KEEPING UP WITH JONES ON JOHN WESLEY'S
CONCEPTION AND USE OF SCRIPTURE
by
William J. Abraham
The debate about the nature and value of John Wesley's views on the doctrine of Scripture rumbles on like a low intensity volcano. In part this debate is simply a manifestation of a wider discussion about the interpretation of the Bible in the history of Protestantism. In this regard, Wesley is a key figure in disputes about the intellectual transitions of eighteenth-century England. The debate involves the matter of receiving and evaluating the legacy of Albert Outler in Wesley Studies. On this score, it is extremely difficult to make progress, because Outler enjoys a kind of cult status in some scholarly and populist circles. Until we get more distance in time from Outler, it will continue to be difficult to raise questions about the famous "Quadrilateral" of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. The debate about Wesley's views is in part an argument about the identity of United Methodist, or Methodist, or Wesleyan commitments today. Here Outler was the complete master of ceremonies. He brilliantly succeeded in using Wesley as a vehicle for his own theological proposals, often turning Wesley in the wind to do so, but all the while excoriating others for not working with the real historical Wesley and himself providing a dazzling array of historiographical essays which camouflaged his own partisan intentions and activities.[1]
Such developments create interesting dilemmas and tensions for a younger generation of students of Wesley. On the one side, there is still a huge debt to be paid to Outler for his labors, his ingenious suggestions, and his extraordinary rhetorical skill. It is essential and natural to build on the work he and others have done. On the other side, the real issue in the end is not the theology of Albert Outler, but the theology of John Wesley. The latter clearly exists in its own right, and Outler's proposals have to be tested against the historical reality, as best we can reconstruct it.[2] In this context, Scott Jones' book, John Wesley's Conception and Use of Scripture,[3] is a landmark study which will easily become the standard work on its assigned topic for the foreseeable future.[4] Taken together with Rex Matthew's unpublished Harvard dissertation[5] on Wesley's epistemology, the student of Wesley has both a mine of information and a benchmark for future research. In this essay I want to review Jones' work, bring out its main strengths, and identify crucial areas in need of further exploration.
Jones breaks new methodological ground in the study of Wesley's views on Scripture. Rather than simply identify and examine Wesley's conception of Scripture, that is, Wesley's own avowals about the nature of Scripture, Jones examines carefully Wesley's actual use of Scripture. He takes very seriously the adage that actions may speak louder than words. The labor involved in this task is admirable: Jones has gone through the whole of the original writings of Wesley, compiling no less than 1,230 references to Scripture and theological method. Within this, he is careful to set aside virtually all works edited or abridged by Wesley. We have here a kind of ruthless inductivism; we have a form of hermeneutical empiricism which would have warmed the heart of Wesley himself. Jones' work is nicely governed by the central thesis developed in the book as a whole. While Wesley held to the authority of Scripture alone, Scripture did not stand alone, but was held in tension with four other factors: reason, Christian antiquity, the Church of England, and experience. There is in fact but one authority with five aspects. Generally speaking, this thesis, claims Jones, is corroborated by Wesley's explicit doctrines on the nature of Scripture and by his actual use of Scripture. This is the core of Jones' proposal. He examines carefully the relevant avowals and usage of Wesley to back it up. The evidence is laid out carefully, systematically, and judiciously. Furthermore, Jones supplies a relevant summary of Wesley's convictions about the nature of interpretation and a corresponding chapter on his interpretative practices. While these come as something of a tailpiece attached to his central chapters, they are entirely in place.
Jones is not just interested in Wesley as an eighteenth-century theologian, but also as a mentor for today. Hence, this is an exercise not just in history, but in historical theology. At this juncture Jones clearly thinks that there is still much intellectual mileage in Wesley's doctrine of Scripture. This is not, of course, a novel thesis, but, given Jones's clear sense of the intellectual distance between the eighteenth and late twentieth centuries, he has certainly set himself a formidable challenge. One is tempted at this stage to say that Jones loses his nerve. While at the outset he makes much of the fact that Wesley is thoroughly negative towards tradition and that Wesley's position requires a fivefold rather than fourfold matrix of authority, at the end he lamely suggests that the Quadrilateral invented by Outler is in good shape after all. This is where the distinction between conception and use pays off. While in conception Wesley was negative towards tradition, in usage he goes well beyond the appeal to Christian antiquity and the Church of England. In usage he is committed to tradition. To some readers Jones will appear to be splitting hairs at this point, yet many will gladly welcome the fact that the position of Outler remains intact.
More generally, many will welcome Jones' closing effort to offer Wesley's subtle and complex matrix of authority as serviceable in the current debate about the nature and authority of Scripture. As Jones sees it, a genuinely Wesleyan understanding of Scripture would satisfy five criteria. It would take a high view of the authority and inspiration of Scripture, within that contending for reliable access to divine revelation. It would foster a ready use of all relevant approaches to knowledge outside of Scripture, correlating them with Scripture. It would seek out the whole message of Scripture, focusing on its soteriological content. It would use the best critical tools. And it would aim at articulating the understanding of the whole Christian church.
Our summary cannot begin to do justice to the immense amount of careful research that has gone into this book. Jones has provided an invaluable service in ferreting out the nooks and crannies of Wesley on Scripture. Throughout he keeps his critical wits about him, noting, for example, that for Wesley the doctrine of the Trinity is tied to his account of the ordo salutis, and that the modern disciple of Wesley will be hard pressed to argue that Wesley's views on the content of Scripture as focused essentially on the ordo salutis can be sustained today. Moreover, Jones does a fine job in relating his account of Wesley to wider developments in biblical criticism. Wesley is really caught between two worlds; he is a traditionalist who cracks open the door for criticism, accepting but not really welcoming the human side of Scripture.
I want now to raise three questions as a way of furthering the debate about the content and value of Wesley's account of Scripture. Let me begin with the normative significance of Wesley for today.
1. There is at the heart of Jones' account of Wesley an obvious incoherence which is never really faced.
... part of Wesley's view is that the Bible is the sole source and sole norm for Christian faith, teaching, and practice. Wesley is clear on this point and insists on it many times and in many ways. This view must be qualified, however. While Wesley says that scripture is the "whole and sole rule of faith" he also relies on other authorities. Scripture stands in a complex relation to reason, Christian antiquity, Christian experience, and the Church of England. While scripture is in one sense the only authority, a comprehensive statement of his doctrine must account for these others. [34]
The obvious problem here is that Wesley and Jones want the impossible. In one moment they want a sole source and norm; the next they want to smuggle in three or four others, depending on how we count and what we are counting. This is simply incoherent if we are to use the English language as its stands. We cannot claim that x is a sole source and norm and then turn around and add other norms. "Sole" is not an adjective which admits of qualification. This is one reason why it is common to prefer the claim that Wesley is committed merely to the primacy of Scripture. It permits room to speak of other warrants for justification in Wesley. Jones does not and cannot really use this term because the evidence he marshals against it is so strong. Wesley really is a traditional biblicist. In his own way, he is even committed to dictation.
Furthermore, note what is offered as additional items on the list of norms. We have reason and Christian experience, which are epistemic terms, and we have Christian antiquity and the Church of England, which are not epistemic terms. The former is a historical construct, reflecting Wesley's idiosyncratic and unjustified idealism about the church before Constantine, and the latter is an institution. This is a very odd list of items to put together. They do not belong to the same category at all. Nor, for that matter, does Scripture fit with reason and experience, although in this case we can understand its inclusion, for Scripture here stands proxy for revelation, which is an epistemic notion.
The confusion in this whole terrain surfaces in Jones' own efforts to rescue Wesley. Jones' strategy is to insist that these five items represent "a single but complex locus of authority" [103]. In fact, "these authorities are nor really five but one..... When properly used, all five have the same content." Together they provide "a unified witness to the truth of the Christian faith." By the end we are lost in a confusion about numbers." For Wesley, these five form a single witness to the truth when they are rightly used" [216]."Whereas his [Wesley's] conception of a fivefold but unified locus of authority is clear, his use indicates a fourfold but unified locus of authority" [218]. How many items do we have here? One, four, five, or six? And what items are we counting: source; or norm; or truth; or witness? Moreover, why does Jones, in the final summing up, privilege usage over conception in his reading of Wesley? He provides no substantial argument for this crucial choice. Is this a political move to soften the blow of his deep and explicit undermining of the Quadrilateral in the first part of the book? Or is it an occasion to try and rescue the Quadrilateral, giving him a chance to deploy the standard but question-begging argument that every theologian really relies on the Quadrilateral whether they like to acknowledge it or not?
We need to dig deeper here. In sorting out Jones' exposition of Wesley we need another layer of epistemological concepts. To be fair to Jones, he has cast the issues in conventional theological categories, that is, in terms of authority, source, norm, witness, truth, and the like. This way of proceeding is entirely understandable, for it relates Wesley naturally to the standard concepts in the field. It is a sure sign that these no longer work, however, when we find ourselves puzzled and perplexed once we stop and stare at what is before us. Jones, perhaps without entirely realizing it, has brought the difficulties more fully into view.
In light of this, we need to go back to the drawing board in epistemology and deploy a richer set of concepts than are currently in vogue. Thus, to speak of a single locus of authority with four or five aspects is to invoke a notion where the perplexity which drove us to this notion breaks out all over again. There is in fact no single problem of authority in theology. The idea of authority harbors a host of logically distinct questions which are too readily run together. We have to go back inside these notions, so to speak, and explore afresh what is at stake. Most importantly, we need to unpack the deeper epistemological problems that lurk in the neighborhood. Within this we can no longer simply confuse Scripture with revelation, or norm with witness, or any of these with truth. Until this fresh epistemological work is done, and until Jones' work is carefully examined with an eye that looks to, but also goes beyond, Matthew's work on Wesley's empiricism, any account of Wesley on Scripture is liable to be confused and incomplete.
2. This leads naturally into a second observation. Jones is right that any proposal must do justice to all the data available in Wesley. Especially must it find a way to take into review both his appeal to Scripture and his appeal to reason, Christian antiquity, and the like. It is also fair to ask that we proceed on the principle of charity, that is, we should attempt to provide a reading which gives prima facie place to consistency in an author who valued consistency both logically and autobiographically. We need, however, to pursue several hypotheses. One such hypothesis is the one offered by Jones; Wesley has one locus of authority with four or five aspects.
Another hypothesis is that Wesley accepts the authority of Scripture for matters of faith and practice, a proposition in turn backed up by an account of inspiration and revelation, and that the other elements, however we identify and number them, are norms not for the truth of Scripture but for the right interpretation of the truth given by God in Scripture. This is a much cleaner and simpler analysis of Wesley. Jones himself supplies evidence in favor of this position, but he never really gives it the attention it deserves.
Yet another hypothesis is this. It was a central feature of medieval theology that one normed one's doctrinal proposals by Scripture or divine revelation. Theology was a form of scientia in which one derived one's premises for argument from the highest knowledge available, namely, divine knowledge given in revelation. This goes a long way to explain the doctrine of sola scriptura in medieval theology and in classical Protestant theology, including classical Anglican theology. Such an epistemology of theology, did not, however, preclude an appeal to reason or tradition or experience. In fact, in arguments with others these were readily invoked, most famously in the five ways of Aquinas. Yet these did not constitute norms for the science of theology; they were essentially apologetic strategies to move a person towards belief and the concomitant salvation of their souls.
Clearly this hypothesis may also fit the data available on Wesley. In conception, he falls naturally into the medieval schema, broadly understood. In practice, as an apologist and a skillful polemicist, he naturally deployed any argument at his disposal which did not undermine his own integrity. What has misled us here is the thought that we can uncover Wesley's epistemology by the simple expedient of counting. We add up the various epistemic entities, like reason and experience, which show up in Wesley, and we presume that the sum of them is his epistemology of theology or his account of authority. Wesley himself may not help here, for as James Hutton of the Fetter Lane Society once remarked, "John Wesley was a level-headed Briton, with a mind as exact as a calculating machine."[6] This whole approach, which we clearly owe to Outler, really misses the epistemological moves being made, and Jones has inadvertently exposed the confusion involved.
These two hypotheses, taken singly or together, go a long way to providing a plausible reading of Wesley in his context. They certainly avoid the confusion manifest in the account given by Jones. Yet, of course, we may have to reckon that Wesley really was confused. Or as Ronald Knox once provocatively suggested: ". . . altogether he [Wesley] is not a good advertisement for reading on horseback."[7]
3. This judgment would not in the end trouble Jones. His commitment to Wesley is critical and conditional. Much as he values Wesley as a mentor, he is prepared to take what he can and move on. In fact, his positive recommendations become very general in the end, and he advances them with considerable caution. There is not the same enthusiasm for detail which one finds, for example, in the work of Randy L. Maddox[8] or Kenneth J. Collins.[9] Thus Jones is well aware that Wesley's claim that the analogy of faith in the ordo salutis is fraught with difficulty exegetically. It is also fraught with difficulty theologically. This is well brought out by the fact that Wesley patches on the doctrine of the Trinity as a kind of afterthought. Something is clearly amiss here. One way to explain the patchwork nature of Wesley's thought at this point is historical. The analogy or rule of faith was once clearly identified as the content of the early creeds. Here indeed we find the doctrine of the Trinity and next to nothing on salvation. It is salvation, however, which has caught Wesley's attention, and he is so carried away by it that initially it eclipses the doctrine of the Trinity. But Wesley is sufficiently formed by the patristic faith to rescue his dangerous substitution at the last minute. Yet he never really grasps what he is doing. This is not just reading on horseback, but doing theology on horseback.
There are Wesleyans who will find this evaluation distressing. They have been convinced by Outler and others that Wesley is a truly great theologian, so to find this kind of incompetence will be a shock to the system. We need more drastic medicine at this point. Wesley is what he is. We nonetheless can learn from him in a host of ways without exaggerating his significance. More importantly, it is a fact that those who were brought to faith through Wesley ultimately had to make their own decisions about what to adopt and what not to adopt from Wesley and elsewhere. In short, they had to make serious canonical decisions on what was binding on the denominations they had to create, and on what way and to what degree those canonical decisions were binding.
To begin to explore this phenomenon adequately, we need another history. We need a careful account of the canonical decisions of the people called Methodists. It is within this field of discourse that we can take up what was or was not carried over canonically from Wesley into the tradition and how far it should or should not be carried over canonically into the future. Students of Wesley tend to ignore this issue. They focus generally on how the whole of Wesley or various selected parts of Wesley were played out in the aftermath. This is entirely legitimate. We can and should look at Wesley like any other figure in history. Happily, the primary and secondary sources at our disposal are legion.
This will not, however, suffice for theology. Through Wesley God raised up a people who in turn found themselves transformed into a church. In this transition they selected what would or would not be binding on the whole community and where and how this might be changed. In other words, they developed a very significant canonical heritage. For too long this canonical heritage has been misread as a quasi-epistemological heritage and reduced to the problem of authority in theology. This is the really deep problem with the status currently accorded to the Quadrilateral in Methodist circles. Problems of canon in the church are transposed into problems of criteria in epistemology. The latter becomes like a soft Irish bog where few are able to secure their footing for long given the difficulty of the subject and given the number of philosophers who are clearing out the peat. The only way ahead is to join seriously in the work of epistemology, but to do so realizing that there is a logically distinct and equally important set of issues about the canonical heritage of the church to be explored and resolved.
Such work on the canonical history set in motion by Wesley and the Methodists will have its own light to throw on Wesley. Outler rightly taught us to examine the sources that went into the formation of Wesley. However, an agent may be known as much by his grandchildren as by his ancestors. An agent, in short, is known in part by his effects in history, and these effects are visible in abundance in the case of Wesley. Focusing on the canonical effects of Wesley's actions could well help us bring the issues under a measure of intellectual control. It might also enable his modern followers to come to better terms with the tensions and divisions which currently beset them.
Endnotes:
