A Wesleyan Take on Protest and Reformation

Ulf Ekman’s conversion to the Catholic Church sparked a
healthy discussion over how to hold the reforming impulse of Protestantism alongside
the new ecumenical impulse.

The starting place for such a discussion is the recognition
that the reforming impulse and the ecumenical impulse converge on the need for
a ressourcement of historic Christianity as the way to affirm catholicity. This
is the case regardless of whether one sees the Catholic Church (or Orthodox
churches) as the most complete visible expression of the Body of Christ and all
other forms as “lesser,” or whether one defines the Body of Christ in terms of
the invisible communion with no visible form fully expressing that body. (The
latter commitment does not imply that all ecclesial traditions or ways of doing
church are equal.)

The question for Protestants concerns how to appropriate the
traditions of historic Christianity in keeping with the reforms initiated by
the Protestant Reformers. From a Wesleyan perspective, this centers on Wesley’s
idea that the purpose of Methodism was “to reform the nation, particularly the
Church; and to spread scriptural holiness throughout the land.”

The Wesleyan idea of spreading holiness finds precedents in
the twelfth century with Cistercian writers like William of St. Thierry. One
can see its outworking in women mystics like Hadewijch of Brabant and Rhineland
mystics like Johann Tauler. These streams also fed a young Martin Luther so
that medieval spirituality continues in a Reformation form. A Wesleyan vision,
then, practices a ressourcement of the spiritual streams of historic
Christianity as a way of promoting and advancing holiness and thereby renewing
the churches.

The emphasis on holiness prompts a theology of immediacy in
which the Spirit of God is the love that reorients human loves conforming them
to Christ the divine lover. For this reason, Wesleyans maintain the historic
Protestant emphasis of sola fide and sola gratia, because faith itself is an
internal movement initiated by the Spirit that comes to rest in the divine
promises. It is a movement of the heart, a turning of emotion and desire that
marks initial turn toward the Son in the power of the Spirit.

To renew the church also involves a form of protest against
the churches. In this way the church catholic emerges from the reform of the
particular churches. One cannot understand the Gregorian reforms of the
Eleventh Century apart from a protest against a way of doing church that was no
longer acceptable.

Too often the debate between a Bernard of Clairvaux and a
Peter Abelard is read in terms of the latter’s so-called heterodoxy when it was
just as much about Bernard’s progressive vision of a church disentangled from
the control of secular princes over against Abelard’s more conservative view of
an ordered relation of patronage and rule between secular rulers and sacred
institutions. Bernard protested what Abelard embraced.

Moreover, this protest represented a massive change in the
very structure of the church in order to secure the life of the churches. The
creation of the college of cardinals alone as the means to secure the
transmission of the papal office free from secular interference was an
innovation within the structure. The question of whether this innovation, as
well as the elevation of the bishop of Rome to jurisdictional authority over
the whole church, is a genuinely catholic move remains to be resolved. Nevertheless,
all can acknowledge it was a genuine effort to reform the churches in the
service of the church catholic.

This is where the global pentecostal-charismatic movement
may enter because, at its best, it seeks to recover a catholic spirituality
that fuses the sacramental and the charismatic. As Isidore of Seville notes, something
is called a sacrament because “divine power (virtus) brings about in a more hidden way the “saving effect” of
the sacrament. Isidore makes a move already found in Augustine’s
differentiating between the sacrament and the power of the sacrament (virtus sacramenti). It is no mistake
that Gregory the Great attributes miracles to the “powers” (virtutes) at work in the saint.

One finds this same use of virtus in the Anglican Tractarian R. I. Wilberforce who
distinguished between the sign, the reality signified (res), and the grace or power within (virtus). The sign mediates Christ through the power of Christ at
work within it and power is nothing less than the Spirit of Christ. What one
finds is that charismatic grace and sacramental grace are two modes of divine
power that transforms and makes holy. It is how scriptural holiness first takes
root in the soul through faith alone by grace alone.

Vibrant forms of Christianity continually practice
ressourcement even if they do so in ways commensurate with their own ecclesial
and theological traditions. Conversions like those of Ulf Ekman should motivate
everyone to engage in this task of reforming the churches by recovering
historic Christianity.