Veritate - Christianity "Methodist" and the Questions

John Wesley never intended to leave the Church of England. He was ordained an Anglican priest, educated at Oxford, and spent his entire ministry insisting that the Methodist movement was a renewal from within, not a departure. But the Church he was trying to renew had been built on a political compromise two hundred years before he was born, and no amount of open air preaching or coal field ministry could fix what had been broken at the foundation. This episode follows Wesley from the Holy Club at Oxford to the strangely warmed heart at Aldersgate Street to the moment he ordained ministers himself, the precise moment a man who believed he had never left the Church of England expressed the Reformation principle as fully as Henry VIII had.

The four questions reveal both what Wesley got right and where the tradition he founded could not deliver what it promised. His rejection of Calvinist predestination brought him closer to the Catholic understanding of grace and freedom than almost any Protestant reformer we have covered. His insistence that justification and sanctification cannot be separated is correct. But when the interior experience of the individual becomes the primary site of religious authority, there is no principled stopping point. The warmed heart becomes the final court of appeal. And a tradition built on the warmed heart will keep reaching for a warmer and warmer experience until it produces something Wesley would not recognize. This episode is also a direct word to anyone who was raised in this tradition by people who loved them. We do not know what we do not know. But Christ did not die for your opinion. He died for His Church.