In my thirty-three years of church planting and then pastoring in the San Francisco Bay Area, I never met a converted or saved Methodist.  It was just the opposite.  They were some of the most liberal, unsaved people I ever met.

I’m not Methodist.  Even when I look at the history, I ask from where do the Methodists get their authority.  If I ask about the Methodists, then I definitely ask the same of the Wesleyans.  They can’t trace their lineage to a true church.  They functioned in and from the state church, taking on some of the characteristics of the apostate denomination from which they came.

The Wesleys and Whitefield

The Wesleys arose within the Church of England.  They knew something was amiss there.  They changed.  When I read Wesley, as have others, I see a heap of contradictions though.  They never understood nor broke from the corrupt root from which they sprang.

George Whitefield and John Wesley had their break-up.  Whitefield studied and went an orthodox biblical direction.  He preached a true gospel the basis of the Great Awakening in the American colonies.  Wesley took the Methodists a different direction with a different theology than the true salvation preaching of Whitefield.  Every way that Wesley countered Whitefield, he headed the wrong way compared to Whitefield.

Now I look at the fruit of what Wesley taught.  Mostly today, Methodism went liberal.  Whatever errors John Wesley believed, the Methodists took a trajectory then away and then further away from the truth.  The perversion in Wesleyan doctrine interrelates in several points of biblical doctrine.  Wesley’s unbiblical errors, even though they leave quite a bit of truth in Wesleyan and Methodist belief, they spoil the whole pot or body.

Wesleyan and Methodist Fruit

While I write on Wesleyan and Methodist error today, I’m working in the Midwest United States in Indiana.  With their wrong doctrines, they still associate themselves with Christianity.  This dominates my present county and surrounding counties where I serve the Lord.  It blinds the population.  It produces false doctrine and practice.

I tend to think right away that Wesleyans and Methodists are wrong.  However, when I listen to some of them, I hear enough truth that it becomes difficult to sort out where they divert from the truth.  There are many subtle errors that massed together they become very significant.

John Wesley and Sin

John Wesley taught a convoluted, unscriptural view of sin.  In the Works of John Wesley, Volume 12, p. 394, we read that Wesley wrote:

Nothing is sin, strictly speaking, but a voluntary transgression of a known law of God. Therefore, every voluntary breach of the law of love is sin; and nothing else, if we speak properly.

When you read that first sentence, it might sound good.  The next one becomes problematic, especially his saying, “and nothing else, if we speak properly.”  Sin is more than just a breach of the law of love.  He also says, “voluntary breach,” so that a person must give assent, activate his will, for sin to occur.  This definition sets Wesley and his followers up for greater problems.

Perfectionism

If sin is this breach of the law of love, it is easy then to see how that a different view of atonement and salvation occurs.  By limiting or twisting the definition of sin, according to John Wesley someone could live without sinning, a theology called “perfectionism.”  I might call it, “dumbing down sin.”  1 John 3:8 says:

He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.

Wesley wrote concerning this in Explanatory Notes on the NT (1818) on p. 661:

Whosoever abideth in communion with him, by loving faith, sinneth not – While he so abideth. Whosoever sinneth certainly seeth him not – The loving eye of his soul is not then fixed upon God; neither doth he then experimentally know him – Whatever he did in time past.

Participatory Atonement

Even though Wesley talks an acceptance of substitutionary atonement, he mixes in other various views of atonement that created a doctrinal quagmire.  It’s why you hear so much differing and contradictory doctrine from Wesleyans and Methodists.  It’s also why they can easily move into theological liberalism.  For instance, Wesley communicates what is called “participatory atonement.”

John Wesley did not have a settled theology or doctrine of salvation before he became the head of a major Christian denomination.  He was still working it out.  He knew something was wrong in the Christianity he observed.  Wesley never pinpointed what was wrong with the Church of England to the extent that he provided a separate correction of Anglican soteriology.

This view, participatory atonement, itself blends together various views of atonement.  The cross of Christ is the means by which human beings can die with Christ and be reborn in Him.  They experience the crucifixion of Christ with him in a mystical way.  Many of the Wesley hymns make reference to this view.

The Place of Moral Example

Participatory atonement has strong parallels with the moral example theory of atonement, where Christ’s death on the cross was a kind of exclamation point of a life of love.  By dying, Jesus provided a moral example, that if lived, atonement is received.  With the Wesleyan participatory atonement, someone by faith subjects himself to the crucifixion that Christ suffered, fulfilling the law of love.  God creates new life in the individual who enters solidarity with Christ in the love of His suffering and death.

The idea of dying with Christ sounds right even to someone who believes in penal substitution.  However, this participatory atonement is something different than the historical interpretation of Galatians 2:20 (“I am crucified with Christ”).  Concerning the defeat of the works of Satan through His death, Wesley wrote:  “It is by thus manifesting himself in our hearts that he effectually ‘destroys the works of the devil’.”  This mirrors the participatory atonement view.  The Wesleys make more reference than other verse in the hymns of their hymnal than they do Galatians 2:20.

Wesley expressed opposition to the view of penal substitution.  He saw the imputation of righteousness as a pass for unholy living.  Everything is finished, so someone would just rest in that.  Wesley had a great concern for the activation of holiness in a person’s life.  He expressed a view of atonement that would yield that moral result.

Baptism and the Lord’s Table

Baptism and the Lord’s Table for Wesley become a means of grace by which men experience participatory atonement.  In Wesley’s explanation of Romans 6:3, he writes:

In baptism we, through faith, are ingrafted into Christ; and we draw new spiritual life from this new root, through his Spirit, who fashions us like unto him, and particularly with regard to his death and resurrection.

Concerning the Lord’s Table, Charles Wesley wrote this hymn:

O the depth of love divine,
the unfathomable grace!
Who shall say how bread and wine
God into us conveys!
How the bread his flesh imparts,
how the wine transmits his blood,
fills his faithful people’s hearts
with all the life of God!

The Wesleys believed that the real presence of Christ was found in the elements imparting saving grace.  Charles Wesley also wrote this:

With solemn faith we offer up,
And spread before thy glorious eyes
That only ground of all our hope,
That all-sufficient sacrifice,
Which brings thy grace on sinners down,
And perfects all our souls in one.

I’m very sure that most of you reading do not sing these Wesley hymns in your services or for worship.  Charles wrote them and others like them though.

More To Come