BACK TO THE FUTURE:
WESLEYAN QUEST FOR ANCIENT ROOTS:
THE 1980s
by
Ted A. Campbell
When Roots was televised in the spring of 1977, I was engaged in genealogical research in a Houston library staffed by Texas women who prided themselves on membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Daughters of the Texas Republic, and the Daughters of the Confederacy. Imagine their discomfort when the grandsons and granddaughters of former slaves, inspired by the televised version of Alex Haley's book, came into the library to engage in the quest for their own histories. Perhaps they were an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual change then happening not only in North America, but throughout global culture. From the 1970s, a particular history began increasingly to shape history.
"Roots" might be taken as an apt byword for the passionate quest to connect oneself to one's past as a way to understand present identity, a quest expressed not only in such literature as Alex Haley's Roots or Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers (1976), but a quest that appeared more broadly in such forms as the move to "Postmodern" architecture, the revitalization of nationalistic, ethnic, and regional traditions and politics, a revival of regional literature in the United States, and even the revival of Celtic musical traditions in the British Isles and in North America.
Religious traditions also reflected the quest for deeper roots in this period. The resurgence of religious fundamentalisms - Islamic, Christian, and Hindu - was just one sign of the religious quest to connect one's community to its deeper roots. But there were "kinder and gentler" movements to recover religious traditions and identities in the late 1970s and 1980s, movements that appeared in the most progressive of "modern" religious traditions, such as Reform Judaism and oldline Protestant denominations in Europe and North America.
The Albert C. Outler Connection
This backtoroots trend is illustrated by a diverse group of scholars throughout the world who, throughout the decade of the 1980s, were engaged in study, teaching, and writing on the topic of John Wesley's relationship to ancient Eastern Christian traditions, with particular intention focused on finding deeper rootage for their own Wesleyan religious traditions. Their scholarly output may be compared to a single dissertation and a single (but influential) paragraph on the topic in the decades preceding. Having been not only an eyewitness of these events (dear Theophilus) but also a participant in them, I am drawn now to consider how they reflect the shifting of a religious ethos in the last decade.
Almost everyone who engaged in this Wesleyan quest in the 1980s had some connection with the work of Professor Albert C. Outler (19081988) of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Outler, originally trained at Yale as a scholar of ancient Christianity, had become deeply involved in the ecumenical movement on behalf of his own Methodist tradition. This led him to the critical study of John Wesley. It was Outler who suggested in a provocative 1964 paragraph and a lengthy footnote attached to it that John Wesley's doctrine of sanctification might have roots in the work of Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocian writers of the fourth century (by way of the so-called "Macarian" homilies).[1]
Outler's comment was followed up in the late 1960s by Robert Sheffield Brightman, then a doctoral student at Boston University, who wrote an ecumenically-inspired imaginary dialogue between Wesley and Gregory of Nyssa. Brightman himself was convinced that Outler's argument about direct influence of the Cappadocians via the Macarian literature was mistaken.[2] For a decade, Brightman's response seemed to have ended what at that point appeared to be an academic controversy with only distant ecumenical overtones.
In the 1980s, however, this seemingly academic quest for ancient Christianity through John Wesley became something of a passion throughout the Wesleyan world. One of the first to engage this topic was Professor Roberta Bondi, who had been a student of Outler's at Perkins School of Theology (SMU) from 1963 through 1965, and who had served as Outler's proofreader in preparing his John Wesley volume. Bondi, then, saw the famous "Macarius" paragraph and footnote in typescript before its publication. But it took a while for Bondi's interest in this topic to mature. Looking back, she considers herself not to have been a Christian believer while in Dallas. She left SMU to enter a doctoral program at Oxford University. As she describes her own experience, it was while sitting in the Oriental Reading Room of the New Bodleian Library in Oxford, reading a treatise by Philoxenus of Mabbug, that her religious conversion began. She notes that her conversion to Christian faith was simultaneously a conversion to feminism, for she found in the ascetic writers of the ancient church the freedom to be both a Christian and a feminist.[3] Her journey took her from Oxford to the University of Notre Dame, where she taught primarily in the area of Syriac language studies.
Roberta Bondia was invited to join the faculty of Candler School of Theology at Emory University in 1978. This, too, was an important transition point in her sense of vocation, for she perceived the call to Emory to be a call to engage ancient Christian studies, not only as an academic discipline, but also as a source of renewal in the contemporary life of the church. She perceived a vocation to teach ancient Christianity, as she puts it, "in such a way that it might change someone." Bondi's move to Emory was also a call to a historically Methodist school, where she could pursue ecumenical interests in the context of a Wesleyan theological tradition. It was natural, in this new context, that in the early 1980s she began offering a course at Candler on "John Wesley and the Church Fathers." By this time she had begun to follow up on Outler's earlier comments. Even if Outler's thesis about Wesley's contact with Gregory of Nyssa was not valid, she argued, his interest in the Eastern ascetic tradition was clear, and Wesley's understanding of sanctification, in particular, reflected the sense of progressive sanctification or theosis that provided a consistent motif in ancient Eastern Christian devotional writings. Professor Bondi has continued to be active in Methodist-Orthodox relations, publishing two articles reflecting this particular interest.[4]
A very different context influenced Kelley Steve McCormick to take up research on John Wesley's use of ancient Christian sources. McCormick is an elder of the Church of the Nazarene and now Chair of the Division of Religion and Philosophy at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts. During his student days at Southern Nazarene University (then Bethany Nazarene College), McCormick became concerned about the discrepancies he perceived between his tradition's understanding of sanctification (inherited from nineteenth century Holiness revivalism) and that of John Wesley. As he pursued his theological education, he discovered both the writers of ancient Christianity and Wesley's interest in them, and he became intuitively convinced that the ancient Christian traditions of theosis ("divinization") had lain behind Wesley's understanding of Christian holiness.
McCormick pursued this intuition in his 1983 doctoral dissertation at Drew University on "John Wesley's Use of John Chrysostom on the Christian Life."[5] In this and subsequent articles, McCormick has argued for an understanding of sanctification that takes seriously the Christian's progressive growth in holiness. While not denying the inherited Holiness Movement's stress on a "crisis moment" of entire sanctification (often understood on the analogy of a revivalistic conversion experience), McCormick found new depths of spiritual richness in the ancient Eastern conception of the Christian's growth into godliness. In this respect, McCormick continues to find Wesley's connection with Chrysostom and other Eastern aescetical writers helpful in serving as a corrective and a source of renewal for his own tradition. But McCormick's concern is not only directed toward the Holiness tradition, because he sees the rediscovery of tradition (ancient and Wesleyan) as an important corrective to the shallowness and time-contingent nature of much modern (and postmodern) theology. The connection between Wesley and ancient Christianity thus serves to broaden his own tradition by linking it to the narrative of the ancient church, and at the same time challenges the theological implications of modernity.
I was myself part of this recent Wesleyan quest for ancient roots, but I came to it from a still different perspective. Whereas Bondi can be described as a Christian feminist in an old-line Protestant tradition who discovered the liberating power of tradition, and McCormick can be described as a progressive within a traditionally Holiness denomination, I would describe myself as an Evangelical within an oldline Protestant denomination (United Methodist). I had an evangelical conversion experience in 1970, decided to pursue a vocation in ordained ministry, and in 1974 heard Albert Outler speak on "Theology in the Wesleyan Spirit." This inspired within me the desire to pursue early Methodist history as a way of linking Methodists to the Christian tradition more broadly, and as a means of renewal for the contemporary church. After two years of theological study in Oxford, I returned to Dallas in 1979 to begin doctoral study.
The dissertation I completed in 1984 at Southern Methodist University focused on Wesley's vision of ancient Christianity. Outler himself served as an amicus curiae (his own term) to the dissertation committee. But, although I had begun with an interest in demonstrating the similarities between Wesley's view of sanctification and that of ancient Eastern Christian asceticism (an issue on which Outler seriously challenged me during the oral examination), I had become convinced of the methodological difficulty of demonstrating such a connection. Certainly the use of ancient Eastern sources existed, but because there were so many other sources for Wesley's doctrine of sanctification, it would be impossible, I argued, to say that the ancient sources were somehow "primary."
The dissertation concentrated, instead, on Wesley's vision of ancient Christianity as a source of renewal for Christianity in his day.[6] In it I resisted the temptation to see Wesley's interests in ancient Christianity as evidence of his "High Church" leanings; instead, I suggested that these terests reflected a broader cultural theme in Augustan Britain, namely, the notion of "classical revival" which had specifically Christian expressions in a wide range of traditions. But if my conclusions about the ancient "influences" on Wesley and about his "High Churchism" were negative, I was (I recognize now) clearly involved in the attempt to "place" or "locate" Wesley within the range of Christian history and experience, and I saw this quest for historical rootage as relevant to the contemporary renewal both of Methodism and of the Evangelical tradition more broadly.[7]
Interest From Other Contexts
It might be tempting to say that the quest for ancient roots was a distinctly American phenomenon, but it affected Wesleyan Christians throughout the world. At about the same time as I had begun my doctorate, a Swedish Methodist, Bengt Haglund, began work on a dissertation in the same area, i.e., Wesley's relationship to ancient Christian sources. Haglund was a licensed Methodist pastor who had studied in Toronto between 1961 and 1962, and at some point during the 1960s became aware of Outler's arguments about Wesley's connection to the ancient church. Back in Sweden, Haglund involved himself in ecumenical ventures with the Covenant Church in the village of Vaxjo where he served as pastor from 1962. Even at this time, however, he began to have some serious questions about the church's life, and also felt constricted as a village pastor. Although he remained as lay pastor of the Växjo congregation after 1966, he ceased pursuing ordination as a Methodist elder and became a clinical therapist.
Towards the end of the 1970s, Haglund took up an interest in the work of Swedish psychohistorian Thorvald Kallstad of the Methodist seminary in Gothenburg, Sweden, who had written on John Wesley's use of the Bible.[8] Haglund was accepted into the doctoral program at the University of Lund and entered into correspondence with Outler in 1980 or 1981, expressing his interest in the questions about Wesley's appropriation of ancient Eastern Christian texts. He attended the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies in 1982 where he discussed with Outler, Bondi, myself, and others the possibilities for a dissertation in this area. It is clear that he was interested both in the psychological investigation of Wesley's use of ancient Christianity as an "authority" for breaking ecclesiastical precedents and with the vista Wesley seemed to offer for connecting Methodism to the ecumenical history of the church. We later were looking forward to hearing a paper from Bengt Haglund summarizing his research, to be given at the 1987 Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies, but early in 1987 it was discovered that he had a rapidly advancing brain tumor. Unable to attend the Conference, he died in December of that year.[9]
Haglund's interest in this question shows that it was not only North American scholars who were intrigued by it. Nor was the quest for ancient roots distinctive of only one generation of Wesleyan scholars. Arthur Christian Meyers's work on "John Wesley and the Church Fathers" (presented in 1985 at St. Louis University) suggests that the fever to find a deeper rootage for Methodism affected older as well as younger scholars in the 1980s.[10] Meyers (b. 1914) was Professor of Economics at St. Louis University and a life-long Methodist, but a late-career vocation to ordained ministry (in the early 1970s) and his exposure to Roman Catholic Christianity at St. Louis University prompted him to investigate his own tradition's catholic roots.
Meyers was known in the field of economics as a statistician, and his dissertation offers an extensive tabulation of Wesley's ancient Christian interests. Meyers was interested in the question of ancient "influences" on John Wesley, arguing that Wesley's exposure to a wide range of Western as well as Eastern patristic literature changed his theological perspective at a number of specific points. He does not render a judgment as to which of these influences is primary, but rather lays out the breadth of Wesley's familiarity with ancient Christian traditions.[11] As in the case of Bengt Haglung, we would have looked forward to hearing more that Arthur Meyers, but he was diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease. Confined to a nursing home through the last years of the 1980s, he died on 25 October 1993.[12]
From a still different perspective came the work of Korean Methodist scholar, Dr. Hoo-Jung Lee (now Assistant Professor of Church History at the Methodist Theological Seminary in Seoul). Throughout the late 1980s Professor Lee was engaged in research of his Emory University dissertation of "The Doctrine of New Creation in the Theology of John Wesley" (completed in 1991). Although the dissertation was primarily concerned with eschatology, it included a very significant chapter, written under Roberta Bondi's oversight, on Wesley's appropriation of ancient Eastern Christian literature, especially the so-called Macarian homilies.[13]
Hoo-Jung Lee was particularly drawn to the relationship between Wesley and the ancient Eastern Christian literature because of the connection he perceived here with his own quest for a distinctively Asian Christian spirituality. As Dr. Lee has expressed it:
Our oriental religious heritage has been deeply rooted in monastic spirituality. Therefore, it is much easier for us to introduce Christianity dressed in ascetic, or monastic terms. Now, we will be greatly nourished by our Wesleyan heritage, of we bring the interesting connections between Wesley and Macarius into a workable synthesis. Then, Wesley will be interpreted in a different way beyond the mere confines of traditional theological agenda.[14]
This is to say for Hoo-Jung Lee, Wesley's conncetion offers not only a way to connect Methodist history with its deeped roots, but it also offers Korean Methodists a way to connect thief Christian tradition with distinctly Asian forms of spirituality. In Lee's case, then, the Wesleyan tradition functions in a double role, linking contemporary Christians with thief past and opening up new possibilities for linkage with cultural traditions in which Christianity as a whole has often seemed alien because of the encumbrance of Western culture attached to it.
The Maturing Quest: The 1980s
At the beginning of the 1980s, several of us were pursuing research interest in the connections between john Wesley and his ancient roots, largely unaware of each other. But, since almost all of us had some contact with Albert Outler, we eventually became aware of the varied research underway. In 1982 Outler served as Co-Convener of the Wesley Studies Working Group of the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies. The group met at Keble College, Oxford, in late July and early August, 1982, and included Outler, myself (acting as Outler's aide-de-camp), Robert Bondi and Bengt Haglund. A paper by Professor Bondi offered the opportunity for a focused discussion of the topic of Wesley's connection to ancient Christianity. Our discussion resulted in the Working Group's recommendation that studies of Wesley's ancient roots should be pursued more explicitly and more intensively.[15]
By the end of the 1980s the interest in this subject had grown to such an extent, in particular among Wesleyans of more conservative traditions, that it became the principle subject of the 1991 annual meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society.[16] The Society took up at this meeting the topic of "Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy." Grounded in a programmatic essay on the topic by theologian Randy Maddox,[17] the conference heard a keynote address by Anglican A. M. Allchin on "The Epworth-Canterbury-Constantinople Axis."[18] Reports were offered detailing new research on Wesley and John Chrysostom, Wesley and the ancient Alexandrian theological tradition, Wesley and the Christology of the Cappadocians, and the Eastern-Christian orientation of Wesley's scriptural exegesis.[19]
If one considers that the Wesleyan Theological Society is the theological commission of the Christian Holiness Association, the ecumenical nature of this conference should appear all the more significant, and marks an important stage in the Methodist concern for ancient roots that we have seen running through (and beyond) the 1980s. In some circles it could be taken as a given by then that the inheritance of ancient Christianity was a significant factor in Wesley's theological development and in his own re-visioning of the Christian life and the renewal of the church in his day.
What Remains Relevant?
Not all scholars are presently convinced about the importance of the ancient Christian motif in Wesley's own life, or about its relevance to contemporary Wesleyan churches. Henry Rack's recent biography of John Wesley decries what he perceives as skewed interpretations of Wesley that look primarily to the books he read or the cultural influences on him:
A word of caution is also necessary here, as elsewhere, about laying too much stress on the books Wesley read and their original religious pedigree and meaning. Too many analyses of Wesley's experience and theology have proceeded in this bookish way.[20]
Elsewhere, Rack specifically discounts Outler's concern with Wesley's Eastern Christian heritage.[21] It is at this point, I would say, that historians simply lack instruments by which to measure the relative strength of influences on a man's or woman's life. Better to proceed historically by trying to discern what Wesley himself believed about Christian antiquity rather than trying to discern the degree to which Christian antiquity may have molded Wesley. Others would say that Wesley's interests in ancient Christianity remain merely academic curiosities.
There is obviously more than "history" involved here. The critical issue perceived by all of the questers noted above, myself included, is tradition, and tradition implies historical selectivity, historical choice. As true as it is (here I genuflect to Edward Gibbon) that we cannot by our selection change what happened in the past, it is equally true that we cannot but choose what of the past we find relevant to our present and our future. Tradition might be defined as those acts by which women and men selectively connect their past to their present and future. What I discovered about Wesley's use of Christian antiquity (it should have come as no surprise) was the selectivity he employed in choosing (and editing) historical materials as he saw their relevance to the eighteenth-century Revival. There is no escape (as I see it) from the act of selectivity when historical study is employed in the formation of communal identity. This is as true of John Wesley (and Alex Haley) as it is of myself and my fellow Wesleyan questers after ancient roots.
So it was that the scholars noted above discovered and selected in Wesley what they perceived to be relevant to the church in their own contexts and even to their own identities as contemporary Wesleyan Christians. In one case the discovery of ancient roots through Wesley was found relevant to the assertion of a contemporary feminist appropriation of the faith. In another case, it was related to the struggles of a North American Evangelical to revise the inherited and identity-forming doctrine of sanctification in a Holiness denomination. In yet another case this discovery was found relevant to the attempt to assert a distinctly Asian spirituality on the part of Korean Methodists. This process, I say, is not only an attempt to discover something about the eighteenth century-it was not "mere history" in that sense-but marks an attempt to define contemporary identity by a selective use of the past. It is a kind of anamnesis to confront the identity-less amnesia that seems to characterize so much of modern life.
I have been tempted to say that there is something "American" about this quest, despite the interest of Swedish and Korean and other non-! American Christians in the topic. I say "American" because the feeling that we are cut off from our roots is a consistent theme in American culture (both North America and South America). But, then, feeling cut o from one's roots is the harvest of modernity, not only in America but! globally, wherever modern forms of economic and cultural life have displaced traditional cultures. One might say that in the last half century the American experience of uprootedness has become a global experience as a result of the onslaught of modernity.
I have become convinced that it is mistaken to think that modernity simply destroys traditional cultures and replaces them with the culture of the destroyer. The Wesleyan quest for ancient roots in the 1980s, of which I have been a part, suggests that it is not only "native" cultures, cultures outside of the "First World," that are being destroyed: it suggests that we too are the victims of our own destructive modernity. We do not have to look far to see modernity's destructive effects, but we must now dig deeply indeed to find identity in the wake of modernity's vastly destructive cultural power.
Endnotes:
