Chapter 18
Free grace, the wider hope, and the long fertile soil of Arminian mercy
Picture an old man on a horse. He is in his eighties, lean as a fencepost, wearing the same plain black coat he has worn for thirty years. By his own count, he has traveled near 250,000 miles on horseback and preached perhaps 40,000 sermons.1 He rises at four in the morning, writes letters by candlelight, and is, just now, the most famous preacher in England. He is John Wesley.
In one saddlebag he carries his pocket Bible. In the other, more often than not, he carries the Gnomon Novi Testamenti of Johann Albrecht Bengel — the Württemberg Pietist whose textual notes on the New Testament Wesley considered the finest commentary ever written. Wesley read Bengel constantly. He translated long stretches of him for the Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755).2
That detail matters. The Wesley of popular Methodist memory is the warm-hearted evangelist of Aldersgate Street, whose heart was "strangely warmed" on May 24, 1738, while someone read aloud from Luther's preface to Romans.3 That Wesley is real. But there is another Wesley behind him: the Oxford-trained Anglican priest and Greek scholar, the patient student of the Greek Fathers, whose Arminianism was not a sentimental rebellion against Calvinist gloom but a sustained, biblically-argued conviction about the universality of God's saving will. He did not become Arminian because he was soft. He became Arminian because, reading Scripture for himself, he found a God who loves the whole world and means it.
That conviction has consequences. They run forward through 250 years of Methodist preaching after him into territory Wesley himself never quite mapped — territory where the breadth of God's love begins to push against the strict deadline doctrine of the Augustinian-Reformed West. Wesley was not a universalist. He was not even, in any developed sense, a postmortem-opportunity theologian. But he laid soil. And on that soil, generation after generation of his heirs would grow what we have come to call the "wider hope."
John Wesley was born in 1703 at the Epworth rectory in Lincolnshire, the fifteenth of nineteen children of Samuel and Susanna Wesley.4 Samuel was the parish priest; Susanna, formidably bright, ran a household school in which the children learned Greek, Latin, French, logic, and the Bible. John went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1720 and was elected a fellow of Lincoln College in 1726. By 1729 he was meeting with his brother Charles and a small group of friends — including the young George Whitefield — for prayer, fasting, communion, and works of mercy among Oxford's prisoners and poor. Their methodical discipline earned them a mocking nickname that stuck: the "Methodists."
In 1735 John and Charles sailed for Georgia as Anglican missionaries. The trip was a near-disaster. Wesley returned to England in 1737 wondering whether he was a Christian at all. The Moravians he had met on the voyage — German Pietists in the lineage of Spener, Francke, and Zinzendorf — had something he did not. They had assurance. Then came Aldersgate: May 24, 1738, a society meeting, Luther's preface read aloud. Wesley's famous words: "About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed."5
The next year he reluctantly accepted Whitefield's invitation to preach in the open air at Bristol. The crowds came. Within months Wesley was leading what would become the largest religious revival in the English-speaking world of the eighteenth century. He preached for the next fifty-three years without pause. He organized converts into "societies," "bands," and "classes." He never left the Church of England, though by the end of his life he was ordaining ministers for America and Scotland — a step the Anglican bishops would not take for him. He died in London on March 2, 1791. Methodism, by then, had become a movement no episcopate could contain.
The first great theological battle of Wesley's ministry was with his closest friend. George Whitefield was a Calvinist. Wesley was not. Through 1739 the two grew increasingly uneasy with each other over the doctrine of predestination, and in April of that year — after, by his own account, drawing lots for guidance — Wesley preached and then published Free Grace, the sermon that would mark his open break with Calvinist soteriology.6 His text was 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?"
The opening lines tell you everything about the theological vision Wesley meant to defend. Grace, he says, is free in all and free for all. Free in those who receive it, because it depends on no merit in them. Free for everyone to whom God offers it, because God offers it to every human being who has ever lived. There is no secret decree that has chosen some for salvation and abandoned the rest to ruin from before the foundation of the world. The God of Scripture is not the God of that decree.
From the Sermon: "The grace or love of God, whence cometh our salvation, is FREE IN ALL, and FREE FOR ALL... It does not depend on any power or merit in man; no, not in any degree, neither in whole, nor in part. It does not in anywise depend either on the good works or righteousness of the receiver; not on anything he has done, or anything he is."
— John Wesley, Sermon on Free Grace (1739), §§2–3.7
Wesley then turns to the consequences of the Calvinist alternative. If God has decreed that some shall be saved and the rest damned regardless of what they do, then evangelism is theatre, repentance is meaningless, and the universal offer of the gospel in Scripture is a sham. Worst of all, he says — and here Wesley borrows directly from Calvin's own famous phrase — the doctrine of double predestination is a decretum horribile, "a horrible decree." Calvin himself had used the Latin phrase in the Institutes to describe his own teaching.8 Wesley turns Calvin's grim self-description into a rhetorical hammer. If even Calvin admits the doctrine is horrible, what shall we say of the God it portrays?
Whitefield was wounded. He published a long reply the following year. The two men eventually reconciled personally — Wesley preached at Whitefield's funeral in 17709 — but the theological line was drawn. From 1739 onward, the Wesleyan stream of the English revival would be irreducibly Arminian. Grace is universal. It is offered to every human being. It can be received or refused. The saved are saved because they have not, in the end, refused it.
Forty-four years after Free Grace, the old man on horseback preached one of his most striking late sermons. The text was Isaiah 11:9: "The earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea." Wesley begins with apparent pessimism. The Christian portion of humanity, he observes, is small, and within that portion the gospel is often weakly preached.10
And then Wesley turns. The prophet's words, he argues, are not embarrassment but promise. The work of revival he sees happening in eighteenth-century England will spread from one nation to the next, and reach the corners of the earth. The sermon is not, strictly speaking, a universalist sermon. Wesley does not argue that the lost will be saved postmortem; his eschatology is missionary and historical, picturing a future in which the gospel triumphs before the eschaton through ordinary preaching, conversion, and the work of the Spirit. But the breadth of the vision is striking. Wesley imagines a humanity in which "the wisdom and goodness of God" will, at last, be vindicated by the conversion of essentially every nation.11
Key Argument: Wesley did not teach postmortem opportunity. But the structural logic of his theology — universal salvific will, resistible grace, the breadth of mercy — keeps generating answers to the "what about the unsaved?" question that strain against the strict Augustinian deadline. The General Spread of the Gospel answers the question by pushing the work of grace outward in space and time during this life; later Methodists would extend the same logic past the boundary of death.
The sermon most often cited as evidence of Wesley's inclusivist instincts was preached three years before his death. The text was Hebrews 11:6 — "without faith it is impossible to please God; for he that cometh unto God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him." The sermon walks through what Wesley calls the different "degrees" of faith. There is the faith of a materialist or atheist (a counterfeit faith, really no faith at all). There is the faith of a Deist (a thin and inadequate faith). There is the faith of a Roman Catholic and the faith of a Protestant (each true so far as it goes, but inadequate by itself). And — here is the move that mattered for the long hope tradition — there is the faith of a "heathen."12
Wesley refuses to dismiss the heathen's faith out of hand. He grants that those who have never heard the gospel may still believe that God is and that He rewards those who seek Him. Such a faith is not the full Christian faith. It does not save in the sense in which the explicit Christian faith saves. But Wesley quotes the apostle Peter at Cornelius's house: "whosoever, in every nation, believes thus far, the Apostle declares, is 'accepted of him.'"13
That sentence has been doing theological work in Wesleyan circles for two centuries. Wesley does not work out the implications. He does not say what eternal destiny awaits the accepted heathen. He does not develop a doctrine of postmortem evangelism. But he opens a door. The door says: there are people who never heard the gospel and yet, on the day of judgment, will be "accepted of him." Strict restrictivism cannot live in the same house as that sentence. Wesley's evangelical Arminianism, taken seriously, presses past restrictivism into something — though Wesley himself would not have named it as such — that the late twentieth century would learn to call inclusivism.14
Wesley's theological reading of Scripture was shaped, more than by any other single eighteenth-century source, by Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752). In 1753 Wesley fell seriously ill, and during his convalescence he began work on a New Testament commentary, leaning heavily on Bengel's Gnomon Novi Testamenti (1742), which he considered the finest exegetical commentary then in existence. The result was the Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), a work that became, alongside Wesley's Standard Sermons, a doctrinal standard for Methodism.15 Wesley reproduced or adapted long stretches of Bengel directly and revised the King James Version against the Greek at roughly 12,000 points.
What Wesley took from Bengel was not only philology. He took a habit of reading Scripture as a unified whole, drenched in promise, oriented toward the universal triumph of grace. Bengel was a Württemberg Pietist whose own prophetic-historical speculations included strong "wider hope" elements: an eventual restoration through stages of redemption, a Christ whose victory over evil was on a cosmic scale, a final reach of mercy that went further than the strict Augustinian-Lutheran scholasticism allowed.16 Wesley did not adopt every speculative detail of Bengel's apocalyptic. But the Pietist temperament — the warm, devotional, gracious-toward-mercy reading of Scripture — passed through Wesley into the bloodstream of Methodism.
Note: The Pietist roots of Wesley's theology, including the Württemberg stream from Spener and Francke through Bengel to Oetinger and the Blumhardts, are developed in Chapter 16. Here it is enough to note that Wesley's Arminianism was not a freestanding English construction. It carried, in its theological DNA, a German Pietist gentleness toward mercy that the harder Calvinist scholasticism of his contemporaries lacked.
Here is where care matters. Wesley was not a universalist. He was not, in any modern sense, a conditionalist either. He preached eternal punishment of the finally impenitent — clearly, repeatedly, and at times in graphic terms. His sermon "Of Hell" (Sermon 73, on Mark 9:48) takes the traditional Augustinian picture more or less at face value: a literal fire that does not consume, a worm that does not die, an everlasting torment for those who reject grace.17 Wesley's eschatology of the wicked is, formally, the eschatology of the Augustinian-Anglican consensus he inherited.
But the tension is real. A theologian who insists, on the one hand, that God loves every human being and that grace is offered to every human being — and who insists, on the other hand, that those who fail to receive grace in this life are tormented forever — has built a house with structural strain. Wesley was content to let the tension stand. His heirs would not be.
On the descent of Christ Wesley said relatively little. He used the Apostles' Creed in catechetical work, including its line that Christ "descended into hell."18 His Notes on the New Testament on 1 Peter 3:18–22 follow Bengel and the broader tradition. For the descent's full theological history, see Chapter 6 on Irenaeus and Chapter 7 on Clement of Alexandria, where the early Church's lively reading of 1 Peter 3 is developed at length.
If John Wesley was Methodism's theologian, his younger brother Charles (1707–1788) was Methodism's poet. Charles wrote, by various counts, somewhere between six and nine thousand hymns. The 1780 Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, edited by John, is essentially the doctrinal handbook of early Methodism set to music.19 John called the Collection "a little body of experimental and practical divinity." That is how Charles's hymns functioned. They were doctrine made portable, sung into the bloodstream of generations of working-class Methodist congregations.
What Methodists sang, week after week, year after year, was the universal scope of grace. "Love divine, all loves excelling" prays for the Spirit to descend on every trembling heart. "And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour's blood?" works out the wonder that I — even I, a sinner — am loved by the eternal God. "Hark! The herald angels sing" announces that Christ is born to bring "God and sinners" reconciled. "O for a thousand tongues to sing" longs to publish the redeemer's praise "through all the earth abroad." The vocabulary is relentlessly universal: all, every, whosoever, the world. Charles Wesley was not a universalist in the doctrinal sense. But the language of his hymns gave generations of Methodists a habit of singing as if the love of God reached, in the end, to every soul that ever lived.
John William Fletcher (born Jean-Guillaume de la Fléchère, 1729–1785) was Wesley's most systematic theological successor. A Swiss-born Anglican priest who served as vicar of Madeley in Shropshire, Fletcher was widely regarded as the holiest man either Wesley brother ever knew. His Checks to Antinomianism (1771–1775) is the most rigorous Wesleyan-Arminian defense produced in the eighteenth century, written in response to the resurgence of Calvinist controversy that followed the 1770 Minutes Conference.20 John Wesley designated Fletcher as his preferred successor for leadership of the Methodist movement, but Fletcher died six years before Wesley, and the leadership question passed to others. The Checks, however, remained a Methodist doctrinal touchstone for a century. They worked out, in calm and ordered form, the universal-salvific-will arguments Wesley had preached: grace is offered to all; saving faith is the gift of God working through resistible grace; no one is damned but by their own free rejection.
By the time of Wesley's death in 1791, Methodism in Britain and America was already moving toward formal separation from the Church of England. The 1784 Christmas Conference in Baltimore established the Methodist Episcopal Church in America under Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke. From that point onward, the question of how Methodists should handle the eschatological tension Wesley had left in place became an internal Methodist question.
In the early nineteenth century, a small but persistent stream of Methodist preachers in both Britain and America began to push past Wesley's "wider hope" toward an explicit universal restoration. The most famous American figure in this stream — Hosea Ballou — came from a Baptist background and is treated in Chapter 19. The American Restorationist controversy of the 1820s and 1830s was a Universalist controversy (between Ballou's "ultra"-Universalism and the "Restorationists" Paul Dean, Edward Turner, and Adin Ballou, who insisted on a period of postmortem purification before final restoration). The Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists was formed in 1831, not as a Methodist body but as a Universalist offshoot.21
Within Methodism proper, the story was quieter. The Methodist Episcopal Church's Articles of Religion, adopted at the 1784 Christmas Conference and reaffirmed in 1808, were Wesley's abridgment of the Thirty-Nine Articles. Preachers who began openly teaching universalism were generally disciplined for "disseminating doctrines contrary to our Articles of Religion" and either silenced or compelled to leave the connection.22 Some left and joined the Universalists; most stayed inside the Methodist fold and held their wider-hope sympathies more or less privately.
The pattern that emerged across the nineteenth century was not a formal Methodist embrace of universal restoration but a gradual softening. By the early twentieth century, mainline Methodism in both Britain and the United States had quietly stopped preaching eternal conscious torment with the urgency the earlier generations had brought to it. The doctrinal statements remained more or less unchanged; the pulpit emphasis shifted. That shift is consistent with the implicit logic of Wesleyan theology. It is not a betrayal of Wesley's vision but its working-out.
Two systematic theologies dominated Methodist seminary education in the nineteenth century. In Britain, William Burt Pope's Compendium of Christian Theology (1875–1876) became the standard.23 In America, John Miley's Systematic Theology (1892–1894), produced at Drew University, served the same role.24 Both retain the formal doctrine of eternal punishment. Both insist that no one is damned but by their own free and final refusal of grace. Both make clear that God's saving will is universal. Pope's treatment of eschatology gives considerable space to what he calls the "wider hope."
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Wesleyan tradition has produced theologians whose work has continued to soften the eschatological hard line: Albert Outler, whose Bicentennial Edition of Wesley's Sermons rehabilitated Wesley for serious ecumenical conversation;25 Thomas Oden, who drew Wesley into conversation with the Greek Fathers; Randy Maddox, whose Responsible Grace (1994) is the most influential modern reading of Wesley's practical theology; and Geoffrey Wainwright and Stanley Hauerwas, whose work returns again and again to the breadth of grace. None is straightforwardly a universalist. But all carry forward the Wesleyan instinct that grace is wider than the strictest forms of the deadline doctrine will allow.
The nineteenth-century Holiness movement and its twentieth-century Pentecostal-charismatic offspring inherited Wesley's emphases — entire sanctification, prevenient grace, the universal scope of the atonement — and built whole denominational structures on them. The Church of the Nazarene, the Free Methodist Church, the Wesleyan Church, the Salvation Army, and the broader Holiness-Pentecostal world are all, in their genealogy, Wesleyan.
The Salvation Army is a clear instance. William and Catherine Booth, both shaped by Wesleyan-Methodist conviction, founded the East London Christian Mission in 1865 (renamed the Salvation Army in 1878). Their evangelistic urgency was driven precisely by the doctrine of eternal punishment: Catherine Booth told an Exeter audience in 1882 that she and her Salvationists "held no modified views of man's future... They believed in an awful and an eternal hell."26 The Booths were not crypto-universalists, and it would be a historical mistake to pretend otherwise. But what is striking about the Army's practice is how little of its ministry was structured around threats of hell. The Army went to the poor, the prostituted, the drunken, the homeless, preaching the love of God and the open door of grace. Its operational theology was unmistakably Wesleyan: grace is for everyone, every soul matters, no person is past hope.
The temptation, when reading Wesley from a long-hope vantage point, is to retroject — to read his "wider hope" sermons as covertly universalist, his "faith of a heathen" remarks as covertly inclusivist in the modern technical sense, his hymnody and his Bengel and his Pietist gentleness as a barely-suppressed Origenism waiting to be set free by some later generation. That reading is not fair to Wesley. He preached eternal punishment when he preached it. He did so in plain language. He did not equivocate.
And yet. The whole thrust of Wesley's theological vision strains in long-hope directions. Take any four of his central commitments and lay them side by side: the universal saving will of God; the universal atonement of Christ for every human being; the resistibility of grace (no one is saved against their will, and no one is damned except by their own final refusal); the prevenient grace that God extends to every person, drawing them toward salvation before they consciously cooperate. Add the Pietist warmth he absorbed from Bengel, the inclusivist hints in his sermons on the heathen's faith, the universal-scope hymnody of his brother, and the eschatological optimism of The General Spread of the Gospel. What do you have? A theological system whose every internal pressure pushes outward — in the reach of grace, in the patience of God, in the breadth of mercy.
Wesley contained those pressures by retaining the strict Augustinian doctrine of eternal punishment as the ceiling of his eschatology. His successors did not contain them as effectively. Generation by generation, the Wesleyan tradition has walked the implications of its founder's theology to their natural conclusions. The Restorationists of the 1820s walked them too quickly for the institutional Methodism of their day to bear. Pope and Miley walked them slowly enough to keep the doctrine of eternal punishment formally intact while making it less and less central to actual Methodist preaching. Outler and Oden and Maddox have read Wesley back through the Greek Fathers and rediscovered a Wesley whose theology is much closer to the ancient Eastern wider-hope tradition than the strict Western Augustinian reading had allowed.
Three things can be said with confidence. First: Wesley himself taught eternal punishment of the finally impenitent. To make him a universalist is to make him into something he was not. Second: Wesley's theological framework is one of the most fertile soils for long-hope development that the English-speaking Protestant world has ever produced. Third: the historical Methodist tradition, with all the qualifications, has been one of the most pervasive carriers of long-hope-friendly theology in the modern English-speaking world. It has been so not in spite of Wesley but because of him.
Scholars have read this trajectory differently. Albert Outler's recovery of Wesley as a serious patristic theologian opens the long-hope reading.27 Henry Rack, in Reasonable Enthusiast, is more cautious — Rack thinks Wesley's eschatology is, on examination, more traditional than the long-hope reading allows.28 Randy Maddox's Responsible Grace charts the careful middle: Wesley is not a universalist, but his "responsible grace" is irreducibly broader than the deterministic Reformed alternatives.29 Kenneth Collins emphasizes the harder evangelical-Pietist edges; Theodore Jennings emphasizes the broader Wesley of Good News to the Poor. But on the central historical question — whether Wesley's theology, taken as a whole, is more hospitable to long-hope conclusions than the strict Augustinian alternatives — the answer in the secondary literature is essentially unanimous. It is.
Insight: The Wesleyan tradition is the long hope's broadest historical home in the English-speaking Protestant world. It is broader than the Cambridge Platonists' (Chapter 17) because Methodism is a mass movement, not an Oxford or Cambridge philosophical school. It is broader than the Anabaptist conditionalist stream (Chapter 16) because Methodism survived as a mainstream tradition, not a persecuted minority. By the late nineteenth century, the Wesleyan-Methodist-Holiness world numbered in the tens of millions, and within it, the long hope was always present — sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, never gone.
The "modern innovation" objection to postmortem opportunity assumes that contemporary advocates of the long hope are reaching past mainstream Christian tradition to recover a fringe view. The Wesleyan-Methodist record is one of the most direct refutations of that assumption. From 1738 onward, the largest evangelical revival the English-speaking world has ever seen was carried by a theology whose every internal pressure pushed against strict restrictivism. That theology was not heterodox. It was not marginal. It was the conviction of Wesley himself, articulated in sermons published throughout his lifetime, sung in hymns memorized by generations of Methodists, taught in the standard systematic theologies of Pope and Miley, and lived out daily in the global Methodist-Holiness-Pentecostal world.
For the contemporary postmortem opportunity advocates treated in Chapter 26 — Clark Pinnock, John Sanders, Jerry Walls, James Beilby, Stephen Jonathan, Andrew Hronich, William Harrison — the Wesleyan inheritance is the immediate Protestant ancestor of their work. Pinnock's Wideness in God's Mercy is a self-consciously Arminian-Wesleyan book.30 Walls writes as a Methodist analytic philosopher of religion working in the Asbury tradition. Beilby's careful biblical and theological arguments draw repeatedly on the universal-salvific-will premises Wesley defended in Free Grace. The modern PO conversation is, in significant part, a Wesleyan conversation.
The Wesleyan tradition's contribution to the long hope is not, in the end, the contribution of any individual theologian. It is the contribution of a whole spiritual culture — pastoral, hymn-singing, evangelistic, missionary, holiness-pursuing — that has carried, for nearly three centuries, the conviction that God loves every person, that Christ died for every person, that grace is offered to every person, and that no one is damned by anything but their own final and free refusal. Whether one ends, with Wesley, in a still-traditional doctrine of eternal punishment held in tension with that universal love; or, with Pinnock and Walls, in a postmortem-opportunity proposal that lets the tension resolve toward mercy; or, with the Restorationists and the contemporary Christian universalists, in an explicit doctrine of final restoration — the soil is the same. Wesley turned it. The fruit has been growing for two hundred and fifty years.
↑ 1. The 250,000-mile figure is the conventional estimate based on Wesley's own journals and the calculations of his Victorian biographers. See Henry D. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, 3rd ed. (London: Epworth, 2002), 1–4, for a measured discussion of the various figures (sermons preached, miles traveled, books published) that have circulated in Methodist hagiography.
↑ 2. Wesley acknowledges his debt to Bengel in the preface to his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755). On Wesley's general reading habits and his use of Bengel, see Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley's Practical Theology (Nashville: Kingswood, 1994), 36–37 and notes; Albert C. Outler's introductions to the Bicentennial Edition of The Works of John Wesley, vols. 1–4 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984–1987).
↑ 3. Wesley, Journal, May 24, 1738. The "heart strangely warmed" passage is the single most quoted line in all of Methodist literature. See the Bicentennial Edition: Journals and Diaries I (1735–38), ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard P. Heitzenrater (Nashville: Abingdon, 1988), 249–250.
↑ 4. The standard scholarly biography is Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast. For Susanna and the Epworth household, see Charles Wallace Jr., ed., Susanna Wesley: The Complete Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). On the Holy Club at Oxford, see V. H. H. Green, The Young Mr. Wesley (London: Edward Arnold, 1961).
↑ 5. Wesley, Journal, May 24, 1738; Bicentennial Edition, Journals I, 250. For Methodist historiography on Aldersgate, see Randy L. Maddox, ed., Aldersgate Reconsidered (Nashville: Kingswood, 1990).
↑ 6. John Wesley, Sermon 110, "Free Grace" in the Bicentennial Edition (= Sermon 128 in the Jackson 1872 edition), preached at Bristol, April 29, 1739, and published the same year. See The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition, vol. 3, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon, 1986), 542–563. On the drawing of lots and the resulting controversy with Whitefield, see Outler's introduction at 542–544.
↑ 7. Wesley, "Free Grace," §§2–3 (Bicentennial 3:544–545; Jackson, Works, 7:373–374).
↑ 8. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.7, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Library of Christian Classics 21 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2:955: decretum quidem horribile, fateor ("the decree is dreadful indeed, I confess"). Wesley's reuse of Calvin's own phrase as a polemical weapon against Calvinism is one of the rhetorical highlights of "Free Grace."
↑ 9. Wesley, Sermon 53, "On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield" (Jackson edition); preached at the Tabernacle, Moorfields, November 18, 1770. The sermon is a model of Wesley's late-life ecumenical generosity toward his Calvinist friend.
↑ 10. Wesley, Sermon 63, "The General Spread of the Gospel" (Jackson and Bicentennial agree on the number), preached November 22, 1783. See Bicentennial Edition, vol. 2, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon, 1985), 485–499, with Outler's introduction at 485–488. The Brerewood statistic Wesley cites (nineteen parts in thirty pagan, six Muslim, five nominally Christian) reflects the seventeenth-century geographer Edward Brerewood's Enquiries (1614).
↑ 11. Wesley, "General Spread of the Gospel," §§22–27 (Bicentennial 2:495–499). For a recent treatment of the sermon's historical and theological context, see John Coffey, "The Pattern of Revival: John Wesley's Vision of 'Iniquity' and 'Godliness' in Church History," Studies in Church History 52 (2016): 339–356.
↑ 12. Wesley, Sermon 106, "On Faith" (Heb 11:6), preached 1788. See Bicentennial Edition, vol. 3, ed. Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon, 1986), 491–501. Both the Jackson 1872 and Outler Bicentennial editions number this sermon 106; the text is on Heb 11:6.
↑ 13. Wesley, "On Faith" (Heb 11:6), §I.4 (Bicentennial 3:494–495), drawing on Acts 10:35.
↑ 14. The technical term "inclusivism" — for the view that those who never hear the explicit gospel may yet be saved through implicit faith in the universal scope of Christ's atonement — was popularized in late-twentieth-century evangelical theology by Clark Pinnock and John Sanders; see Chapter 26 for the modern Wesleyan-evangelical inclusivist literature.
↑ 15. John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament, 1st ed. (London: Bowyer, 1755); standard reprint, Salem, OH: Schmul, 1976. See Robert R. Williams, John Wesley's Use of the Bible (London: Epworth, 1959), and Scott J. Jones, John Wesley's Conception and Use of Scripture (Nashville: Kingswood, 1995). Wesley acknowledges his use of Bengel's Gnomon in his preface.
↑ 16. For Bengel's apocalyptic and his Württemberg-Pietist context, see Martin Brecht's standard German treatment, summarized in English in Geoffrey Wainwright and Paul Westermeyer, eds., Lift Every Voice and Sing (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2009), and in the relevant sections of Chapter 16 of the present work.
↑ 17. Wesley, Sermon 73, "Of Hell" (Jackson edition); Bicentennial Edition vol. 3, 30–44. The sermon is notable both for its severity and for its inability to fully cohere with Wesley's pastoral emphasis on the love of God. The tension is built into Wesley's theology and is part of what later Methodism would have to work out.
↑ 18. See Wesley's Letter to a Roman Catholic (1749), where he affirms the Apostles' Creed line by line, including the descent. The doctrinal weight of the descent in Wesley's theology is modest; he does not develop it as the patristic tradition had.
↑ 19. John Wesley, ed., A Collection of Hymns, for the Use of the People Called Methodists (London: J. Paramore, 1780). The standard scholarly edition is in the Bicentennial Edition, vol. 7, ed. Franz Hildebrandt and Oliver A. Beckerlegge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983). On the eschatological content of Charles Wesley's hymnody, see John R. Tyson, Assist Me to Proclaim: The Life and Hymns of Charles Wesley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).
↑ 20. John Fletcher, Checks to Antinomianism, 4 vols. (London: 1771–1775). For Fletcher's significance see Patrick Streiff, Reluctant Saint? A Theological Biography of Fletcher of Madeley (Peterborough: Epworth, 2001), and Laurence W. Wood, The Meaning of Pentecost in Early Methodism: Rediscovering John Fletcher as John Wesley's Vindicator and Designated Successor (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2002).
↑ 21. For the Universalist Restorationist controversy and the Massachusetts Association of Universal Restorationists (founded 1831, disbanded 1841), see Ann Lee Bressler, The Universalist Movement in America, 1770–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chs. 3–4; Russell E. Miller, The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America, 1770–1870 (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1979), chs. 5–7. The full development of the American Universalist story belongs to Chapter 19.
↑ 22. On the doctrinal authority of the Articles of Religion and the disciplinary mechanism, see "Doctrinal Standards in American Methodism," UMC.org, and the more thorough treatment in Thomas A. Langford, Practical Divinity: Theology in the Wesleyan Tradition (Nashville: Abingdon, 1983).
↑ 23. William Burt Pope, A Compendium of Christian Theology, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1879). Vol. 3 contains the extended treatment of eschatology.
↑ 24. John Miley, Systematic Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Hunt & Eaton, 1892–1894). Miley was professor of systematic theology at Drew Theological Seminary from 1873 until his death in 1895.
↑ 25. Albert C. Outler, John Wesley, Library of Protestant Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Outler, ed., The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial Edition, esp. vols. 1–4: Sermons (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984–1987). Outler's introductions to each volume of the Sermons remain the standard scholarly framing of Wesley's theological development.
↑ 26. Catherine Booth, address at Victoria Hall, Exeter, 1882, as quoted in Roger J. Green, Catherine Booth: A Biography of the Cofounder of the Salvation Army (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), and in Norman H. Murdoch, Origins of the Salvation Army (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994). The Booths' personal eschatology was firmly traditional. The point in the text is that the Army's ministry practice drew on the universal-grace tradition of Wesleyan Methodism in ways the formal doctrine alone might not have predicted.
↑ 27. Outler's most influential interpretive essay is "John Wesley as Theologian — Then and Now," Methodist History 12 (1974): 63–82. Outler's portrait of Wesley as a serious patristic-trained theologian shaped a generation of subsequent Wesleyan scholarship.
↑ 28. Rack, Reasonable Enthusiast, esp. chs. 13–15, on Wesley's mature theology. Rack is more cautious than Outler about how far one can press Wesley's eschatology toward modern wider-hope readings.
↑ 29. Maddox, Responsible Grace, esp. chs. 8–9 on Wesley's eschatology and the doctrine of grace. See also Kenneth J. Collins, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007); Theodore W. Jennings Jr., Good News to the Poor: John Wesley's Evangelical Economics (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990); Thomas C. Oden, John Wesley's Scriptural Christianity: A Plain Exposition of His Teaching on Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994).
↑ 30. Clark H. Pinnock, A Wideness in God's Mercy: The Finality of Jesus Christ in a World of Religions (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992). For Pinnock's career-long Wesleyan-Arminian trajectory, see Barry L. Callen, Clark H. Pinnock: Journey toward Renewal (Nappanee, IN: Evangel, 2000). The full development of Pinnock and the modern PO advocates belongs to Chapter 26.