Chapter 18

The Wesleyan and Methodist Tradition

Free Grace, Universal Reach: How Wesley's Arminianism Opened the Long Hope to the English-Speaking World

It is a Wednesday evening, May 24, 1738, on Aldersgate Street in London. A small religious society has gathered in a borrowed room. One of the members is reading aloud from Martin Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. Among the listeners is an Anglican clergyman in his mid-thirties, recently returned from a failed mission to the new colony of Georgia. He has come "very unwillingly." He has spent thirteen years trying to be a Christian of the most rigorous sort — Oxford fellow, Holy Club founder, transatlantic missionary, lifelong ascetic — and he has just admitted in his journal that he himself does not have the saving faith he has been preaching to others.¹

About a quarter before nine, while the reader is describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, something shifts in him. He will write the words later that night and they will be quoted on Methodist plaques and pulpits for the next three centuries: I felt my heart strangely warmed. He felt, he tells us, that he did trust in Christ — Christ alone — for salvation; and an assurance was given him that Christ had taken away his sins, "even mine," and had saved him from the law of sin and death.²

John Wesley was thirty-four. He would live another fifty-three years. He would preach more than forty thousand sermons, ride a quarter of a million miles on horseback, organize hundreds of small societies, and leave behind a movement that would outgrow the established Church of England within a century of his death. From that warmed heart in Aldersgate Street, by way of an itinerant ministry that refused to be confined to parish walls, would come the largest Protestant tradition the English-speaking world has produced apart from the Reformed family itself.

And it would carry, inside its DNA, a doctrine of grace so universal in its reach — so insistent on the breadth of God's saving will — that no Methodist could ever quite tell the strict Augustinian story about the dead with a clear conscience.

Wesley himself was no universalist. He preached eternal punishment of the wicked plainly and often. He never imagined that all would be saved, and he resisted those of his contemporaries who began to wonder out loud whether they might. But the theological frame he assembled — universal salvific will, prevenient grace given to every soul, resistible mercy that woos but does not coerce, an "almost Christian" who is not yet a Christian but who is already drawn by the Spirit, a "faith of a heathen" that is less than saving faith but more than damnation — this frame, once erected, could not in the long run support the older Augustinian conclusion. Each piece pulled against it. Each generation of Wesley's heirs would feel the pull. Most would resolve it by softening the doctrine of hell quietly, in the pews if not in the pulpit. Some would resolve it by stepping into outright Restorationism. A few would resolve it by leaving Methodism altogether for the new Universalist denomination forming on the New England coast (a story we shall follow into Chapter 19). But all of them — the loyal Wesleyans, the soft-hell mainliners, the Restorationist defectors — were working out an internal logic that was already there in Wesley.

The eighteenth century into which Wesley was born was an unsettled time for English religion. The Toleration Act of 1689 had ended the Anglican monopoly without dethroning it. The Hanoverian succession had stabilized a Protestant crown. The new natural philosophy, the new Lockean epistemology, the new transatlantic trade routes, and the new urban poverty of London were all reshaping the religious landscape in ways the Church of England struggled to keep up with. Deism flourished in coffeehouses; Jonathan Edwards's Great Awakening was about to break out across the Atlantic; the Moravians under Zinzendorf were carrying a warm-hearted Lutheran pietism across Europe and into the British Isles. The Calvinist consensus that had once dominated English Protestantism (Puritan and Conformist alike) was fraying. Latitudinarians inside the Church were softening the harder Reformed edges. The Cambridge Platonists, whom we met in the previous chapter, had already begun to imagine an English Christianity in which the doctrine of hell did not look quite like Calvin had drawn it.³

Into this unsettled scene Wesley walked — first, with the Holy Club at Oxford, then with the field-preaching at Bristol, then with the Methodist societies up and down England, then with the printed sermons that would carry his teaching long after his death. He was an Arminian by deep conviction, and he meant it in a hard sense. He thought predestinarian Calvinism made God a tyrant. He thought it made the gospel unpreachable. He thought it betrayed the testimony of Scripture on the universal love of God for fallen humanity. And he never tired of saying so.

What he did not say — what he could not say without overturning his settled doctrine of hell — was that the universal love of God would, in the end, do for every sinner what it had done for him at Aldersgate. He held the line. But the line was harder to hold than he sometimes admitted, and the children of his movement found, generation by generation, that they could not hold it where he had held it. The Wesleyan tradition is one of the most consequential carriers of long-hope theology into the modern English-speaking world — not because its founder taught the long hope, but because the framework he taught made the long hope hard to keep out.

The Life Behind the Doctrine

John Wesley was born on June 17 (Old Style; June 28 New Style), 1703, in the rectory at Epworth, Lincolnshire, where his father Samuel was the Anglican parish priest.⁴ He was the fifteenth of nineteen children, of whom only ten reached adulthood. His mother Susanna — herself the twenty-fifth child of a Nonconformist minister who had been ejected from his living in 1662 — ran the household with a rigor that would shape John's habits for life. She taught the children one hour each every week, set bedtimes by the clock, and held what amounted to private worship services in the kitchen on Sunday afternoons. When the rectory burned in 1709 and five-year-old John was rescued at the last moment from an upstairs window, Susanna saw it as providential confirmation that this child was "a brand plucked from the burning" — a phrase Wesley himself would use about his life ever after.⁵

He went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1720, was elected Fellow of Lincoln College in 1726, took priest's orders in 1728, and returned to Oxford in 1729. There, with his younger brother Charles and a small group of friends including the future evangelist George Whitefield, he formed what their detractors called the "Holy Club" or "Methodists" — a label first applied as a mockery of their methodical ascetic habits and only later embraced by Wesley as a badge of honor. The Holy Club kept fasts, attended weekly communion, visited prisoners, taught poor children, and read the Greek New Testament together. It was disciplined, earnest, and (Wesley would later say) not yet Christian in any saving sense.⁶

In 1735 Wesley sailed for Georgia as a missionary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, expecting to convert the Creek and Cherokee. He converted no Native Americans, alienated the colony's leadership by his rigorous parochial discipline, became entangled in a painful relationship with a young parishioner named Sophy Hopkey, and returned to England in 1738 in something close to despair. On the voyage out he had met a group of Moravians whose calm in a storm at sea had impressed him deeply. On the voyage home he could not stop thinking about the gap between their assurance of salvation and his own anxious striving. Peter Böhler, a Moravian missionary on his way to America, met Wesley in London after his return and pressed him with the New Testament doctrine of saving faith as an instantaneous gift. Wesley was at first incredulous. Then he came to Aldersgate.

From May of 1738 onward, Wesley's life had a single overriding shape: itinerant evangelism. In April 1739 his Oxford friend Whitefield invited him to take over the open-air preaching at Bristol's Kingswood colliery. Wesley was scandalized at first — preaching outdoors, outside a parish church, was almost as bad as preaching outside the Church of England — but he "submitted to be more vile," in his own words, and stood up on a small eminence and preached to about three thousand people.⁷ For the next fifty-two years he scarcely stopped. He preached in the open air to coal miners, weavers, tin smelters, and dockworkers. He organized them into "societies" subdivided into "classes" of about twelve, each class meeting weekly under a lay leader for prayer, mutual examination, and financial support of the movement. He licensed lay preachers (initially over his own brother's objections), held annual Conferences (the first in 1744) to coordinate the work, and built a publishing operation that printed his sermons, his abridged classics, his hymns, and eventually his Notes upon the New Testament for a Methodist audience that quickly outgrew the rural margins.

The single great theological controversy of Wesley's life broke open in 1739 with the publication of his sermon Free Grace. Whitefield had remained a Calvinist; Wesley had not. The sermon was Wesley's declaration of theological independence, and it permanently fractured his relationship with Whitefield (though the two would reconcile personally before Whitefield's death in 1770).⁸ A second wave of the same controversy broke out in 1770 over the Conference Minutes; this time Wesley's defender was John Fletcher of Madeley, whose Checks to Antinomianism would become the most influential Wesleyan-Arminian polemic of the century. The split between Calvinist Methodists (Whitefield, the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion, Toplady, Hervey) and Wesleyan Methodists was permanent.⁹

In 1784, faced with the post-revolutionary American situation in which the Church of England had effectively withdrawn its bishops from the new United States, Wesley took the irregular step of ordaining Thomas Coke and others for the American mission — an act that effectively created the Methodist Episcopal Church as a separate denomination. The same year, by his Deed of Declaration, he gave the British Methodist Conference legal standing apart from the Church of England.¹⁰ Wesley himself remained, to his death, a clergyman of the Church of England; but the Methodists were now a movement and a denomination and a continent.

He died on March 2, 1791, at the City Road Chapel in London, in his eighty-eighth year, surrounded by friends, lay preachers, and the doctors who had attended him. His last words, repeated several times, were: "The best of all is, God is with us." He left a movement of about 71,000 members in Britain and Ireland and another 60,000 in the new United States, plus a vast informal periphery of hearers, sympathizers, and former parishioners.¹¹ Within a generation, Methodist membership in the United States alone would pass a million. Within two centuries, the worldwide Wesleyan tradition would number tens of millions.

This is the figure we now turn to read at length on his own terms.

What Wesley Actually Taught

Free Grace and the End of Calvinist Predestination

The sermon Wesley preached at Bristol in April 1739 and printed before the year was out is the document on which much else depends. Free Grace, on Romans 8:32 — "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" — is short, plain, hot, and unsparing. It is also one of the clearest declarations of universal salvific will in the English language.¹²

Wesley opens with the proposition that grace is "free in all" and "free for all." It is free in all, he says, because it depends in no part on the worthiness of the one receiving it. It is free for all, because Christ died for every human being without exception. From there he moves directly to the doctrine of predestination as he found it in Calvin and Beza and the strict Reformed tradition — the teaching that God from before the foundation of the world has chosen some to eternal life and passed over the rest, leaving them to a deserved damnation. Wesley calls this doctrine, in the Latin phrase Calvin himself had not flinched from, the decretum horribile, "the horrible decree."¹³

What follows is a sustained attack. Wesley argues that predestination as Calvin teaches it makes the preaching of the gospel vain, since those whom God has elected will be saved regardless and those whom He has passed over cannot be saved by any preaching at all. It destroys the meaning of holiness, since holiness is no longer a fruit of believing faith but the marker of those already arbitrarily chosen. It cuts the nerve of comfort, since the believer cannot be confident he is among the elect without precisely the marks of grace that the doctrine has made it impossible to read. It overturns Scripture, which everywhere addresses its appeals to "whosoever will" and never to the secret list. Most of all, Wesley says, it slanders the character of God.

Wesley closes the sermon with the great peroration in which he declares that the love of God is "free for all" — that Christ tasted death for every man — and that to preach anything less is to dishonor the One whose blood was shed for the world. Whitefield was wounded by the sermon and wrote a pained reply. The two never again preached together in unanimity, though they would reconcile personally. The break was permanent, and so was the conviction. Every later Wesleyan statement on God's saving will would build on the platform laid here.¹⁴

The theological logic is worth pausing over. If God really does desire the salvation of all — if "Christ tasted death for every man" — then the question of what happens to those who never had a real chance to respond becomes a serious theological problem. Strict Reformed predestination dissolved that problem by denying that God ever desired the salvation of the non-elect. Wesley would not allow the dissolution. He insisted that God genuinely desires the salvation of every person. And once that is granted, the question of the unreached, the unevangelized, the infant, the cognitively disabled, the pre-Christian Gentile, the pseudoevangelized lapsed believer — these all become unavoidable. Wesley did not solve them by appeal to postmortem opportunity. He solved them, partially, by the doctrine of prevenient grace (every soul, by virtue of Christ's atonement, receives a measure of awakening grace) and by a careful inclusivism about the "almost Christian" and the "faith of a heathen." Those doctrines do real work. But they leave residues, and the residues are where his successors would press further than he did.

The General Spread of the Gospel

Wesley's grandest eschatological vision appears not in a treatise but in a sermon he preached in 1783, late in his ministry, when he was eighty years old. The text was Isaiah 11:9 — "The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea" — and the sermon was titled The General Spread of the Gospel. It is a remarkable document for several reasons.¹⁵

It opens with one of Wesley's characteristic surveys of the state of the world. He estimates the populations of the continents (drawing on a recent geographical work he admired) and produces the bracing calculation that of the roughly nine hundred million inhabitants of the earth, perhaps one hundred and twenty million are nominally Christian, and of those the vast majority are "Christians" only in the most degraded sense — Roman, Greek, or Protestant by name but pagan or worse in their actual lives. He sees the world as it is, in its actual condition of "intellectual darkness, ignorance, with vice and misery attendant upon it," and he refuses pious euphemism.¹⁶

And then, against this sober assessment, he sets the prophecy of Isaiah. The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord. The promise is unconditional. Whatever the present looks like, the future is fixed. Wesley sketches the means — renewed preaching of justification by faith, the spread of inward and outward holiness, the multiplication of Methodist-like societies on every continent — and he allows himself a glimpse of an outcome that, in any other Anglican pulpit of his century, would have raised eyebrows.

What is remarkable is what comes next. Wesley extends the vision beyond Christendom to "the Mahometans" (his term for Muslims), then to the Jews, then to "the heathen world" generally. Each in turn will, he believes, see the lived reality of authentic Christianity and respond. And then, in the closing paragraphs, Wesley reaches the most striking line in the sermon. He has been answering an unstated objection: how can the present misery of the world be reconciled with the wisdom and goodness of God? His answer is the Apostle Paul's, drawn directly from Romans 11:32: "God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all."¹⁷

And then, in a sentence that has caught the attention of every careful Wesley scholar since: "It is enough, that we are assured of this one point, that all these transient evils will issue well; will have a happy conclusion; and that mercy first and last will reign."¹⁸

What does the late Wesley mean by "mercy first and last will reign"? He certainly does not mean what a Universalist of the next century would mean by it — namely, that no one will finally be lost. He is talking, in immediate context, about the millennial age in which the gospel will spread universally over the earth. He retains his belief in a final judgment in which the wicked will be punished. But the eschatological color of the sermon is striking. It is a hopeful sermon, with a sweep that extends to every continent and every religious community. It anticipates a world in which the "knowledge of the Lord" really does cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. And it places the language of mercy, not the language of wrath, at the center of God's final dealings with His creation. Methodist preachers throughout the nineteenth century would draw on this sermon when they wanted to soften Methodism's hellfire reputation. And they were not wrong to do so. The sermon's logic, if pressed, opens onto possibilities Wesley himself would not have endorsed but could not quite close off.¹⁹

The Faith of a Heathen and the Possibility of Salvation Beyond the Visible Church

Among Wesley's later sermons there is a small cluster on the theme of faith that deserves careful reading. The two most important are Sermon 106, On Faith, preached on Hebrews 11:6 ("Without faith it is impossible to please him") in 1788, and the closely related Sermon 130, On Living without God, written about the same time.²⁰

In On Faith, Wesley distinguishes "several sorts" of faith. There is the faith of a heathen, which Wesley defines as the conviction that God exists and that He is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. There is the faith of a Jew — one who, between the giving of the law and the coming of Christ, believed all that is written in the Old Testament and expected the Messiah. There is the faith of a Roman Catholic and the faith of a Protestant, each of which Wesley discusses with characteristic frankness (and to which he denies saving status if "no more than" intellectual assent). And there is "the faith which is properly saving" — a divine conviction of God and the things of God that "enables every one that possesses it to fear God and work righteousness." Wesley's striking conclusion, drawing on Peter's speech to Cornelius in Acts 10:35, is that "whosoever, in every nation, believes thus far, the Apostle declares, is 'accepted of him.'"²¹

Wesley is careful. He is not denying the centrality of Christ. He is not embracing pluralism. He is not saying that the heathen who fears God and works righteousness has the same standing before God as the Christian who has come to explicit faith in Christ; he insists the Christian's faith is greater, fuller, more saving. But he is saying that the One who is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him recognizes a faith that is genuinely directed toward Him even where the historic gospel has not been preached. He is, in the language of modern theology, an implicit inclusivist.²²

The same posture appears in The General Deliverance (Sermon 60, 1781) and in The New Creation (Sermon 64, 1785), the two late sermons in which Wesley extends his eschatological vision even to the animal creation, arguing that the eventual restoration of all things in Christ would include the brute creatures in some form of redemption proportionate to their nature. This is not universal restoration in the Origenist sense. But it is a startlingly broad imagination of the scope of Christ's saving work.²³

Modern restrictivist evangelicalism has not generally known what to do with the late Wesley sermons. They cannot be dismissed as fringe; they appear in the Standard Sermons, were preached repeatedly, and were among Wesley's "maturer" thoughts in his own self-description. They cannot be claimed for explicit universalism; Wesley repeatedly affirms a real and final judgment of the wicked. They sit, instead, in a middle position that bothers both the strict Calvinist and the open Universalist — and that has, for two and a half centuries, kept the question of God's wider mercy genuinely alive in the Methodist tradition.

Wesley's Debt to Bengel

To understand Wesley's eschatology, one must understand Bengel. Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), the Württemberg Pietist whose work is taken up at length in Chapter 16, was the most important New Testament scholar of the eighteenth century and one of the most theologically significant Pietists. His Gnomon Novi Testamenti (1742), a Latin commentary on the entire Greek New Testament, combined careful textual criticism with a warmly pious exposition that drew freely on the Württemberg tradition of prophetic-historical universalism — the tradition that ran from Johann Wilhelm and Johanna Eleonora Petersen through Friedrich Christoph Oetinger and on into the nineteenth-century Blumhardts.²⁴

Wesley read Bengel and was changed by him. He records the encounter in the Preface to his own Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), the project that grew out of his enforced rest during the serious illness of 1753–1754. Wesley says he had originally intended to compose his own commentary without consulting anyone except the inspired writers themselves. But, he writes, "no sooner was I acquainted with that great light of the Christian world, (lately gone to his reward,) Bengelius, than I entirely changed my design, being thoroughly convinced it might be of more service to the cause of religion, were I barely to translate his Gnomon Novi Testamenti, than to write many volumes upon it." Wesley therefore translated many of Bengel's notes, abridged others by stripping out their purely critical apparatus, and produced a commentary that is, on the substantive eschatological texts, a direct conduit of Bengel's Pietist theology into the English Methodist tradition.²⁵

The matter is consequential. Bengel was a careful enough Lutheran to avoid open universalism in print, but his eschatology is markedly hopeful, his reading of Romans 11 is broadly inclusive of all Israel, and his commentary on Revelation envisions a sequence of restorations and triumphs that brings the saving work of God much closer to universal scope than the Augustinian default allows. When Wesley translates and adapts Bengel's notes for English readers — the Explanatory Notes would become a Methodist doctrinal standard, alongside the Standard Sermons — he carries Bengel's vision with him. The Methodist preacher who learned his New Testament theology from Wesley's Notes was being formed in a tradition that included, however quietly, the Württemberg Pietist universalist hope.²⁶

Henry Rack, the standard modern biographer, observes that Wesley carried Bengel's Gnomon on his preaching circuits and consulted it constantly. Randy Maddox notes that the influence of Bengel on Wesley's prophetic-eschatological imagination is one of the most underappreciated features of Wesley's mature thought.²⁷ The line of theological transmission — Petersen and Oetinger and Bengel and Wesley — is not a marginal curiosity. It is a central part of the genealogy of Wesleyan optimism.

One more conduit deserves brief mention. Adam Clarke (1762–1832), an Irish Methodist preacher and one of the leading biblical scholars of the early nineteenth century, produced the Holy Bible, with a Commentary and Critical Notes (1810–1826) that for two generations of British and American Methodists was the standard biblical reference work. Clarke read his Greek New Testament with one eye on Bengel and the other on a wide circle of Continental Pietist exegetes. His treatment of Romans 5:18–19 ("as by the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one, the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life") and 1 Timothy 2:4 ("who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth") presses the universality of the saving will with characteristic Wesleyan firmness. Clarke himself, like Wesley, stopped short of universalism; but his commentary became one of the principal vehicles by which the Wesleyan-Bengelian reading of these texts reached generations of Methodist pulpits and pews.⁵³

Wesley on Hell and the Wicked

It must be said clearly: John Wesley preached eternal conscious punishment of the wicked. He did so repeatedly and without softening. His Sermon 73, simply titled Of Hell, takes the traditional Latin doctrine and rehearses it with characteristic plainness. The fire of hell is a real fire. The worm that dieth not is a real worm. The duration is endless. The torment is conscious.²⁸ Wesley's preaching on hell was one of the engines of Methodist conversion; he did not pull his punches with the colliers at Kingswood or the weavers at Newcastle, and the evangelistic urgency of early Methodism cannot be separated from the conviction that the unconverted were, quite literally, in mortal danger.

And yet — and this is the tension that defines the chapter — the eschatology of Wesley's sermons on hell sits inside a framework that elsewhere keeps moving toward mercy. Hell is real. The wicked perish there forever. But the wicked, in Wesley's working theology, are not those whom God has predestined to that end. They are those who, in possession of resistible prevenient grace, have finally and irrevocably refused the God who sought them. Their damnation is their own — the result of a real human refusal, not an arbitrary divine decree. And God's saving will toward them, from before all worlds, was never anything but mercy.

The structural tension is unstable. Hold the universality of God's saving will with full force, and the question presses: if God really desires the salvation of every person, if the resistance of human freedom is what finally damns the lost rather than divine pretermission, then by what means and through what duration is that saving will exercised? Wesley's answer was the duration of the present life and the means of the gospel preached in the present life (with the limited supplement of the "faith of a heathen" doctrine). His Methodist heirs were not always so confident that the present life and the present preaching exhausted what God's universal love could do. The pressure was always there. The post-Wesley Methodist tradition would, over the next two centuries, gradually relieve it.

Wesley on the Unevangelized and the Descent

Wesley's treatment of the destiny of those who never heard the gospel is, by modern standards, undeveloped. He was working before the great age of Protestant world missions and before the late-nineteenth-century crisis over the moral status of restrictivism. But the materials are there in the sermons and in the Notes, and they push consistently in a wider direction.²⁹

In Sermon 91, On Charity, Wesley writes of the heathen that "the merciful God regards the lives and tempers of men more than their ideas." In the Notes on Acts 10:35 (Cornelius), he affirms with characteristic plainness that God accepts those in every nation who fear Him and work righteousness, while still maintaining that the fuller revelation in Christ is the divinely appointed means of saving knowledge. Stephen Jonathan, in his pastoral and theological evaluation of postmortem salvation, observes that Wesley's collected sermons contain numerous indications of a "wider hope" with respect to the heathen — a hope that is implicit inclusivism without quite becoming explicit postmortem opportunity.³⁰

Wesley's treatment of Christ's descent to the dead, the doctrine to which we return at length in connection with Origen, the Antiochenes, and the modern PO scholarship, is relatively traditional and undeveloped. He affirms the descent in his catechetical use of the Apostles' Creed but does not develop a postmortem-evangelistic reading of 1 Peter 3:18–20 or 4:6. The descent is, for Wesley, a creedal datum more than a theological resource. It is one of the places where his successors — from the nineteenth-century soft-hell Methodists to the late-twentieth-century Wesleyan-influenced postmortem-opportunity scholarship (Pinnock, Walls, Beilby, treated in Chapter 26) — would press much further than Wesley did himself.

Reception: Charles, Fletcher, and the Methodist Aftermath

Charles Wesley's Hymnody and the Universality of Grace

If John Wesley wrote the doctrinal framework of Methodism, his younger brother Charles (1707–1788) wrote its singable theology. Over the course of his life Charles produced something between six and nine thousand hymn texts — the higher estimate is John Telford's count from the Methodist Hymn-Book, the lower estimate from a more conservative reckoning of authenticated authorship.³¹ The 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, compiled by John from Charles's enormous corpus, became the Methodist devotional standard. Its theology is Wesleyan-Arminian to the core. Its language of grace is relentlessly universal.

Consider "Love divine, all loves excelling" (1747), perhaps the most famous Wesleyan hymn outside "Hark! the herald angels sing." Its second verse begs the descending Spirit to "into every troubled breast" enter; its fourth invites the believer to be "finished" by sanctifying grace until "lost in wonder, love, and praise" before the heavenly throne. The whole hymn refuses any limitation on the scope of divine love. The 1747 text breathes the universal-grace logic of Free Grace in lyric form.³²

"And can it be that I should gain" (1738) — written within weeks of Charles's own evangelical conversion (which preceded John's by three days) — turns on the wonder that "for me, who Him to death pursued," Christ would have died at all. The "me" is, by Charles's deliberate Arminian theology, any believer at all. The same Christ who tasted death for every sinner pursues every sinner with the same love that pursued the singer. "Wrestling Jacob" ("Come, O Thou Traveler unknown") sets the doctrine of grace in dramatic form: the sinner contends with the unknown stranger through the night, demands his name, and finally hears it: "thy nature and thy name is Love." That name is the Wesleyan reading of God's character in two words.³³

Charles was not a universalist. He affirmed eternal punishment as plainly as his brother did. But his hymns, by the texture of their language and the relentless universality of their address, have done as much as any other body of writing in the English language to make the strict-Augustinian narrative emotionally unsustainable for those who sing them. A people who has been formed to sing "for all my Lord was crucified, for all, for all my Saviour died" cannot easily preach restrictivism with conviction.³⁴ The Wesleyan tradition's hymnody is one of the most pervasive carriers of long-hope-friendly theology in the English-speaking Christian world, even when the formal doctrine in the doctrinal standards has remained more cautious.

John Fletcher of Madeley

John William Fletcher (1729–1785), born Jean Guillaume de la Fléchère in Nyon, Switzerland, was Wesley's most able theological lieutenant and the man Wesley intended as his successor.³⁵ Fletcher would have led British Methodism after Wesley's death had he not died first, in 1785, six years before Wesley. His pastoral ministry was based at the parish of Madeley in Shropshire, where he served as vicar from 1760 until his death. His intellectual output is contained chiefly in the multi-volume Checks to Antinomianism (1771–1775), composed during the second Calvinist controversy of Wesley's career.

The Checks emerged from a polemical occasion. Wesley's 1770 Conference Minutes had used language about good works ("If thou wouldst be perfect, yet not as the means of finding favour with Christ, but in consequence of having found favour") that strict Calvinists, led by Walter Shirley and Augustus Toplady, interpreted as a betrayal of justification by faith alone. Fletcher, asked by Wesley to defend the Minutes, produced a sequence of open letters that grew into a complete defense of Wesleyan-Arminian soteriology — the first systematic theological writing in the Methodist tradition produced by anyone other than the Wesley brothers themselves.³⁶

Fletcher's contribution for our purposes lies in two doctrines. First, his careful articulation of the doctrine of dispensations — the idea that God deals graciously with humanity in successive economies (Gentile, Jewish, Christian, Pentecostal), each of which contains genuine saving grace appropriate to its measure of revelation. Fletcher uses this framework to argue that the faithful of the previous dispensations were really saved by grace in a way intelligible within their own situation, and the implication carries naturally to the heathen of the present day who never hear the gospel. Second, his refusal to flinch from the implication that God's love is sincerely directed toward every fallen soul. Fletcher writes that Calvinist "irresistible grace toward the elect only" is an unspeakable misrepresentation of the divine character: the same grace that saves Paul on the road to Damascus also strives with every sinner in every nation in every age.³⁷

Fletcher did not teach postmortem opportunity. But the framework he developed — universal saving love, real prevenient grace given to every soul, the dispensational hospitality of God toward the religiously partial light of the heathen — is precisely the framework that twentieth-century Wesleyan inclusivists like Clark Pinnock and Wesleyan-shaped postmortem-opportunity advocates like Jerry Walls would draw upon. Fletcher's Checks are the first Methodist systematic theology, and they are theologically positioned exactly where the modern Wesleyan wider-hope conversation would later flourish.

The Restorationist Controversy

By the early nineteenth century, the inner logic of Wesleyan Arminianism was beginning to produce children that Wesley himself would not have recognized. The most public expression of this was the Restorationist controversy that broke out in American Universalism between roughly 1817 and 1831.³⁸

The American Universalists, treated at length in Chapter 19, were not initially a Methodist sect, but their leadership repeatedly drew converts from Wesleyan and Calvinist backgrounds, and the controversy that nearly split them in the 1820s pitted two readings of universal salvation against each other. The "Ultra-Universalists," led by Hosea Ballou, held that there is no future punishment of the wicked at all — sinners are punished only in this life, and at death all are immediately restored to God's presence. The "Restorationists," led by Edward Turner, Paul Dean, Jacob Wood, and the young Adin Ballou, held that there is real postmortem punishment of the wicked, but that this punishment is corrective and bounded; eventually, through purgatorial discipline, all are restored to God. The Restorationists were thus universalists whose theological logic resembled, more than any other historic position, the patristic apokatastasis of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. They were also, by temperament and by training, closer to Wesleyan piety than the Ultra-Universalists were.

The conflict came to a head in late 1822, when six Universalist ministers led by Turner published "An Appeal to the Public" and a declaration "To the World" in the Christian Repository arguing for the necessity of postmortem punishment as a doctrine of universalist orthodoxy. Hosea Ballou's faction, in control of the Universalist Magazine, replied through Hosea Ballou the Second. The General Convention of New England Universalists charged Paul Dean and Hosea Ballou; the charges were cleared in 1823 but reconciliation proved temporary. In 1828–1829, the Restorationist David Pickering organized a "Providence Association" as a counter-association within the wider Universalist body. In 1830 the Southern Association (of New England Universalists, despite the name) condemned the Providence Association. In 1831 Paul Dean, Pickering, Adin Ballou, and other Restorationists met in Mendon, Massachusetts, and formed a separate denomination, the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists, which lasted until 1841 before collapsing under the strain of disagreements about social reform.³⁹

Within American Methodism proper, the discipline against Restorationist preaching was firm. Throughout the early nineteenth century, several Methodist Episcopal preachers who began to teach universal restoration were brought before conference discipline, asked to recant, and (when they refused) expelled. The exact membership flow from Methodism into Universalism is hard to quantify, but it was significant enough that the Universalist denomination of the antebellum decades took on a noticeably Methodist-derived pastoral character — circuit-riding preachers, camp meetings, hymn-singing congregations — even as it embraced the doctrine Methodism formally rejected.⁴⁰

Several individual American Methodist preachers in the early decades of the nineteenth century, separately from the formal Universalist denomination, came to embrace Restorationist views and were brought before conference discipline as a result. The Methodist Discipline required affirmation of the eternal punishment of the wicked as a condition of pastoral standing; the affirmation could not be qualified or read into a Restorationist framework. The result was a series of small but significant defections through the 1820s and 1830s, in which Methodist preachers who had come to doubt the eternity of hell either left voluntarily to join the Universalist Church or were removed from Methodist appointments and continued their ministries independently. The pattern repeated itself, in slightly different forms, in early nineteenth-century British Wesleyan Methodism, where similar tensions led to a series of denominational breakaways — though there the major divisions (Methodist New Connexion in 1797, Primitive Methodists in 1810, Bible Christians in 1815, Wesleyan Methodist Association in 1836) were driven primarily by issues of governance and lay leadership rather than by eschatology.⁵⁴

The pattern of the next century is consistent. Mainstream Methodism in both Britain and America retained its formal commitment to eternal punishment of the wicked. But it gradually stopped preaching that doctrine with the urgency the early Wesley had given it. By the late nineteenth century, the standard Methodist systematic theologies — William Burt Pope's Compendium of Christian Theology in Britain (1875–1879), John Miley's Systematic Theology in America (1892–1894) — treated the topic in measured, sober tones that left the lurid hellfire preaching of the eighteenth century behind.⁴¹ By the mid-twentieth century, mainline Methodism (in the M.E. Church, the Methodist Church after the 1939 merger, and the United Methodist Church after 1968) had largely ceased active preaching of eternal conscious torment, even where its Articles of Religion (which Wesley had himself trimmed from the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1784) retained the older formulations.⁴²

The persistence of Wesleyan "wider hope" theology runs through this period as a continuous undercurrent. Pope's Compendium is sympathetic to the broader Methodist hope while retaining formal commitment to eternal punishment. Miley's Systematic Theology is sober and traditional. In the twentieth century the line continues through figures as different as Thomas Oden, whose vast Systematic Theology attempts a paleo-orthodox retrieval; Geoffrey Wainwright, whose ecumenical Methodist theology dialogues constructively with both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox eschatology; and Stanley Hauerwas, who has been less interested in hell as a doctrine than in the ethical life of a church that takes seriously the universality of God's saving address. None of these is a universalist in the strict sense; all of them carry the irreducible Wesleyan emphasis that God's saving will is genuinely and universally directed toward every fallen soul.

Wesleyan-Holiness, Pentecostal-Holiness, and the Salvation Army

The Wesleyan-Holiness offshoot, beginning with the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness (1867) and its later denominational expressions (Wesleyan Methodist Connection, Free Methodist Church, Church of the Nazarene, Church of God [Anderson], Pilgrim Holiness Church), inherited the Wesleyan framework largely intact, including its formal commitment to eternal punishment.⁴³ The same is true of the Pentecostal-Holiness branch that emerged from the 1906 Azusa Street Revival and its predecessors. Both traditions have generally retained ECT as formal doctrine.

The Wesleyan-Holiness movement's practical theology, however, has consistently been shaped by the Wesleyan emphasis on the universal scope of God's saving will and the resistibility of grace. The result is an evangelistic urgency that is real but that does not entail or require the strict double-predestinarian backdrop. A Holiness or Pentecostal-Holiness preacher who calls sinners to repentance does so on the assumption that the call is genuine, that the Spirit is actively wooing every hearer, and that no human soul has been written off in advance. That assumption is Wesleyan to the core, and it has long-hope implications even when the explicit doctrine remains traditional.

The Salvation Army, founded by William Booth (a former Methodist New Connexion minister) and Catherine Booth in 1865, deserves a brief note. The Booths and the Army's Doctrines have affirmed eternal punishment of the wicked plainly — the eleventh of the Army's eleven Articles of Faith confesses "the endless punishment of the wicked."⁴⁴ William Booth was not a universalist and would have firmly rejected the label. His famous remark that he would send his officers to hell for five minutes to prepare them for compassionate ministry was meant in earnest. What is striking, however, is the missionary posture of the Army: every soul, regardless of social condition, is approached as one for whom Christ died and toward whom the saving will of God is genuinely directed. The Booths' pragmatic theology of mission ran ahead of their formal doctrinal article, and the Army's actual ministry has long been carried out in the spirit of Wesleyan universal-grace conviction even where its formal doctrine retained the older Augustinian language.

Assessment: What Wesley Held and What He Did Not

Three claims, carefully made, summarize what the historical record actually supports about John Wesley's eschatology.

First, Wesley taught universal salvific will without qualification. The doctrine appears already in Free Grace (1739) and is restated repeatedly through the next half-century. Every sermon, every Conference Minute, every pastoral letter from Wesley assumes it. God genuinely desires the salvation of every fallen soul. Christ's atoning death is for every sinner without exception. Prevenient grace is given universally. This is not a minor or peripheral Wesleyan doctrine; it is the load-bearing wall of the entire system. Wesleyan Arminianism, considered as a theological tradition, begins here.

Second, Wesley taught the resistibility of grace and the genuineness of human refusal. God's universal saving will is not coercive. The sinner who finally and irrevocably refuses the wooing grace of God is genuinely the author of his own damnation. This is what distinguishes Wesleyan Arminianism from any easy or sentimental optimism. Wesley insists with full seriousness that hell is real, the damned are really damned, and the cause of their damnation is their own refusal of a real divine offer. There is no hidden divine veto behind the visible human refusal.

Third, Wesley did not teach universal restoration, did not teach explicit postmortem opportunity, and did not abandon the doctrine of eternal punishment. The post-Wesley movement that did move in these directions did so by extending Wesley's framework beyond where Wesley himself was willing to take it. The author of Free Grace would have been uncomfortable with Origen and indignant at Hosea Ballou. He was, in his own deliberate self-understanding, a thoroughly orthodox Anglican of the Article-XVII variety — an Article that affirms predestination "to life" while leaving open the broader scope of God's saving will toward the rest.⁴⁵

What the historical record also supports is that Wesley's framework is structurally unstable. The instability is not a defect of Wesley's logic; it is a feature of trying to hold together two propositions that are in genuine tension: that God really, sincerely, and universally desires the salvation of every soul, and that the present life is the sole window of opportunity for that desire to be realized. Hold the first proposition with full force, and the second begins to look like an arbitrary limitation. Hold the second with full force, and the first begins to look like polite divine politeness, sincere in the abstract but unwilling to do what would be needed to make it actual.

Wesley managed the tension through the doctrine of prevenient grace, the doctrine of the "almost Christian," the "faith of a heathen" allowance, and his late-life eschatological optimism about the global spread of the gospel. These are real theological resources, and they do real work. But they leave residues: the infant who dies before the use of reason; the cognitively disabled person who cannot consciously embrace the gospel; the inhabitant of pre-Columbian Brazil or pre-Christian Japan who could not have heard the gospel through no fault of her own; the religiously confused person who was given a distorted Christ by pseudoevangelism and whose refusal of that Christ may not be a refusal of the Christ. Wesley addressed some of these residues partially. He did not address all of them. And the Methodist tradition after him would press the tension with increasing seriousness.

Albert Outler, the great twentieth-century editor of Wesley, was clear-eyed about this. Outler observed that Wesley's optimism about grace pushes constantly toward a wider hope, and that Wesley's repeated affirmation of eternal punishment functions as a doctrinal limit rather than as the natural conclusion of his soteriology.⁴⁶ Henry Rack, in Reasonable Enthusiast, traces the same observation through Wesley's late sermons and concludes that there is in Wesley a "tendency toward inclusivism" that the formal doctrine cannot quite contain.⁴⁷ Randy Maddox, in Responsible Grace, develops the point further: Wesley's "responsible grace" framework — grace freely given, freedom genuinely returned — is one of the most fertile theological frameworks for the later wider-hope conversation precisely because it neither collapses into Calvinist predestination nor floats free into open universalism.⁴⁸

From a different angle, Kenneth Collins (a more theologically conservative Wesley scholar) reaches a similar conclusion: Wesley's "optimism of grace" is real and important, and the contemporary Wesleyan tradition has every right to develop it; but the optimism cannot, on Wesley's own grounds, be extended into outright universalism without breaking with what Wesley actually taught about the seriousness of final judgment.⁴⁹ What contemporary Wesleyan scholarship has, across the theological spectrum, recognized is that the question of postmortem opportunity (as distinct from universalism) sits within the Wesleyan framework far more naturally than within the strict Reformed framework. Postmortem opportunity does not require denying the seriousness of judgment, the reality of hell, or the genuineness of human refusal. It only requires recognizing that the saving will of God, which Wesleyan theology has always insisted is universal in scope, may also be universal in temporal reach — not stopping arbitrarily at the moment of biological death.

This is, in fact, the position taken by some of the most prominent contemporary Wesleyan-influenced theologians of the wider hope: Clark Pinnock (himself shaped by Wesleyan soteriology even though formally a Baptist), Jerry Walls (who explicitly identifies as Wesleyan and has developed a Methodist case for purgatorial postmortem opportunity), and James Beilby (whose 2021 Postmortem Opportunity is, structurally, a thoroughly Arminian-Wesleyan defense of the position). All of them take Wesley's framework and follow it where they believe Wesley's own logic was already pointing.⁵⁰ Beilby's argument that God's universal salvific will entails a universal opportunity for response is, as he himself acknowledges, an extension of Pinnock's reading of Wesleyan logic into territory Wesley did not develop. Walls's defense of a Protestant doctrine of purgatorial postmortem opportunity (the subject of Chapter 26) draws explicitly on the Wesleyan tradition's insistence that God's grace is not arbitrarily curtailed by the calendar.

A further question deserves attention at this point. Why is it that Wesleyan-Arminian theology produces, with such regularity, figures who press toward the long hope? The answer is not sociological accident or generational drift. It is theological. The Wesleyan-Arminian system rests on three load-bearing claims that, taken together, generate sustained pressure on the deadline doctrine. First, that God genuinely desires the salvation of every fallen soul, without exception and without secret reservation. Second, that the determining factor in any individual's final destiny is that individual's free response to God's wooing grace, not God's hidden prior decree. Third, that the moral seriousness of the final judgment is preserved by the genuineness of human freedom, not by an arbitrary scarcity of opportunity. The first claim makes restrictivism uncomfortable: how can God's universal saving will be reconciled with a temporally limited window of saving address? The second claim makes traditional Augustinian solutions to that discomfort unavailable: one cannot resolve the tension by appeal to God's secret election of some and pretermission of others, because the Wesleyan system has already excluded that move. The third claim makes universalism resistible: one cannot resolve the tension by simply declaring that all will eventually be saved, because that would compromise the genuineness of human freedom that is itself the load-bearing wall of the system. The three claims together box the Wesleyan theologian into a narrow but well-defined space. The most natural occupant of that space is some version of postmortem opportunity — an extension of God's saving address beyond death without a guaranteed universal acceptance of it. That postmortem opportunity advocates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have found their most coherent home in the Wesleyan-Arminian tradition is not an accident. It is the working out of a theological logic that was there from Free Grace onward.

One final note of historical realism. Wesley was a man of the eighteenth century, with the limitations of his time. He believed in witches (and once attended a witch trial, though with skeptical commentary). He held views on slavery that, while abolitionist in his late years, did not always carry the depth of analysis later abolitionists would bring. His attitude toward Roman Catholicism was, in his own famous "Letter to a Roman Catholic," irenic in remarkable ways for his era, but his attitude toward Catholic doctrine on purgatory was firmly Protestant and dismissive.⁵¹ The Wesley of the historical record was no proto-postmortem-opportunity advocate dressed up in eighteenth-century clothes. He was an Anglican High-Church-formed-evangelical, deeply Arminian, deeply pastoral, deeply biblical, and deeply confident that the present life is the appointed time of decision. That confidence is part of the historical Wesley, and to read him otherwise would be anachronism.

What can be said, and what this chapter has tried to say, is that the framework he assembled has long-hope implications he did not develop — and that his successors, in every generation, have found those implications harder to suppress than Wesley himself did.

Why This Matters for the Long Hope

The Wesleyan tradition matters for the long hope in three concrete ways, each of which deserves brief attention here.

First, the tradition is genuinely large. The combined Methodist family worldwide — United Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal (AME), AME Zion, Christian Methodist Episcopal, Free Methodist, Wesleyan, Nazarene, Pilgrim Holiness, the various Pentecostal-Holiness denominations, the Salvation Army, the worldwide Methodist mission churches in Africa and Asia — numbers in the tens of millions of adherents and runs to roughly seventy-five million baptized members by the early twenty-first century, depending on how the boundaries are drawn.⁵² When the contemporary popular evangelical claim is made that the wider hope is a fringe innovation, it is worth noticing that the tradition just described is approximately the size of global Anglicanism and is shaped from end to end by the Wesleyan emphasis on universal saving will. The wider hope is not a marginal position quietly tucked into a corner of Western Christianity. It is, in soft or strong forms, the de facto pastoral assumption of one of the world's largest Protestant traditions.

Second, the tradition is theologically continuous with the broader long-hope stream. The lineage runs from the Württemberg Pietists (Petersen, Oetinger, Bengel) through Wesley into Anglo-American Methodism, then forks: one branch follows the formal Wesleyan denominations through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, retaining Wesley's restraint on universalism; another branch leaks out through the American Universalists into a more explicit restorationism; a third branch reappears in late-twentieth-century evangelical postmortem-opportunity scholarship (Pinnock, Walls, Beilby) and in evangelical hopeful universalism (Boyd, Bell, Bradley). All three branches drink from the same Wesleyan well, and all three are intelligible as developments of the framework Wesley laid down. The contemporary conversation is not a sudden modern departure; it is the latest in a continuous stream.

Third, the tradition has been pastorally sustained, not just academically. The Methodist circuit-riders of the early American republic, the Methodist class-leaders who took the gospel to industrial Britain, the Salvation Army soldiers in the East End slums, the Wesleyan-Holiness preachers in the rural South, the Nazarene missionaries in southern Africa — all of these have carried out their work on the assumption that God's saving will reaches every soul they meet. That pastoral assumption has formed millions of Christians whose lived theology is closer to the long hope than to strict restrictivism. When such Christians, in their grief over an unbelieving relative or their bewilderment about the unevangelized, ask their pastor whether anything more can be said, they are not asking a question that comes from outside the Wesleyan tradition. They are asking a question that the Wesleyan tradition has been hospitably asking, in different ways, for two and a half centuries.

The figure who appears in the next chapter — Charles Chauncy in eighteenth-century Boston, John Murray on the New Jersey shore, Hosea Ballou in his Massachusetts parish — was raised, in many cases, in this same Wesleyan or Methodist or revivalist-Arminian air. So was the figure who appears in our final movement of the book: James Beilby at Bethel University, defending postmortem opportunity as a thoroughly evangelical doctrine, drawing on a Wesleyan-Arminian framework that he traces straight back through Pinnock to Wesley to Bengel and Petersen and the wider Pietist universalist hope.

The line is long. The continuity is real. And one of the strangest features of much contemporary evangelical conversation about hell — the assumption that the long hope is a modern departure from an unbroken historic Christian consensus — is the apparent forgetting of the fact that the founder of Methodism, the man whose movement underlies a very large portion of contemporary American evangelicalism, was already laying the framework two and a half centuries ago.

I close with one more passage from the late Wesley, a man eighty years old, still preaching, still hopeful, still convinced after decades of itinerant ministry that "mercy first and last will reign." This is the Wesleyan tradition's most enduring contribution to the long hope: not a doctrinal innovation, not a polemical victory, not even a particular eschatological position, but a habit of preaching the love of God to every soul as though God really meant it. The habit is contagious. Once installed, it is hard to uninstall. And it has been doing its quiet work in the Methodist family, and beyond it, for a very long time.