The Wesleyan Middle Way

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As an outgrowth of Anglicanism, the Wesleyan movement developed its own version of the Anglican via media. Because Wesleyanism emerged as a movement within the Church of England, its understanding of the middle way became grounded in soteriology rather than ecclesiology. By focusing on holiness, Wesley attempted to carve a path between crisis and process, divine sovereignty and human freedom, sacramentalism and revivalism, or any number of extremes he found in his own day. Indeed, one way to translate Wesley’s desire for a middle way is to reduce it to orthopathy as the means to hold together orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Fundamentalism emerges from the way in which confessionalization comes to dominate the church, whereas modernism emerges from a reinterpretation of Christian doctrine in terms of praxis. The emphasis on holiness has provided Wesleyans with a mechanism to maintain a balance between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It’s the Wesleyan middle way.

Confessionalization, Fundamentalism, and Orthodoxy

Confessionalizaton is a social process that stems from the creation and implementation of confessional identity as a way of life. It began with the emphasis on confessions in the early Reformation, which culminated in the Imperial Diet of Augsburg of 1530. While the initial purpose of these confessions (like the Augsburg Confession or the Tetrapolitan Confession) was for Protestants to proclaim their orthodoxy to Catholic political rulers, the purpose quickly morphed over the course of the sixteenth century into the social and political definition of various parts of Europe. The work of Heinz Schilling has shown that confessions emerged as doctrinal identity markers and then expanded into social and political markers that separated German lands into Protestant and Catholic. 

As a social process, confessionalization concerns how doctrinal identity becomes paramount to define and renew cultural and institutional identity. For Reformed Protestants, Reformed Christianity represented a so-called Second Reformation solidified by the proliferation of Reformed confessions and reinforced by political rulers who provided the legal backing for those confessions. This partly explains why the Synod of Dordt became not simply a national synod defining Reformed Christianity, but an international one that sought to define Protestant Christianity in England. Compelled by Puritan desire to fully reform the English church, Reformed confessionalization wreaked havoc on England, culminating in a civil war and the interregnum, out of which came The Westminster Standards. It is fair to say that those doctrinal standards represented a long process of confessionalization in Europe and the British Isles. 

In many respects, confessionalization forms a crucial part of the Reformed and Baptist experience in America. The use of doctrine to reform and renew social and political life and preserve a distinct identity formed the backbone of that Reformed resurgence stemming from the origins of Princeton Seminary in 1812. Yet, the introduction of the idea of worldview as a comprehensive view of life in the late 1800s and early 1900s reinforced confessionalization. Indeed, when Cornelius Van Til argued for presuppositionalism, he provided a philosophical basis for confessionalization. There were assumptions each person held—a worldview—that had to be tested and tried over against the proper understanding of Christianity as articulated by the Reformed confessional tradition. The modern apologetics movement was birthed in this context. 

Under the banner of worldview thinking, American society could be transformed through a social and political program that extended the right confession to every area of life. This social impulse was not simply behind Fundamentalism, it more fiercely governed the Neo-Evangelicals like Carl Henry, who utilized this broader vision of confessional identity to fight against modernism for the soul of church and society. It was not simply about affirming Trinity and Christology expressed in the five solas of the Reformation, but a movement into doctrinal positions on the creation of the world (young earth, old earth, etc.) or the integration of social sciences into a Christian framework (the biblical counseling movement).

Under the influence of Protestant pietism and the sacramental emphasis on holiness in High Church Anglicanism, John Wesley resisted the transformation of society through confessionalization. While he was a good Anglican, he saw very quickly how confessionalization broke apart the social ties that bind people together. More importantly, confessionalization led to a form of Christian identity devoid of holiness of heart in favor of ideological conformity and deeply resistant to a dynamic, experientially driven Christianity. The emphasis on the crisis of encounter, an assurance of faith, purity of heart, and the veracity of spiritual experience pulled Wesley away from the forms of confessionalization he found in British ecclesial life and toward a social program of holiness. 

Modernism, Liberal Theology, and Orthopraxy

Modernism stemmed from a reaction to confessionalization. This reaction began with a return to the experiential ground of Christianity that led to an international pietistic movement within Protestantism. On German soil, pietism sought to recover medieval mystical streams and wed them to congregational programs that facilitated personal renewal. With the advent of Enlightenment thinking and the turn inward, external authority began to be questioned in favor of human reason and the autonomy of the individual. The liberal tradition in Christianity was born out of this fusion of Enlightenment thinking, individual experience, and the questioning of external authority, particularly scripture. 

Although the liberal tradition first flowered in German soil, it quickly took root in the United States alongside the rise of the research university built on the model of Berlin. The emphasis on God’s presence within creation became wedded to certain ideas about evolution and postmillennialism to give rise to a progressive idealism. All of these streams flowed into what became the social gospel, which jettisoned doctrine in favor of action. Orthopraxy in the form of living out the gospel mandate to bring justice to the nations became the order of the day. This was all about living out the kingdom in the form of a social program driven by an exemplarist model of the atonement in which Jesus’ death expressed the way of love.   

In contradistinction to confessionalization, the American liberal theological tradition trumpeted an orthopraxy grounded in love and justice and wedded it to a rejection of external authority in favor of reason and experience. At the same time, the liberal tradition sought to retain some emphasis on the mystical element in religion by seeing it as part of the appeal to experience. The mystical and the psychological became part of the overall approach to Christianity, yielding the fruit of a therapeutic approach to spirituality. Yet, this very rejection of external authority in favor of reason and experience came under attack by liberationist theologians in the 1960s and 1970s who pointed out the obvious: the appeal to a common human experience or some universal form of reason by white men was itself an enshrinement of white male patriarchy and superiority. 

Under the banner of the modernist rejection of external authority, liberal Christianity sought to transform society through an orthopraxy grounded in a kingdom ethics of love that took seriously race, gender, and, eventually, sexuality. The liberationist approach expanded orthopraxy through a vigorous critique of patriarchal and racial constructs espoused within the very liberal tradition out of which it came. Slowly the social sciences came to dominate the focus on lived experience. One can see this not only in the internal debates within the newly formed United Methodist Church, but within the evolution of Union Theological Seminary in New York from modernist to Niebuhrian reaction to liberationist approaches. Salvation as orthopraxis involved a kind of therapy of the soul through the ethics associated with gender, racial, and sexual diversity. The appeal to group experience became the lens to interpret and integrate scripture into the Christian life. 

While Wesley never encountered the later versions of modernism and social-gospel orthopraxy, he became convinced that the approach to holiness grounded in High Church sacramentalism was insufficient to renew Christianity. It required integration into a broader theological framework that emphasized the encounter-driven revivalism of the Great Awakening. He also saw the attempt to evacuate the content of Christian doctrine by deists as leading to an anemic church that could no longer argue for its unique role as reformer of society. The church became just another institution, even if it was reinforced by the state. Wesley’s own evangelical identity moved him beyond the sacramental vision of holiness of High Church Anglicanism and the generic deism of Enlightenment rationalism in the service of revolution. 

Orthopathy: The Wesleyan Middle Way

The link between right confession and right action was the proper formation of the affections, since the affections were the integrating center of the human person. In an important sense, the declaration that the purpose of Methodism was “to reform the nation, particularly the church, and to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land” embodied this basic idea. To be holy was to have the mind of Christ, and the mind of Christ was not some deeper consciousness one tapped into through lived experience but the mind of God expressed in and through the plan of God found in scripture and accessed by the Spirit of God. It was “scriptural” holiness. To rightly order the affections required a right order, which was itself grounded in God’s story as expressed in the person and work of Christ and set forth in the scriptures.

There is no doubt that orthodoxy requires a common confession. This confession is more accurately understood as a common story, a narrative about God and God’s people that cannot simply be broken up or set aside in the name of individual experience or a particular form of rationality. This was the lesson Christianity learned in the internal debate with Gnostic Christians like Valentinus in the second century. From Irenaeus’ Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching to Augustine’s City of God, Christians theologized in light of the one story because they viewed scripture as itself an epic telling of the origin of the people of God, much like Homer or Virgil. Just as every line of The Iliad must be linked to the larger plot, every passage holds its place and proper understanding within the story of God. One cannot understand Origen’s On First Principles apart from its intertwining of apostolic and ecclesial teaching through the single plot found in the scriptures. The spiritual meaning of any passage cannot abrogate the one story of God expressed in the scriptures.

The common story, like other stories, must be internalized so that it becomes my story. Peter’s universal declaration of Jesus as messiah on the other side of Pentecost invites the whole world to participate in the story of Israel that has now become the story of Jesus and therefore the story of the world. While scripture embodies this story, the church becomes the bearer of the story through its retelling in word, sacrament, and deed. Hence, Wesley did much of his theology in the form of sermons, hymns, and treatises that told the story over and over again. And, John Fletcher placed Wesley’s emphasis on story into a trinitarian historical framework that became the way to interpret and harmonize scripture.

The point is that orthodoxy is first and foremost about entering a way of salvation with the people of God. It is less a confessional identity, grounded in a set of propositions and propagated through ecclesial and civil institutions, than a doxological participation in the holiness of God. Such a participation requires the transformation of the affections through holy love as the means by which this story becomes my story and this people become my people. Apart from orthopathy, there can be no genuine orthodoxy, no genuine worship of God. To spread scriptural holiness required a participation in the life of the holy One of Israel by being caught up into a story that cannot simply be remade in one’s own image. In the same way that one cannot change one’s ancestors or the story of one’s national and cultural heritage, so one cannot change the story of God and God’s plan in the world. One can understand it more deeply or articulate it more clearly, but one can never simply deconstruct it without at the same time deconstructing one’s own existence. 

And yet, the formation of right affections is about more than doxological participation in and through works of piety. It was also about works of mercy and right praxis. Holiness was not simply a sphere of God’s presence that one participated in through worship, it was also a set of practices that gave rise to a holy disposition. For this reason, orthopathy became the link between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Wesley’s vision of spreading scriptural holiness concerned the transformation of the nation through holy action in the church and world. 

Even though Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield both agreed with Wesley on the need to form the affections rightly, it was Wesley who saw the connection between internal formation and right action. His Thoughts Upon Slavery expressed his commitment to reform the nation by calling upon his fellow English to act out of a genuine love for humanity. He wanted to bring holy love to bear on human relations, not simply relations within the church itself. Having been formed in holiness through the story of God, one now engaged in mission.

On the one hand, Wesley’s famous declaration that there is no holiness that is not social reinforced his commitment to forming holy lives in the context of the church. Orthopraxy begins with the family of God. It was in this context that Wesley began to alter his stance toward women preaching as part of the extraordinary call of God with the context of the extraordinary movement called Methodism. In short, women were part of the renewal of the church. On the other hand, over the course of his long life he understood the implications of social holiness to involve works of mercy that included standing against slavery. Moreover, this kingdom praxis was itself part of the way of salvation and thus the means by which one participated in the holiness of God. Orthopathy was not simply a movement from orthodoxy to orthopraxy. This movement went both ways because becoming holy meant shaping the affections through doxological participation in the story of God and missional participation in the world.

The Wesleyan via media is an approach to Christianity grounded in the doctrine of salvation. It is an attempt to hold together orthodoxy and orthopraxy through an emphasis on holiness of heart (orthopathy). Whenever Wesleyanism abandoned Wesley’s effort to hold together revivalism and sacramentalism, sovereignty and freedom, or crisis and process by an overemphasis on confessionalism or on moralism, it has done so by first jettisoning the orthopathic center of holiness.  

Dr. Dale M. Coulter is Professor of Historical Theology at Pentecostal Theological Seminary. He also serves on the Editorial Board for Firebrand.