Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens

How do Christians see the world? With what lens?
"I see the world biblically," some will say. "I have a Christian worldview."
But "Christian" worldviews vary widely. Not all lenses are the same. Some are clearer than others; some distort more than others; some block out part of the biblical vision, filtering out part of the spectrum.

There is a particularly Wesleyan way of looking at the world and everything in it. The strength of the Wesleyan lens is its comprehensiveness.

Seven aspects of Wesley’s wide-angle way of seeing the world are especially important. Together they give us a broad biblical view of the world—a more comprehensive view than we commonly find today. Wesley no doubt had his blind spots, but his large vision was remarkable.

Several unique advantages elevated Wesley’s vision beyond that of most figures in Christian history. John Wesley was blessed with a well-informed Christian upbringing, especially with a wise mother who helped him think deeply. He had a both/and rather than an either/or mind, both rational and poetic, fascinated by language, alert to metaphor and paradox, yet interested in logic and in scientific discovery (both right-brained and left-brained, we would say today). He was a voracious reader with broad and eclectic tastes. His grounding in the Anglican via media of Scripture, reason, and tradition, gave him historical and theological breadth. He studied at Oxford during the rediscovery of early Christian sources. He lived at the height of the Age of Reason, but also at the beginning of new interest in human experience and emotion or "enthusiasm." He read of the discoveries coming from the "New World" and England’s far-flung empire. He experienced the Industrial Revolution. Through the influence of the Pietist Movement, particularly the Moravian Brethren, his heart was "strangely warmed" by God, igniting a deeper spirituality and a new passion for evangelism and church renewal. Finally, Wesley was physically vigorous and lived a long life (1703 to 1791), his mind alert, inquiring, and deeply devout to his last hours.

This rare combination is found in no one else in church history. Wesley viewed these advantages as testimony to the active providence of God.

For all these reasons, Wesley’s way of looking at the world, and God’s purposes within it, has lasting significance. So we examine the Wesleyan way of looking at the world, highlighting especially his accents on Scripture, the image of God, the wisdom of God in creation, salvation as renewal of God’s image, audacious hope, a renewed church, and the restoration of all things.

I. The Lens of Scripture
John Wesley was, famously, "a man of one book." Of course he was a man of thousands of books, not to mention newspapers, journals, and pamphlets. But he was clear about biblical authority.
For Wesley, the Bible was the touchstone of authority on all matters of faith and practice. It was in fact his lens for viewing reality; his worldview (as we would say today); the revealed, authoritative narrative of what God had accomplished, promised to accomplish, and surely would yet accomplish. This is absolutely key, and we misunderstand Wesley if we fail to grasp this. We may debate Wesley’s interpretations on specific points, but his conviction and intent were clear.

Wesley viewed and used Scripture in a particular way. The Bible is the authoritative narrative of salvation. It is not primarily a compendium of doctrine but the story of creation, sin, and redemption through Jesus Christ.

Wesley said the Bible should be interpreted according to the "analogy of faith" (Rom. 12:6), comparing Scripture with Scripture. This was Wesley’s key principle—"the agreement of every part of [Scripture] with every other," as he put it (Sermon 62, "The End of Christ’s Coming," III.5). Grasping this overall biblical "agreement" requires, of course, a master narrative—a story line by which every passage is interpreted. Wesley was increasingly clear throughout his life as to that story line: God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit is reconciling the world to himself, restoring "all things."

Wesley’s sermons illustrate this. His 151 published sermons often don’t exposit Scripture systematically, but typically a third or more of a Wesley sermon is either paraphrase or direct quotation from Scripture.

Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens means seeing everything—our lives, the church, and God’s kingdom plan—through the authoritative lens of Scripture, interpreted in the light of God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ.

II. Seeing the Image of God
Viewing the world in a Wesleyan way means seeing the image of God in every person. The Wesleyan worldview is marked by this positive note: Every human being, man or woman, is God-imaged, a God-bearer.

Wesley saw how defaced the image of God had become in human beings and society because of sin. But for Wesley, sin has neither the first nor the last word. Wesley’s sermons "On the Fall of Man" and "The Mystery of Iniquity" detail the disfiguring effects of sin. But Wesley believed also in "God’s Approbation of His Works" in creation, a "General Deliverance," and "The New Creation" (to cite some key sermon titles).

The Wesleyan lens starts with good news: A good God created good people in a total creation that God pronounced "very good." In the Wesleyan telling, the gospel story moves from the good news of creation in God’s image, to the bad news of sin and distortion, to the even better news of redemption and new creation through Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit.

This is not uniquely Wesleyan, of course. It is biblical and should be true of all faithful Christianity. In the Wesleyan understanding, however, three points are especially important:

First, creation in God’s image means that all people reflect God’s character and human capacity for goodness, wisdom, creativity, justice, and holy love. This is why bad people can sometimes do good things; why parents, though "evil, know how to give good gifts to [their] children" (Mt. 7:11).

All human beings bear something of the character of God. This is our glory; our potential; the inherent possibility that God’s grace grasps when we turn to Jesus Christ and by the Spirit open ourselves to God’s transforming power.

Second, this is a social image. God is Trinity, and humankind is compatibly male and female, made for family and community. We don’t find our true identity as isolated "individuals" any more than Jesus Christ found his true identity separate from the Father and the Spirit. To be God-imaged is to be social, communal. The person and character of God is Triune. Sociality and community form the nature of personhood—first in God, and hence in humankind.

Third, in Wesley’s view the image of God connects us to, rather than separates us from, the rest of creation. Here the Wesleyan view clashes with much popular Christianity.

It is important to understand Wesley here, because his comprehensive view of salvation hinges upon it. Creation in the image of God means we are both like and unlike God, and it means we are both like and unlike the rest of creation. God is infinite; we are not, and we have been marred by sin. Like God’s other earthly creatures, we are finite and we exist in a space-time world, this good earth. Like other creatures, we are dependent on food, water, air, and earth. God made us this way: Interdependent, all sharing the same earth ecology.

Wesley understood this. That’s partly why he was so interested in gardens, all earth’s creatures, and in how we treat animals.

Wesley saw human beings as reflecting God’s image in a primary sense, and all creation as reflecting God in a secondary sense. Humans are unique because of their unique capacity to respond to God self-consciously, willingly, and responsibly. Therefore they have a unique calling as stewards of all creation. Men and women are "capable of God" (as both Wesleys said) in ways that God’s other earthly creatures are not. Yet the horse, the dog, the bird, the tree, the flower, even rocks of the field and pebbles of the seashore reflect the image of God in a more remote sense. They depend upon God for their existence and preservation. Their design, order, intricacy, and interdependence all reveal something of God. All fits into the larger ecology of God’s creative and redemptive work.

Like his contemporaries, John Wesley used the ancient idea of a "great chain of being" descending in near-infinite gradation from God to the minutest particle to express this interconnectedness. But Wesley understood this "chain" biblically, not philosophically. He was clear about God’s sovereignty, human uniqueness and sinfulness, and the need for redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ. He saw the whole scheme of salvation, however, in this interconnected way. God will redeem the whole creation, not only the human part of it, because God has vested interest in the whole creation.

Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens, then, means seeing every person and the whole creation as bearing, in appropriate degree, the image of God.

III. The Wisdom of God in Creation
Wesley liked the phrase "the wisdom of God in creation" so much that he issued a whole book on the subject, A Survey of the Wisdom of God in Creation (abridged from another author). God’s wisdom in creation has practical meaning: Worship, certainly, but also moral instruction and the call to stewardship. Wesley said in one sermon, "God is in all things, and . . . we are to see the Creator in the glass of every creature; . . . we should use and look upon nothing as separate from God, which indeed is a kind of practical atheism; but with a true magnificence of thought survey heaven and earth and all that is therein as contained by God in the hollow of his hand, who by his intimate presence holds them all in being, who pervades and actuates the whole created frame, and is in a true sense the soul of the universe" (Sermon 23, "Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse III," I.11).

In his Survey Wesley wrote, "Life subsisting in millions of different forms, shows the vast diffusion of [God’s] animating power, and death the infinite disproportion between him and every living thing. . . . Even the actions of animals are an eloquent and a pathetic language. . . . Thus it is, that every part of nature directs us to nature’s God."

God’s image in human beings, and more remotely in the whole creation, displays his wisdom in creation and so lays the basis for God’s wisdom in redemption and new creation. It is all of one piece, one story, for Wesley.

Seeing the wisdom God in creation moves us not only to praise but also to care and to understand God’s intent and the breathtaking breadth of redemption. In keeping with the Great Tradition of Christian teaching, Wesley affirmed that what God had created, preserves, and cares for is being redeemed through Jesus Christ whom God has "appointed heir of all things" (Heb. 1:2).

IV. Salvation as the Restoration of God’s Image
Jesus Christ is the perfect living, loving image of God, and salvation is the restoration of that image. This was a consistent and insistent theme in Wesley’s approach. Through Jesus Christ Christians are "restored to the image of God" (Sermon 85, "On Working Out Our Own Salvation," II.1).

Wesley described "true Christianity" as having the mind of Christ, being renewed after Christ’s image, and walking as Jesus walked. Real Christianity is practical Christlikeness enabled by the Holy Spirit. Wesley preached justification by faith and the necessity of the new birth. But the goal of salvation is more than justification; it is sanctification—thorough transformation into the image and mind of Christ.

So the new birth is entrance into a new, relational way of living. It establishes a new love relationship with God the Trinity; with the Christian family, the church; with our neighbors, near and far; and in fact with all creation. Growth in holiness is growth in Christlikeness, not only individually but together in community as the whole church grows up into the "fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:12–16).
This is hugely practical. Wesley understood that believers can help each other come to know Jesus Christ deeply through the infilling of the Spirit and through life together in Christian community. This is the spring then for redemptive, Christ-like mission in the world. Wesley spoke of "all inward and outward holiness"—loving God with heart, strength, soul, and mind, and our neighbors (near and far) as ourselves.

Since the image of God is social and relational, salvation means the restoration of true community. Wesley called this "social Christianity" or "social holiness." He meant not primarily social justice but rather that salvation itself is social. True faith is social because God is Trinity, because his image in humankind is social, and because God’s plan is the restoration of healthy community, shalom, throughout his whole creation.

The image of God uniquely present in humankind but also more remotely present in all creation gives Wesley the theological basis for salvation as the "restitution" (KJV) or "restoration" of all things (cf. Mt. 17:11, Acts 3:21). Salvation through the blood of Jesus Christ, and especially through his resurrection, means that God is creating a new heaven and earth. God is bringing a total restoration of creation that is more glorious and flourishing than the original prototype.

For Wesley, this is a present reality and a present mission, not just a future expectation. Restorative salvation means that men and women can now, by the Spirit, fulfill their original calling as stewards. In "The Good Steward" Wesley wrote, "no character more exactly agrees with the present state of man than that of a steward... This appellation is exactly expressive of his situation in the present world, specifying the kind of servant he is to God, and what kind of service his divine master expects of him."

If salvation means "walking as Jesus walked," this has immense ethical meaning for our discipleship. God’s people are not only the recipients of God’s restoration but also, joined to Jesus by the Spirit in his body, the agents of this restoration, this plan of God to "reconcile . . . all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven" (Col. 1:20).

V. Audacious, Gracious Hope
John Wesley’s understanding of what God is up to in the world is thus audaciously optimistic. Albert Outler spoke of Wesley’s "optimism of grace." Commenting on Wesley’s sermon "The New Creation," Outler cites Wesley’s "unfaltering optimism, . . . an optimism of grace rather than of nature."
Wesleyan theology is saturated with hope, expectancy, optimism of grace and the grace of optimism. This hope is based not on human intelligence or technology but on Jesus’ resurrection, God’s promise, and the present work of the Spirit.

In Wesley’s view, God’s "economy" of salvation is rooted in the personal, loving character of God and in the correspondence between the divine nature, human nature, and the created order. In contrast to Augustine and Calvin, Wesley balanced the emphasis on original sin with a dynamic optimism about the possibilities of God’s loving grace in human experience and in society.

Perhaps the frequent failure of the church to transform the world through the power of Jesus’ gospel is above all a failure of hope—a failure really to believe that God will keep his promises and thus a failure to act in hope so that God’s will may be done on earth as in heaven.

Romans 8:20-21 reminds us that "The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God." If "the creation waits in eager expectation" (Rom. 8:19), so should we. If Satan convinces us the world is hopeless, we become hopeless in our witness and ministry. Or we reduce hope unbiblically, expecting only the salvation of souls for a disembodied eternity in heaven. We forget God’s plan through Jesus Christ "to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross" (Col. 1:20).

That divine plan defines our mission. And that mission is irrepressibly one of hope—the audacious, gracious hope that comes not from self-confidence or technology or money but from God’s promises.
Here Wesleyan theology clashes sharply with contemporary North American (or at least U.S.) evangelicalism. The optimism of grace gets undermined in two ways: By a discontinuous, disjunctive eschatology that makes too sharp a break between this age and the age to come (the kingdom of God in its fullness), and by a dualistic worldview. Many Christians see life on earth as an inferior, lower plane, and view disembodied spiritual existence on a higher, totally other plane. They see no real link between the two except through prayer and occasional miracles (or through tongues-speaking, if one is Pentecostal or charismatic).

This was not Wesley’s view. It isn’t the biblical view. "All things . . . in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible" (Col. 1:16), things present and things to come (Rom. 8:38, 1 Cor. 3:22), are part of the one world (and one worldview) that the Bible reveals and describes. This one God-created world is the stage upon which God is bringing to fulfillment the great drama of redemption and new creation.

If we don’t believe—don’t have the audacious hope—that God’s will really can be done on earth as it is in heaven in all dimensions of life, society, and culture, we won’t act with the audacious hope that God uses as a key means in fulfilling Jesus’ prayer, "may your kingdom come" on earth now. And so we will fail to see, at least in our time and place, the visible realization of God’s "intent . . . that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenlies" (Eph. 3:10). For lack of faith we fail effectively to be God’s mission in the world.
Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens and acting in the world in a Wesleyan way means living the audacious, gracious hope that we experience through the powerful resurrection of Jesus Christ (Eph. 1:18-23).

VI. A Renewed, Missional Church
Methodists trace their beginnings to John Wesley’s heart-warming experience at Aldersgate on May 24, 1738. But long before Aldersgate, Wesley yearned for the renewal of the church. The question was how. Touched by God’s Spirit at Aldersgate, Wesley found the power, and then the vital means, for the renewal he had long envisioned.

Wesley saw the depths into which much of his beloved Church of England had fallen. He longed to see it become vital and missional (as we say today), a church that would transform England and then the world. Wesley’s intent was always church renewal for the sake of mission. He saw Methodism itself as a renewal movement. The mission of Methodism was to be God’s instrument for returning the church to the vitality God intended—the vitality of earliest Christianity.

Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens means a vision for church renewal; an expectancy for a vital, missional church. In the Wesleyan perspective, virtually no church is beyond hope for renewal. God intends to renew his church—from the local congregation to denominations everywhere; the whole people of God worldwide.

Wesley believed a renewed church is more than a congregation where people have faith and live pious lives. A renewed church is marked by a potent combination of worship, evangelism, loving discipleship, and a witness of justice and mercy in the world. A renewed church is God’s instrument for renewing society. A renewed church is a vital community that practices the New Testament "one another" passages, building up one another, encouraging and equipping one another, and growing up into Jesus (Eph. 4:11-16). It is a discipling community that by the Spirit exhibits and practices a range of spiritual gifts through which the church fulfills its mission of justice, mercy, and peace in the world.

Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens means never giving up on the church. We know that dry bones can live again; that resurrection is possible; that even the deadest-looking tree trunk may still have life deep in its roots. Renewal can come if people return to their first love and center their lives and witness in Jesus Christ and the power of the Spirit.

VII. The Restoration of All Creation
Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens means seeing the New Creation that God is bringing through Jesus Christ.

God’s promise to "restore everything" was a key element of John Wesley’s theology. Wesley’s hopeful certainty was based not on a few scattered biblical references but on the whole thrust of the biblical story, beginning to end. His sermons "The New Creation," "The General Deliverance," and "The General Spread of the Gospel" highlight key Scriptures: Romans 8:19-22 on the liberation of the whole creation being from its "bondage to decay," Isaiah 11:9 on the earth being full of the knowledge of the Lord, and Revelation 21:5, "Behold, I make all things new."

For Wesley, salvation was all about restoration. Salvation is healing from the disease of sin. The true "religion of Jesus Christ" is "God’s method of healing a soul" that is diseased by sin. "Hereby the great Physician of souls applies medicines to heal this sickness, to restore human nature, totally corrupted in all its faculties" (Sermon 44, "Original Sin," III.3). As he grew older, Wesley increasingly emphasized salvation as the healing of the whole created order.

Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens means seeing the New Creation now, through eyes of faith, based on Holy Scripture, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. "Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see" (Heb. 11:1). By the eyes of faith, we see "a new heaven and a new earth." We foresee the fulfillment of the promise, "God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God" (Rev. 21:1-3). By faith we now see, anticipate, and hope for the New Creation, the "reconciliation of all things." And we have now received the Holy Spirit, the anticipatory present experience of the final new creation (Eph. 1:13-14). When we come to know God through Jesus Christ, we experience the firstfruits of that total restoration that Paul describes in Romans 8, Isaiah pictures, and that the Book of Revelation shows us so movingly.

Conclusion
Our television and computer screens, our billboards and newspapers, our movie theatres and magazines incessantly offer us ways of viewing the world. They present a vision of reality. But it is distorted reality; a twisted worldview and a suicidal narrative, "the path that leads to destruction."
Seeing the world through a Wesleyan lens means an expansive, audacious vision. More than a worldview, this is a way of living out God’s plan in the world and engaging in the mission of the one who said, "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you" (John 20:21).

A Wesleyan worldview means living in "eager expectation" of God’s full salvation, the time of "general restoration," the time when all things are brought to fulfillment and the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is glorified in all things forever. With that vision and expectation, we seek to "live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God" (Col. 1:10). Filled with the Spirit, we become agents of the reality we see through the gift of faith.

Dr. Howard A. Snyder serves as the Chair of Wesley Studies at Tyndale Seminary. Visit his website at wineskins.net