Calvin and Wesley on the Christian Life
Richard M. Riss
Glenwood Presbyterian Church, Glenwood Landing, NY
Meeting jointly with The United Methodist Church of Sea Cliff, NY
August 2, 1998
With respect to the Christian life, most of what John Wesley
said in the eighteenth century was in perfect agreement with what
John Calvin had said two centuries previously during the time of
the Reformation. In fact, on this topic, the comments of these
two towering figures were very similar in many respects to what
was said by many of the other well known devotional writers of
history.
One of them, Martin Luther, had such a profound effect upon
Wesley that Wesley said on a number of occasions that his
conversion experience of May 24, 1738, the famous Aldersgate
experience, was a direct result of the reading aloud of Luther's
PREFACE TO THE EPISTLE OF ST. PAUL TO THE ROMANS. Here's what
Wesley said about this: "In the evening, I went very unwillingly
to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's
preface to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was
describing the change God works in the heart through faith in
Christ, 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 away my sins, even mine, and saved me from
the law of sin and death."
Luther's PREFACE to the book of Romans, is, of course, still
extant, and it does say some things about the change that God
works in the heart through faith in Christ. In this work, Luther
wrote, "to fulfil the law, we must meet its requirements gladly
and lovingly; [and] live virtuous and upright lives without the
constraint of the law, . . . as if neither the law nor its
penalties existed. But this joy, this unconstrained love, is put
into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, as St. Paul says in Chapter
5." Further on, Luther writes, "Faith, however, is something
that God effects in us. It changes us, and we are reborn from
God, John [chapter] 1." He goes on to say that faith is a
confidence in God's grace which "makes us joyful, high-spirited,
and eager in our relations with God and with all mankind. That
is what the Holy Spirit effects through faith." For Luther,
"righteousness . . . is God's gift, and shapes a man's nature to
do his duty to all. . . . His own righteousness, which He
confers through the medium of faith, is our only help."
It would appear from John Wesley's JOURNAL that at the
society meeting at Aldersgate Street, God did bring about a
change in Wesley's heart similar to what Luther describes in
these passages from his PREFACE that were read at that meeting.
There was, however, a theological difference. This became clear
in 1740 when Wesley preached and published a protest against what
he felt was an overemphasis upon predestination on George
Whitefield's part. Wesley felt that Whitefield's Calvinistic
emphasis constituted a denial of free will, and that it was an
unnecessary encouragement to people to relax Christian
discipline. This brought about what has been described as an
irreparable breach between Wesley and Whitefield.
Interestingly enough, however, it was not Calvinism, so much
as Lutheranism, that was vulnerable to the second of these two
criticisms. Calvinism, in its understanding of the "third use of
the law," did emphasize and successfully maintain Christian
discipline in its effort to avoid criticisms of this very kind
that had been brought to bear against Luther and the theology of
the Reformation.
The first of these two concerns of Wesley's, with respect to
the question of free will, was eloquently expressed by Wesley's
mother, Susanna Wesley, who wrote to him in 1725 to the effect
that if the individual has no choice as to whether he or she is a
recipient of the saving grace of God which transforms the heart,
and if, as a consequence, some people are irretrievably bound up
in sinfulness, with the effect that they are predestined to hell,
then, "it directly charges the most high God with being the
author of sin, . . . For 'tis certainly inconsistent with the
justice and goodness of God to lay any man under . . . a . . .
necessity of committing sin, and then to punish him for doing
it." For this reason, she felt that "the doctrine of
predestination as maintained by the rigid Calvinists is very
shocking, and ought utterly to be abhorred."
While the rigid Calvinists of the eighteenth century may
have held such views, what about John Calvin himself? It is
instructive to make careful comparisons between John Calvin and
John Wesley on these issues, especially since Calvin is
considered the fount and source of nearly all that is believed
and practiced by Presbyterians, while Wesley was the founder of Methodism.
Calvin is often criticized for his stance on justification
by faith alone, as though, according to his understanding, good
works were irrelevant. However, Calvin states quite clearly in
his INSTITUTES, Book III, Chapter 9, section 1, that "The faith
by which alone, through the mercy of God, we obtain free
justification, is not destitute of good works." This, of course,
makes perfect sense, since the change that is wrought by God in
the heart of man, if it is genuine, will normally result in acts
of kindness, benevolence, and altruism.
On the other hand, Wesley is often criticized for an
opposite stance on the same issue. It is often argued that
Wesley believed that good works are necessary to justification,
and that he therefore held to a form of "works-righteousness,"
according to which the individual must earn the right to
justification by performing good works. However, Wesley's
comments specifically indicate that good works are not always
necessary to justification. For example, in a sermon entitled
"The Scripture Way of Salvation," Part III, section 2, he wrote,
"Therefore both repentance and fruits meet for repentance are in
some sense necessary to justification. . . . Those fruits are
only necessary conditionally, if there be time and opportunity
for them." It would seem quite clear from these passages that
both of them believed that justification is by faith alone, but
that the faith that justifies is never alone whenever it is given
the opportunity for expression in actions.
But what about the issue of predestination? Once again, the
viewpoints of Wesley and Calvin are remarkably similar. In his
sermon on Predestination, Wesley expresses sentiments which
closely parallel Calvin's INSTITUTES, Book III, Chapter 21. In
both of these works, there is a great deal of emphasis upon the
importance of understanding that God's foreknowledge of who will
be saved is not the cause of election. Wesley writes, "God
foreknew those in every nation who would believe, from the
beginning of the world to the consummation of all things. . . .
All time, or rather all eternity . . . being present to Him at
once, he does not know one thing before another, or one thing
after another, but sees all things in one point of view, from
everlasting to everlasting. . . . But observe: we must not think
they ARE because he KNOWS them. NO; he knows them because they
are. . . . What he knows, whether faith or unbelief, is in no
wise caused by his knowledge. . . ." Then, in section 14 of the
same sermon, Wesley writes, "As all that are called were
predestinated, so all whom God has predestinated he foreknew. He
knew, he saw them as believers, and as such predestinated them to
salvation, according to his eternal decree."
In a similar vein, Calvin wrote, "The predestination by
which God adopts some to the hope of life, and adjudges others to
eternal death, no man who would be thought pious ventures simply
to deny; but it is greatly cavilled at, especially by those who
make prescience its cause. We indeed ascribe both prescience and
predestination to God; but we say that it is absurd to make the
latter subordinate to the former. When we attribute prescience
to God, we mean that all things always were, and ever continue,
under his eye; that to his knowledge there is no past or future,
but all things are present, and indeed so present, that it is not
merely the idea of them that is before him . . . but that he
truly sees and contemplates them as actually under his immediate
inspection."
Both Wesley and Calvin make it abundantly clear that they
believe in predestination as it is taught in the Pauline
epistles, and both understand that the foreknowledge of God does
not cause this predestination.
Is there any real difference, then, between Wesley and
Calvin on this issue? If there is a distinction to be made
between them, then it would be that Wesley emphasized the freedom
of the will while Calvin emphasized man's inability, in and of
himself, to choose to repent and believe the gospel.
Wesley wrote, "Indeed if man were not free he could not be
accountable either for his thoughts, words, or actions. If he
were not free, he would not be capable either of reward or
punishment. He would be incapable either of virtue or vice, of
being either morally good or bad. If he had no more freedom than
the sun, the moon, or the stars, he would be no more accountable
than they. On supposition that he had no more freedom than they,
the stones of the earth would be as capable of reward and as
liable to punishment as man--one would be as accountable as the
other. Yea, and it would be as absurd to ascribe either virtue
or vice to him as to ascribe it to the stock of a tree."
But unlike many Calvinists, Calvin himself did believe in
free will, but he felt that it was necessary to emphasize that we
cannot make proper choices without supernatural help. In a work
entitled "The Necessity of Reforming the Church," he wrote,
"though we deny not that man acts spontaneously, and of free
will, when he is guided by the Holy Spirit, [we] maintain that
his whole nature is so imbued with depravity, that of himself he
possesses no ability whatever to act aright."
What, then, did Wesley think about depravity as it is
described here? In his sermon entitled "Original Sin," Wesley
wrote that "the first, grand, distinguishing point between
heathenism and Christianity" is that the heathen "knew not that
all men were empty of all good, and filled with all manner of
evil. They were wholly ignorant of the entire depravation of the
whole human nature, of every man born into the world, in every
faculty of his soul."
When all is said and done, we must be prepared for the
likelihood that by and large, Wesley and Calvin were saying
basically the same things. This should not come as a great shock
to us if we remember that both of them carefully studied the
Bible and church history and took both very seriously. Yes,
there were differences in emphasis, but even within the sixty-six
books of the Bible there are differences in emphasis.
So then, it should not be surprising to us if we find that
John Wesley's sermon on "Self-Denial" bears a close resemblance
to Calvin's INSTITUTES. In Book III, Chapter 7 of the
INSTITUTES, Calvin states that "we are not to seek our own, but
the Lord's will. . . . For when Scripture enjoins us to lay
aside private regard to ourselves, it not only divests our minds
of an excessive longing for wealth, or power, or human favor, but
eradicates all ambition and thirst for worldly glory . . . ."
Wesley said it this way: "But what is self-denial? Wherein
are we to deny ourselves? And whence does the necessity of this
arise? I answer, the will of God is the supreme, unalterable
rule for every intelligent creature."
There is no question that both Wesley and Calvin would have
agreed that to be able to defer to the will of God in those cases
in which it would seem to be to our disadvantage to do so would
be an impossibility apart from the active work of God in our
hearts and minds, causing us to be willing to do so.
May God grant that He might give us new hearts and put a new
spirit within each of us; that He might remove the heart of stone
from us and give us a heart of flesh, as the prophet Ezekiel
says. May He put His Spirit within us and cause us to walk in
His statutes, so that we will be careful to observe His ways.
This we pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.