It is not that they did not feel the same pull and tug that we feel. John Wesley wrote more than once that if it were up to him he would not have moved around so much, but he felt God had put it on him. He famously described his first round of field preaching with a biblical quote about submitting to be more vile by taking to the fields.

These tensions did not go away when Methodism moved across the ocean. John Wigger reports in his book Taking Heaven By Storm the social pressures on circuit riders not to take up the hard, poorly paid, and disrespected calling of itinerant preaching.

Dan Young’s mother urged him to join the Presbyterians or Baptists rather than the Methodists, and John Littlejohn’s mother threatened to disinherit him if he persisted in his preaching. Benjamin Paddock’s father found the Methodists to be “about as distasteful to him as any thing well could be.” Word that his son planned to join the itinerancy “frenzied him.” John Cooper’s father “threw a shovelfull of hot embers” on Cooper when he discovered him at prayer, but Cooper became a Methodist preacher anyway. Even the audacious Billy Hibbard has his early doubts about the Methodists. Following his conversion, Hibbard was torn between his desire for respectability and his attraction to Methodism. “I wanted to be a Congregationalist, and to be respectable. But I wanted the love and seriousness of the Methodists.”

I know in my own heart the desire for respectability. I fear that too many of us have given into that desire, to the end that Methodism itself is no longer controversial.

In his book Mainline or Methodist?, Scott Kisker argues that is precisely our problem.

We United Methodists have become a privileged lot. We are educated well beyond the majority in our society. We pay our clergy, as distinctly mainline, beyond the majority in our society. If we are to recover Methodism, freed from its addiction to the American mainstream, it will require the kind of conversion Wesley experienced that day in Bristol [when he submitted to be more vile by preaching in the open air]. It is a conversion to god and neighbor because we are witnesses to God’s ultimate kingdom of the new creation. For such a recovery, we must humble ourselves before almighty God, trust in the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and expect a blessing through a miraculous anointing of the Holy Spirit. Following that we must take some risky, perhaps uncomfortable steps.

[W]herever I see one or a thousand men running into hell, be it in England, Ireland, or France, yes, in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, I will stop them if I can: As a Minister of Christ, I will beseech them, in His name, to turn back, and be reconciled to God. Were I to do otherwise, were I to let any soul drop into the pit, whom I might have saved from everlasting burnings, I am not satisfied God would accept my plea, “Lord, he was not of my parish.”

All that leads to this helpful post by Derek Oullette that is based in the above scenario, but I commend it to my fellow bloggers for the observations it makes about Christian blogging.

A preaching of the gospel that calls men and women to accept Jesus as Savior but does not make it clear that discipleship means commitment to a vision of society radically different from that which controls our public life today must be condemned as false.

Read it here.

Here is the summary the post offers of the Wesleyan Arminian position on predestination:

• It was on the basis of these two areas of concern that Wesley advocated for his evangelical Arminian position on predestination, which can be outlined in the following six points:
  • Total depravity is affirmed by Wesley, meaning that the fallen human being is completely helpless and in bondage to sin. Contrary to popular misconception, Wesley does not believe that fallen human beings have an inherent freedom of the will.
  • The atonement is universal in scope.  Christ’s death was sufficient to atone for the sins of the whole world, not only an elect few, as proposed by five-point Calvinism.
  • Prevenient (or preceding) grace is universally available. God’s grace is present in our lives before we turn to Christ in faith, and this grace restores a measure of freedom so that we can respond to his gracious gift.  This is how Wesley could affirm that all human persons were free to respond to the gospel in spite of total depravity—but note that the freedom which humans possess is a measure of freedom (not absolute freedom in all respects), and it is freedom-by-grace, not an inherent endowment of fallen humanity.
  • Grace is resistible and can be rejected, to our own destruction.  God is actively drawing all people to himself, but his grace is not coercive.
  • Predestination is therefore based on God’s foreknowledge, not his will.  That is, God corporately predestines all those who respond in faith to salvation, and by foreknowledge he knows who will respond.  Yet the response of each person is truly theirs, because God’s foreknowledge does not cause their response.
  • Assurance of salvation is given by the Holy Spirit, who witnesses directly to our adoption as children of God through Christ, and whose fruit in our lives also provides confirmation that we are God’s children.

The story is told in detail and with a sensitivity to the nuance and complexity of the debates and politics that play out on a national and global scale. A married lesbian, Hall is an advocate in the battles and her framing of the debate, tone, and language do not hide this. What she describes in the book is a splintering of two churches that started coming apart at the beginning of the 19th century. In her words:

In this period of reformation, the interpretation/authority of scripture has been challenged many times: the abolition of slavery as an acceptable way of life, the acceptance of divorce, the ordination of women, and now full inclusion of gay and lesbian people. This latter is perhaps the bitterest fight because it incorporates the question of gender as well as the question of marriage, and it is also the most difficult to argue because the Bible says nothing positive about homosexuality. The battle for gay inclusion of exclusion seems to mark the development of two different religions, both called Christianity, but it may have served as the final point of bifurcation for two strands that began to unravel as early as the late nineteenth century.

The book is fascinating because of its depth as it traces the story of the Episcopal Church in recent decades. It is fascinating for this United Methodist as we appear to be walking over much of the same ground.

This brief review cannot do justice to the book, but reading it did raise two other thoughts that may or may not be worthy of further discussion.

First, Hall connects the ongoing battles over sexuality in the church to the Baby Boomer (my word, not hers) generation’s coming of age in the 1960s. The left-right divide of that decade set the terms for the debate and the issues going forward. I wonder, in part, if this is why the rising Millennial generation is so weary of this conversation. It is their parents’ fight, not their own. This is my question, not Hall’s, but her book stirred the thought.

Second, Hall connects the debate over sexuality to broader questions in the church. For instance, she offers this observation about the various responses within the Anglican Communion to Islam.

In the Anglican debate, the second question about coexisting religions becomes: Is Jesus Christ the only way to God, or is it limiting God to think that he cannot also work in other ways? Archbishop Akinola, who sees Jesus as the only way, aimed to grow the Church of Nigeria as big as possible in order to vanquish Islam nonviolently — though he has never ruled out the possibility of violent response. Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori, on the other hand, sees the valuable contribution of Islam and has joined in faith conversations with Muslim leaders.

I find Hall’s engagement with the broader set of issues and the broader context of Anglican Christianity most helpful. It sees issues as inter-related rather than isolated, which strikes me as more reflective of real life.

Hall does not hide her bias in the book. Conservative motives are often cast in a negative light and liberals are the heroes. She ends the book with an appendix that argues that the Bible does not really teach what traditional Christians have said it does. But the book is fascinating reading and an in-depth look at the melange of issues that the United Methodist Church has been wrestling with for 45 years. As our church becomes more “global,” the fault lines Hall describes will only deepen.

I’ve read a great deal of pastoral theologizing on the Internet since the news about the tornado in Oklahoma. The themes are all familiar. And they are ancient, of course. As long as people have died in ways we cannot understand, we have turned to God and asked for or demanded answers.

I can never escape a passage from the Gospel of Luke when I hear such news.

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for fruit on it but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard, ‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’

“‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’” (Luke 13:1-9, NIV)

Jesus did not withhold tears when Lazarus died, and he certainly knew anguish over suffering. There is a time to mourn and ask questions, but I don’t think we can demand answers of God. Or rather, the biblical witness appears to be that making such demands is not going to get us the answers we seek.

There is a man in the ditch over there, beaten by robbers. Ours is not ask why God allowed the beating. It is to get down in the ditch and tend to his wounds.

In his first sermon on the Sermon on the Mount, he speaks of the person of Christ — as the preacher of the sermon — and of the first two beattitudes. He argues that poverty of spirit is a state of utter awareness of our own guilt and unworthiness before a holy God, which opens the way to the joy of the kingdom of God revealed to us. He argues that the mourners who will be comforted are those who having once found Christ discover clouds and darkness and heaviness of spirit blocking their view of their Savior.

He ends the sermon by saying we also mourn for those who do not know Christ, and ends with an exhortation for Christians not to let the scoffing of non-believers stop them from sharing the gospel.

Ye, whose eyes are enlightened, be not troubled by those who walk on still in darkness. Ye do not walk on in a vain shadow: God and eternity are real things. Heaven and hell are in very deed open before you; and ye are on the edge of the great gulf. It has already swallowed up more than words can express, nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues; and still yawns to devour, whether they see it or no, the giddy, miserable children of men.

When I talk to people these days, I get the impression they have an overly rosy view of the Christianity of earlier centuries. In fact, the world has always been full of non-Christians. It just so happens that in some places and times lots of non-Christians went around claiming the name of Christ. In John Wesley’s day, nearly everyone in England was officially a Christian. But he saw the truth.

In our day, more and more, people no longer feel and social pressure to claim to be something they are not, but people are no different than they were in 1740 or 33.

The last line of the quote above has a turn of phrase I think is particularly apt for us. Wesley wrote of “the giddy, miserable children of men.” Giddy is not a word we use a lot, but ours is a giddy age. We whirl about and are made dizzy by the spinning. We value laughter and frivolity nearly above all else. Our culture seems built to increase our giddiness at every turn. Faster and faster we spin, till we fall down staggering and laughing like drunkards.

Wesley says we are misled if we think that is the path to happiness. What we need is not giddiness, but poverty of spirit. Only then will we be happy.

Who then are “the poor in spirit?” Without question, the humble; they who know themselves; who are convinced of sin; those to whom God hath given that first repentance, which is previous to faith in Christ.