THE EPWORTH-CANTERBURY-CONSTANTINOPLE AXIS

by
A. M. Alichin  

I must begin by saying what a joy and a privilege it is for me to be here and to have a part in this meeting on Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy. The subject is one which for many years has seemed to me to be of great importance, and one on which I have worked from time to time. The chance to take it up again in a new context and with new encouragement has been very precious to me.

I bring with me on this occasion, at least in the spirit, a very dear friend, colleague and teacher who died some fourteen years ago, but, who has not ceased to influence me, H. A. Hodges (1905-1976). To him I owe my whole initiation into this topic.

Herbert Hodges, by temperament a quiet, retiring man, was one of the most distinguished lay theologians that the Church of England has known in the twentieth century. By family background and upbringing he was a Methodist. At Oxford, as an undergraduate, he passed through a time of unbelief. When he regained his Christian faith it was in a distinctly Anglican and Catholic form. In this, his personal evolution parallels that of his friend and contemporary Austin Farrer, who also came from a free church background, and, after a period of agnosticism, reached a Catholic Anglican position.

By profession Hodges was a philosopher, for the greater part of his working life Professor of Philosophy in the University of Reading. But he became more and more known as a theologian as well. Books such as The Pattern of the Atonement, or Death and Life Have Contended, brought the clarity and penetration of his mind to the exposition of Christian doctrine, while Languages, Standpoints and Attitudes, and his posthumously published Gifford lectures, God Beyond Knowledge, showed him as a man powerfully equipped to discuss the philosophical problems of Christian belief, in a time when such discussion in Britain was rare.

Hodges had recovered his Christian faith in a strongly Anglo-Catholic form. But he felt more and more the limitation s of the Latin Catholic tradition, impressive though its many achievements are. He became convinced that the Catholicism of the Greek East, Eastern Orthodoxy, presented a fuller and more balanced picture of the Christian faith. For him, Eastern Orthodoxy became normative. He expressed that view in Anglicanism and Orthodoxy, a small book published in 1955, in which he argued that it is the vocation of Anglicanism to become a kind of orthodoxy of the West. I think that in his later years, Hodges came to feel that this essay had oversimplified large and complex issues. But he did not repudiate it, and there is much in it which expressed his abiding convictions, not least that the discovery of Eastern Orthodoxy allows a Western Christian to turn back and rediscover his own tradition in a new way. He learns to see it afresh with new eyes.

I came to know Hodges through the annual meetings of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius, an ecumenical association, primarily Anglican and Orthodox. It was there that I first heard him expounding the theology of the Wesleys, especially the theology of Charles Wesley's hymns. This was the context in which we were working when we came to write the long introduction to our selection of those hymns published in 1966 as A Rapture of Praise.

We were mainly concerned with Anglican-Methodist relations just then, so we did not stress the Eastern Orthodox element in that introduction. But it is there to be seen by those with eyes to see it. We knew by this time, of course, of Outler's views on the patristic influences on Wesley, published in his 1964 selection of John Wesley's writings, and they greatly encouraged us. But our own approach, or rather Hodges' approach, since I learnt it from him, long antedated our acquaintance with Outler's writing.

From the point of view of our meeting today, Hodges' most important contribution to the discussion is to be found in his essay in the little book We Belong To One Another, published in 1965. It is entitled simply "Methodists, Anglicans, and Orthodox." It is here that he speaks of the Epworth Canterbury-Constantinople axis and says, "If this axis does not yet exist as an acknowledged fact it is something which could and ought to exist."1 Hodges would not, of course, have denied the importance of other, better known axes, Rome-Wittenberg or Rome-Geneva, for instance, but as an Anglican who had been a Methodist this was the direction which seemed to him important and which he wanted to explore.

Part of his essay in that book is directly concerned with the terms of Anglican-Methodist unity then under discussion in England. But much of it is, I believe, of permanent value, and indeed I wonder whether parts of it would merit reprinting. He suggests that it is the idea of Christianity as a fullness, a fullness of faith, experience and life, which can unite the three traditions. This is the fullness of God's own inherent life and being, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, imparted to his creation in the incarnation of the Son and in the life-giving presence and activity of the Spirit in the midst of his people, a fullness which in the end lifts up not humanity alone but all creation into the communion of the divine life. In different ways he finds that vision at the heart of Orthodoxy, of Anglicanism, and of the Methodism of John and Charles Wesley.

I have mentioned H. A. Hodges here, partly out of a sense of loyalty and indebtedness to a very fine scholar and a remarkable Christian, but also to insist that the positions which I shall affirm today are not only of my own making. They owe much to one who had known Methodism from inside, as I have never done, and who was a professional philosopher, with a very acute, analytical mind, something to which I have never pretended.

Now there is one point in Hodges' discussion of the nature of Anglican unity in Anglicanism and Orthodoxy which I want to underline, because it seems to me to give us another way of thinking about that which unites Anglicanism, Methodism and Orthodoxy across all of their evident differences. This is the stress he lays on the idea of the co-inherence of human and divine, as it is expressed in Archbishop Crammer's Communion rite. It is this which he feels gives substance to that rite.

By faith we live in Christ and He in us, and this is not figuratively, but substantially and effectually, so that from this union we receive eternal life. When in the Eucharist we make our act of faith and thanksgiving our union with Christ is strengthened and deepened ... Crammer reminds us of St. Ignatius' phrase about the Holy Communion as the "salve of immortality," and Dionysius' reference to it as "deific " with other strong and graphic phrases from the Fathers to the same effect. It is this doctrine, this spirit . . . which has kept alive a vein of Eucharistic devotion through the most arid and apparently hopeless times . . . the doctrine of the mystical union of Christ with the believing soul "2

This vision of the mutual indwelling of human and divine which Hodges sees at the heart of the worshiping experience of the post-reformation Church of England, is not something which was at all strange to John Wesley. Consider how Albert Outler keeps coming back to this point in his introduction to the four volumes of sermons. He speaks of Wesley's "lifelong interest in the patristic ideal of divine-human participation expressed in every Eucharist in the Prayer of Humble Access," and in another place he speaks of this as being Wesley's "central theme." Further on he refers to "the 'catholic substance' of Wesley's theology in the theme of Participation, the idea that all life is of grace and all grace is the mediation of Christ by the Holy Spirit."3 These are points to which we shall return.

I turn now to a very familiar place, to the best known day in the life of John Wesley, Wednesday, May 24th, 1738. There can be no doubt where the climax of that day comes. It comes in the evening in Aldersgate when Luther's commentary on the Epistle to the Romans is being read. By that fact it relates the life, the teaching, the ministry of John Wesley firmly to the tradition of Western Christendom, and specifically to the tradition of the sixteenth-century reformation. Nothing that I shall say is intended to deny or minimize the importance of that fact. But John Wesley was a large and many-sided man, and his life needs to be seen as a whole. There were other moments in that day in May, 1738, which have not always been sufficiently appreciated, moments which may give us a different perspective on the evening in Aldersgate. There are moments which suggest to us other aspects of his life and character, aspects which root him firmly in the tradition of the Church of which he was a minister, and which reflect its own character as a body which cherishes its continuity with the Church before the sixteenth-century reformation, as well as with the Church after it.

Let us now look at two of those incidents.

1). In the afternoon, Wesley tells us, "I was asked to go to St. Paul's." We do not know who proposed that he should attend evensong in the Cathedral that day, but it was evidently nothing unusual for him. We can see in his journal that he was present at evensong in St Paul's on the Thursday and Friday following, and on both occasions he notes with attention the words of the anthem sung. It is a small but interesting example of the steadiness of his devotional habits through the week of the Aldersgate experience.

Wesley was a priest of a Church which alone of the reformation Churches had preserved the pre-reformation tradition of the daily office of prayer and praise, an office made up for a large part of the words of Scripture, in particular the Psalms. This way of prayer is of course of a primarily monastic origin. It was part of the genius of Thomas Crammer that he adapted and simplified this tradition, making out of the seven hours of monastic prayer the two services of Morning and Evening Prayer. It was his intention that these hours should be used daily not only by the clergy but also by the laity. In the first half of the eighteenth century that intention was honored not only in the cathedrals, where the offices were sung every day, but also in the parish churches where they were usually said. It was a striking feature of the religious life of the city of London at that time, that in many of the churches the daily offices were said, often supported by members of the various religious societies which flourished at the turn of the century.

This was not only a matter which touched cathedral and major city churches. It also touched at least some private households. Morning and Evening Prayer was said either in whole or in part in quite a number of families. And there were some who went further than this. Office books were published, notably those of John Cosin in 1627 and Susannah Hopton in 1701, which provided material for an almost monastic round of daily worship, with five or six or seven offices a day. The example of the Ferrar family at Little Gidding was not forgotten and although we know of no other example of a family whose days were so wholly given to prayer it stood for something which attracted many. In his life of John Fletcher, published in 1786, John Wesley writes, "When I was young I was exceedingly affected with a relation in Mr. Herbert's Life; an account of Ferrar's family at Little Giddings, in Huntingdonshire . . . I longed to see such another family, in any part of the three kingdoms."4

It is clear that within the large, extended families of the time, there were those who felt themselves called to a life of special prayer and devotion. Jeremy Taylor, in Holy Living, a book which we know influenced Wesley greatly, provides rules "necessary for virgins that offer that state to God, and mean not to enter into the state of marriage."

While the Church of England of this period vehemently repudiated "popish monkery," by which perhaps the fully developed monastic system of the later middle ages is to be understood, it appealed to the first centuries of the Church's history for an example of Christian living, and found that those were the centuries in which monasticism had its origin. William Law's life of prayer and withdrawal at Kingscliffe was not so unusual in eighteenth-century England as the "Behmenist" theology (from Jacob Boelime) with which he accompanied it.

It seems indeed that at the end of the seventeenth century there was a special interest in the possibility of forming some kinds of religious community. The notable Christian feminist, Mary Astell, put forward a plan for such a community of women in her book, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, first published in 1694, and revised and republished in 1697. Wesley read this book in 1733 and it attracted him. In 1698, Sir George Wheeler published The Protestant Monastery; or Christian Economics, containing Directions for the Religious Conduct of a Family. This book primarily considers family life, but it is notable that its author has positive things to say about the monasteries of Greek Orthodoxy which he had got to know on his travels in the Near East. He also is not unfavorable to plans for "Monasteries for Women." Nothing came of these proposals; indeed, their proponents scarcely seemed to think that anything would. But John Wesley lived in a Church where such ideas were entertained, and he was not uninfluenced by them.

In a recent and very valuable article, John Walsh has written about Wesley's lifelong fascination with the example of the community of goods in the Apostolic Church as described in the Book of Acts. That model was not, in Wesley's view, something for the apostolic age alone. It spoke of latent possibilities within the Church of his own day.

... like Law, Wesley regarded the primitive community of goods as retaining a prescriptive authority for Christians of all ages. Pushing his inherited High Church primitivism beyond its conventional limits, he saw the early Church as a model not only for credal orthodoxy, ecclesiological correctness, and personal spirituality, but as an important guide to contemporary social ethics. Most authors of his day drew a firm caesura between the world of the earliest Christians and the normative course of Christian history which followed it, sealing off the world of Acts, with its charismatic explosiveness and radical potential, into a separate historical compartment. Wesley saw in the koinonia of Acts not only a vision of what Christianity had been at the moment of its miraculous conception, but of what it should and might be again. In his 1755 Notes on the New Testament he asserts of the apostolic community of goods, "To affirm ... that Christ did not design it should continue is neither more nor less than to affirm that Christ did not design that love should continue. I see no proof of this."5

In later life, Wesley seems to have come to the conclusion that this ideal was beyond the reach of most even faithful Christians. In a late sermon (1787), The More Excellent Way, he sets out a kind of double standard: "It is the observation of an ancient writer that there have been from the beginning two orders of Christians," the first content to lead a good life following the Gospel but conformed to the world in all that is not unlawful, the second aiming at Christian perfection.6 Albert Outler in his note to this place points us back to The Shepherd of Hermas and Clement of Alexandria as early witnesses to such a vision.

I wonder whether we should not also see here a reminiscence of the eloquent passage at the end of chapter nine of William Law's Serious Call, which begins, "Ever since the beginning of Christianity, there hath been two orders or ranks of People among good Christians." The first serve God in the responsibilities of the world; the second, renouncing marriage and property, seek "to live wholly unto God in the daily exercise of divine and heavenly life." John Wesley's vision of Christian perfection is more active and apostolic, less withdrawn and contemplative than William Law's; but both men seem to envisage the possibility of a variety of callings within the body of the Church.

I do not say that John Wesley was conscious of all of these things as he sat listening to the chanting of the Psalms in St. Paul's Cathedral on May 24. But by being present at that office he was inserting himself again into a way of prayer which goes back into the earliest Christian centuries. In recent years it has been common to say that there is something distinctly Benedictine about Anglican ways of life and worship. Perhaps one can make too much of this, but it is nonetheless true that when in the middle of the nineteenth century religious communities, first of women and then of men, came to life again in our Church after a break of three centuries, the members of those communities could see in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at least traces of the ideal to which they responded.

It has been one of the more unexpected developments of the last forty years in Continental Europe that both among Lutherans and Reformed, in France and Switzerland and Scandinavia, but above all in Germany, such semimonastic type communities should have come to life again and been acknowledged and indeed welcomed by the Churches to which they belong. They are in themselves remarkable witnesses to the one life shared by Catholic, orthodox and Protestant alike. Were such developments to take place in American Methodism, I can see nothing in the teaching of Wesley to inhibit them. Indeed I can see many reasons why, in the face of the acquisitive individualism of our European and American societies, such communities might be considered desirable in the life of the Church at the end of the twentieth century, no less than at earlier times. But that is a matter which takes us beyond the scope of this paper.

2). If St Paul's Cathedral has its place within the total experience of May 24, still more has the Biblical text which Wesley read and prayed at five o'clock that morning. It was 2 Peter 1:4: ". . . whereby are given to us exceeding great and precious promises that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature."

It is striking that Wesley notes the verse down in Greek before putting it in English, as if to underline its significance. Martin Schmidt in his great theological biography comments that this was a favorite text with some of the pietists.7 This indeed is true. But he does not remark that this was a key text in the development of the classical theology of the Church to which Wesley belonged. But, as I have tried to show in a recent study, the doctrine of our participation in the divine nature as a direct consequence of God's participation in our human nature, is a key to understanding the teaching of two of the greatest and most influential of all post-reformation Anglican theologians, Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes.8

In the case of Richard Hooker, as Olivier Loyer points out in his masterly study of the whole range of Hooker's thought, legal, political and philosophical, as well as strictly theological, the concept of mutual participation is throughout of crucial importance. We see this in the central passages of Book Five of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in which Hooker expounds in detail his understanding of how God is in Christ and Christ in us, and how through the work of the Holy Spirit the sacraments serve to make us partakers of Christ. And Francis Paget, in his old but invaluable commentary, is surely right in pointing to this text of 2 Peter as providing the underlying theme of the whole complex argument.9

Writes Hooker:

Life as all other gifts and benefits groweth originally from the Father, and cometh out to us but by the Son; nor by the Son to any of us in particular but through the Spirit. For this cause the Apostle writeth the church of Corinth, "the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost," which three St. Peter comprehendeth in one, "The participation of the divine nature."10

For Hooker, the phrase from 2 Peter sums up the whole Gospel.

If this is the case with Richard Hooker it is still more evidently the case with his contemporary, Lancelot Andrewes. Because Andrewes lived a quarter of a century longer than Hooker, we are inclined to think of him as a writer of the seventeenth century. But all of his distinct theological positions were already formed in principle in the reign of Elizabeth I. Andrewes' Ninety-Six Sermons preached before the royal court over a period of more than twenty-five years, at the great feasts of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun, can stand together with Hooker's book on The Laws as a classical statement of the Anglican position; this time in a scriptural and kerygmatic style, as opposed to the more philosophical and reflective method of Hooker. Here we are fortunate indeed to have a study of this body of teaching which has particular relevance to our subject today, Lancelot Andrewes, Le Predicateur (1986) by Nicholas Lossky, a book which will be published in English translation early next year.11 We have in this book, for the first time, a detailed and masterly study of an Anglican theologian by an Eastern Orthodox scholar. The affinity between Orthodoxy and Anglicanism is affirmed here not by a romantic Anglican anxious to establish links with a vanished patristic past, but by a Russian orthodox lay theologian, who has lived all his life in the West and is one of the acknowledged spokesmen of his Church in Western Europe. He is a man who is also an authority on the literature and religion of seventeenth-century England, and he sees in Andrewes, whose work he has studied over three or more decades, a kind of Eastern father living in the post-reformation Christian West.

I allow myself to dwell on this book because it is a work which I think would be of great value to anyone concerned, first, to understand Wesley against his Anglican background, and then to explore how deep were the patristic influences, and in particular the Greek patristic influences in the formation of that background. I am not claiming that there was any special link between John Wesley and Lancelot Andrewes. I do not know even whether he had read him. There are elements in Andrewes' "metaphysical" style which the eighteenth century found uncongenial, though it is interesting to see that both John and Charles thought highly of George Herbert, Andrewes' intimate friend and disciple. But what is evident is that the theological school which is characteristic of the seventeenth-century Church of England was formed by Hooker and Andrewes and finds one of its classical expositions in John Pearson's commentary, On the Creed. And we do know John Wesley's evaluation of Pearson, whom he describes in his Letter to William Warburton: "as learned and orthodox a divine as ever England bred." Writing in May, 1764, to Cradock Glascott, a student, Wesley says,

In order to be well acquainted with the doctrines of Christianity you need but one book (beside the New Testament), Bishop Pearson On the Creed. This I advise you to read and master thoroughly: it is a library in one volume.12

In the letter to Bishop Warburton in which he refers at length to John Pearson, Wesley gives special attention to Pearson's doctrine of the Holy Spirit the teaching that it is God Himself who is at work throughout the whole development of Christian faith and prayer and life. Now, anyone who begins to become acquainted with the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes must soon be struck by the quality of the Pentecost sermon, every bit as valuable and original as the Christmas sermons (which influenced T. S. Eliot so much). In his Whitsun sermons, Andrewes expresses the doctrine of the Holy Spirit with wonderful vigor and variety, and with constant application to the growth of Christian faith and life. Throughout his preaching Andrewes circles around the classical themes of Christian doctrine as they were developed and expounded in the first five or more centuries of the Church's life. He does not argue against the distinctive tenets of Calvinism, which were already attracting so much attention in the old England of his day and which were to have such an important role in the setting up of New England. He simply focuses our attention elsewhere, on the mystery of Christ's redemptive incarnation, on God's coming to be where we are so that we way come to be where He is, on the mystery of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost where the whole economy of Christ is fulfilled and made real for men and women of all times and in all places. Here is a theology at once practical and mystical, a theology of proclamation and worship, at once kerygmatic and doxological. It has a weight and a complexity of style which is very different from the hurried plainness of much of Wesley's preaching, but the faith and experience which it propounds is unexpectedly the same.

All of this is set out by Nicholas Lossky with clarity and care, and in considerable detail.

The importance given to pneumatology in the theology of Andrewes is to be explained, in my view, by the stress which he puts and deification of man as the supreme goal of the way of salvation. It is a question of the union of man with God in Christ by the Holy Spirit.13

This is a thoroughly functional doctrine of the Trinity, a doctrine which works itself out in the daily experience of prayer and life. It is in this sense that Lossky speaks of Andrewes as a mystical theologian, using the word "mystical" in a sense very different from that which it commonly had in Wesley's day.

The final goal of spiritual life being union with God, one can say that the theology of Lancelot Andrewes is a mystical theology, as long as one elucidates the meaning of the word "mystical." It is not a question of exceptional experience, reserved for a few, in some way outside the traditional ways of theology. On the contrary, it is a question of the interiorisation of the revealed Christian mystery, to which Andrewes calls all the baptized. This theology is mystical in the sense that it is not an abstract reflection, but a concrete way of living the mystery in the deepening of the faith through prayer and the renunciation of one's own will. It is a way of the submission of the human to the divine will, which allows the grace of the Holy Spirit to impregnate human nature.14

It could be said of Andrewes no less than of Wesley that, in Melvin Dieter's words, "A Christ-centered trinitarian pneumatology became the heartbeat of [his] understanding of the believer's relationship with God. At every point it is life in and from the Holy Spirit.15 In this Christ-centered Trinitarian pneumatology we can see a dynamic description of that fullness of faith and experience which Hodges believed to be characteristic of Methodism, Anglicanism and Orthodoxy alike.

We have come, here, to the very heart of our subject, to what Albert Outler calls "the 'catholic substance' of Wesley's theology in the theme of participation, the idea that all life is of grace and all grace is the mediation of Christ by the Holy Spirit."16

I would like to quote some passages of Wesley which express this idea with great power, in a way which is totally typical of him, but in a way which I believe is totally at one with the deepest and most constant teaching of the Fathers of the Church. Note that in the first two passages which I shall quote, there seems to be an echo of the Jesus Prayer, the Eastern formula, "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me." I do not for a moment suggest that Wesley knew of that prayer and its central place in Orthodox spirituality. What is so striking is that for him, as for Eastern Orthodoxy as a whole, the simple cry, "Jesus, Master, have mercy on me, God be merciful to me a sinner," carries within itself by implication a prayer for healing as well as pardon, for new creation, transformation and participation in the life of God himself. All of this is hidden, latent in God's mercy.

The Spirit or breath of God is immediately inspired, breathed into the newborn soul; and the same breath which comes from God, returns to God. As it is continually received by faith, it is continually rendered back by love, by prayer, and praise, and thanksgivinglove, praise and prayer being the breath of every soul which is truly born of God. And by this new kind of spiritual respiration, spiritual life is not only sustained but increased day by day, together with spiritual strength and notion and sensation; all the senses of the soul being now awake, and capable of "discerning" spiritual "good and evil."

The eyes of his understanding are now open, and he "seeth him that is invisible." He sees what is "the exceeding greatness of his power," and of his love towards them that believe. He sees that God is merciful to him a sinner; that he is reconciled through the Son of his love. He clearly perceives both the pardoning love of God and all his "exceeding great and precious promises." . . . Thus the veil being removed which before interrupted the light and voice, the knowledge and love of God, he who is born of Spirit "dwelling in love, dwelleth in God and he in him."17

Or, again from the second of the sermons on the Sermon on the Mount.

Whosoever thou art whom God hath given to "hunger and thirst after righteousness," cry unto him that thou mayest never lose that inestimable gift, that this divine appetite may never cease. If men rebuke thee, and bid thee hold thy peace, regard them not; yea, cry so much the more, "Jesus, Master have mercy on me." Let me not live but to be holy as thou are holy!. . . Leave all "for the excellency of the knowledge of Jesus Christ; for the entire renewal of thy soul in the image of God wherein it was originally created. . . . Let nothing satisfy thee but the power of godliness, but a religion that is spiritual life; the dwelling in God and God in thee, the being inhabitant of eternity; the entering in by the blood of sprinkling "within the veil," and sitting in heavenly places with Christ Jesus.18

For John Wesley, as for the Christian tradition as a whole, and particularly for the Greek fathers, this change, "this entire renewal of the soul in the image of God in which it was originally created," which is the work of the Holy Spirit within us, grows and is strengthened as human beings grow in the basic virtues of faith and hope and love, all of them God's gifts which make us participants in the divine life. This is particularly so in the case of love. We are to grow in love for God and in love for all our fellow men and women. We are to love God above all, and paradoxically in doing so we shall find that we can love God in all, and so love others as ourselves. This change wrought in the whole soul affects both the active and outward dimensions of human life no less than its inward and contemplative ones. Our social existence is to be transformed no less than our personal existence. You are, Wesley says, to love God who has so loved you, as you never did love any creature, so that you are constrained to love all men as yourself with a love not only ever flaming in your heart, but flaming out in all your actions and conversations, and making your whole life one labor of love, one continual obedience to those commands, "Be ye merciful as God is merciful," "be ye holy as I the Lord am holy," "be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect."19

Let us place next to these texts of John some verses of Charles from the neglected collection of hymns on the Trinity.
 

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Saved by Thee
Happy we
Shall thy Throne inherit.
Here our heavenly banquet tasting
In thy love
Joy we prove
Ever, everlasting.
Rapturous anticipation!
Who believe
We receive
Sensible salvation.
Silent bliss and full of glory
In thine eye
While we lie
Prostrated before thee.
Manna spiritual and hidden
Perfect peace,
We possess
Our recover'd Eden;
Till we find the fullness given In that sight,
Mercy's height,
Love's sublimest heaven.20

Having quoted Charles may I make a plea for a more frequent study of the hymns and sermons of the two Wesleys together, taken as a single corpus. I believe that it is when we study them together that we see all of the richness, theological and spiritual, of the original Methodist vision. Here we have something to learn from the Danish scholars who in recent years have made a very close study of the interrelationship between hymns and preaching, between the imaginative and the expository, between kerygmatic and doxological in the work of N. F. S. Grundtvig.21 Of course, that interrelationship is closer and more constant in the case of a single writer than it can be in the case of two. But despite their differences of temperament, and their occasional differences of judgment, what is astonishing is the depth of collaboration between the brothers Wesley. Is there any other example in Church history, apart from that of St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nyssa, of two brothers so united by a common genius and a common devotion?

Both in John and in Charles the goal of the Christian life is in that transformation of our human nature by which we became partakers of the divine nature, sharers in the divine life, "changed from glory into glory." The warmth and assurance of the Aldersgate experience set fire to John's faith, gave him a wholly new freedom of speech and of life. But the contents of that faith were already there before that momentous evening. They were summed up in the verse on which he had meditated that morning.

I shall try to make my conclusion brief.

1). An important part of the makeup of that great and complex man, John Wesley, can be traced to his indebtedness to the Christianity of the early centuries, particularly in its Greek and Syriac forms. This indebtedness can be seen in two ways. First, it can be seen in Wesley's stated appeal to the primitive Church; that is, to the witness of the centuries before the conversion of Constantine. The influence of these early centuries is evident particularly in Wesley's view of the spiritual life as a life of growth in grace and in his teaching on Christian perfection. Second, it can be seen in his almost unconscious acceptance of the christological and trinitarian inheritance of the early centuries, something which he had learnt and assimilated through his whole Anglican upbringing, and which he verified in his subsequent experience. Here he is heir to at least the first five centuries of early Christian thought and decision-making, much of it distinctly Greek in nature.

2). This aspect of Wesley's character has great ecumenical significance. First, it can help us to understand the way in which he does not easily "fit in" to the customary Western debates. It sheds light on his attempted synthesis of an evangelical doctrine of justification with a Catholic doctrine of sanctification. Then, it can help us to discover the vital importance of the contribution of Eastern Orthodox Christianity to the resolution of the problems of the Christian world today. If we follow out the implications of the Epworth-Canterbury-Constantinople axis we shall discover that an encounter with Eastern Orthodoxy in its contemporary form is not an optional extra for a Western Christian in search for the fullness and integrity of Christian faith.

3). This Eastern quality in Wesley's thinking has relevance to his understanding of the difference between what is essential and therefore necessarily one, and what is inessential and therefore properly various. It is not that Wesley's formulation of this question is in itself Orthodox. It is certainly not. But there is something here about the relationship of faith to theology, of the knowledge of the head to the knowledge of the heart, in which Wesley needs to be confronted with the Eastern tradition and vice versa. In Hodges' words, we need to understand how "to make criticism serve the fullness," how to make the activity of the critical, analytical intellect not something destructive, but something which clarifies and illuminates faith. The example of the Greek fathers can help us here.

4). Finally, this rediscovery of the total context of Wesley's life and work, the realization, on which Outler insisted, of the extent to which John and Charles were heirs to a whole long Christian tradition of thought and experience, can help us to make a positive response to those kinds of ahistorical fundamentalism, linked, as they often are, with a grievously truncated and rigidified version of the Christian Gospel, which confront us everywhere in the English-speaking Protestant world. John and Charles Wesley speak to us from an older and deeper tradition. Their gospel is empowered by an optimism of grace, not by the threat of judgment; it is a gospel which sees the fulfillment of God's purposes not in the redemption of humankind alone but in the redemption of the whole creation. And in both of these ways they came near to characteristically Eastern ways of understanding the heart of Christian faith.

This theme of the cosmic scope of redemption is one which seems particularly to recur in John Wesley's later sermons. There is a confidence here in the power of God's love to encompass and transform his whole creation; there is an assurance here which speaks from the heart of the New Testament. There is a joy here, a boldness of access into the holy places, a participation in the exceeding great and precious promises of God's love which tells us how that love goes beyond all of the desires and longings of the human heart, bringing us to that mutual indwelling of God in us and we in Him.

That is a life into which we are brought even now, but which is not bounded by the moment of our earthly death; it is a life for all eternity, an everdeeper entry into the dwelling places of the Three in One, in the Kingdom of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
 

Notes

1H. A Hodges, "Methodists, Anglicans and Orthodox," in A. M. Allchin, ed., We Belong To One Another: Methodist, Anglican and Orthodox Essays (London, 1965), p.33

2H. A. Hodges, Anglicanism and Orthodoxy (London, 1955), pp. 1819.

3John Wesley, The Sermons of John Wesley, Albert C. Outler, ed., (4 vols. in Frank Baker, editor-in-chief, The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley [Oxford and Nashville, 1975ff]), 1:56, 75, 99.

4A. M. Allchin, The Silent Rebellion: Anglican Religious Communities 1845

1900 (London, 1958), p.33. For all that refers to this subject of the late seventeenth and eighteenth-century proposals for communities, see Chapter 1 (pp.1535) in this work.

5John Walsh, "John Wesley and the Community of Goods," in Keith Robbins, ed., Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America c. 1750c. 1950 (Studies in Church History. Subsidia), 7.

6Cf. Wesley, Sermons, ed. cit., III:265ff.

7Martin Schmidt, John Wesley. A Theological Biography (2 vols.; London, 1962), 1.262.

8A. M. Allchin, Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in the Anglican Tradition (London, 1988), chapter 1, pp.723.

9Olivier Loyer, L'Anglicanisme de Richard Hooker (2 vols.; Paris and Lille, 1979), I:353ff.

10Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Vol.1 of John Keble, ed, The Works of that Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker (London, 1836), V.lvi.7.

11Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes, Le Predicateur (Paris, 1986).

12John Wesley, The Letters of the Reverend John Wesley, A. M., ed. John Telford (8 vols.; London, 1960), IV:242243.

13Lossky, op. cit., p. 327

14Ibid.

15Melvin Dieter, "Wesleyan Theology," in John Stacey, ed., John Wesley, Contemporary Perspectives (London, 1988), p.171.

16Albert C. Outler, "Introduction," to John Wesley, The Sermons of John Wesley, ed. cit., p 106. Also see Albert C. Outler, "The Place of Wesley in the Christian, Tradition," in Thomas C. Oden and Leicester R. Longden, eds., The Wesleyan Theological Heritage (Grand Rapids, 1991), pp.9295. This citation is to a reprint of Outler's essay, "The Place of Wesley in the Christian Tradition," in Kenneth Rowe, ed., The Place of Wesley in the Christian Tradition: Essays delivered at Drew University in celebration of the commencement of the publication of the Oxford Edition of the Works of John Wesley (Metuchen, N.J., 1976).

17Wesley, Sermons, ed. cit., 1:434435.

18Ibid., p.498.

19Ibid., p.294.

20Charles Wesley, Hymns on the Trinity (Bristol, 1767), pp.6869.

21See Christian Thodberg, "Grundtvig the Hymn-writer," in Christian Thodberg and A. P. Thyssen, eds., N. F. S. Grundivig, Tradition and Renewal (Copenhagen, 1983), pp.160-196.

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