Why I am an evangelical Christian
by tim on Sep.24, 2007, under History, Theology, Training Course
Introduction
On Sunday the 3rd of February, 1788, Richard Johnson preached the very first Christian sermon on Australian soil. Johnson had been appointed as chaplain for NSW and travelled with the First Fleet. His appointment was in no small part due to the influence exerted by two remarkable and influential men, William Wilberforce and John Newton, who believed it very important that the chaplain for this important expedition should be a committed evangelical Christian.But why were Wilberforce and Newton so keen to have an evangelical presence in NSW? And why was Johnson willing to up and transplant himself from a comfortable life in England for the sake of enduring the privations of sailing to the other side of the world?
This week we will explore these questions and more.
However, the evangelical story does not begin with Johnson, nor even with Wilberforce or Newton. Unlike the protestant and reformed innovations, the evangelical movement cannot really be linked to one man in particular. There were so many great leaders: Jonathan Edwards in America; Ebenezer and Ralph Erskine in Scotland; Howel Harris in Wales; and George Whitefield, William Wilberforce and John Newton in England. However, if I were to select one person as being representative of the movement as a whole, it would be John Wesley.
John Wesley
Toward the end of January 1736, the good ship Simmonds, bound for Savannah, Georgia, sailed into a series of violent Atlantic storms. The wind roared; the ship cracked and quivered; the waves lashed the deck.
A young, slightly built Anglican minister on board was frozen in fear. John Wesley had preached the gospel of eternal salvation to others, but he was afraid to die. He was deeply awed, however, by a company of Moravian Brethren from Herrnhut. As the sea broke over the deck of the vessel, splitting the mainsail in pieces, the Moravians calmly sang their psalms to God.
Afterward, Wesley asked one of the Germans if he was frightened.
“No,” he replied. “Weren’t your women and children afraid?” Wesley asked.
“No,” said the Moravian, “our women and children are not afraid to die.”
“This,” Wesley wrote in his Journal, “was the most glorious day I have ever seen.”
At that “glorious” moment Wesley was a most unlikely candidate for leadership in a spiritual awakening soon to shake England to its moorings. He had a form of godliness, but had yet to find its power.1
John Wesley was born in Epworth, England. He was the fifteenth of nineteen children. At the age of five, John was rescued from the burning rectory where he lived. This escape made a deep impression on his mind; and he regarded himself as providentially set apart, as a “brand plucked from the burning.”2 The Wesley children’s early education was given by their parents in the Epworth rectory. Each child, including the girls, was taught to read as soon as they could walk and talk. In 1713 John was admitted to the Charterhouse School, London, where he lived the studious, methodical, and (for a while) religious life in which he had been trained at home.
At seventeen he was off to Oxford University where he studied first at Christ Church and later at Lincoln College. He found little there to stimulate either mind or soul, but took the opportunity to read widely, including such books as Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living, Thomas à Kemipis’ Imitation of Christ and William Law’s Serious Call to a Holy Life. These men, he said, “convinced me of the absolute impossibility of being half a Christian. I determined, through His grace, to be all devoted to God.” So he listed his weaknesses and developed rules to overcome them.
In 1726 Wesley was elected a fellow of Lincoln College. This gave him not only academic standing at the University but assured him of a steady income. Two years later he was ordained to the Anglican ministry and returned to Epworth for a time to serve as his father’s assistant.
When he resumed his duties at Oxford, he found that his brother, Charles, alarmed at the spread of deism at the University, had assembled a little band of students determined to take their religion seriously. John proved to be just the leader they needed. Under his direction they drew up a plan of study and rule of life that stressed prayer, Bible reading, and frequent attendance at Holy Communion.
The little group soon attracted attention and some derision from the lax undergraduates. Holy Club, they called them; Bible moths, Methodists, and Reforming Club. The Methodist label is one that stuck.
The members of that little society were ardent but restless souls. They found fresh enthusiasm when a townsman or new student joined them, such as the bright and brash undergraduate from Pembroke College, George Whitefield. But they were constantly in search of ways to make their lives conform to the practice of early Christians. They gave to the poor and they visited the imprisoned. But John was quick to confess that he lacked the inward peace of a true Christian. God must have something more in mind.
Then came the invitation to Georgia. A friend, Dr. John Burton, suggested that both John and Charles could serve God in the new colony led by General James Oglethorpe. Charles could be the General’s secretary and John a chaplain to the colony. John welcomed a chance to preach to the Indians so the brothers boarded the Simmons in October with youthful idealism and missionary zeal, totally unaware of the storms on sea and soul just ahead.
The whole Georgia episode proved to be a fiasco. John discovered that the noble American savages were “gluttons, thieves, liars and murderers.” And his white congregation were not fond of his strict high church ways and his prohibition of fancy dresses and gold jewelry in church.
John’s frustrations were compounded by his pitiful love affair with Sophy Hopkey, the eighteen-year-old niece of Savannah’s chief magistrate. Wesley was so mixed up emotionally and spiritually that he didn’t know his own mind. Sophy finally resolved the affair by eloping with John’s rival. The jilted lover then barred her from Holy Communion, and her incensed husband sued John for defaming Sophy’s character. The trial dragged out and after six months of harassment, Wesley fled the colony in disgust.
On his way home, he had a chance to ponder the whole experience. “I went to America,” he wrote, “to convert the Indians, but, oh, who shall convert me?”
Wesley returned to England depressed and beaten. On the night of May 24, 1738, at a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate Street, London, in which he heard a reading of Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans, and penned the now famous line “I felt my heart strangely warmed.” This completely changed the character and method of his ministry.
Though his understanding of both justification and assurance matured, he never stopped preaching the importance of faith for salvation and the witness of God’s Spirit with the spirit of the believer that they were, indeed, a child of God. His unorthodox teachings, however, meant that he was excluded from preaching in most parish churches.
Wesley’s Oxford friend, the evangelist George Whitefield, was also excluded from the churches of Bristol. In February of 1739, he went to the neighbouring village of Kingswood and preached in the open air to a company of miners. Wesley hesitated to accept Whitefield’s invitation to copy this bold step. Overcoming his reservations, he preached his first sermon in the open air, near Bristol, in April of that year.
He was still unhappy about the idea of field preaching, and would have thought, “till very lately,” such a method of saving souls as “almost a sin.” These open-air services were very successful, however, and he never again hesitated to preach in any place where an assembly could be gotten together. More than once he used his father’s tombstone at Epworth as a pulpit! He continued for fifty years — entering churches when he was invited, and taking his stand in the fields, in halls, cottages, and chapels, when the churches would not receive him.
Wesley travelled constantly, generally on horseback, preaching two or three times a day. In fact, by Wesley’s own estimate, he averaged 8000 miles of travel per year, most of it on horseback! He rose at four in the morning, lived simply and methodically, and was never idle if he could help it. He formed societies, opened chapels, examined and commissioned preachers, administered aid charities, prescribed for the sick and superintended schools and orphanages. He received at least £20,000 for his publications, but used little of it for himself. His charities were limited only by his means, and he died a poor man.
All of this activity had one cause: Wesley’s renewed understanding of the importance and preeminence of the Gospel.
The Gospel
The partnership between Wesley and Whitefield was a strange one. Although they had similar backgrounds, their theological viewpoints were wildly different. On the one hand, Whitefield was a staunch Calvinist, subscribing to all of the beliefs we learned about last week; on the other, Wesley was an Arminian, believing, for example, that man is capable of overcoming their own sinfulness enough to be able to turn to God – anathema to a Calvinist. They put aside these differences, however, in order to preach the Gospel.
This renewed Gospel focus led to one of the great missionary movements of all time. The Society for Missions to Africa and the East (later renamed the Church Mission Society) was formed in 1799 by a group of activist evangelicals. Other voluntary societies, including the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the Royal Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children were also established by evangelicals. Much of the social work that was done by these societies was accompanied by Christian witness and evangelism. In this, they followed Christ’s example – he who preached God’s kingdom come and then worked to see that fulfilled here on earth by caring for the sick, the poor and the outcast.
One of the big battles that evangelicals had to overcome was the perception in society that Christianity was only useful for the purpose of teaching morals (this idea is known as moralism). Most people were baptised as infants, and so considered themselves to be Christians by default. As a result, so it was thought, the Church needed only to preach morality. Wesley, perhaps largely because of his own experience, held to the importance of all people undergoing ‘conversion’ and being born-again.
Assurance of Salvation
Wesley believed that all Christians have a faith which implies an assurance of God’s forgiving love, and that one should feel that assurance, or the “witness of the Spirit”. This understanding is grounded in Paul’s affirmation, “…ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father. The same Spirit beareth witness with our spirits, that we are the children of God…” (Romans 8:15-16, Wesley’s translation). This experience was mirrored for Wesley in his Aldersgate experience wherein he “knew” he was loved by God and that his sins were forgiven.
I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that He had taken my sin, even mine.3
The Bible
Broadly speaking, there are 4 categories of belief about the source of authority for the church:
- The Bible
- Tradition
- Personal Experience
- Reason
Different groups have different emphases on each of these – for example, as we learned when looked at protestantism, the Catholic church emphasises the role of tradition, and the teachings of the church, to be equal with Scripture. Other churches see the personal experience of the Holy Spirit’s work in your life as being the determining force for that life; hence you are encouraged to always seek the Spirit’s leading before taking action.
John Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in Scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason. Scripture, Wesley argued, is primary, revealing the Word of God ‘so far as it is necessary for our salvation.’ For Wesley, Tradition, Reason, and Experience do not form additional “sources” for theological truth, for he believed that the Bible was the sole source of truth about God, but rather these form a matrix for interpreting the Bible. Therefore, while the Bible is the sole source of truth, Tradition forms a “lens” through which we view and interpret the Bible. But unlike the Bible, Tradition is not an infallible instrument, and it must be balanced and tested by Reason and Experience. Reason is the means by which we may evaluate and even challenge the assumptions of Tradition.
But for Wesley, the chief test of the “truth and nothing but the whole truth” of a particular interpretation of scripture is how it is seen in practical application in one’s Experience. Always the pragmatist, Wesley believed that Experience formed the best evidence, after Scripture, for the truthfulness of a particular theological view. He believed Scriptural truths are to be primarily lived, rather than simply thought about or merely believed. Thus, how a particular interpretation of scripture is lived out is the best and most viable test of our theology.
This primacy of Scripture is one of the central tenets of evangelical belief.
Conclusion
John Wesley was one of many leading the evangelical charge in the 18th Century, and many have followed in his footsteps since. His great contributions to Christianity were a renewed emphasis on Scriptural authority, and an appreciation for the need for conversion.
Richard Johnson faced a great struggle as the first chaplain of NSW. Governor Phillip demanded that Johnson should teach the convicts and soldiers good morals; Johnson wanted to preach the gospel… and so that is exactly what he did. And that is why Wilberforce and Newton fought so hard to have an evangelical aboard the First Fleet.
And that is why I am an evangelical Christian.