesley feared that restitutionism implied static views of the church. He felt many restitutionist groups became in time as lifeless as the churches from which they initially withdrew. Unless the Spirit constantly saved from the "mystery of iniquity," the purest of churches would eventually fall as did the first church. Furthermore, any church that failed to follow the providential leadings of the Spirit, adapting its ecclesiology to the missionary needs of the age, would become salt without savor.

If Wesley had lived in the sixteenth century, he might have felt that ecclesiology was the crucial question of the age. He lived, instead, in eighteenth century England, and soteriology was then the burning issue of the day. This conditioned Wesley's perceptions quite strongly. It is not that he disparaged ecclesiology; many felt he was too rigid in his insistence upon the Methodist system. Nor did he think lightly of the primitive forms of the church; he positively rejoiced whenever Methodism could imitate any of them. But, at a deeper level, he was not trying to restore the church; he was trying to recapture primitive Christianity. He was more interested in the spirit of the early church than its form.

If Protestants must be assigned to either the camp of the magisterial reformers or the fold of the radical restitutionists, then, Wesley clearly belongs with the company of the restitutionists. But in a very real sense his stance was more radical than that of either group. The magisterial reformers were content to stop with a church purged of Romanism. The radicals were satisfied that they had successfully restored the church of the apostles and martyrs. Without denying their accomplishments, Wesley said these were not sufficient in themselves. The "mystery of iniquity" is a constant menace, even to the best church. The church is in constant need of salvation, lest it lose the vital breath of the Spirit. Unless there is a continuous revival of primitive Christianity, one could never talk of having recaptured the primitive church.

We could not be authentically Wesleyan unless we insisted upon the pragmatic value of such a study. I will try to imitate Wesley's penchant for brevity in sketching out three possible implications. First, Wesley's primitivism serves well as a hermeneutical key to his life. It runs through all the stages of his life, providing a unifying theme that binds together both sides of Aldersgate. It explicates his soteriology, which was the existential core of his theology. Its insight into his mature churchmanship solves many riddles in his ecclesiology. Primitivism explains the comprehensive nature of Wesley's Methodism, an eclectic breadth that defies standard theological labels. And it provides the background to his social concern.

An illuminating aspect of Wesley's social concern was his view of wealth. His comments upon Acts 2:44, 45 and 4:32-37 13 indicate that Wesley believed that the community of goods was the Lord's intention for the church in all ages. He believed Constantine's flood of riches upon the church caused its great fall. In the Holy Club at Oxford and in his missionary party in Georgia, the Christian community of goods was the virtual practice.14 Wesley tried to structure a form of shared goods into the Methodist system, but apparently it never received widespread acceptance.15 Thus he tried to get his people to contribute sacrificially to the needy around them in terms of his famous formula: "get all you can, save all you can, and give all you can."16 Late in life he was greatly troubled that many did not follow his example in philanthropy. He believed that wealth was hindering the revival of true primitive Christianity for eighteenth century Methodists as it had originally destroyed the primitive faith in the days of Constantine 17 Thus stewardship and social action were integral parts of Wesley's primitivism.

In the second place, Wesley's primitivism enlightens the perennial task of being a faithful church. If we invest Methodist models with ultimate value we are not being true to Wesley. Neither are we true to Wesley if we glorify the spontaneous and the novel. The early church is our one true model, but it is the Spirit alone who can both tie us to the primitive community of saints and lead us providentially as He did them, functionally and dynamically, in carrying out the missionary task of the church. This same model of the Jerusalem Church also speaks to the quality of our worship and fellowship, to our need for discipline and discipleship, and to our lack of stewardship and philanthropy.

In the area of ecumenicity there well may be a third implication. Wesley would caution us against seeking unity in terms of agreements concerning orders of ministry, theology of sacraments, or forms of worship. Such areas of ecclesiastical particularity may well be insurmountable. But even if "lowest common denominator" agreements should yield a widespread reunion, Wesley would have a crucial word for us. What then? If there is no more evidence of the Spirit in the united church than in the fragmented bodies, how has Christianity been restored to its primitive health? As at Pentecost, so in every age, it is the Spirit who creates the church. If his vital breath does not infuse our lump of clay, our ecumenical efforts will be merely the dressing of a corpse.

After Wesley was gone, those who knew him best tried to pin down the cause of his singular influence upon his age. It is interesting how many mention the word "apostolic" in their attempt to portray the character of the man. Many today still feel that quality when they read his sermons, journals, letters, or varied treatises. Like the character Ernest in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Great Stone Face, Wesley contemplated the primitive age until he began to reflect it in his own person. A lifelong disciple of the early church, he became at last an influential apostle of Christian primitivism.

1A copy of the complete epitaph can be found in John Whitehead, The Life of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A., 2 vols. (Boston: J. McLeish, 1844), II, 282.

2The complete inscription can be found in Beecham's " The Life of the Rev. John Wesley," The Works of John Wesley, 14 vols. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958-9), V, 549.

3Primitivism throughout this article stands for a religious outlook in Christianity in which one tries to recapture the spirit, thought, and practices of the early Church in one's own religious context.

4One can read Bishop Gibson's six point summary of the sermon in John S. Simon, John Wesley and the Methodist Societies(London: The Epworth Press, 1923), p. 319.

5Works, VIII, 43-45.

6John Telford, ed., The Letters of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 8 vols. (London: The Epworth Press, 1931), II, 77-78.

7Publications of The Wesley Historical Society, No. 1.John Bennet's copy of the Minutes of the Conferences of 1744, 1745, 1747, and 1748; With Wesley's Copy of Those for 1746 (London: Charles H. Kelley, 1896), pp. 24-50.

8Letters, II, 292-311. The quote is found on p. 308.

9Nehemiah Curnock, ed., The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M., 8 vols. (London: The Epworth Press,1909-16), VIII,331-334. Note also Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970), p. 249.

10At the foundation service (April 21, 1777,) for his new chapel on City Road, London, Wesley reviewed the history of Methodism from its rise to that late moment in his life. Wesley summarized Methodism as the revival of the genuine old religion of the Bible, the primitive church, and the English Church of the reformation era. He saw it as a singular work of God, unparalleled by any age since apostolic times. Works, VII, 419-430.

11Four sermons in sequence in that addition give a rather comprehensive sweep of his mature conception of sacred history. They are "The Mystery of Iniquity," "The End of Christ's Coming," "The General Spread of the Gospel," and "The New Creation." Works, VI, 253-296.

12Works, VI, 261-262.

13See, for example, his Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament for the passages cited.

14Works, VII, 421-422; Letters, I, 190.

15Note the action of the Methodist Conference of 1744 in regard to the Rules for the Select Society in Bennet's Minutes, p. 14. See also M. Riggall, "Richard Viney's Diary, 1744: Part VI," Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, XIV (1923-24), 29-30.

16This formula is spelled out in his sermon on "The Use of Money." Works, VI, 124-136.

17These views are expressed in detail in his sermon on "Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity." Ibid., VII, 281-290.