Wesley and Tradition

No one lives in a vacuum. Even John Wesley, beloved of so many and yet such a complex figure, was shaped and formed within a contextual framework. And yet his context is so rarely a part of the story, except to say that he was a clergyman in the Church of England in the eighteenth century. The claim is true but the context was much more interesting and had a much greater impact on Wesley and his Methodist movement. Wesley’s formative years took place during a distinct period of English history after the Restoration of the Monarchy when the theological ground of Anglicanism was coming into focus and the absence of long-held Reformed views revealed a distinctly English form of Protestantism wedded to the church fathers, the ancient structures and patterns of the church, and a society-wide drive to restore the best of the past. It is within this context that Wesley’s own restorationist project takes flight. Within this larger restorationist context, both Wesley and his Methodism take on a depth that is often missing when the context is ignored. And his theology becomes not primarily a challenge to predestinarians, but rather a part of a movement to restore the vitality of the Early Church, the passion of church fathers, and the best of church tradition in his own day.  

When reading Wesley, one clearly can see his use of church tradition. He cites church fathers at will, both Eastern and Western. He recommends his followers read the lives of holy men and women from centuries past. When he quotes the Psalms, it’s almost always the Coverdale translation found in the Prayer Book of 1662. In his arguments, he cites the foundational documents of Anglicanism, including the Book of Homilies written largely by Thomas Cranmer.  Many scholars have argued that Wesley viewed tradition through the lens of purity points, or rather times when the Church “got it right,” such as the early church and the Reformers, sometimes the Puritans and oftentimes English high churchmen. As I work through the process of research and writing a new book on John Wesley and his context, I’ve come to see Wesley’s use of tradition and his own place within the tradition of the Church differently. Instead of trying to find the authors that Wesley used or recommended – a valuable exercise itself – what happens when we ask why Wesley took this approach? 

The eighteenth-century context in which Wesley was raised, educated, and in which he took a leading role in the Evangelical Revival, was much more formative than scholars have given it credit for being. The aversion to seeing Wesley in context largely stems from nineteenth century scholarship that has given us the false narrative that Wesley and his band of lay preachers set out to revive a moribund Church, bereft of all life. When the Church didn’t fully embrace them, the Methodists gave up and founded a worldwide movement of their own. Even though Wesley famously said that God would leave the Methodists if they ever left the Church of England, the narrative is flipped so that when Wesley’s heirs leave the Church the light goes out with them. Using the sketches of William Hogarth as the basis of their worldview, rather than the exaggerations that they were, they’ve created a self-serving view of the eighteenth-century Church. This narrative is the propaganda of a later separatist Methodism. The irony is often lost, that this same narrative – with variations – has been used by the heirs of the Oxford Movement, who set out to restore pre-Reformation era Catholic ritual and theology, calling into question the value of earlier Anglicanism apart from key high churchmen along the way. Placing Wesley in context reveals a much more dynamic narrative, and one that will help to locate Wesley’s thought within, not counter to, an identifiable English tradition. 

In order to get to this dynamic narrative, we must start with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. The events of the seventeenth century loomed large in Wesley’s life. The English Civil Wars had left lasting scars on the landscape. To a certain extent the image of the beheaded monarch now martyr, Charles I, haunted Wesley’s contemporaries. The Commonwealth under Cromwell was seen as a time of social, religious, and political chaos, when monarchy, church, and state had collapsed and the worst of society showed its head. They could see very easily where extremism would lead. Whether their view of these events was accurate was not the point. The Restoration was seen as the dawn of a new day for England: Monarchy, Church, episcopacy, Prayer Book, all restored. And very shortly after that restoration, the Great Ejection of the Puritans on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1662 and the end the Puritan project within the establishment, at least in part. 

What the Restoration launched, in fact, was a larger movement of restorationist thinking, a movement of renewal that can be seen throughout English society built on the understanding that true progress meant restoring the best of the past. This is key to the entire eighteenth century and has been made evident by the work of J. C. D. Clark. Only in the nineteenth century would progress mean moving beyond the past, a view held by many today. But let’s be careful. This was not mere replication or repetition, but rather a complex social engagement with the past meant to translate its collected wisdom in ways useful to the present. It wasn’t simply political or ideological. One can see this vision in the dominant architectural style of the day. The architectural approach used by Wren, Hawksmoor, Gibbs, and others looked back to Greek and Roman architecture, its use of clean lines and symmetry spoke to the 18th c. mindset. It also countered the excesses of Catholic baroque and gothic. At its core, it was a version of the Reformers’ call for a return to the sources, ad fontes. 

In the world of English theology, this period marks the rise not only of the Latitudinarians but more importantly for Wesley a group of high churchmen, namely the later Caroline Divines such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Ken. Such theological voices were part of the larger restorationist vision of the time as they gave precedence in their work to the church fathers. Indeed, throughout this period to be high church, as Wesley claimed for himself, was to give precedence to the church fathers. And in places like Oxford, this approach would largely dominate theological and political discourse. There’s a reason why Wesley was nicknamed “Primitive Christianity.”

Architecture and high churchmanship are just two examples of the larger restorationist vision after 1660. But the vision itself would continue to develop. The Church would continue to develop as it was restored and even the monarchy would adjust to new political realities, most especially with the Revolution of 1688. We don’t have time in this essay to dive into the Revolution, but it, too, was a part of this restoration, even if it was largely a rejection of Catholicism and monarchical absolutism. The Revolution continued to define the Restoration; England would be a Protestant nation with a constitutional monarchy. 

But for the Church, it was the Act of Toleration the following year that marked a pivotal moment in English Christianity. The Church had already ejected the Puritans in 1662 – or the Puritans had rejected the Church by not agreeing to the Act of Uniformity, and most especially the episcopacy and the Prayer Book. Yet with the passage of the Act of Toleration and the rejection of moves for a comprehensive church that would have included both episcopal and Puritan forms of English Protestantism, 1689 marks the end of the formerly dominant Reformed worldview of the established Church. The remnants of the “Old Divinity,” as it would be called, was taken up by the Dissenters – Presbyterians, Baptists, and Independents – and what would come to be known as Anglicanism, a liturgical and episcopal Protestantism built on a catholic consensus would emerge. Later Evangelical Anglicans would reintroduce this Reformed vision within the establishment in the 1740s, but it would never again come to dominate English theological thought. 

The collapse of a Reformed ontology within the established Church after the events of 1660, 1662, 1688, and 1689 was a dramatic shift in the theological world of English Christianity. I’m not trying to say that all traces of Reformed theology were expunged from the Church. Reformed thinkers had written many of its foundational documents. But by the 18th c. and beyond these foundational documents would be read through a different lens. As John Walsh has argued, by 1700 even in England itself a Calvinist “was a rare bird.” It’s into this world that Wesley was born.

This approach has many different repercussions for any study of Wesley and in particular an understanding of tradition from a Wesleyan perspective. Wesley would embrace the form of Christianity that grew out of the Restoration. He was, even in his most irregular moments, an episcopalian Protestant shaped and formed by the Prayer Book. His use of the church fathers, too, acknowledges his place within the high church tradition after the Restoration and its very obvious from his descriptions of Methodism that he saw the movement not as a separatist experiment but as a means to revive “primitive Christianity” within the establishment. That his societies would later emerge as a separate ecclesiastical body should not be seen to negate his original vision. Even his ordinations in 1784, ironically perhaps, can be seen in this vein; his arguments for their irregularity are based on ancient church practice and centuries’ old debates within the Church. Even the way that he ordained Whatcoat, and Vasey followed the rubrics of the Prayer Book!

But what this means is that Wesley should be seen as a part of a larger movement of episcopalian, liturgical, Protestant Christianity in the English tradition, one that equally rejected a Reformed ontology and the advances of Roman Catholicism. As such, Wesley emerges not simply as an Anglican – although he was one – but Methodism itself can be seen more clearly within a larger restorationist movement that not only embraced tradition but saw it as foundational. After you’ve finished this essay, go and read Wesley’s 1777 sermon given at the laying of the foundation of the “New Chapel” on City Road with this restorationist vision in mind. Wesley wanted to restore much more than we might think.

Having this foundation – the faith once delivered, the church fathers, the reformers, etc – is precisely why Wesley was so open to “experiential divinity,” the human experience of the divine. On that firm foundation, experience could be rightly interpreted and engaged. Built on that restorationist vision, Wesley could argue for the radical notions of assurance and Christian perfection, not as new ideas but as representing the wholeness that had been taught all along. Built on that foundation, he could justify irregular practices, i.e. field preaching, society meetings, etc., as long as the nature of the faith itself wasn’t undermined and the goal was to spread scriptural holiness, i.e. restore the Church’s holistic vision. 

But be careful. Neither Restoration movements – nor God’s grace – are limited to the long eighteenth century.

Ryan Danker is Associate Professor of Church History and Methodist Studies at Wesley Theological Seminary.