CHAPTER 2
Born Again and the Pastor Who Wasn’t
What Is an “Almost Christian”?
One of the names that Wesley used for describing nominal, sinful, and lukewarm Christians was a name that caused him a lot of trouble: “almost Christians.”
He charged them to become “not only almost, but altogether Christians.” An “almost Christian,” as Wesley’s hearers could tell, was really a “not Christian.”
How dare he? In Christian England, it was a provocation to tell churchgoers that they were not Christians. But Wesley was not just trying out shocking ways of speaking to get his audience’s attention. He meant it.
He meant it first of all because he was reflecting on his own experience. For years he had been convinced that it was impossible to be “half a Christian.” Since reading the challenge of William Law’s Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, he had resolved to give to God “all my soul, my body, and my substance.” And then at Aldersgate in 1738 he broke through to an understanding of saving faith.
Looking back from Aldersgate, he declared that he was now altogether a Christian, where previously he had been “only almost” a Christian. Wesley immortalized the phrase “The Almost Christian” in the classic 1741 sermon with that title (sermon 2 in the Standard Sermons).
There he made a long list of all the virtues a person could have without being truly Christian: heathen honesty, works of mercy, a form of godliness (“the outside of a real Christian”), church attendance, private prayer, and deep sincerity.
But he testified personally that these were not enough: “Suffer [permit] me then, to speak freely of myself. . . . I did go thus far for many years, as many of this place can testify. . . . Yet my own conscience beareth me witness in the Holy Ghost, that all this time I was but almost a Christian.”
Wesley was not arguing merely from his own experience when he declared to his fellow Anglicans of the 1700s that they, too, were only almost Christians; his experience was undergirded by two prior judgments.
First was his theological conviction that the message of salvation is all-important, and has to be stated in terms of free forgiveness and regeneration: “If any doctrines within the whole compass of Christianity may be properly termed fundamental, they are doubtless these two—the doctrine of justification, and that of the new birth.”
And second was his pastoral judgment that the church of his age was filled with unregenerate members, shepherded by a frightful number of unregenerate pastors.
So Wesley’s own experience, his theological convictions, and his understanding of the times flowed together providentially at the headwaters of the revival. We should look at each in turn.
What Happened at Aldersgate
Something happened to John Wesley on May 24, 1738, at Aldersgate—but what?
The Wesley who came “most unwillingly” to listen to a public reading of Luther’s Preface to Romans was a thirty-five-year-old Anglican priest with experience in foreign missions. For over a decade he had been convinced that it was impossible to be half-Christian and had committed himself to a spiritual regimen of monastic strictness.
With all that he knew and all that he had seen and heard, what was the word that reached him on that night?
Though Wesley does not tell us exactly which sentences from Luther’s Preface to Romans penetrated his mind, he does say that it was from part of the book in which Luther “was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ.”
This could apply to any number of passages in the work, but perhaps it was this one: “Doing the works of the Law,” wrote Luther, “and fulfilling the law, are two very different things.”
Wesley Finally Understood Justification by Faith
On the one hand, the works of the law include “everything that one does or can do,” and it is never enough. But faith, according to Luther, is the only thing with power to fulfill the law:
Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a man would stake his life on it a thousand times. This confidence in God’s grace, and knowledge of it, makes a man glad and bold and happy in dealing with God and with all his creatures, and this is the work of the Holy Ghost in faith. Hence a man is ready and glad, without compulsion, to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer everything, in love and praise of God, who has shown him this grace, and thus it is impossible to separate works from faith, as impossible as to separate heat and light from fire.
It was this Lutheran teaching about a heart changed by “living, daring confidence in God’s grace” that got through to Wesley, reorienting his spiritual quest and instantly solving the theological and spiritual problems he had either inherited or invented.
For several months, Wesley had been wrestling with the Lutheran teaching as communicated to him by Peter Boehler and the other Moravians. Looking back on his development, Wesley would testify just how great his confusion about salvation had been:
It was many years after I was ordained deacon before I was convinced of the great truths above recited. During all that time I was utterly ignorant of the nature and condition of justification. Sometimes I confounded it with sanctification (particularly when I was in Georgia); at other times I had some confused notion about the forgiveness of sins, but then I took it for granted the time of this must be either the hour of death or the day of judgment. I was equally ignorant of the nature of saving faith, apprehending it to mean no more than a firm assent to all the propositions contained in the Old and New Testaments.
It seems that Wesley had very recently come to a true doctrinal understanding of justification by faith. What happened to him at Aldersgate was that he suddenly (“about a quarter before nine”) experienced its application to his own soul.
Wesley Finally Understood Grace
Over the course of the previous weeks, Wesley had finally adopted classic Protestant views, and the arguments of Luther had cleared away some peculiar eighteenth-century Anglican mistiness. By his own confession he reached this stage of his ministry “utterly ignorant of the nature and condition of justification.”
Somehow all the reading and praying and seeking he had done up until this point in his life had only served to entrench him ever more doggedly in a false understanding of how a person is accepted by God. He was sure the answer must be personal holiness, and everything he read and experienced seemed to confirm this to him. “There was a basic principle in Wesley’s thought at this period in his life,” writes William Cannon,
the principle that man must be saved through moral goodness, through universal obedience, and through the rigid fulfillment of all the commandments of God. This principle defined his conception of justification and, like a magnet, drew unto itself all elements which helped to confirm, clarify, and more especially to achieve its aim.
The magnet image is apt: Wesley’s mind was magnetized by the law of God, and it drew to itself all the legalistic elements in his environment. Even when he read a good gospel-centered book, he only drew from it the legal bits.
We know that Wesley read plenty of properly Protestant teaching in his earlier life. The Anglican and Puritan sources he immersed himself in included plenty of sound teaching on justification by grace alone through faith alone.
Indeed, after Aldersgate, Wesley would rifle through the Anglican church’s official Homilies, Articles, and prayer book to confirm that his new understanding was in fact not new to the church, but only new to him. It was an easy task, since the classic Anglican sources are packed with the gospel of justification by faith. But first the magnetic polarity of Wesley’s own soul had to be reversed.
Until the principle of grace was activated in his own strangely cold heart, Wesley systematically read for the message of legal performance. Until then, all the books kept pitching grace, but Wesley kept catching law.