In Every Solid Truth Abide
Learning's redundant part and vain
Be all cut off, and cast aside,
But let them, Lord, the substance gain,
In every solid truth abide;
Swiftly acquire, and ne'er forego,
The knowledge fit for man to know.
- Charles Wesley
Methodists were once serious about teaching the faith to their young. The movement was birthed in Susanna Wesley’s instruction of her children. John and Charles gained the moniker “Methodists” when they formed the Holy Club, in no small part devoted to the study of the faith while at Christ Church, Oxford.
Endowed with the responsibility to shepherd the Methodist movement, the Wesleys provided for the instruction of children. The Kingswood school was founded in 1740, two years after John and Charles’s hearts were strangely warmed. For the occasion, Charles penned the splendid line: “Unite the pair so long disjoined, Knowledge and vital piety.”
In 1745, John published Instructions for Children, directing the parents and teachers into whose care these young souls fell to “above all let them not read or say one line without understanding and minding what they say. Try them over and over; stop them short, almost in every sentence.”
In 1763, Charles published Hymns for Children, which went through four editions over the following two decades. In the first edition, the first thirty hymns followed closely the set of topics in John’s earlier Instructions for Children. Charles Jr. and Sally, two of his three children that survived infancy, were then six and four.
Many now lament the decline of careful instruction of children in American Methodism. The problem, however, is not distinctively Methodist. According to Barna, 63% of pastors say poor discipleship models are a major concern facing the Christian church in the U.S. today. What happened?
If discipleship problems are not distinctively Methodist, there are distinctively Methodist discipleship problems. Ours are the product of slumbering doctrine. Our peculiar and bold doctrines have been laid to waste. We followed the twentieth-century trend in mainline American Protestantism to thin doctrine and emphasize nebulous accounts of experience. Our propensity for trend-following devastated Methodist teaching and preaching. Prevenient grace was once a doctrine to rouse the boldest sinner to weep for mercy, therein finding penitent joy. It’s now been replaced with saccharine universalism. Our once-bold assertion that God, indeed, desires that all be saved, and the Son’s death on the cross is sufficient means for it, now detached from a clear sense of what salvation from sin and death consists in, lost its savor and urgency.
Worst of all, that doctrine which Wesley called “the grand depositum” of Methodism, entire sanctification, now passes as a curiosity. Absenting a robust sense of our fallen nature, prevented from its just dissolution by the mercy of preventing grace, we cannot glimpse the wonder that our God would endow our disordered souls with such grace that we become suffused with the love of God.
In short, there is work to do. This is one reason Phil Tallon and I decided to write The Absolute Basics of the Wesleyan Way. We wanted to retrieve the wisdom of John and Charles. We wanted to look after the instruction of our young. We are also fathers of four kids apiece, so there was no small amount of self-interest in the decision.
Most of all, we believe the doctrines of the Wesleyan tradition, and the way of living the Christian life those doctrines engender, are gifts the church universal needs preserved.
We’re proud of the book, but we’re also conscious of the fact that much more work needs to be done. The long-term effect of doctrinal thinning has left us without the resources necessary to articulate the Methodist faith in the twenty-first century, twenty years in. What should we do with the next twenty years?
Foremost we must find the nerve to reckon with the reality that our tradition has fallen into doctrinal disorder. Our heritage has been depleted. Only then can we set about restoring it. The spiritual renewal so many of us long for, if the history of Christianity is any precedent, will follow upon and finally be sustained by doctrinal renewal.
The Wesleys were gifted a doctrinal heritage. As William Burt Pope put it,
The founders of Methodism…did not, like the Reformers of the sixteenth century, find themselves face to face with a Christianity penetrated through and through by error. They accepted the doctrinal standards of the English Church; and the subscription both of their hands and of their hearts they never revoked.
Wesleyans, like the Wesleys, must resist any disjunctive talk about doctrine and holiness. Knowledge and vital piety are to be united. When Wesley encountered the excesses and disorders of Lutheran Pietism, he undertook to purify them in the waters of English doctrine. When he “submit(ed) to be more vile,” a favorite quote for Wesleyans chasing today’s trends, he rejected the path of Whitefield, and developed his own doctrine-shaped order for moving those plucked by the Spirit from field and mine along the path to holiness. The Societies, with their Classes and Bands, are the embodiment of the Wesleyan doctrine of grace.
It was natural that, while ordering the Societies, Wesley was also caring for their formation in Christian teaching – doctrine – by the publication of sermons, songs, and so on. And it worked. Again, William Burt Pope: “early Methodism had a sound theological training; theology preached in its discourses, sung in its hymns, shaped its terms of communion, and presided in the discussions of its conferences. Hence its stability in comparison of other results of the general awakening.” They were stable because they were abiding in solid truth.
Now our task is to recover and propagate solid truth. And then, in every solid truth abide.
How? The task is large. It will take a variety of people doing a variety of things. We will need resources, and we will need expert teachers. We will need exemplary sanctity. But we must remember, along the way, that knowledge and vital piety are integral. The holy are gifted with a supernatural capacity to perceive truth. Those gifted with divine wisdom know it elicits the desire for union with God. To know God is to love God. The two – love and knowledge – are naturally ordered to one another.
We make a good start by disciplining ourselves to holy teachers of the faith. People once moved cross-continent to seek out a teacher like Anselm of Canterbury. When the Church of England grew doctrinally thin with latitudinarianism, members of the Oxford Movement dedicated themselves to the wisdom of holy teachers. They produced the Library of the Fathers, around 50 volumes of the church fathers in English translation. In our own tradition, Tom Oden devoted the latter part of his life to reading and organizing others for reading early Christian sources. He was preparing a way for prayerful study and reflection upon Scripture under the guidance of these historic witnesses.
We should pick up where he left off. There we might reintegrate and reorder our doctrinal tradition. And, best of all, we might come to imitate the holy teachers, and find ourselves holy – enflamed with the love of divine truth.
Dr. Justus Hunter is Assistant Professor of Church History at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. His most recent book, co-authored with Dr. Philip Tallon, is The Absolute Basics of the Wesleyan Way.