I’m not sure how many posts this will entail, but I’m going to start a deep dive on John Wesley’s sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation.” This is one of John Wesley’s standard sermons, which are doctrinal standards for the United Methodist Church.
As doctrinal standards, they should be key texts for helping us discern what it means to be Methodist today. These days in the United Methodist Church, it is quite fashionable to quote — and sadly often misquote — Wesley. What I want to do is take the time to actually read him, and, with God as my helper, hear him.
So, without further ado …
1. Nothing can be more intricate, complex, and hard to be understood, than religion, as it has been often described. And this is not only true concerning the religion of the Heathens, even many of the wisest of them, but concerning the religion of those also who were, in some sense, Christians; yea, and men of great name in the Christian world; men who seemed to be pillars thereof. He comes out swinging. That “as it has been often described” is doing so much work. Up until that point in the sentence, you could imagine lots of people nodding in agreement. Yes, yes. Religion is hard to understand and full of complicated ideas and practices. But then Wesley pivots. The man who said he was a plain preacher for plain people tosses much Christianity together with heathen paganism, even while barely granting it the status of Christianity. That reference to those “who were, in some sense, Christians” had clear targets in mind, as must have been his reference to those men who “seemed to be pillars” of the church.
Yet how easy to be understood, how plain and simple a thing, is the genuine religion of Jesus Christ; provided only that we take it in its native form, just as it is described in the oracles of God! Take note champions of the “Wesleyan Quadrilateral.” The source of knowledge about the nature of Christianity is found in the Bible. And what’s more, that religion is plain, simple, and easy to understand. Now, Wesley has already shown us that he is well aware of all the ways that human beings make religion complicated and obscure, but he does not accept the fact that we make it a mess as an indication that it is a mess that Jesus has put in our hands.
It is exactly suited, by the wise Creator and Governor of the world, to the weak understanding and narrow capacity of man in his present state. I do not believe Wesley would object to the notion that God is well beyond our understanding and comprehension. His ways are higher than our ways. But Wesley did insist that the religion God has given us is simple. It has to be simple, because we are ignorant. The mystics are correct that there are depths to God that we cannot begin to grasp, but the religion of Jesus Christ is so simple that even we can get hold of it. How else could this be the case? Just as a parent or teacher of small children uses simple and plain examples to instruct, so God has done with us.
How observable is this, both with regard to the end it proposes, and the means to attain that end! The end is, in one word, salvation; the means to attain it, faith.
2. It is easily discerned, that these two little words, I mean faith and salvation, include the substance of all the Bible, the marrow, as it were, of the whole Scripture. So much the more should we take all possible care to avoid all mistake concerning them, and to form a true and accurate judgement concerning both the one and the other. And so here we see outline for the rest of the sermon. Wesley will first consider what we mean when we say the word “salvation” and then consider what we mean by “faith.” This method of preaching is one that Wesley uses a lot. He tells us what it means to be a Christian by giving clear meanings to words. We learn to “speak Christian” as a first step to learning how to be Christian. In this case, we must be clear about what we mean when we speak of salvation and faith.
This point feels as important today as it did in Wesley’s day. In the United Methodist Church today, it is not at all clear that we mean the same things when we use the same words. We appear, in my observation, to be much more interested in “our theology” and “my understanding” than we are in having a common vocabulary that unites us.
I think this is why it is so hard to say these days what makes a United Methodist a United Methodist. When someone says, “I was born and raised a United Methodist. The church I grew up in was as United Methodist as you can get” I’m not sure at all what they mean until they go on to explain it. Usually, what they explain are certain liturgical practices or features of our polity or some vague sense of being warm-hearted and socially concerned.
I’ve never heard any Methodist say anything like: “What makes me a Methodist is my conviction that the true religion of Jesus Christ is plain, simple, and easy to understand, and it can be summed up in just two words: salvation and faith.”
And yet, that is what the first Methodist insisted upon.
If you are at all interested, stay tuned as we move more deeply into this sermon and, perhaps, find a shared language to help us remember who we Methodists are.
John Meunier 