THE COSMOLOGICAL BASIS FOR WESLEY'S "GRADUALISM"
by
Michael E. Lodahl
"Press the instantaneous blessing. Then I shall have more time
for my peculiar calling, enforcing the gradual work."
- John Wesley to brother Charles,
June 27, 1766
Why did John Wesley consider it his "peculiar calling" to emphasize God's "gradual work" of redeeming and restoring human lives to the divine image? What is the significance in Wesley of the image/concept of gradualness? What relationship does it bear to instantaneousness?
There are many routes one might take in attempting to answer such questions, certainly including Wesley's attentiveness to lived experience. In what follows, however, I intend to take a path rarely noticed and less often trod. I want to interpret the notion of "gradualness" by exploring the general cosmological themes found in some of Wesley's sermons. This will be done with the suspicion that these themes may have provided the broad foundation for his "peculiar calling." My working assumption is that God's "gradual work," as Wesley termed it, is rooted in his understanding of the continuity of divine presence throughout the creation: God the "Creative Spirit" creating, sustaining, nurturing, cherishing, and laboring to redeem all creatures.
Cosmology has not received an abundance of attention in Wesleyan circles historically. This inattention is due largely, one would suspect, to the characteristically Wesleyan emphasis on soteriology. This emphasis has fostered certain idiosyncracies in Wesleyan thought, described well by J. Kenneth Grider as experiential, existential, and interested in human freedom and the moral dimension (28). True and proper as all this might be, such anthropologically-oriented characteristics have often tended to create brittle distinctions between us human beings and the fabric of the created order in which we live, move, and have our being by God. They have fostered an unhealthy and unbiblical anthropocentrism, and surely have encouraged a sense of alienation between humans and the world that does not lend itself, for instance, to ecological sensitivity or commitment.
What has surprised me recently in my reading of Wesley, given this tendency in subsequent Wesleyan tradition, are his own explicit and oft-repeated cosmological ruminations that help to place his optimism of grace in a larger, more cosmic context. I intend to argue that, at least partly because of what he assumed to be the case about God's rich relations to the universe, Wesley was able to preach and teach with optimism concerning God's "gradual work" of sanctifying human beings and all of creation. While Wesley had little patience for natural theology per se, he developed, particularly in some of his later sermons, a strong and explicit theology of nature. He also aggressively explored the implications of this theology, particularly in regard to the doctrines of omnipresence and omniscience.
God the Omnipresent Creator
Late in his life (1788) Wesley wrote "On the Omnipresence of God," one of his most philosophical sermons. He utilized the biblical query, "'Do not I fill heaven and earth?' saith the Lord" (Jer. 23:24) as his text. The operative theme of this sermon was simply, "God is in this, and every place" (1987, IV:41).
God acts everywhere, and therefore is everywhere; for it is an utter impossibility that any being, created or uncreated, should work where it is not. God acts in heaven, in earth, and under the earth, throughout the whole compass of his creation.... (1987, IV:42)
Put simply, God is no Creator from a distance. "There is no place empty of God," wrote Wesley in "The Imperfection of Human Knowledge," and "every point of infinite space is full of God..." (1985, II:569). Wesley's theologic implies that there cannot possibly be any place, indeed any submicroscopic point anywhere at any time, where God is not fully and actively present. Wesley's doctrine of creation dictates that where God is not-if such a scenario were possible-certainly no thing can possibly be. And of course, it is not sufficient simply to think of omnipresence as meaning that God occupies the invisible "empty space" between perceivable objects; rather, every point, no matter how infinitessimal, is absolutely full of divine presence-and, presumably, must be so, in order to be at all.
In Wesley's day, Newtonian physics still tended to assume that a gaseous quasi-material called "ether" filled the space in which discrete objects moved and interacted. While 18th-century disciples of Newton found the ether hypothesis increasingly unnecessary as they developed the idea that objects exercised gravitational force at a distance, Wesley in his sermon on omnipresence reflected a still common opinion. He wrote: "And it is now generally supposed that all space is full" (1987, IV:44). He realized that this hypothesis was not unanimously accepted by his contemporaries, but he was prepared to insist nonetheless on the proposition's veracity on theological grounds alone. "Perhaps it cannot be proved that all space is filled with matter. But the heathen [Virgil] himself will bear us witness... 'All things are full of God.' Yea, and whatever space exists beyond the bounds of creation...even that space cannot exclude him who fills the heaven and earth" (1987, IV:44).
Certainly today when we meditate on the utterly incomprehensible immensity of our space-time continuum, this idea that God dwells fully in every place, and indeed beyond every place, virtually shatters the mind. It is not an idea that receives much attention presently, but in classical theology this is the doctrine of divine immensity. While omnipresence, literally interpreted, means that God occupies all places, divine immensity means, in H. Orton Wiley's words, that "God as Spirit is above all spatial limitations, and it is because of this that [spatial] relations have validity" (339). Hence, while every place has its place in relationship to other places in the universe (I live in Nampa, which is in Idaho, which is in North America, which is on earth, etc.), the only viable answer to the largest question of locale-"Where is the universe?"-is "God." Simply stated, our universe (and all other possible universes, of course) is in God and actually can be nowhere else. "In a word," Wesley wrote, "there is no point of space, whether within or without the bounds of creation, where God is not" (1987, IV:42).
The doctrines of omnipresence and immensity become all the more infathomable when one attempts to reflect on them in the context of the new physics. In Wesley's era, the notion of atoms as miniscule, rather granular "building blocks" of the universe was fairly common. Today, however, the very notion of "building blocks" has been decimated by the seemingly endless discovery of "subnuclear debris": from atoms to nuclei and electrons, from nuclei to protons and neutrons; from protons and neutrons to pions, muons, leptons, those quirky quarks, and so on-possibily ad infinitum. Couple all of this with the physicists' analogy that if a single atom were the size of a football stadium, those sub-atomic particles (if we can yet call them particles!), waltzing together in their dance of uncertainty, would be the size of grains of sand.
What is left for us to imagine, then, according to British physicist Paul Davies, is a universe that is essentially "empty space," no longer understood to be "a collection of separate but coupled things," but rather "a network of relations" (112). Davies continues: "We cannot pin down a particle and say that it is such-and-such an entity. Instead we must regard every particle as somehow made up of every other particle in an endless Strange Loop. No particle is more elementary than any other" (163). Such a strange universe this is turning out to be, where empty space overwhelmingly predominates and what is fundamental appears to be wispy, virtually spiritual relations! Further, all of this is occuring in God, for presumably God fully indwells the "empty space" of sub-atomic chaotic order just as surely as God embraces the whole of the universe within God's own self.
Sallie McFague argues that the metaphor of the world as God's body is one helpful theological model, among others, for encouraging Christians to take seriously the issues of bodily existence within our bodily universe.1 However, my point here may actually be more bold while, at the same time, ironically, more conservative regarding traditional theological categories. My point is that when Christian theologians, including Wesley, have considered carefully the meaning of divine omnipresence, it has been (and is) difficult for them to avoid the conclusion that God truly is the "place" where the universe is happening, and thus also that the universe is in some sense the embodying of God. Such a conclusion would stand not as a useful model only (as in McFague's case), but as the implication of what it means for God to be God and the world to be God's creation.
However, since all theological language is necessarily imprecise (whether analogical or metaphorical), we are reminded that there is no simple formula for describing the mystery of God's omnipresence. Like Wesley, we can affirm "the fact" while remaining largely ignorant of "the manner." As he stated it in "The Imperfection of Human Knowledge," "How astonishingly little do we know of God!... What conception can we form of his omnipresence? Who is able to comprehend how God is in this and every place? How he fills the immensity of space?... [T]he fact being admitted, what is omnipresence or ubiquity?" (1985, II:569).
God the Intimate Sustainer
As suggested in the previous section, for Wesley the doctrine of God's creative and sustaining activity, or omnipotence, is linked very directly to God's omnipresence. In his words, also from "On the Omnipresence of God": "Nay, and we cannot believe the omnipotence of God unless we believe his omnipresence. For seeing...[that] nothing can act where it is not, if there were any space where God was not present he would not be able to do anything there" (1987, IV:44). Again, here Wesley assumes that God creates, sustains, and redeems not "from a distance," but always immediately and immanently; "God acts everywhere, and therefore is everywhere" (1987, IV:42). God acts by ever renewing the Genesis call to let there be,
by sustaining all things, without which everything would in an instant sink into its primitive nothing, by governing all, every moment superintending everything that he has made; strongly and sweetly influencing all, and yet without destroying the liberty of his rational creatures. (1987, IV:42f)
While Wesleyan theologians, particularly H. Ray Dunning in his Grace, Faith & Holiness, have spoken much of prevenient grace as God's loving, sustaining presence in human lives, here in Wesley we discover a broader, more cosmically comprehensive category for speaking of the Spirit-one we might call creative grace.2 Humans do indeed live, move and have their being in God, but humans so live, move, and exist within the fabric of an entire universe that exists in God. All of creation depends in "every moment" on the One who calls it into being and sustains it in being, and without Whom "everything would in an instant sink into its primitive nothing."
To be sure, Wesley's emphasis on God's immediate, sustaining presence in creation should be understood within the context of his ongoing battle with deism. Wesley refused to brook any notion of a distant God, or of autonomous human beings (or anything else) that could exist distanced from God. While a child of the Enlightenment, Wesley refused to be lured by the Enlightenment ideal of autonomous, analytical reason that celebrated the independent individual. His doctrine of God was much too rich in its appreciation of the classical categories of omnipresence and omniscience. Further, his doctrine of humanity was too deeply immersed in the early Greek Fathers' fascination with human participation in God to permit any capitulation to deism. Hence, in his "Upon our Lord's Sermon on the Mount" (third discourse), Wesley comments on Jesus' injunction, "Swear not at all":
. . . and [God] is as intimately present in earth as heaven.... God is in all things, and...we are to see the Creator in the glass of every creature; ...[and] should use and look upon nothing as separate from God, which indeed is a kind of practical atheism; but with a true magnificence of thought survey heaven and earth and all that is therein as contained by God in the hollow of his hand, who by his intimate presence holds them all in being, who pervades and actuates the whole created frame, and is in a true sense the soul of the universe. (1984, I:516f)
Wesley, then, could be so bold as to call God the anima mundi. But contemporary Western evangelicalism, including the Wesleyan-Holiness movement, has not followed Wesley's example. One could argue that the evangelical faith has, instead, allowed its theism to drift toward the deism that results inevitably from an underappreciation for the doctrines of creation and divine immanence.
Obvious evidence for this argument is found in the all-too-typical suspicion of the theme of God's immanently sustaining presence in creation, or even of Christian ecological awareness. Such suspicion has become a kneejerk reaction in many evangelical circles spawned by the understandable concern not to be identified as "new age." Yet one might proceed to ask why this so-called "new age movement" has become so widespread in its appeal. Certainly its popularity represents, at least in part, a reaction against the very ideal of "enlightened" analytic reason that Wesley himself fought in the form of deism. This flat, secular, and finally unimaginative notion of reason, for all its technological success, is too barren to sustain human hope. One could argue that our society's renewed interest in mysticism, angels, near-death experiences, and human relatedness to nature are indicative of such a reaction to deistic (not to mention atheistic) reason. A renewed appreciation for the theology of creation in Wesley might serve well both Wesleyanism and Western societies.
Another obvious indication of our need to revisit the doctrines of creation and divine immanence is the tired old creationist-evolutionist debate. Sadly, "creationism" as a movement tends to restrict its doctrine of creation to a concern with how long ago God created the earth. Creation is then understood essentially as a past, completed event, with little attention or appreciation given to God's continuing creativity in terms of sustaining, directing, and offering new possibilities to the created order. While the creationist movement on the whole, of course, is not deistic, its preoccupation-God's act of creation - tends to be colored in rather deistic hues.
Wesley, however, was far more interested in rejoicing in God's continuing labor of creation. While deists, wrote Wesley, believed that God "gave things their beginning, And set this whirligig a-spinning," he went further himself:
...we have the fullest evidence that the eternal, omnipresent, almighty, all-wise Spirit, as he created all things, so he continually superintends whatever he has created. He governs all, not only to the bounds of creation, but through the utmost extent of space; ...from everlasting to everlasting. (1987, IV:69)
When Wesley said "from everlasting to everlasting," he meant it. It is as though God has embarked upon a covenantal commitment in calling creation to be, and sustaining it in being. While Wesley recognized the dynamism of the world and the changeability of matter, he doubted that God would ever undo creation-which, after all, would be to act contrary to his own loving, creative nature. "It is very possible," Wesley speculated in his 1786 sermon "On Eternity,"
[that] any portion of matter may be resolved into the atoms of which it was originally composed. But what reason have we to believe that one of these atoms ever was or ever will be annihilated? It never can, unless by the uncontrollable power of its almighty Creator. And is it probable that ever he will exert this power in unmaking any of the things that he hath made? In this also God is "not a son of man that he should repent." (1985, II:362)
God the Lover of All Creatures
It is most fascinating that Wesley would quote pagan religious sources with a measure of approval in order to make his cosmological point. He did this in his sermon on omnipresence, preferring the anima mundi of Virgil's Aeneid-"the all-informing soul, that fills, pervades and actuates the whole"- to the distant, attenuated God of deism. However, Wesley states, the heathens "had no conception of [God's] having a regard to the least things as well as the greatest; of his presiding over all that he has made, and governing atoms as well as worlds" (1987, IV:43). While deists affirmed that God is creator of the universe, they deemed God to be creator at a distance. Pagan philosophers, on the other hand, tended to think of God as the immediately present and sustaining World-Soul. Neither cosmology, however, could recognize or appreciate the loving and personal attentiveness of Jesus' God and Father to every moment and event, to every nook and cranny of the vast created order.
We have already seen that Wesley believed in divine omnipotence as a corollary of omnipresence. It must now be said that omniscience, too, was for Wesley a corollary (or even a consequence) of omnipresence. As he wrote in his 1786 sermon "On Divine Providence":
...as this all-wise, all-gracious Being created all things, so he sustains all things.... Now it must be that he knows everything he has made, and everything he preserves from moment to moment. Otherwise he could not preserve it: he could not continue to it the being which he has given it. And it is nothing strange that he who is omnipresent, who "filleth heaven and earth," who is in every place, should see what is in every place, where he is intimately present.... how shall not the eye of God see everything through the whole extent of creation? Especially considering that nothing is distant from him, in whom we all "live and move and have our being." (1985, II:538)
As has been pointed out, Wesley's understanding of God's knowing and sustaining of creation is that God does so by immediate presence, as "the omnipresent Spirit," and not as a distant, objectifiable person per se. If indeed we meditate on what we mean by omnipresence (God being fully and "intimately present...in every place") and by omniscience (God knowing thoroughly and intimately all things and events), we shall again be led to something like the universe-as-God's-body model promulgated by McFague.
God does not know "at a distance," but from within, and indeed through the experiences (conscious or not) of all creatures (sentient or not). If God truly knows all things in the Hebraic participatory sense of the word-concept "to know," then God's knowing will indeed include a sharing in every creature's experience-including, again, the strange and mysterious world of sub-atomic processes-"from the inside." The universe of events, things, and relationships can occur nowhere but in God, and thus God's knowing must be intimate, experiential, utterly thorough and, in some analogical sense, bodily.
The fact that such suggestions may sound strange or even heretical to many of us today reflects contemporary Western Christianity's drift toward the deism of a distant deity and autonomous, utterly distinct individuals. Listen again, however, to Wesley's attempt to describe a far richer, more immanental cosmology:
The manner of [God's] presence no man can explain, nor probably any angel in heaven. Perhaps what the ancient philosopher speaks of the soul in regard to its residence in the body, that it is tota in toto, et tota in qualibet parte, might in some sense be spoken of the omnipresent Spirit in regard to the universe-that he is not only "all in the whole, but all in every part." Be this as it may, it cannot be doubted but he sees every atom of his creation, and that a thousand times more clearly than we see the things that are close to us: even of these we see only the surface, while he sees the inmost essence of everything.
The omnipresent God sees and knows all the properties of all the beings that he hath made. He knows all the connections, dependencies, and relations, and all the ways wherein one of them can affect another. In particular he sees all the inanimate parts of the creation, whether in heaven above or in the earth beneath. (1985, II:538f)
The omnipresent Spirit, fully present not only in the whole but in every part-indeed, in every atom in all its "connections, dependencies, and relations"4-knows by immediate, full, and participatory awareness. It is particularly fascinating, even curious, that Wesley would suggest that in particular God "sees all the inanimate parts of the creation," though it is possible that this was yet another parry at the deistic tendency to understand the world as a grand impersonal machine, well-oiled by God at the beginning, but now whirling, turning, clicking, and churning by its own "natural laws" and on its own momentum.
If this suggested interpretation holds weight, then Wesley was instead arguing that God is the deeply personal Knower whose sustaining presence pervades even the deepest, darkest, and deadest reaches of cold space. This "old creation" is an eminently good creation, precisely because the One "who alone is good" creates, sustains, and nurtures all things. God the Creator "is love" (1 Jn. 4:8, 16)! Hence, Wesley in "On Divine Providence" affirmed that
[God] knows all the hearts of the sons of men, and understands all their thoughts. He sees what any angel, any devil, any man, either thinks, or speaks, or does; yea, and all they feel. He sees all their sufferings, with every circumstance of them.
And is the Creator and Preserver of the world unconcerned for what he sees therein? Does he look upon these things either with a malignant or heedless eye? Is he an Epicurean god? Does he sit at ease in heaven, without regarding the poor inhabitants of earth? It cannot be.... We are his children. And can a mother forget the children of her womb? Yea, she may forget; yet will not God forget us. (1985, II:539; italics added)
While in the above passage Wesley refers only to the thoughts and feelings of rational creatures ("any angel, any devil, any man"), the doctrines of omnipresence and omniscience logically embrace all experiences of all creatures of any kind. Indeed, Wesley says as much in his 1781 sermon on "the groaning creation" of Romans 8, entitled "The General Deliverance": "While 'the whole creation groaneth together' (whether men attend or not) their groans are not dispersed in idle air, but enter into the ears of him that made them. While his creatures 'travail together in pain', he knoweth all their pain, and is bringing them nearer and nearer to the birth which shall be accomplished in its season" (1985, II:445; italics added).
To be sure, Wesley's conviction that God's love embraces all of creation is not rooted primarily in the doctrine of omnipresence but in the Christian confession that "we know love by this, that Jesus Christ laid down his life for us" (1 Jn. 3:16). The compelling beauty of a Christian cosmology, though, is precisely this confidence that the "pure, unbounded love" revealed in Christ's cross is in fact the omnipotent Creator Spirit who creates and sustains the universe, who in "all his wisdom is continually employed in managing all the affairs of his creation for the good of all his creatures" (1985, II:540).
Wesley admits that, given the harsh realities of misery and pain in the created order, "it is hard indeed to comprehend this; nay, it is hard to believe it" (1985, II:540). Yet, lest we make God a liar-we are assured, after all, that not one sparrow is forgotten before God, and "even the very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Lk. 12:6-7)-Wesley insists that we must understand God as the compassionate Maker and Provider of every creature. But with so much suffering in our world, we are left to stand in awe before the mystery of Providence in creation, with no simplistic theodicy firmly in hand.
Not surprisingly, the only step Wesley is willing to take toward a solution of the problem of evil is to offer the freewill defense. This of course is quite consistent with the conviction that God is love and acts in love: in order that love might flourish in creation, responsible agency must be offered to, and nurtured in, creatures of intelligence. God's creative power "continually co-operates with" God's wisdom and goodness, and thus labors in a fashion expressive of a love that bestows and encourages relationship rooted in human freedom. According to Wesley:
Only he that can do all things else cannot deny himself; he cannot counteract himself, or oppose his own work. Were it not for this he would destroy all sin, with its attendant pain, in a moment. He would abolish wickedness out of his whole creation, and suffer no trace of it to remain. But in so doing he would counteract himself, he would altogether overthrow his own work, and undo all that he has been doing since he created man upon the earth.... If therefore God were thus to exert his power there would certainly be no more vice; but it is equally certain, neither could there be any virtue in the world. Were human liberty taken away men would be as incapable of virtue as stones.... God...[wills] to assist man in attaining the end of his being, in working out his own salvation-so far as it can be done without compulsion, without overruling his liberty, ...without turning man into a machine.... (1985, II:540f)
Hence, God's loving purpose in creating us is that human liberty might be persuaded toward virtue and away from vice, toward salvation and away from wickedness and destruction. We thereby arrive at the central paradox of the doctrine of creation: that God is the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Creator Spirit who immediately, intimately, and continuously sustains all things as other than himself. God "lets there be" that which is not God, but which depends immediately upon God for its continued being-and that not "from a distance" but indeed "from within"! How wonderful is love like this!
The Proper Human Response
There is, then, no one who can escape from God's Spirit, none who can flee from God's presence (Ps. 139:7; cf. Heb. 4:13). In fact, to be without God's Spirit is to be not at all, but to return to dust (Ps. 104:29). By the same token, "Thou dost send forth Thy Spirit, [and all creatures] are created; and Thou dost renew the face of the ground" (Ps. 104:30).
The fact that Wesley quotes copiously from Psalm 104 in his sermon on "The General Deliverance" of all creation is evidence that he appreciated the powerful and dynamic Spirit-cosmology found therein. All creatures wait for God to give them food and sustenance; all creatures are satisfied with good from God's own open hand and indeed live by the very breath of God (vv. 27-29). This "good old creation" is ever made new by the life-giving Spirit who continually recreates and sustains all things ("renews the face of the ground"), and who continually calls for a response from the human creatures, who are made to attain virtue through liberty.
It is precisely at this point of evoking the human response, of course, that what I am calling creative grace becomes the more familiar prevenient grace. To be sure, we are not talking about different sorts of grace, but rather about the continuity of divine presence within, throughout and embracing all of creation as God the Spirit interacts with responsible human beings. Even as a person begins to respond ever so slightly to the intimations of grace, the possibility and reality of redemption is begun. Through the preaching of the gospel of Christ-the One uniquely anointed by the Spirit-the character, mercy and will of the Infinite Spirit become more clearly revealed, thus creating the possibility of a more clearly informed and nuanced response to God in terms of Christian faith, repentance, and obedience. At the point of such a response, prevenient grace becomes saving grace. The continuity, throughout and within creation, of the presence of God who is Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and Sanctifier insures that "gradualness" of growth in grace-grace as creative/prevenient/saving/sanctifying-shall be a quite inevitable dimension of our "renewal in love," or our restoration to the image of God.
There is, then, the possibility of new creation, or renewal, of our world. It does not come by coercion, for that would "altogether overthrow [God's] own work, and undo all that he has been doing" in the act of creation. It comes, rather, by human liberty as God sustains us, convicts us, gently persuades us and lovingly liberates us to offer ourselves to his mercy and his will. In this way the good "old" creation can become "new creation," and is indeed renewable in every moment.
It is noteworthy in this connection that, in his comments on Jesus' beatitude "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God," Wesley interprets the implicit eschatology of the beatific vision by means of the cosmology of "good old creation" as explored in this paper. "The pure of heart," Wesley writes, not only shall, but already do "see God" because they "see all things full of God." But their seeing all things in this way is not simply a matter of seeing-as, not simply their saintly perspective being superimposed on their sense experience. Rather, the "pure in heart" see "all things full of God" because all things are full of God, and the pure have been graciously restored to seeing creation for the "good old" creation that it is, ever renewed by, and in, the infinite Creator Spirit. Wrote Wesley:
[The pure in heart] see him in the firmament of heaven, in the moon walking in brightness, in the sun when he rejoiceth as a giant to run his course. They see him "making the clouds his chariots, and walking upon the wings of the wind." They see him "preparing rain for the earth", "and blessing the increase of it"; "giving grass for the cattle, and green herb for the use of man." They see the Creator of all wisely governing all, and "upholding all things by the word of his power." (1984, I:513f)
Here there is a sense of gradualness, of continuity, in the relationship between God and humanity, and indeed all creation; it is, after all, the one God revealed decisively to us in Jesus Christ who is always and continually Creator, Sustainer, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. This is not at all to deny the moments of crisis, of drama, of timeful and timely decision which are distinctive markers on the path to purity of heart. But those crisis moments arise primarily out of the variable human factors of awareness of and response to the Creator Spirit's prevenient presence and activity.
Hence, for example, while Psalm 139 opens with a ringing affirmation of God's intimate, probing knowledge of the psalmist, it nonetheless concludes, strangely enough, with the psalmist's invitation for God to "search me...and know my heart" (v. 23). To make that prayer our own is to move closer to the Heart of "good old creation," to perceive and to experience creation as being ever renewed, ever sustained, ever loved, and ever known in ways infinitely more profound than Adam ever knew Eve!
"In order to attain these glorious ends," Wesley has counseled us, "spare no pains to preserve always a deep, a continual, a lively, and a joyful sense of his gracious presence" (1987, IV:47). Search us, O God!
Notes
1Sallie McFague, The Body of God: An Ecological Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), especially chapters 1-2.
2Dunning is reticent to speak much of the Spirit in a cosmological, creational context in Grace, Faith and Holiness (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1988). However, in An Introduction to Wesleyan Theology (Beacon Hill Press, 1989), Dunning and co-author William Greathouse cite a Charles Wesley hymn on page 47 that complements brother John's cosmological vision beautifully:
Author of every work divine,
Who dost through both creations shine.
The God of nature and of grace.
Thou art the Universal Soul,
The plastic power that fills the whole,
And governs earth, air, sea, and sky;
The creatures all Thy breath receive,
And who by Thy inspiring live,
Without Thy inspiration die.
Spirit immense, eternal Mind,
Thou on the souls of lost mankind
Dost Thy benignest influence move,
Pleased to restore the ruined race,
And recreate the world of grace
In all the image of Thy love.
3Wesley's fascinating suggestion that God intimately knows all things in their "connections, dependencies, and relations" resonates well with the convictions of the process theological tradition. One begins to wonder if this cosmological dimension of the Wesleyan understanding of God, though often only implicit, has not played a part in predisposing so many Methodist theologians toward process modes of thought. Marjorie Hewett Suchocki, for one, certainly thinks so, and has argued the point in her stimulating article "Coming Home: Wesley, Whitehead, and Women" (The Drew Gateway, No. 57, Fall 1987). She writes, for example:
No experience is isolated; every experience exists through its interconnectedness with yet other experiences. In a relational world, every individual experience is one which is "trailing clouds of glory" in that it implies much about further modes of experience. The world is one of mutual implication, of fuzzy edges, of "if's...then's." In short, to name experience as a norm for theology, even when that experience is specifically narrowed to religious experience, is to lay the basis for a Christian natural theology. Is it any wonder, then, that a tradition which allows non-perceptual experience into the normative material for theology should generate a mode of theology which is based upon a fundamentally non-perceptual analysis of experience? I remind you again: most process theologians are United Methodists. (36)
Works Cited
Davies, Paul. 1983. God and the New Physics. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Dunning, Ray, and Greathouse, William. 1993. An Introduction to Wesleyan Theology. Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press.
Grider, J. Kenneth. 1994. A Wesleyan-Holiness Theology. Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press.
McFague, Sallie. 1993. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. "Coming Home: Wesley, Whitehead, and Women." The Drew Gateway, 57:31-43, Fall 1987.
Wesley, John. 1984. The Works of John Wesley, Vol. I. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Wesley, John. 1985. Works, Vol. II. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Wesley, John. 1987. Works, Vol. IV. Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Wiley, H. Orton. Christian Theology, Vol. I. Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1940.
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