In this "preaching life" of Wesley Pasquarello places Wesley's sermons in the larger religious, political, and intellectual world of their eighteenth-century context. Neither a biography nor an intellectual history, it is a homiletic history, one that both uses the details of Wesley's milieu to build a framework for understanding his sermons, and that illumines the practical wisdom embodied in the content, form, and style of Wesley's preaching. John Wesley: A Preaching Life vividly portrays the centrality of Wesley's preaching to the religious revival that transformed eighteenth-century England.
In this "preaching life" of Wesley Pasquarello places Wesley's sermons in the larger religious, political, and intellectual world of their eighteenth-century context. Neither a biography nor an intellectual history, it is a homiletic history, one that both uses the details of Wesley's milieu to build a framework for understanding his sermons, and that illumines the practical wisdom embodied in the content, form, and style of Wesley's preaching. John Wesley: A Preaching Life vividly portrays the centrality of Wesley's preaching to the religious revival that transformed eighteenth-century England.
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Overview
In this "preaching life" of Wesley Pasquarello places Wesley's sermons in the larger religious, political, and intellectual world of their eighteenth-century context. Neither a biography nor an intellectual history, it is a homiletic history, one that both uses the details of Wesley's milieu to build a framework for understanding his sermons, and that illumines the practical wisdom embodied in the content, form, and style of Wesley's preaching. John Wesley: A Preaching Life vividly portrays the centrality of Wesley's preaching to the religious revival that transformed eighteenth-century England.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781426732065 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 407 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
John Wesley
A Preaching Life
By Michael Pasquarello III
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2010 Abingdon PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-3206-5
CHAPTER 1
The Practice of Wisdom
This book interprets Wesley as a preaching theologian who serves as an examplary witness to the task of assisting the work of the Holy Spirit in the ministry of the Word. It discusses the practical wisdom that characterized Wesley's preaching ministry in eighteenth-century England; a ministry that entailed a renewal and reintegration of Christian devotion, doctrine, and discipline.Contrary to much contemporary homiletic wisdom, the truth and goodness of Christian doctrine is relevant to neither evangelism nor the building up of Christian communities through the proclamation of the Word. Rather, knowing and loving the Triune God is necessary if the church is to be formed in the pattern of its crucified and risen Lord. In other words, the truth we know, love, and proclaim is embodied by faith in the activity of the Father through the Son who rules and indwells the church through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit.
Although the efficacy of preaching is dependent upon the voice of the risen Christ that is made audible by the work of the Holy Spirit, it will also include the participation of preachers who have been formed by the practical wisdom intrinsic to faith in the Word that works through love. In other words, the practical wisdom of preaching receives its shape in knowing and loving the truth and goodness embodied by Christ and the witness of Scripture, according to "the analogy of faith." This presumes, however, that the source and goal of preaching is love of God and neighbor—or holiness—that is the gift of the indwelling Spirit through which we know and bear witness to Christ and his work in our midst and in the world. Wesley writes:
O who is able to describe such a messenger of God, faithfully executing his high office! Working together with God; with the great Author both of the old and the new creation! See his Lord, the eternal Son of God, going forth on that work of omnipotence, and creating heaven and earth by the breath of his mouth! See the servant whom he delighteth to honour; fulfilling the counsel of his will, and in his name speaking the word whereby is raised a new spiritual creation.
For Wesley, "good" preaching is the good work of good preachers that participates in God's goodness by the grace of Jesus Christ through the witness of the Spirit. The source and goal of such "good" news is the Triune God who delights in communicating his goodness through an intensely intimate communion of love to redeem and renew creation. Moreover, the redemption of God's good creation—viewed theologically as coming from God and returning to God—entails an "ecstatic" participation in Christ who orders the church's life through the Spirit's grace, gifts, blessings, and empowerments.
Attending to Wesley in this manner will involve us in a conversation beginning with the early church and extending through the sixteenth-century for which theology—theologia—was a practical habit, or habitus, an aptitude of the intellect and will having the primary characteristic of knowledge seeking wisdom in love. In earlier times some saw this as a directly infused gift of God that was intimately tied to faith, prayer, virtue, and desire for God. Later, with the advent of formal theological investigation, others saw it as a form of wisdom that could also be promoted, deepened, and extended by human study and argument. However, the meaning of theology did not displace the more primary sense of the term; theology as a practical habitus, the habit of attending to God's saving wisdom in Christ through the work of the Holy Spirit in the worshiping life of the church.
Theology, then, is a practical way of knowing which directs the mind and heart to God as the end of all human knowledge, desire, and action. This saving wisdom is mediated by the witness of Scripture in the ministry of the church through which the Spirit engenders faith that works through love of God, the neighbor, and all creatures in God. The mission of God is therefore acknowledged within a living tradition grounded in, and continuous with, the sending of Christ and the Spirit who call forth and create the church to embody the distinctive habits of "social holiness." Or as Bryan Stone writes:
My point ... is that Christian salvation is ecclesial—that its very shape in the world is a participation in Christ through worship, shared practices, disciplines, loyalties, and social patterns of his body, the church. To construe the message of the gospel in such a way as to hide what Christians called ecclesial is to miss the point of what God is up to in history—the calling forth and creation of a people. The most evangelistic thing the church can do, therefore, is to be the church not merely in public but as a new and alternative public; not merely in society but as a new and distinct society, a new and unprecedented social existence.... "Social holiness," to use John Wesley's phrase, is both the aim and the intrinsic logic of evangelism.
This theological and ecclesial perspective unites Wesley, the Oxford Don, and Wesley, the popular evangelist; two images that, if divided, betray a theory/practice split that perpetuates views of Wesley as either an irrelevant intellectual or anti-intellectual pragmatist. Dividing Christian doctrine and the Christian life, this modern dogma obscures the wisdom of Wesley's "practical divinity" in which the experience and ministry of the church was bound to and shaped by doctrinal convictions, just as theological understanding was grounded in and enriched by participation in the faith and life of the church.
Geoffrey Wainwright has summarized Wesley's integrity of vision and practice in the following manner:
First, he looked to the Scriptures as the primary and abiding testimony to the redemptive work of God in Christ. Second, he was utterly committed to the ministry of evangelism, where the gospel was to be preached to every creature and needed only to be accepted in faith. Third, he valued with respect to the Christian Tradition and the doctrine of the Church a generous orthodoxy, wherein theological opinions might vary as long as they were consistent with the apostolic teaching. Fourth, he expected sanctification to show itself in the moral earnestness and loving deeds of the believers. Fifth, he manifested and encouraged a social concern that was directed toward the neediest of neighbors. Sixth, he found in the Lord's Supper a sacramental sign of the fellowship graciously bestowed by the Triune God and the responsive praise of those who will glorify God and enjoy him forever.
Wesley approached the interpretation of Scripture as both an act of faith and means of grace through which the understanding and desire are engaged by the Word and the Spirit to induce the knowledge and love of God. He insisted that Methodist preachers engage in daily prayer and study for the purpose of nourishing faith, deepening understanding, and inspiring love—for God and neighbors in God—that enhances one's capacities for thinking, living, and speaking according to the "mind that was in Christ." David Cunningham comments on the loss of such character in our time:
The persuasive role of character was seriously devalued during the Enlightenment. The rise of experimental science emphasized the goal of neutrality, which was thought to be guaranteed only through radical detachment: subject and object were thus torn asunder. On this view, an experiment needed only to take place under properly controlled conditions; the character of the experimenter was irrelevant. Empirical experimentation tended to focus attention away from how things appear in nature, and toward exceptions to the rule. This narrow focus contributed to the reduction of the meaning of ethos from a complex, holistic habitus to a mere series of rules and regulations.
Forgotten in this empirically derived view is that the goal of Christian faith, hope, and love is the restoration of the image of God in human creatures; an image that has been defaced but is now being restored by the Spirit through participation in the fellowship of the Father and the Son. "This renewal into the image of God takes place in the embodiment of a new law, which the Holy Spirit gives internally. This 'new law' is a participation in Christ's human righteousness where the Spirit sanctifies the believer."
The life of Christian people, which includes preachers as exemplary witnesses, is the fruit of the new law of the gospel ruling the intellect, affect, and will through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Becoming a preacher entails cultivating capacities for discerning the truth and goodness of Christ through the illumination of the Spirit that engenders the knowledge we live by in the intellectual and moral virtues. Wesley writes:
There can be no doubt that with this love to God and man a suitable conversation will follow. His "communication," that is, discourse, will "be always in grace, seasoned with salt," and meet to "minister grace to its hearers." He will always "open his mouth with wisdom," and there will be "in his tongue the law of kindness." Hence his affectionate words will "distil as the dew, and as the rain upon the tender herb." And men will know "it is not" he only "that speaks, but the Spirit of the Father that speaketh in him." His actions will spring from the same source as his words, even from the abundance of a loving heart.
The virtue of practical wisdom is committed to pursuing the good that is rooted in a definite community and tradition with favored character, dispositions, and habits. As a way of "knowing in action," practical wisdom, or prudence, is sustained by good character and habits that enable discernment of the good for the sake of doing good acts that are a source of joy. "The good practitioner has been formed by a history of participation in the practice itself. His or her experience of serving the end or telos of the practice—and recurrently trying to discover what this concretely requires—has laid down certain dispositions of character which, through discipline and direction, enable and energize."
For this reason, a practically wise person will possess skills of deliberation, discernment, and decisiveness that make him or her capable of transforming knowledge of reality into virtuous speech and action. Michael Dauphinias and Matthew Levering describe practical wisdom, or prudence, in the following manner,
Prudence not only includes making the right decision, but also demands we carry out the decision. In this way prudence links the intellectual and moral virtues (knowing and doing). Moreover, prudence shapes the other moral virtues insofar as it enables the just person to act justly, the courageous person to act bravely, and the temperate person to act with self-control.
Joseph Dunne's discussion challenges an instrumentalist, "cause and effect" approach to practice that frames objectives in advance, anticipates plans, controls the moves one will make, and then evaluates both the activity and results on terms defined by "effectiveness." Following the moral philosophy of Aristotle, Dunne argues persuasively that practice is irreducible to external techniques or procedures, but requires a nontechnical, personal, and participatory way of knowing that cannot be framed in terms of detachment, universality, and utility. This discussion shows that cause and effect utility, while presuming to be only "practical," actually embodies a definite kind of theory that is effectively reduced to mere skill and technique with no larger purpose or end.
Dunne defines this type of activity as a form of "making" that is specified by a maker who determines its end or goal in advance: "Techne, then, is the kind of knowledge possessed by an expert maker, it gives him a clear conception of the why and wherefore, the how and with what of the making process and enables him, through the capacity to offer a rational account of it, to preside over his activity with secure mastery." In contrast to the activity of making or producing that proceeds by explanation, prediction, and control for acting externally upon the raw material of one's work, Dunne discusses the social activity of practice. A practice is conducted in public places in cooperation with others and with no ulterior purpose or goals external to sharing in the truth and goodness of the practice itself; and with a view to no other end or outcome than the moral intentions, habits, and qualities exemplified by wise, experienced participants of the practice.
This definition of shared communal activity may arguably be extended to Christian practices such as worship, the interpretation of the Scripture and preaching, evangelization, catechesis, training in discipleship, and pastoral care. Activities of this nature are carried out in such a way to realize and demonstrate their true end, those virtues, dispositions, and excellences valued by the church as a historical community and constitutive of its life and witness. This will require prudence, as Josef Pieper writes:
Prudence, then, is the mold and mother of all the virtues, the circumspect and resolute shaping power of our minds which transforms knowledge of reality into realization of the good. It holds within itself the humility of silent; that is to say, of unbiased perception; the trueness—to—being of memory; the art of receiving counsel; alert, composed readiness for the unexpected. Prudence means the studied seriousness and, as it were, the filter of deliberation, and at the same time, the brave boldness to make final decisions. It means purity, straightforwardness, candor, and simplicity of character; it means standing superior to the utilitarian complexities of mere "tactics."
Dunne interprets this kind of activity, that is phronesis, or practical knowledge, as a kind of "knowing how" that is historical, traditioned, personal, embodied, and shared with others. In other words, the wisdom of practice is as much a matter of who we are and to whom we belong as much as what we know.
In questioning the attainability of technical mastery over these areas an alternative to the technicist picture has been developed. In this alternative picture, practical knowledge has been shown as a fruit which can grow only in the soul of a person's experience and character; apart from cultivation of this soil, there is no artifice for making it available in a way that would count. In exposing oneself to the kind of experience and acquiring the kind of character that will yield requisite knowledge, one is not the kind of epistemic subject that has been canonized by the modern tradition of philosophy. One is at the same time a feeling, expressing, and acting person; and one's knowledge is inseparable from one as such.
Dunne's description of these two distinct modes of activity can illumine how preaching articulates and embodies the practical wisdom that we are to love God and our neighbor as ourselves. Seen from this perspective, good preaching will be characterized by a particular kind of history, experience, judgment, and influence which, although rooted in the wisdom of Scripture and the Christian past, remains open to gifts, dispositions, and habits appropriate to hearing the Word and responding to the Spirit in the present.
Preaching, therefore, is a form of "ecstatic" speech that is enabled by the Holy Spirit through ongoing encounter with the living Word in worship, the sacraments, and the other means of grace. Thus when preaching is reduced to following "how to" steps—the procedural application of abstract, disembodied principles—its character is limited to technocratic knowledge possessed by an "expert" belonging to a specialized craft. What this will mean, however, is that the identity of "preacher" is defined as a person whose primary form of knowing consists of applying rules to effect results according to external criteria such as "relevance," "effectiveness," or "church growth." Stone comments:
For if a practice [such as preaching] can be described and understood apart from the specifying ends (in other words, can be described in solely pragmatic terms), then one must ask whether the ends have been made external to the means, thereby disqualifying the practice aspractice. Excellence is then determined by the efficacy of the activity in achieving or producing an assumed end rather than by the character of the practice itself embodying an end to which it is internally related.
Craig Dykstra has commented extensively on a tendency toward reducing Christian practices to universalistic and abstract "one size fits all" procedures rather than the skills of living and speaking faithfully according to scriptural wisdom that is embodied by participatory, communal ways of knowing tested by the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the church. Dykstra's discussion parallels that of Dunne; that when practice is reduced to making something happen—a combination of knowledge, power, and the application of skills and techniques for producing desired outcomes and results—its nature will be understood technologically, individualistically, and ahistorically. What matters most in this kind of activity is the merely functional, which operates through cause-and-effect relations and is dependent upon its utility for attaining immediate ends—rather than convictions and virtues intrinsic to the church's faith, identity, tradition, and wisdom.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from John Wesley by Michael Pasquarello III. Copyright © 2010 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface,Introduction: A Homiletic Theologian,
1. The Practice of Wisdom,
2. Learning and Devotion,
3. Back to the Future,
4. Speaking the Truth in Love,
5. The Way to God,
6. The Spread of Virtue and Happiness,
7. Preaching Theologians,
Notes,