John Wesley

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John Wesley was an English Anglican clergyman, theologian, and revivalist whose ministry gave rise to Methodism, one of the largest of the movements born from the eighteenth-century evangelical revival. Ordained in the Church of England and a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he never formally left that church in his lifetime, yet the societies he organised and the lay preachers he commissioned became, after his death, a separate communion spread across the English-speaking world. The shape of his life is the shape of that paradox: a man who insisted he was a son of the established church to his last breath, and who built, almost without admitting it, the framework of a new one.

Epworth and the brand from the burning

He came from a clerical family at Epworth in Lincolnshire, the fifteenth child of the rector Samuel Wesley and of Susanna Wesley, born on 17 June 1703. The household was poor, learned, and severe; Susanna catechised her many children on a fixed schedule and ran the family as a small disciplined society of its own, a habit her son would later reproduce at the scale of a movement. On the night of 9 February 1709 the rectory caught fire, and the boy of five was left at an upstairs window as the building burned; neighbours formed a human ladder and pulled him out moments before the roof fell. Susanna afterward spoke of him as a brand plucked from the burning, taking the phrase from the prophet Zechariah, and Wesley carried the image of providential rescue for a purpose through the rest of his life. He was schooled at the Charterhouse in London and then at Christ Church, Oxford, in the early 1720s, and elected a fellow of Lincoln College in 1726 — a post that gave him income and standing and that he held, technically, until his marriage thirty years later.

The Oxford Holy Club and the name “Methodist”

From 1729 a small circle of earnest young Oxford men began to meet for prayer, study, and frequent communion. His brother Charles, the hymn-writer, had begun it with two friends; on returning to take up tutorial duties at Lincoln, John joined and quickly became its director, and he later dated the “first rise” of Methodism to those rooms. The members read the Greek New Testament and the devotional classics together, kept a strict timetable of fasting, rose before dawn, examined their hours against a written rule, and visited the prisoners in the city gaol and the sick poor. George Whitefield, who would become the most powerful open-air preacher of the age, matriculated at Pembroke College in 1732 and was drawn in. The discipline drew ridicule; the circle collected a string of mocking labels — the Holy Club, Bible-moths, Sacramentarians — and the one that stuck, fastened on them around 1732 for the methodical regularity of their devotion, was “Methodists.” The group declined to be shamed by it and in time wore the name as its own. The sources of that early piety were ascetic and medieval as much as Protestant: the Imitation of Christ of Thomas à Kempis, and Jeremy Taylor and William Law on holy living, taught Wesley a regimen of self-watchfulness he never abandoned, even after he came to think it had not yet touched the root.

Georgia, the Moravians, and Aldersgate

A mission to the new colony of Georgia in the mid-1730s ended in disappointment. Wesley sailed in 1735 to serve as a parish minister at Savannah and to evangelise the native peoples; instead he found a small, fractious settlement, attempted to impose a high-church discipline that the colonists resented, became entangled in a painful courtship that collapsed, and repelled the woman in question from the sacrament — a step that brought legal trouble and his departure late in 1737. He came home convinced of his own failure. The lasting fruit of the voyage was an encounter. On the outbound ship a storm broke with such violence that the English passengers, Wesley among them, were terrified, while a party of German Moravians went on singing their psalms unmoved. Their composure exposed to him the gap between a religion of strict observance and a religion of inward assurance, and the question of that assurance — whether he himself possessed saving faith — became the wound of the next two years.

It closed, in Methodist memory, at a meeting on Aldersgate Street in London on the evening of 24 May 1738. Wesley went reluctantly to a religious society where someone was reading aloud Martin Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans; as the reader described the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, Wesley recorded that he felt his heart “strangely warmed” and was given an assurance that Christ had taken away his sins, even his. He set the moment down in his Journal as the hinge of his life. Whether it was a single conversion or one bright point in a longer, less tidy change has been argued by his biographers ever since: he had been ordained, devout, and self-disciplined for a decade before it, and he would qualify and re-describe what happened at Aldersgate in later years. But he returned to the date as a landmark, and the movement built a feast around it. The reading was Luther’s, and the warmed heart was, in substance, the Reformation’s old doctrine of justification by faith felt as an experience rather than held as a proposition — the Pietist and Moravian channel had carried that doctrine to him before the books did.

The milieu of the heart: Pietism and the Moravians

The German strangers on the ship were not an accident of weather. They belonged to the broad continental movement of Pietism, the renewal within Lutheranism that Wesley met first at sea and then in person, and whose stress on conversion, small disciplined fellowships, and a living rather than a notional faith ran close to his own instincts. Its founding figure, Philipp Jakob Spener, had called a generation earlier for the gathering of the awakened into little companies for mutual edification — the ecclesiola in ecclesia, the small church within the church — and Wesley’s classes and bands would answer to that description almost exactly. The Moravians proper, the renewed Unity of the Brethren gathered under Count Zinzendorf at Herrnhut, were the most missionary wing of that world; Wesley visited Herrnhut in the months after Aldersgate, learned from them, and then broke with them over what he judged a quietist passivity that waited for faith instead of using the ordinary means of grace. He kept the Pietist temperature and rejected the Pietist stillness. The same continental soil, in its Württemberg branch, would grow figures such as Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, whose theosophy turned the inward turn toward speculative cosmology; Wesley’s turn went the opposite way, toward organization, the open field, and the discipline of the many.

Half a century on horseback

What followed was half a century of travel. Barred from many parish pulpits and unwilling to wait for invitations, Wesley took up the practice Whitefield had begun near Bristol and, in April 1739, preached for the first time in the open air to the colliers of Kingswood — a descent into irregularity he recorded with audible distaste, as a thing he had to make himself stoop to. From then on he preached in fields, at market crosses, and at pit-heads, to crowds of laborers and miners the established church largely ignored, and by the traditional reckoning he rode something near a quarter of a million miles on horseback across England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, reading as he went. The preaching was the visible part; the durable invention was the structure beneath it. He built a “connexion” — the word was deliberate, a network bound to him personally — of local societies, each subdivided into small classes of about a dozen members under a leader who collected the weekly penny and watched over souls, and bands for closer confession. The societies were grouped into circuits worked by itinerant lay preachers, men (and a few women) without university or ordination whom Wesley licensed, examined, stationed, and moved at will. From 1744 he gathered the preachers in an annual Conference that deliberated doctrine and discipline and that he governed with a near-absolute hand. The genius of the system was that it ran on the laity, reproduced itself in new places, and held together at a distance through the person and the post of its founder — a polity that could survive transplanting, and did.

Arminian grace against Calvinist election

The revival nearly split at its source over the doctrine of grace. Wesley held to an Arminian account of salvation: grace is prevenient, going before and waking the sleeping will; it is offered to all without exception; and, decisively, it can be resisted and refused. Whitefield, his colleague and rival, held the strict predestinarian Calvinism of the Reformed tradition — that God from eternity elects some to salvation and passes over the rest, and that grace, where given, is irresistible. In August 1739, on Whitefield’s departure for America, Wesley published the sermon “Free Grace”, a frontal rejection of predestination in every Calvinist form, and the two men parted in doctrine while remaining, with strain, in affection. The dispute ran through the whole revival and flared again in the bitter “Calvinist controversy” of the 1770s; Wesley named his periodical the Arminian Magazine in 1778 to plant his flag. The quarrel set him squarely against the line that runs from Augustine through John Calvin, and it touched the ancient questions of how a fallen mind comes to know and will the good that the divine-illumination tradition had posed; the older Christological storms of Arius and Nicaea lay far behind it, settled ground on which both sides stood. Wesley insisted that to make God the author of any soul’s damnation was to blaspheme the divine love, and that universal, refusable grace was the only account that left God good and the sinner answerable.

Christian perfection, the prized and contested teaching

His most distinctive — and most disputed — teaching was Christian perfection, or entire sanctification. He held that a believer might, in this life and by a work of grace often distinct from and later than justification, be so filled with the love of God and neighbour as to be cleansed from all deliberate, voluntary sin. He set it out at length in his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, first issued in 1766 and revised to the end of his life, gathering his statements on the doctrine from 1725 onward to show that he had taught it consistently. He guarded it carefully: perfection did not mean freedom from ignorance, mistake, bodily infirmity, or temptation, and it could be lost; it meant a heart wholly given over to love. Critics — Calvinists especially, but many Anglicans too — found the claim that any mortal might be free of sin pastorally dangerous and plainly contradicted by experience, and even Wesley’s brother Charles drew the threshold higher than he did. His followers prized it as the crown of the Christian life and the engine of the whole movement, the goal toward which the classes and the disciplines pointed. Wesley named it the great deposit God had lodged with the people called Methodists, and would not let it go.

Ordination, the breach denied, and the inheritance

Late in life the logic of the connexion forced the question Wesley had spent decades avoiding. After American independence the Church of England’s structure collapsed in the new republic, no bishop would ordain ministers for the Methodist societies there, and the people were left without the sacraments. Persuaded by his reading of the Anglican Edward Stillingfleet and especially of Lord Peter King that bishop and presbyter are essentially one order — so that a presbyter may ordain — Wesley in September 1784 set apart Thomas Coke as superintendent for America, with power to ordain others, and ordained two men to go with him. He prepared a revised prayer book, The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, to go with them. At the Christmas Conference in Baltimore that same year the American preachers organised themselves as a church and Coke ordained Francis Asbury; in the same year the Deed of Declaration gave the British Conference, the “Legal Hundred,” a corporate existence to outlast its founder. The self-ordination effectively conceded the breach with Anglican order even as Wesley denied to the end that he intended any separation; he died, on 2 March 1791 at his house beside the City Road Chapel in London, a clergyman of the Church of England, the assurance that God was present with them reported as the burden of his last words. He left a vast Journal, four volumes of standard sermons, a body of letters, and the machinery of a movement.

Methodism became a worldwide family of churches. From his account of entire sanctification grew the nineteenth-century holiness movement, with its language of a second blessing and a clean heart, and from the holiness movement, at the turn of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism drew the conviction that the Spirit’s fullness is a definite experience to be sought and received. His brother’s hymns carried the same theology in a form congregations could sing, reaching far beyond those who ever read the prose. And the paradox held to the end and past it: he had founded, governed, and willed into permanence an apparatus of societies, preachers, conferences, and ordinations — a church in everything but its own admission — while insisting on his deathbed that he lived and died in the communion he had never left. The institution he built was the proof against the claim he never stopped making; the Methodist who would not call himself a separatist had, by his own deeds, made one church out of his loyalty to another.

Sources and scholarship

The primary base for Wesley is his own enormous output, now being issued in the critical Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley. Its first volumes appeared as the Oxford Edition of the Works of John Wesley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975–83) under Frank Baker, who served as editor-in-chief from 1969 to 1986; publication continued as the Bicentennial Edition (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984– ), later under the general editorship of Richard P. Heitzenrater, and supersedes the older nineteenth-century collected editions for textual reliability. Wesley’s account of his Aldersgate experience stands in his Journal under 24 May 1738, the entry on which an entire interpretive literature turns. His doctrine of Christian perfection is most fully laid out in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766; revised to 1777), and the break with Calvinism is sharpest in the 1739 sermon “Free Grace”; both are hosted in full at the Wesley Center Online. The standard modern narrative history is Richard P. Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodists (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995; 2nd ed. 2013), which treats the founder inseparably from the connexion he built; a concise scholarly orientation is the Encyclopædia Britannica article on John Wesley. Twentieth-century Wesley scholarship reads Aldersgate against the ordained, disciplined decade that preceded it — weighing how much the warmed heart added to a man already devout, and how Wesley’s own later qualifications of the night reshape its meaning — and reads the doctrine of perfection against the connexion that carried it, so that the founder and the movement are studied as a single subject, exactly as Wesley governed them.

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