Wesleyan Optimism in an Age of Fear
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
Over the past year, we as a global community have faced the crippling challenges of a pandemic. While a pandemic is not a new occurrence in history, very few of us have the ability to remember a time when so much of life has been in lockdown, when so many have died of an airborne disease, nor when the levels of anxiety and fear have impacted so many. I have been aware lately of just how many people are living in a state of fear.
Casting fear is a time-tested linguistic and political tool. Those who employ this tactic deny arguments that oppose their proposals, projecting emotion rather than intellectual engagement. But the level of fear caused by the pandemic and its repercussions is different. This time, the fear of losing life itself is real, of losing incomes, homes, savings, and even loved ones. The fear of losing one’s life is triggered by something as commonplace as human interaction. Mental health challenges are becoming widespread. Isolation and loneliness have become a pandemic unto themselves. The political arena, racial tension, insurrections and riots – from the left and the right – are indicative of a reality built on anger, frustration, distrust, and fear. I have noticed lately just how many friends end their emails, texts, or calls with the words “please stay safe.” The world seems finally to have realized its own brokenness, but whether or not it can see a means of healing is something different.
Yet the Wesleyan expression of the Christian faith – acknowledging the pain and struggle that we face as created beings – offers a radically different approach to the world’s issues. Fear does not drive the tradition. At the heart of the Wesleyan vision is a striking optimism rooted in God’s faithfulness, an inherent hope and confidence based on God’s promises and the experiential nature of salvation.
There are numerous reasons for this approach, including the Wesleyan definition of grace and the doctrine of Christian perfection – the chief reason why, as Wesley claimed, God raised up the Methodists. This optimism is not itself the driving force of the tradition, but arises out of the witness of Wesleyans who proclaim God’s work among us, fueling this optimism.
This is not a pie-in-the-sky approach. We believe that the resurrection of Christ is a precursor of the general resurrection, that believers will be with Christ after death, and that God will ultimately make all things new; but I’m not talking about here-but-not-yet optimism, however useful that may be. Our understanding of salvation produces optimism here and now. In one of his most profound sermons, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” Wesley reminds the listener that salvation is not something that we will only experience when we die. In fact, he says that salvation is not simply “the going to heaven.” Salvation begins now. And as salvation is a restoration of humanity as God originally intended it to be, the inherent freedom made possible by salvation produces an inherent optimism.
Salvation is made possible by grace. Its inauguration in the heart of human persons is a sheer act of God’s gracious empowerment. No one word is more used by Wesleyan Christians than the word “grace.” And although some have had difficulty defining the term, Wesleyans use it to describe a dynamic and transforming power from God. In fact for Wesley, it was nothing less than the “power of the Holy Spirit.” It’s a repercussion of God’s presence with us, active and dynamic. Wesley sometimes used the term in the more passive definition used by Reformed Christians – unmerited favor – but only in the overarching sense that grace is an outgrowth of a dynamic encounter with the Living God, whose power rains down on us in “showers of grace.” This dynamic understanding of grace is a sign of God’s active engagement with every aspect of our lives. The God who wants to make us whole is already enabling us with His grace to seek Christlikeness. Grace calls us to the Father. Grace makes the new birth possible. Grace is the fuel of holiness and therefore the Christian life itself. Put differently, the best of all is God is with us.
The active work of God in human lives produces freedom and gives assurance of salvation. This is one of the aspects of God’s restoration work that my students find the most difficult to understand. For so many of them, assurance is knowing, themselves, that they’re saved. It’s their work. But this is not a Wesleyan view of assurance. Rather, in the Wesleyan tradition, assurance is a gift from God – just like every other aspect of salvation. Wesley described it as God’s Spirit communicating with our spirit that we are children of God. Diane Leclerc often describes the depth of this knowledge of God’s work by asking, “Do you know, that you know, that you know” you’re a child of God? For Wesleyans, the question of assurance is not simply one of knowledge but one of experience. This gift of assurance is a gift that is experienced at the deepest level of our being and it, too, produces optimism by its very nature. In Wesley’s translation of 1 John 3:1, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the children of God.” In his note, he makes it even more emphatic, emphasizing that we are not only called the children of God, but are the children of God.
This optimism is not ignorant of human fallenness. Wesleyans are well aware of the shortfalls of humanity and the diseased, even corrupted, state of the creation after the Fall. But we believe that God can and does make us whole – makes us like Jesus – in this life. There would appear to be a tension between this optimism for human wholeness made possible in Christ and the state of human depravity and sin, yet we don’t see that in Wesley. Instead we see a bold pronouncement, even trust, in God’s promises. This is not one of those “both/and” moments in Wesley, but rather a defiant – dare I say optimistic – embrace of biblical truth, that humanity is diseased, corrupted by sin, and that God is not only capable of making us whole, but desires it.
The tension only exists if we believe at a certain level that God is incapable of granting wholeness in this life, that He is somehow hindered by human sinfulness. We defiantly hold to an honest assessment of human sinfulness precisely because we rest in the promises of the One who raised Jesus from the dead. The resurrection was an in-breaking of the new creation into the present, not just a foretaste of things to come. It’s the explosive revolution of God’s new work that continues to this very day, made possible by the Holy Spirit working within us. The same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead dwells now in the hearts of the faithful, and it is that same Spirit working in us now.
Some could assign the tradition’s optimism to Enlightenment thinking from the eighteenth century, and while we can’t deny the impact of contemporary movements on Wesley, we shouldn’t imagine that the Enlightenment and its valuation of human reason and accomplishment was the driving force behind his thinking. Spend any time in Wesley’s writings and you will see a man whose mind is bathed in scripture, immersed in the Church Fathers, and engaged with the Protestant Reformers.
Ultimately, this optimism – hope and confidence – comes into the tradition by means of the doctrine of Christian perfection. It’s hard to think of a more optimistic assessment of the reach of salvation. As Wesleyans we believe that not only are we made alive in Christ at the new birth but also that the new birth is a gateway to growth in grace, “grace upon grace” as Wesley termed it.
In the new birth, the inward work of God to make us whole takes on new life. Pardoned of our sins in justification, we are now made alive in Christ. But we don’t stop there. The person made alive in Christ moves on to perfection, participating in the means of grace, walking with Christ, loving God and neighbor, until in God’s good timing we are made whole, free from the power of sin in our lives, free to live as God intends. And this divine gift is made available by faith, even now. As Wesley wrote to his friend in 1781, “Be a Methodist still, expect perfection now.”
There’s trust in Wesley’s words about perfection, trust in God’s promises, awareness of an experience with God’s transforming presence, and sure hope – or even optimism – in God’s willingness to bring His promises to pass even in us.
We have this hope and confidence because of the promises of God, because we believe that the blood of Christ truly cleanses from sin, and that the Holy Spirit is still about the work of new creation. Because of these truths and an experienced assurance of God’s promises, the “inward witness” as Samuel Wesley, Sr., described it to his sons, John and Charles, Wesleyanism is an inherently optimistic tradition, arguably optimistic by the grace of God.
Ryan N. Danker is a member of the Firebrand Editorial Board and President of the Charles Wesley Society.