by
Steven T. Hoskins

Ronald Spivey describes as follows a marble table in the apse of the City Road Chapel in London that was erected to John Wesley's memory:

In the center of the carving is the globe, for the world was John Wesley's parish. It is appropriate that the portion of the globe which confronts the eye is the Atlantic Ocean with its many shores. Protruding from behind the globe are the Biblical symbols of a winged trumpet and a shepherd's crook, for Wesley's labors combined equally the work of preacher and pastor. It is important, however, to notice that in the carving the world is held in place by two books; one is the Bible and the other is the liturgy of the Church of England. This signifies that for a proper understanding of Methodism in history and in the world today, it is essential to remember that the evangelical revival was also a revival of private prayer and corporate worship upon which the souls of many generations of Christians have been fed. The revival resulting from the proclamation of the gospel of grace was sustained and kept alive by the provision of the means of grace (qtd. in Bishop 51).

While the keenness of this analysis cannot be overestimated, there is, perhaps, at least one element missing from the construction which also could serve as a memorial to John Wesley and the entire Wesleyan movement. If the carving were placed in the shadow of a hymnal, the table would be a fairly complete symbol of Wesleyan identity.

The identity of the Wesleyan revival, as revealed in the table, was a complex of components, each of which made its own contribution. This essay inquires into one of these aspects of identity, the ardent and persistent emphasis of the Wesley brothers on the Lord's Supper within the life of the movement, and even more narrowly, the relationship of the Supper to eschatology.

The concern of John and Charles Wesley, and the movement they spawned, for eucharistic piety continually found its way into their works and practice. They were insistent on it as a necessary means of grace for the believer. While this theme played strongly in the early Methodist movement, it has too often been ignored by succeeding generations of Wesleyans. This sort of historical myopia often has caused the heirs of the Wesleys to miss (or misunderstand) their own history in one of the places where it was most vital, in the worshipful activity of the believing community. The purpose of this essay, then, is two-fold: (1) to provoke discussion about the role of the Lord's Supper in early Methodism and (2) to explore how the eschatological accents within the works of the Wesleys, in particular the hymns, had some bearing on the formation of the identity of the movement.

Identity is not something that is consciously sought. It is, rather, an emerging quality of life that occurs with maturity. It is also an essential feature of the life of a communion that has, over a period of time, listened to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

The early Wesleyan movement (the period of the Wesleys), had a complex identity that went beyond those whose gifts organized it and sometimes kept it afloat. The Wesleys were not alone in the shaping or experience of the movement. The same spiritual forces which enlivened them quickly began "to revitalize the lives of other people" (Church 211). To put it succinctly, they were the catalyst for a revival.

While the Wesleyan revival began as a "militant campaign for the hearts, minds, bodies, and lives of the perishing multitudes in eighteenth-century England" (Sanders 157), it quickly moved beyond the initial preaching to the formation of bands and societies of Christians seeking to live faithful and holy lives in the fear of God. It was far greater than the launching of a mere revival movement, but an attempt to restore the continuity of the full Christian life of adoration within the Anglican Church. The Wesleyan revival became more than an appeal to those outside the Christian faith. It was also a revival of authentic Christian devotion, especially that of the eucharistic variety.

The Wesleys were sacramentalists. As loyal sons of the Church of England they cherished its traditions and found great comfort and direction in its institutions, especially the Book of Common Prayer. Citations to this Book are abundant throughout their works and references to ideas informed by its contents can also be detected.² However, their sacramentalism has sometimes been viewed either as peripheral or perfunctory. It was neither. John's words in his sermon "On The Duty of Constant Communion" are not those of someone attached only to a commonplace status for the sacrament: "He that when he may obey the commandment if he will, does not, will have no place in the kingdom of heaven" (qtd. in Bowmer 188). Charles exhibits the same high regard in his sermon "On A Weekly Sacrament" (Bowmer Appendix III). They were always conscientious in their devotion - the sacrament.

Over time the Lord's Supper also became vital to those who followed the Wesleys. The extraordinary amount of hymnals, service books, instructions and sermons on worship, and devotional collections published by the Wesleys attest to the importance they and their followers attached to liturgical and sacramental devotion, corporate or private. In sacramental identity and practice the Wesleys "wished their people to be the same as them" (Rattenbury, 1928, 176), So they provided worship materials for instruction and service. Part of the first counsel given to those joining the Methodist societies was to be at church and the Lord's table every week.³ Further, as constant communicants throughout their lives,⁴ the Wesleys showed themselves to be fine examples of both practice and devotion.

This should not be surprising. While the Methodist hymnal of 1933 states that Methodism was "born in song," it is probably more accurate to say that Methodism was fathered by the pietistic influences of the Moravians and mothered, quite literally, by the devotional practices of high-church Anglicanism. The "conversion" experiences of the Wesleys were combined with the liturgical and sacramental piety that they had embraced through the influence of the Non-jurors, Anglican high churchmen, and their own parents.⁵ Their concern for worship and spirituality was centered around both the Bible and the liturgical life of the church. In his sermon "The Means of Grace," John speaks of the importance of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, noting 1 Corinthians 10:16:

This was the message of Anglican high-church devotion on which the Wesleys were nurtured.

In Anglican worship the Wesley's encountered a separate world of time and space surrounded by consecrated objects and furniture. No shrines were present, but striking and often glorious images graced the sacred space of Anglican churches. The altar, stained glass windows, and the building itself were frequently beautiful and at times served as magisterial reminders of the presence of God and the glory of heaven (Stout 11). Sacred time was kept with an abbreviation of the Christian year. All of this was intended to convey a deep sense of the numinous to the worshiper. Further, the historical continuity of Christ's church uniting with the angels and all the company of heaven in a liturgical unison of praise to the resurrected Lord was seen as the continuation of a mission begun in the church of the New Testament and carried on by the Church Fathers.

Through the liturgy and the Lord's Supper a deep sense of spiritual and mysterious power was conveyed. This power, the Wesleys believed, was able to sustain the believers in growth and grace and to lead them through a lifetime of the pursuit of Christian perfection. In his sermon "The Duty of Constant Communion"⁶ John conveys this opinion about the power of the Lord's Supper:

This is where the spiritual brilliance of the Wesleys shines forth. "It is one of the glories of the Methodist revival that the traditional means of grace were enlisted in the service of evangelistic zeal" (Bowmer 188).

For the Wesleys there was no rigid antithesis between evangelical and sacramental, between preaching and the Lord's Supper. The two were simply different sides of the same coin. The supper was not a substitute for ethical religion, nor for implicit trust in Christ for salvation (Bowmer 200). It worked as a force to empower the evangelical labors of the revival and to deepen the believers in devotion to Christ. One need only read a few of the accounts of the Methodist assistants in Wesley's Veterans or Lives of the Early Methodist Preachers to learn how the supper played a significant role in the spiritual life of those who worked to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land (Rattenbury, 1948, 7). From this vantage point the profound significance of the early Wesleyan movement as a model of spirituality becomes clearer. "Because the Wesleyan movement was big enough to comprehend both the sacramental and the evangelical, it can be regarded as a revival of all that was vital in experimental (i.e., experiential) and historic Christianity" (Bowmer 205).

Several details of the historical canvas need to be highlighted to deepen our understanding of the movement's identity. First, eucharistic practice within the established church was at a decidedly low ebb. By statute, the sacrament was required to be administered only three times a year. Beyond statutory requirements, regard for the feast was included among a host of other concerns, most of which were designed to make the Christian faith a more reasonable and less mysterious enterprise.⁷ While there were attempts at eucharistic revival within England, most notably through the efforts of the Non-jurors, none of them were able to attract for sacramental devotion the popularity it enjoyed within Methodism. The Methodists came to table and they came in great numbers, often by the hundreds or even thousands.⁸

To lay the blame for the high regard of the Lord's Supper in early Methodism at the feet of the irregular observance of the sacrament in eighteenth century Anglicanism ignores several factors, not the least of which was the providential genius of the Wesleys in grounding the revival in Christian worship. Such judgment would also ignore the movement of the Holy Spirit within the people. Many of the Methodists were poor industrial workers who were not nurtured on a diet of Anglican Christianity. The encounter that they had with Methodism was the first religious experience for many of them. That they would be drawn to the eucharist because of any previous experience seems unlikely.

Whether they attended the local parish church as the Wesleys advised or later at the Methodist chapels,⁹ the people came because they found a great spiritual power available to them. They went to the table first because the Wesleys led them there. They continued to go, not because John and Charles were great men, but because they experienced vital and direct contact with God in the sacrament. While the Wesleys certainly did not subscribe to the doctrine of transubstantiation (no good Anglican would), they did believe that Jesus was really present in the sacrament. In one of his hymns Charles articulates this conviction:

Receiving the bread, On Jesus we feed:

It doth not appear his manner of working; but Jesus is here! (Rattenbury, 1948, 84).

Such manner of presence was not trapped by rational articulation or bare memorial. It was belief in the mystery that Christ was making himself present to His Church in a profound and efficacious way through the sacrament. This manner of presence was not to be explained but enjoyed. Charles' hymn "0 The Depths of Love Divine" depicts this combination of real presence and experiential joy in the eucharist:

Sure and real is the grace,

The manner be unknown;

Only meet us in Thy ways,

And perfect us in one.

        Let us taste the heavenly powers;

        Lord, we ask for nothing more:

Thine to bless, 'tis only ours

        To wonder and adore (Rattenbury 1948, 213).

Such experience led them deeper into things spiritual than anything else they had ever found. Charles noted this in his journal in December 1748:

"The Lord gave us under the word to know the power of his resurrection, but in the sacrament he carried us quite above ourselves and all earthly things" (Jackson, 2:45).

Secondly, the popularity of the supper was also tied to the high-church understanding of the feast held by the Wesleys. For them, the Lord's Supper was the central act of Christian worship and they passed this belief on to their followers. It is interesting to note that the sacrament played a prominent role in many of the disputes of the early Methodists. This was so, not because they were divided over its meaning and use, but because they were in such agreement concerning its importance (Church 213). The sacrament of the Lord's Supper, not preaching, was the "supreme response of men to the word of God" (Bowmer 188) in the early Wesleyan movement:

The Prayer, the fast, the Word conveys,

When mixed with Faith, thy life to me,

In all the channels of thy Grace

I still have fellowship with Thee,

        But chiefly here my Soul is fed

with Fullness of Immortal Bread.

Communion closer far I feel,

And deeper drink th' Atoning Blood,

        The Joy is more unspeakable,

And yields me larger Draughts of God,

Till Nature faints beneath the power

        And Faith fill'd up can hold no more (Rattenbury 1948, 212).

Through this, the principal act of Christian worship and devotion, the worshippers were brought into contact with Christ through what one of the hymns calls "His closest Love" (Rattenbury 1948, 214). In commenting on this hymn, Geoffrey Wainwright points out that for the Wesleys the Lord's Supper was different from other sacraments. This difference existed not in kind, but in degree, since through it "Christ may enter into the very marrow of our being. Apart from the obvious doctrinal value, this presents the supper as the kind of devotional experience that is the crown of Christian experience in this life" (Wainwright 109). Such an experience of the eucharist was able to sustain the evangelical experience of those who came to the table.

Third, the Wesleyan revival, like most other revivals, was prone to emphasize the individual approach to God. Such emphasis sometimes led to subjectivistic excesses within the movement. The Wesleys found the liturgical experiences to be a powerful corrective to such extravagances. There was a need for restraint as well as expression and so John wrote sermons including "On the Means of Grace" and "The Duty of Constant Communion," and Charles wrote hymns (Rattenbury 1948, 18) that attempted to curb the "extravagance and fanaticism with historic Christianity" (Church 255). It is somewhat ironic that these checks to immoderation were fruits of a revival. They were also integral in the formation of the identity of this particular movement.

The concern of the Wesleys for worship also had a notable effect on their theology. In doing theology, John and Charles were reflecting on Christian worship. The first two generations of Wesleyan theologia~₅ "developed their theology (or theologies) within the context of worship, corporate and private, as established by the Book of Common Prayer. They came from worship to theology; they did not develop their understanding of worship out of their theology" (Bassett I). Such a convergence of experience and theology had profound consequences for the identity of the movement. By grounding the revival in worship, with theology informed by historic Christianity as elucidated by the Book of Common Prayer; the Wesleys provided their followers with an understanding of the faith that encompassed established Christian truth and substantive Christian experience at the same time. They did not take up theological subjects as they bumped into them along the way. Rather, the Wesleys did theology as it specifically related to the experience of the believers and as the believers would encounter these subjects in worship, whether corporate or private.

The relationship between eucharist and eschatology¹⁰ in the writings of the Wesleys provides an exemplary illustration both as to how this occurred and how it played a formative role in the identity of the movement.¹¹ Where the two subjects intersect in their works, they are reflecting upon their experience of the sacrament in worship and also their own eschatology that was learned in their Anglican education. The works they produced, especially the eucharistic hymns, had a double effect: (1) they taught Christian truth on the subject according to the Scriptures and Christian tradition, and (2) as the hymns were sung and the sermons heard, they helped to form a holy people seeking to live out their lives in proper fear of God.

Nowhere is this combination of eschatology and eucharist, of worship experience and theology, more evident than in their Hymns on the Lord's Supper (1745) which went through ten editions by 1790.12 This volume is a remarkable book on at least three accounts. First, it contains a collection of 166 of the most powerful and beautiful hymns on the Lord's Supper to be found within Christendom. These alone could account for the value of this work.

Second, the volume was published under the names of both John and Charles Wesley. It is obvious that Charles wrote most if not all of the hymns. John, however, would not have lent his name, nor his editorial pen, to the work had it not "satisfactorily expressed his own views (Sanders 161). John was possessed of temper and mind that was ample enough to dispute anything with which he disagreed. His name provides evidence that he did not do so in this case. Further, the abridgement of Daniel Brevint's The Christian Sacrament and Sacrifice that served as an introduction to the volume bears his distinctive hand.¹³

Third, it is also a good illustration of how the theological texts and worship worked together to help form the experience of the people. Both the hymns and the extract provided sustained theological reflection on the sacrament for those who encountered them. Being published for public worship and instruction, they show how worship informed theology and how theology in turn shaped the identity of the movement, including its practice and understanding of the Lord's Supper.

Brevint's work shows a "careful analysis of important aspects of the eucharist" (Simpson 35) and provided the hymnal with its divisions. The section entitled "The Sacrament as a Pledge of Heaven," a title which was taken directly from Brevint, provides the greatest number of hymns with eschatological themes, while other hymns with like attributes can be found throughout the book. What is seen in these hymns is a generous complement of eschatological doctrine and imagery as encountered in the supper. These hymns depict the "glorious . . . life above which in this ordinance we taste" (Rattenbury 1948, 227).

While Brevint utilized the phrases "title," "earnest," and "pledge" to show that a legal relationship existed between the Lord's Supper and the coming kingdom (the sacrament is a "pledge of heaven"), the hymns give wings to the phrases and do not relegate the terms to such pedestrian use. The earnest is not just the deed to a mansion but is "felt in our hearts" as a result of the "Kingdom Feast" (Rattenbury 1948, 225). The pledge is an assurance of a place in the kingdom to come for those who receive:

His sacramental pledge we take,

Nor will we let it go;

Till in the clouds our Lord comes back,

We thus His death will show.

Now to Thy glorious come;

(Thou hast a token given;)

And while Thy arms receive us home,

Recall Thy pledge in Heaven (Rattenbury 1948, 227).

The hymns are also used to tie Biblical testimony about the second coming of Christ to the supper. Hymn 98 is a clear example:

He whom we remember here,

Christ shall in the clouds appear;

Manifest to every eye,

We shall soon behold him nigh.

Faith ascends the mountain's height,

Now enjoys the pompous sight,

Antedates the final doom,

Sees the Judge in glory come.

Lo, He comes triumphant down,

Seated on His great white throne!

Cherubs bear it on their wings,

Shouting bear the King of kings.

Lo, His glorious banner spread

Stains the skies with deepest red,

Dyes the land, and fires the wood,

Turns the ocean into blood.

Take our happy seats above, 

Banquet on his heavenly love,

Lean on our Redeemer's breast,

In His arms forever rest (Rattenbury 1948, 226)

Through this hymn the striking biblical depiction of the coming eschaton was animated in the minds of the faithful. This dynamic understanding made the eschaton both a future hope and present experience of the believers through the eucharist. 

The supper was also seen as a foretaste of heaven and the heavenly banquet. The importance of this use of taste cannot be overlooked in the hymns. The Wesleys used it to connect the feast at the Lord's Supper directly to the heavenly banquet that Christ promised to eat with his followers in the coming kingdom. The symbol is mentioned in hymns 101, 103 and 108 and alluded to elsewhere. The taste is not just a sense experience but also a "taste" of the fullness of the heavenly kingdom. For example:

Here He gives our souls a taste,

Heaven into our Hearts he pours:

Still believe and hold Him fast;

God and Christ and all is ours (Rattenbury 1948, 227).

In ascribing this quality to the supper, Charles allows it to "express both the provisionality and yet the genuineness of the Kingdom as it flavors the present" (Wainwright 152). 

While no doubt is left that "to heaven the mystic banquet leads" (Rattenbury 1948, 226), it is apparent that the Wesleys viewed the supper as having a powerful eschatological effect on the present experience of the believer as well. Both Bowmer (184-85) and Rattenbury (61-78) make the case that in The Hymns on the Lord's Supper there is found an emphasis on the "already" and the "not yet" in eschatology and cite this as being the type of realized eschatology that is associated with the work of C. H. Dodd.¹⁴ Geoffrey Wainright also supports this position and links it directly to the use of the "taste" of the eucharist within the hymns. In commenting upon those hymns where the concept is used (like the one noted above), he says "the concept of taste is much rarer . . . than one might have expected; but its value as an expression for the relation between the already and the not yet is undeniable" (152).

Rattenbury says that the hymns helped the Methodists to "realize an experience that makes these ideas reality in the present moment" (1948, 63). Thus, they were able to sing around the table:

By Faith and Joy already there

Ev'n now the marriage feast we share,

Ev'n now we by the Lamb are fed,

Our Lord's celestial joy we prove (Rattenbury 1948, 224).

Such a realized view of eschatology is never far from the future perspective, for in the same hymn it says:

We now are at His table fed,

but wait to see our heavenly King;

To see the great Invisible

Without a sacramental veil.

Him to behold with open face,

High on His everlasting throne (Rattenbury 1948, 224).

In commenting on this use of a realized eschatology, Rattenbury says that it is tied to the evangelical experience. "The sense of deliverance from sin and fear extended the experience of the Methodists to heaven itself" (Rattenbury 1948, 64).15

This form of realized eschatology was also tied to the belief in the real presence of Christ in the sacrament. The hymn "Victim Divine" shows how the divine sacrifice of Jesus, though done in the past, makes him present to the believers through the action of the table. The memorial of that sacrifice in the eucharist is dynamic and efficacious, reaching into the present experience of those who receive. The real presence of Christ provided the supper with its real power. Again, the presence is not explained, but is meant to be enjoyed:

We need not now go up to Heaven

To bring the long-sought Savior down,

Thou art to All already given:

Thou dost ev'n Now thy Banquet crown:

To every faithful Soul appear

And show thy Real Presence here (Rattenbury 1948, 232).

The experience of realized eschatology in the eucharist also served to help the Church join in its mission of a liturgical union of praise with the whole company of heaven. The supper was understood as a vehicle that transformed the assembly of believers and gave them a present place in the "Church Triumphant":

The church triumphant in Thy love,

Their mighty joys we show;

They sing the Lamb in hymns above,

And we in hymns below.

Thee in Thy glorious realm they praise,

And bow before Thy throne;

We in the kingdom of Thy grace,

The kingdoms are but one (Rattenbury 1948, 225).

These lines are taken directly from the section in the hymnal entitled "The Sacrament a Pledge of Heaven."

Such an emphasis on eschatology should not be taken to mean that in their eucharistic theology and experience the Methodists exhausted the contents of heaven. They found so much joy in contemplating heaven because in their experience of the eucharist they had already learned much about it (Rattenbury 1948, 68). Their realization of the promise in the sacrament fairly shouted a confidence of the heavenly experience whose first-fruits were encountered at the table. This activity did not deny the future reality of the coming eschaton. It served rather to make it a present as well as a future reality.

The eucharist, as illuminated by the Wesleys, was a remarkable vehicle of Christian experience. As an "earnest of Heaven," it brought together the past, present, and future in such a way that the believers simultaneously experienced the fullness of the glories of Christ as he made himself present through the sacrament. This convergence of experience is expressed in hymn 94:

O what a soul-transporting feast

Doth this communion yield.

Remembering here Thy passion

We with Thy love are fill'd.

Sure instrument of present grace

Thy sacrament we find,

Yet higher blessings it displays,

And raptures still behind.

It bears us now on eagle's wings,

If Thou the power impart,

And Thee our glorious earnest brings

Into our faithful heart.

O let us still the earnest feel,

Th' unutterable peace,

This loving Spirit be the seal

Of our eternal bliss! (Rattenbury 1948, 224).

This particular work is evidence that what occurred in this period of the Wesleyan movement was extraordinary. The eucharistic devotion of the Wesleys and those who followed them played a vital role in the emerging identity of the movement. As the early Methodists heard the sermons about worship, sang the sacramental hymns, read Brev~nt's work and others like it that Wesley abridged,¹⁶ and followed the Wesley's lead to the table, their love for the sacrament and their numbers at the table increased. While not all of their followers shared this love, it had an undeniable influence on the movement.

In considering the intersection of eucharist and eschatology in the works of the Wesleys, several conclusions become apparent that help to explain the role they played in the identity of the movement. The importance of eschatology, both in the scheme of eucharistic theology and in the identity of the movement, should not be overlooked. Eschatology was not just an incidental part of the Lord's Supper. It was, for the Wesleys, an important part of the fullness of Christian truth and experience that the sacrament imparted to the faithful.

The Wesleys were careful to help their followers understand the importance of the table by emphasizing it both as a powerful tool of spiritual devotion and also as a guard against the divorcing of present experience from historic doctrine. For example:

This linking of experience to doctrine was also important as a check against individualism and fanaticism. It helped the Wesleys defend their theology against those who would charge them with enthusiasm of the and that was reliant on purely emotional forms of religion to supply its followers with spiritual power.

The material on eucharist and eschatology bears the distinctively Wesleyan accent that the Church is "best defined in action, in her witness and mission" (Outler 307). The concern of the Wesleys with Christian devotion was so that their followers would experience the grace and truth of the One that they adored in an authentic way as they witnessed to him in worship. In joining the Lord's Supper and eschatology, they made the form of Christianity in the Wesleyan movement a fusion of historic doctrine and enthusiastic experience. They tied the traditions of the Book of Common Prayer to present devotion and experience in ways that encouraged the participation of the faithful. The identity of the movement cannot be understood apart from this.

The Wesleys' use of a form of realized eschatology was consistent with their emphasis on the present experience of the believer. Through the hymns, as they were sung and heard, the eschaton came to life. It was no longer a far-off promise, but a part of present reality. This was true because the doctrine "was no longer contained in abstract and prosy definitions, unintelligible to the great majority; it lived in simple inspired phrases so unforgettable that the singers became thinkers who presently made truth their own" (Church 230). As they experienced the glorious, resurrected Christ in His supper, they were strengthened to live a holy life of authentic and sincere devotion to the Savior, the goal of which was heaven. The fullness of the eschatological experience and its significance for both the present and the future were found at the table of the Lord's Supper.

Notes

¹In characterizing this period as that of the Wesleys, I do not mean that the brothers were in agreement at every point during the period nor that their individual works should be taken as one corpus. In this designation, I am attempting to describe their effect on the movement as a collective one, especially in regards to the subject matter at hand. This is made clearer below. While it is evident that John played a greater role in Methodism at large, Charles' contributions are at least as important, if not more so, in the area of liturgy and the sacraments. For a good discussion of Charles' formative role within the Methodist tradition, see Richard P. Heitzenrater, "Charles Wesley and the Methodist Tradition," in Charles Wesley, Poet and Theologian, ed., S. T. Kimbrough, Jr., Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992. See also T. Crichton Mitchell, Charles Wesley: Man with the Dancing Heart (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1994).

²In 1784, when John was moved to create a Service Book for the Methodists in America, he simply abridged the Book of Common Prayer.

³John Wesley, The Nature, Design, and General Rules of the United Societies, 1743, quoted in Outler, 177.

⁴1n some years John communed every four or five days. In a now famous article, "The Place of the Lord's Supper in Early Methodism," published in the London Quarterly Review (July 1923), T. H. Barratt used John's diary entries to show this pattern.

⁵This development has been well outlined in other places. See J.E. Rattenbury, Wesley's Legacy to the World, 174ff. and Sparrow Simpson, John Wesley and the Church of England. Many writers link this particular strain in the identity of the Wesleys directly to their parents. While there can be no doubt that high-church devotion was taught in the rectory as well as the church in Epworth, Gordon Rupp in his Religion in England, 1688-1791 goes so far as to name Susannah Wesley a practicing lay non-juror (pp.25-27). The effects of these devotional practices, learned at home, would have significant consequences for the Wesleyan movement.

⁶This sermon apparently was first written and used by John Wesley during his days at Oxford in 1733. It was republished by him 55 years later near the end of his career, with the note that in the meantime he had "added very little, but retrenched much; as I then used more words than I do now. But, I thank God, I have not yet seen cause to alter my sentiments in any point which is therein delivered" (Outler 334).

⁷Several publications of the period bear this out: Bp. Benjamin Hoadley's A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Lord's Supper (1735), John Toland's Christianity Not Mysterious (ca. 1700) and John Locke's The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695). At the risk of oversimplifying the argument, suffice it to say that the point of such publications was to promote the idea that any belief or practice which required understanding beyond that of natural human reason was an impediment to the Christian faith.

⁸Rattenbury (Hymns 5) cites several illustrations of these large crowds from John's journal entries during the last ten years of his life. From Leeds to Birmingham to Manchester to Plymouth to Dublin, the people gathered in great numbers for the services of word and table.

⁹The Wesleys never intended for the Methodist services to be substitutes for worship in the local parish church. The rise of the Methodist chapels was a phenomenon that arose from the will of the people (Bishop 69-72). While the chapels at first were not meant for sacramental observance, they were used by the Methodists to observe the supper when an ordained minister was present and later with regularity after their break with the Church of England.

¹⁰Neither one of the Wesleys ever developed a complete scheme of eschatology. This should not be taken to mean, however, that they found no interest in the subject. John's sermons "The Great Assize," "On the Fall of Man," and "On the Resurrection of the Dead" offer proof of the concern that the movement had with eschatological themes. Their concern for eschatology, though, must be understood in the broadest sense of those subjects "usually connected with a serious consideration of eschatology" (Mercer 56) such as death, hell, and resurrection. Such themes abound throughout their theological writings and hymns.

¹¹1t should be emphasized that this study is just one aspect of the identity of the movement. Ole Borgen in his definitive study John Wesley On The Sacraments is somewhat critical of emphasizing the eschatological aspects of the sacrament (Borgen 86ff., 217ff., 231). He believes to do so denies some of the more important aspects of the doctrinal emphases of the movement, notably the concern for the means of grace, the presence of God in the heart of the believer, and the sacrament as sacrifice. The eschatological doctrine expressed in their writings and hymns on the eucharist should not be seen as a competing factor, but as part of the full complement of Christian experience. To see these works any other way, e.g., only as doctrinal or as a denial of the importance of salvation, would be to minimize their importance for the experience of the believer and rob them of their significance.

¹²1t is interesting that after 1790 the hymnal is not published again until 1875 and only then by a group of Anglo-Catholics.

¹³Egil Grislis claims that, because the extract is such a considerable rewrite and improvement of Brevint, it can be considered John's "own position" (103).

¹⁴That a form of realized eschatology is present within John's works is supported by Colin Williams in John Wesley's theology Today (Nashville: Abingdon, 1960) 194-198. For an interesting use of this principle by a contemporary Methodist theologian, see Theodore W. Jennings, Life as Worship (Grand Rapids, Mi.: Eerdmans, 1982), 126-139.

¹⁵It is hard to read such a commentary and not wonder if this was also tied to the concern of the Wesleys for the assurance of salvation as a real part of the experience of the believer.

¹⁶An example is Thomas A Kempis' Companion to the Altar (1742) which was an extraction from Book IV of his The Imitation of Christ. This little publication went through at least six printings.

Edited by Michael Mattei for the
Wesley Center for Applied Theology
at Northwest Nazarene University
© Copyright 2000 by the Wesley Center for Applied Theology

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