Could you consider Wesley’s theology essentially penitential in nature?
This question arises for me after reading Louis Newman’s Repentance: The Meaning & Practice of Teshuvah.
In the book, Newman describes a Jewish understanding of repentance and the steps entailed in turning back to God. He outlines seven steps of repentance that apply whether the one we have sinned against is our neighbor or our God.
- Recognizing our culpability
- Feeling truly remorseful
- Confessing in public
- Apologizing to the one we have wronged (repeatedly if necessary)
- Making restitution or “setting the scales right again”
- Take careful accounting of our souls
- Facing the temptation to sin again and resisting it
Jewish and Christian understandings of repentance differ, of course, but as I read his book I find myself wondering if this process he describes is what Jesus meant when he told the crowds to repent.
Wesley’s small groups – it seems to me – were all about fostering a culture of repentance. The weekly questions in the bands about sins confronted, the constant reminders about the state of the sinner’s soul, the teaching of the moral law, and the only entry requirement, a sense of being under the wrath of God and needing refuge from it, all fit in with the picture of repentance Newman paints in his book.
If to any degree the answer to my initial question is “yes,” then I wonder how we recapture some of that.
I am struck in worship how often the confessional prayers – when prayed at all – are greeted with a decided lack of gusto. It may be because you cannot truly confess if you have not first truly examined yourself and taken responsibility for your sins. But I suspect that it is also because we do not like to think of faith in penitential terms.
That does not work for us.
We want a faith of uplift that sanctifies our desires, not one that pulls us down in the dust and teaches us that our hearts often desire what would kill us.
Repent! Jesus and the apostles preached. Do we truly know what it means to preach that word the way they did?
I am a part-time local pastor serving 
The doctrine of original sin is surely more humbling to man than the opposite: And I know not what honour we can pay to God, if we think man came out of His hands in the condition wherein he is now.
