SPIRIT AND FORM IN WESLEY'S THEOLOGY:
A RESPONSE TO KEEFER'S "JOHN WESLEY: DISCIPLE OF EARLY CHRISTIANITY"

by
Howard A. Snyder

Luke Keefer's principal thesis, as I see it, is that "Aldersgate refocused Wesley's primitivism from ecclesiology to soteriology" (p. 4). The Aldersgate experience brought about an "inevitable ecclesiological readjustment" in which Wesley's primitivism continued but became primarily soteriological, rather than ecclesiological.

I find myself in essential agreement with the main body of Keefer's paper. I would qualify, however, Keefer's argument at several points.

1. It is somewhat misleading to speak of a shift from "ecclesiological primitivism" to "soteriological primitivism" in Wesley, or in connection with Aldersgate. One needs to remember that restoration of the form of life of primitive Christianity was always Wesley's goal, both before and after Aldersgate.

2. Keefer connects Wesley's Aldersgate experience with Pietism, seeing the stress on the New Birth as the connecting link between Wesley, Pietism, and the early church. I believe the sources reveal, however, that the real connecting link was the stress on the life of Christian perfection. It is true that the New Birth was a prominent theme in Spener and Francke, but both saw this as means to the end of Christian perfection. Both before and after Aldersgate Wesley's primary concern was with the holy life, and this is what drew him to John Arndt (often considered the father of German Pietism) and to such early sources as Macarius-all of whom emphasized Christian perfection, with the image of God as an important theological starting point.

3. It is true that after Aldersgate we find a shift from a more static to a more dynamic view of the church in Wesley-but this is not a shift away from ecclesiology. It is a shift toward a more organic and functional view of the church. The concern after Aldersgate is not with life rather than form, but rather with life and with life-nurturing form, with how to enliven the forms. In this connection, it goes too far to say that "Methodism repudiated sacramental theology," unless we are speaking of Methodism after Wesley.

Wesley maintained a continuous interest in ecclesiology-in the nature and structure of the church-throughout life, from his Oxford days until his death.1 This was, in fact, one of the constants in Wesley's life. It was parallel to and connected with his consistent life-long stress on the Eucharist. Yet it is a Wesleyan theme which is largely overlooked today. In part, the ecclesiological interest was a reflection of Wesley's personality; this remarkable man was always, from childhood on, interested in method and form.

There are many ways of illustrating this in Wesley. Wesley said he considered himself, Biblically, as an episkopos. This was an important question for him; he felt he had to be able to justify his practice as head of the Methodists according to a Biblical ecclesiology. He pointed to the correspondence between Methodist and early church practices and forms as evidence for the authenticity of the Methodist revival and as signs of the restoration of primitive Christianity. (Cf. Wesley's "Plain Account of the People Called Methodists.")

Wesley's understanding of holiness as "social," and the ideal of a community of goods in the church (which he also maintained to the end of his life), further attest the ecclesiological bearing of his whole theological system. To speak of community of goods in the church is to speak of the wedding of spirit and form, not simply of one or the other. So-called Wesleyan theology is not truly Wesleyan, in fact, if it ignores this dimension.

Keefer suggests that Wesley was trying to "recapture primitive Christianity," not "to restore the church." In fact, however, these two were inseparable for Wesley. It may be argued that one of Wesley's keenest insights was precisely the inseparable link between spirit and form.

In his helpful comparison of Wesley's view of the church with the Radical Protestant or Anabaptist theme of restitution, Keefer suggests that revival, rather than restitution or reformation, is in fact Wesley's conceptual model for the recovery of primitive Christianity. I would argue, however, that revival is inadequate as a model precisely because it usually fails to connote the ecclesiological dimension which was prominent in Wesley. Perhaps the more fundamental Wesleyan model, which has affinity with the Radical Protestant model, is restoration-the restoration of both the spirit and the form of primitive Christianity. We know that a fundamental theme of Wesley's theology (as also of Arndtian and Spenerian Pietism) was the restoration of the image of God in human experience. Ecclesiologically for Wesley, this translates into the restoration in principle, if not in detail, of the form of the early church. Wesley desired, and believed he was witnessing in part, the restoration of the image of God in Christian experience and of the life of the early church in the corporate experience of the Methodists. Revival in personal, individual experience of the life of the primitive church is not enough; genuine revival means restoration of a committed, covenant life together. This is precisely what Wesley was attempting, and this is what marks him off, in part, from George Whitefield.

In sum, Keefer's paper tends to move from ecclesiology to soteriology in a way which is not really Wesleyan. It does, however, reflect the common tendency in the contemporary church to neglect the ecclesiological bearing of soteriology. At this point Wesley stands closer to the Radical Reformers than to Luther or to contemporary Evangelicalism. There is a strong tendency among Evangelicals to dissolve ecclesiology into the immediacy of personal Christian experience-a tendency, in the name of functionality, to make the question of normative patterns of shared Christian life irrelevant. This tendency testifies not only to the individualism of much contemporary Christianity but also to a kind of sociological naivete.

Keefer rightly says that "If we invest Methodist models with ultimate value we are not being true to Wesley." On the other hand, however, if contemporary Wesleyans do not develop functional equivalents to such Methodist structures as the class meeting, "lay" preaching, and the Methodist society, they also are betraying Wesley. As even the name "Methodist" suggests, it is hard to imagine an authentic Wesleyan theology which focuses exclusively on spirit, to the neglect of form. And one does not really have Methodist or Wesleyan "experience" without some form of life together in community.

In this sense, one of Wesley's profoundest insights remains his statement in Discourse IV on the Sermon on the Mount: "Christianity is essentially a social religion, and . . . to turn it into a solitary one is to destroy it."2

1See in this connection my The Radical Wesley and Patterns for Church Renewal (InterVarsity, 1980).

2Wesley, Works (3rd ed.), V. 296.