John Wesley

A Lack of Consensus in Advent

/ Robert D / Leave a comment

“It is a primary truth of Christianity that God reaches us directly. No person is insulated. As ocean floods the inlets, as sunlight environs the plant, so God enfolds and enwreathes the finite spirit. There is this difference, however, inlet and plant are penetrated whether they will or not. Sea and sunshine crowd themselves in a tergo. Not so with God. He can be received only through appreciation and conscious appropriation. He comes only through doors that are purposefully opened for him. A person may live as near Goad as the bubble is to the ocean and yet not find him. He may be ‘closer than breathing, nearer than hands or feet,’ and still be missed.”

Rufus Jones, from “The Double Search” as quoted in “A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants” by Reuben Job & Normal Shawchuck

In our study of “All the Good: A Wesleyan Way of Christmas,” during the first week of Advent, one of the authors of the study, Laceye Warner, shared a personal story of playing hide and seek with children in the middle of a worship service. She was comparing the game of hide and seek to Christ approaching in Advent. In Advent, ready or not, here Christ comes.

This week I was looking through the readings for reflection from “A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Others Servants” when Rufus Jones’s words showed up in a quote from “The Double Search.” Recently I have been spending time in Rufus Jones’ 1916 work “The Inner Life,” so I paid attention to what Jones wrote while wondering how Rufus Jones ended up in the readings for the second week of Advent.

What an interesting tension between these two readings. Rev. Warner wrote about how Jesus is coming into the world whether it is ready or not. Rufus Jones wrote about how God is by nature a God who believes in consent. For Jones, God is as close as a bubble may be to the ocean, but consent is required before God will enter into a life. For Warner, God is right there on the verge of entering into the world whether or not it is ready.

Now the interesting thing about these two from my perspective is the potential clash of theology. Rev. Warner is deeply and steeply within the Methodist tradition. As an elder, I can say that I would not question her theology for one moment if I were on a Board of Ordained Ministry. Her position is solidly supported by Wesleyan research, writings, and traditions. Should she one day google this blog article, I hope she sees that I give her and her theology a thumbs up! Nothing personal here, Rev. Warner.

There is grace in the world for us and that grace is prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying. These graces exist in that particular order. God works within us even before we consciously choose to accept God. Unmerited favor pours down and into a life that comes to a point of acceptance and justification. Students of Methodist theology call that type of loving kindness and mercy prevenient grace.

Quaker theologian Rufus Jones states that God is right in the world around us, but that there must be an acceptance of God’s love before God truly enters into a person. I’m not enough of a Quaker scholar to state whether or not Jones would say that the presence of God in that proximity would qualify as a form of prevenient grace, but I wonder. God is there surrounding a person like the sunshine surrounds a tree or like the water fills an inlet, but Jones states there’s a difference: the sun may fill a plant with light that leads to a reaction with chlorophyll, but the plant has no say in the presence of the light. The water may pour into the inlet, but the inlet has no say in the matter. Tides, gravity, and water levels conspire to fill an inlet whether or not it desires to be wet.

For Rufus Jones, there must be consent before God enters into a life. For people like John Wesley, acceptance definitively matters as a prerequisite before prevenient grace leads a person to a salvific experience with the justifying grace offered by Christ. There’s a similar view on consent for both Jones and Wesley when it comes to salvation. The question I have is whether or not prevenient grace is a consensual grace.

As a minister, I have heard many times from a beloved child of God about the life of a loved one who is in their prayers. Sometimes the loved one is not willing to come to church or to accept the presence of God in their life. There have been prayers for the beloved person who may be angry, hurt, frustrated, or just done with the church. Sometimes the prayer is that the beloved person will find faith, accept an invitation to church, or even walk away from a dangerous situation. The hopes and the prayers they inspire are almost always well-intentioned and loving.

The question Jones inspires is what happens when we would like to see a flood of prevenient grace swell up to bear someone into the arms of God while the person in the water may want nothing to do with that grace or the God who is waiting. We would present the humorous simile of hide and seek with Rev. Warner and many other Methodists (including me) who want to explain the presence of God entering the world, but some people have no desire to play that game. They are not interested. The plant may rest in the sunshine regardless of intention, but if Jones is accurate in his portrayal of how God functions, the people we love may shut that door on God. What’s more, God may even honor their decisions to shut the door.

If prevenient grace must be or should be consensual, then there may be a theological hurdle for many of us as we consider how we relate to the world around us. I was sitting in a district clergy meeting this fall when an elderly fellow stated that things would be okay if we could just sit people down and explain to them where they are wrong and where we are right. I paraphrased that a bit, but I will state that’s what I heard. I hold no ill will for the person sharing that sentiment, but I wonder how well it works to force people to sit down and listen to us as the people who proclaim that we are right and they are ignorant.

In my experience, forced conversation about faith where the person is being forced into the conversation rarely leads anywhere good for either the person sharing or the person receiving that forceful sharing. Moving beyond the fact that bullying someone into faith seems the opposite of what we are called to do as Christians, there’s something deeply flawed here, The very idea that bashing someone over the head with a theological or even educational hammer is a form of grace seems a bit arrogant. The choice to act with theological, spiritual, educational, or even positional power should be rejected when we consider that honest conversation and loving actions can lead to similar conversations and results from a more respectful place of kindness, mercy, and graciousness.

Such conversations, poorly done and with carelessness, can lead to traumatic results. We know that religion having a negative impact can happen and has happened depending on how religion is used to cope with challenging situations. Other conversations, done carefully and with love, can lead to people seeing the extension of faith, hope, and love as being means of prevenient grace. When there is consent and all is well, then salvific results can ensue. When there is a lack of consent, our actions can be considered means of sorrow instead of means of grace.

It is perhaps easy to look at our actions in this light and see the value of consent and love in our approaches to evangelism and even to what Warner referred to as “works of mercy” throughout this season of Advent. Works of mercy, consensually and lovingly done, are glorifying to the name of God. Works of mercy that are not done with consent or even perspective can end as poorly as the incredibly outdated concept of the “Indian Boarding Schools” (which United Methodists are encouraged to be actively repenting of as a part of a whole church that hurt itself: racism is an act that hurts all people (Book of Resolutions, ¶3371: A Charter for Racial Justice in an Interdependent Global Community)).

You may think that I have gone far afield from my original conversation by talking about how we engage in evangelism and acts of mercy. Perhaps you wonder why it matters that won-consensual evangelism and “works of mercy” have caused harm. What does this have to do with prevenient grace and consent? Well, do we think our desire for another person to come to know God is greater than their desire to be left alone? Can we truly see a loving God pushing someone around without a sense of love and care simply because we ask for it? If God truly loves that person and loves us, can we see God working to empower us to share with love instead of forcing grace into their life through the school of hard knocks?

We know it is harmful to force other people into a place where they are deeply harmed by our good intentions. There’s a reason why the first of the three general rules is to do no harm and we even recognize those rules are purposefully in the order we have them. We seek to do no harm even before we seek to do good. As such, perhaps we need to deeply consider whether or not prevenient grace should be consensual. If it is to be, perhaps our time should be spent helping others to find that grace with love and kindness.

Consent is a powerful thing. Consent takes something beautiful and makes it extravagantly wonderful. A lack of consent takes something beautiful and turns it into something horrific. We know this is true of something as common as human sexuality. Can you imagine a world where prevenient grace is extravagantly wonderful? Put another way, can you imagine a world where prevenient grace is celebrated without the eventual need for global acts of repentance? What if we worked for a world where people sought God with joy instead of God having to play hide and seek with the unwilling as a result of our behaviors? What if our Christmas gifts to Christ were acts of consensual mercy?

Richard Rolle of Hampole

/ Robert D / Leave a comment

“I marvelled more than I can say when I first felt my heart grow warm and burn, truly, not in imagination but as it were with sensible fire. I was indeed amazed at that flame which burst forth within me; and at this unwonted comfort—because of my inexperience of this abundance—I have often felt my breast to see if perchance this heat was due to some outward cause. But when I knew that this fire of love had blazed forth only from within, and was not of the flesh but a gift of my Maker, I was full of joy and dissolved in a desire for yet greater love; and chiefly because of the inflowing of this most sweet delight and internal sweetness which, with this spiritual burning, bedewed my mind to the core. For I had not thought before that such sweet heat and comfort might come to pass in this exile.”

Richard Rolle of Hampole, from “A Translation of the Legenda in the Office Prepare for the Blessed Hermit Richard” in “The Fire of Love” (2015, Aeterna Press)

Richard Rolle of Hampole was a Christian mystic who died in 1349. I have been reading his work “The Fire of Love” as released by Aeterna Press in 2015. As Evelyn Underhill notes in the foreword to the volume, Richard Rolle presented a vision of God’s presence that was marked by heat, sweetness, and song. She states:

“His love was essentially dynamic; it invaded and transmuted all departments of his nature, and impelled him as well to acts of service as to songs of joy. He was no spiritual egotist, no mere seeker for transcendental satisfaction; but one of those for whom the divine goodness and beauty are coupled together in insoluble union, even as ‘the souls of the lover and the loved.’ “

As a Methodist, I have to admit that my attention immediately caught upon the description of a strangely warmed heart. John Wesley is infamous for expressing an experience of similar automatism when reading Martin Luther’s introduction to the Book of Romans on May 24, 1738. I picked up Richard Rolle’s book to trace a quote from an anthology of Christian mystics on the nature of love. I have been trying to sort out my feelings on the subject of love and relationships, so I wanted to have context for Richard Rolle’s words… Yes, I still remember the motto we were taught while studying scripture and philosophy in college: “A text without a context is a pretext for misinterpretation.”

I have yet to find the elusive quote as I think doing a search for the phrase would be rushing into the text without context. Searching on Kindle is wonderful, but some analog methods of study still have merit. What I have found is this interesting correlation between John Wesley and Richard Rolle who both had similar experiences approximately four centuries apart. Like many a Methodist, I caught on Wesley’s description as it reminded me of my own spiritual experiences while coming to faith and growing throughout the years. 

I felt an immediate spiritual kinship with Richard Rolle that I felt with John Wesley. I have spent most of my spiritual life as an adult both in service to God through the United Methodist Church where I am called as a minister and seeking to understand my own relationship to God and neighbor. I am still unpacking the act of God that literally saved my life as a teenager who was on the edge of committing an act of self-harm that could have been fatal. My life on the night of my fifteenth birthday was blanketed with love and my heart was given that sense of warming peace that I had never known. The direction of my life changed although I would continue to struggle with anxiety, depression, and eventually the hidden disease of alcoholism that would come for me as the son of someone who struggled with Johnny Barleycorn for a good portion of the life I shared with her.

All of this to say I feel drawn to Richard Rolle as I continue my life as a minister, a divorcee, and as a person in long term recovery, I am curious about where and how the experiences of Richard Rolle and John Wesley will mirror each other. 

I am also curious about what I will read and resonate with as I read through Richard Rolle’s work from centuries ago. I am curious whether I will see things in a similar perspective to Evelyn Underhill. She stated that in  “examining the passages in which Rolle speaks of that ‘Heat’ which the ‘Fire of Love’ induced in his purified and heavenward turning heart, we see that this denotes a sensual as well as a spiritual experience.” Will I find a more sensual side to this experience than that normally connected with John Wesley? Only time will tell.

Let us Ramble: Common threads of grace

/ Robert D / Leave a comment

I have been working through my readings for the Academy for Spiritual Formation. In particular, I have been working through “The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology” as compiled by Igumen Chariton of Nalamo and Translated by Kadloubovsky and Palmer. I was reading through the second chapter when I was struck by the words of Theophan the Recluse on grace. Theophan writes in the section entitled “The prayer of the mind in the heart”:

“But no one is refused. Because all have grace, only one thing is necessary; to give this grace free scope to act. Grace receives free scope in so far as the ego is crushed and the passions uprooted. The more our heart is purified the more lively becomes our feeling towards God. And when the heart is fully purified, then this feeling of warmth towards God takes fire…Grace builds up everything because grace is always present in believers.”

Of course, as a good United Methodist, I was immediately drawn to these words on grace. John Wesley penned and preached a sermon entitled “Free Grace” in 1739, which was 76 years before Bishop Theophan was born. In that sermon, John Wesley wrote the following:

“The grace or love of God, whence cometh our salvation, is free in all and free for all.

First, it is free in all to whom it is given. It does not depend on any power or merit in man; no, not in any degree, neither in whole, nor in part. It does not in any wise depend either on the good works or righteousness of the receiver, nor on anything he has done, or anything he is. It does not depend on his endeavors. It does not depend on his good tempers, or good desires, or good purposes and intentions, for all these flow from the free grace of God. They are the streams only, not the fountain. They are the fruits of free grace, and not the root. They are not the cause, but the effects of it. Whatsoever good is in man, or is done by man, God is the author and doer of it all. Thus is his grace free in all, that is, no way depending on any power or merit in man, but to God alone, who freely gave us his own Son, and with him freely giveth us all things.”

I would like to think that Wesley’s work might have had an influence on that of Bishop Theophan, but given the time of the Bishop’s life, even as a scholar, it would be unlikely that Bishop Theophan would have been heavily influenced by a reformer like John Wesley within the Anglican church.

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Two books in a stand isn’t nearly as catchy a phrase as two peas in a pod…

 

Regardless, clearly both Bishop Theophan and John Wesley agreed on the power of grace, the presence of grace being available for all people, and the ability for that grace to build up everything and to draw us closer to God.

All of this being said, there’s a major difference in thought here. While Bishop Theophan believed that grace was free for all, he warns the people reading his work to take care not to stifle the spirit. He writes earlier in the same paragraph quoted before:

“He who turns to God and is sanctified by the sacraments, immediately receives feeling towards God within himself, which from this moment begins to lay the foundation in his heart for the ascent on high. Provided he does not stifle it by something unworthy, this feeling will be kindled into flame, by time, perseverance, and labour. But if he stifles it by something unworthy, although the path of approach of approach and reconciliation to God is not thereby closed to him, this feeling will no longer be given at once and gratis. Before him is the sweat and work of seeking and of gaining it by prayer. But no one is refused…”

There is a difference in understanding here. Although both John Wesley and Bishop Theophan believe in the power of grace, there seems to be a disconnect on how that grace can and will be applied. For Bishop Theophan, if there is a stifling of the grace of God, at some point there is a place where labor becomes necessary to achieve a reconnection to God’s mighty acts of grace.

For Wesley, while there is a strong connection to the concept of choice, the reality is that the good which is done by humans is done through God. Although our choices may lead to blessed events like the floodgates of grace being opened, the freedom of grace beginning to work fully within us, and a reshaping of ourselves into the further image of Christ, these are but streams of God’s grace, not the fountain of the grace itself. To put it another way, we might grow branches out from the trunk of who we are in Christ, but without the roots made in, through, and by God, we will achieve nothing.

I might be making too strong a point for the differentiation here, but let’s think about the difference. What if Wesley is correct that if God, putting a stumbling block between sinners and salvation, would be acting like a crocodile shedding tears “over the prey which himself had doomed to destruction?” To complete the quote “Free Grace” by John Wesley:

“To say that [God] did not intend to save all sinners is to represent him as a gross deceiver of the people. You cannot deny that he says, ‘Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden.’ If then you say he calls those who cannot come, those whom he knows to be unable to come, those whom he can make able to come but will not, how is it possible to describe greater insincerity?’ You represent him as mocking his helpless creatures by offering what he never intends to give. You describe him as saying one thing and meaning another; as pretending the love which he had not. Him ‘in whose mouth was no guile’ you make full of deceit, void of common sincerity. Then especially, when drawing nigh the city, ‘he wept over it’, and said, ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together… and ye would not…’ Now if you say, ‘They would’, but ‘he would not,’ you represent him (which who could hear’) as weeping crocodile’s tears, weeping over the prey which himself had doomed to destruction.”

These words, like many of the words of John Wesley, are very strong. To be honest though, there’s some merit to what Wesley wrote. How could God say “I desire good for all” while setting such a high standard for a future with God after a stifling of that grace? Does not grace abound when one chooses to turn from sin?

Do we choose to continue in sin knowing this to be the case? I would say that would grieve the heart of anyone who loves God and is grateful for salvation, but I cannot believe that God would put a firm barrier that some could not overcome between their desire to find salvation and the achievement of that goal. Even if that warming of the spirit is simply an assurance of salvation, I cannot believe that God would slam that door so heavily.

How could one even desire to move past a place of futility if the feeling “towards God” described by Bishop Theophan is stifled and no longer free of charge? Would you turn to God for a path towards salvation if you had not desire in your heart to draw nearer? Would not such a journey become nearly impossible given the fact that the reward itself is something that can only be seen and felt by faith and not the eyes? A person might work at a job they hate because of a paycheck that comes regularly, but would they do the same job with the assurance that they would be paid when the job was complete? Would they do so if they did not even feel an iota of love or desire to be near and with the one who would bring that good into their life?

There is much to think about with these streams of grace. What do you believe about grace? Is it free to all? Is John Wesley’s desciption a grace which is too “cheap” in the words of Bonhoeffer? Is grace something else entirely? What are your thoughts?