SCRIPTURE REFERENCES, ALLUSIONS, AND ECHOES IN WORKS BY CHARLES AND JOHN WESLEY

Trinity Journal, Spring 2004 by Rogal, Samuel J

I. THE PROBLEM: TO WHAT EXTENT DID THE WESLEYS RELY UPON SCRIPTURE?

"There can hardly be a single paragraph anywhere in Scriptures," wrote Henry Bett, more than five decades ago in his survey of the literary and religious qualities of Methodist hymnody, "that is not somewhere reflected in the writings of the Wesleys."1 Although such a statement may appear, on the surface, as an oversimplification of the obvious, it clearly identifies the total extent of the issue, while, at the same time, it begs for a transference from the general to the specific: To what extent and actual degree did Charles Wesley -in his hymns, secular verse, sermons, and prose narratives - and John Wesley -in his sermons, poetic translations and revisions, prose tracts, correspondence, and journals -employ Scripture as a means of reinforcing their own definitions of and commitments to their particular phase of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival in the British Isles (and elsewhere)?

For scholars whose pursuits include the relationships between general literature and the biblical influences upon certain writers of that literature, the popular assumption announcing that the two Wesleys possessed complete command of the sound and the sense of Holy Scripture requires little in the way of further discussion; that the sound and the sense of Scripture permeated their private and published works prompts even less of a need for additional commentary or analysis. What remains, therefore, focuses upon a perceived need, insofar as limited space will allow, to view specific strands and fragments of scriptural references, allusions, and echoes residing within the mass of poetry and prose of the Wesleys so that students and scholars can identify certain of the principles and processes employed by each of the brothers in their efforts to promote an understanding of the most influential of all texts fundamental to the Judaic-Christian tradition. After all, the Wesleys stood not alone in sharing with John Milton the concise but sharp view on the necessity, through Scripture, to "assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men."

In assessing the actual role of and contribution of general knowledge to the advancement of his evangelical mission, John Wesley placed the command of Scripture at the forefront of his list. All knowledge, he consistently maintained, proceeded from Scripture. For the leader of the Methodists,

a knowledge of the Scriptures . . . teach[es] us how to teach others; yea, a knowledge of all the Scriptures; seeing Scripture interprets Scripture; one part fixing the sense of another. So that whether it be true or not, that every good textuary2 is a good Divine, it is certain that none can be a good Divine who is not a good textuary. None else can be mighty in the Scriptures; able both to instruct and to stop the mouths of gainsayers.3

II. WHAT DID SCRIPTURE MEAN FOR JOHN WESLEY?

For the elder Wesley, Scripture stood as the essential textbook for the moral instruction of those who would become, eventually, complete Christians. Throughout more than half a century of his evangelical mission, he spent (if one reads his works thoroughly and carefully) as much time on instruction as he did upon the conversion and the maintenance of the converted. "I have warned you a thousand times," he lashed out upon the collective conscience of his followers, "not to regard any example which contradicts reason or Scripture."4 Thus, in equating reason with scriptural sound and sense, he provided eighteenth-century Methodists with the substance upon which to think and to choose -a textual filter, if you will, for all human thought, experience, action, and reaction. He event went as far as to define the key term of his religious organization, Methodist, as "One that lives according to the method laid down in the Bible."5

In terms of his personal preferences and practices, John Wesley followed his own advice. "I read the Bible with what attention I can," he informed Rev. William Dodd on 12 March 1756, "and regulate all my opinions thereby to the best of my understanding."6 Thus, decisions concerning his personal life and his religious organization known as Methodism came forth as the result of supporting evidence from Scripture. That which could not endure the test of scriptural text, he simply discarded as unworthy of further consideration -a process that yielded both positive and negative results and ranged from relations with specific men and women to the construction of Methodist chapels in distant circuits. "The Bible is my standard of language as well as sentiment," he wrote to John Newton on 1 April 1766.

I endeavor not only to think but to speak as the oracles of God. Show me any one of the inspired writers who mentions Christ or faith more frequently than I do, and I will mention them more frequently. But otherwise I cannot without varying from my standard.7

III. HOW DID JOHN WESLEY INTEGRATE THE LANGUAGE OF SCRIPTURE?

Not surprisingly, there arise instances within the written works of John Wesley when the reader cannot always determine the speaker of a passage - whether the author be Wesley or the writer of one or more biblical books. To those individuals whose commitments to evangelical Christian doctrine appeared, in Wesley's view, to have been uncertain or unsteady, he literally saturated his own texts with direct references and allusions to Scripture; thus, certain letters, for instance, tended to appear as diminutive, epistolary sermons. Writing to Joseph Cownley, a Methodist lay preacher, and to Cownley's fellow members of the Methodist society at Leominster, Herefordshire, on 20 September 1746, John Wesley exhorted them,