“What can wash away my sin?
Noth’n but the blood of Jesus.”
The greatest single contribution of John Wesley will, in the end be his doctrine of “Prevenient Grace.” Naz Theologian Raymond Dunning was the first to have opened my heart to the multilayered truth of it.
What is ”Prevenient Grace?” The usual definition is “the grace that goes before salvation.” Yet such a definition hides what is so compelling; that God is intimately and mercifully present to every human being, culture and institution nurturing love—the very ability to give sacrificially.
Let us pull back a couple layers; The awareness of what Wesley called “sin, improperly so called.” The context for the term was the Calvinist assertion that we humans are hopelessly incapable of rising beyond sin and living into genuine love. Their definition of sin included, wisely, the idea of any falling short of the glory of God (Love), the image of God being deeply marred—as fear, pride, violence, lust and greed flowing from our first parents cross-generational sin, does.
Wesley, I believe, fundamentally agreed with such a sensitivity. He saw inside our daily Spirit anointed awareness of attitudes, broken spaces and addictive desires (infirmities he called them) the very human weaknesses, vulnerabilitlies that form the occasion of our experience of progressive sanctification—that is being increasingly able to Love God first, as no other and our neighbor as ourselves or conversely, a thousand lessor loves. Becoming human, becoming real necessitated a God Presence fully acquainted with both our humanity and the un-real disintegrated, self absorbed spirits we are capable of as well—love‘s deprivation.
Indeed, such wounded spaces held the promise of our heart being made pure so that we continually love God first as no other—as we, through the means of grace (worship, communion, small group confessionals) , confess and surrender each. One such moment might take us to the very core of our being and we would come out the other side entirely given over to the Sanctifying Presence of Christ.
Wanting to encourage such awareness of human need, Wesley would affirm the central truth of this Calvinist claim that—at least in this sense of falling short of love’s ideal—we stand in need of a Savior. Wesley further understood that these human failings in temperament, prejudices without malice, and a thousand shortcomings were both the direct and indirect result of Adam’s original sin and certainly needed the atoning work of Christ. What differentiated his theology and set him free of Calvinisms pessimism is his high view of justification.
Context:
As I understand it Anglicans, Wesley included, saw justification in two senses. There is the justification initiated by the Trinity of God that reconciles or establishes in the sovereign will or heart of God the very real access that each human has precisely because, at great cost to the Father-Son-Spirit we are accepted, welcomed, received. Simply imagine a communal mind or heart innocent of violence, fear, anger, addictive lust suddenly—not only tasting, but—entering deeply into the life of a community so focused. As one who hates the word “fuck” so casually or angrily bandied about, it is a loss to my spirit when in such a company—even as I delight in other playful conversations out of my narrow box of thoughts and feelings.
The second justification is usually realized in us as we mature in Christ and fully as we near death or beyond. This is simply the “making real” in us and in our human experience what God has already declared is true in God’s heart. This justification fully grown or actualized is the result of God’s sanctifying Presence as we respond to the kind favor extended.
Wesley therefore honors Calvin’s Sovereign and saving initiative and roots it inside the Jesus event with the cross at center. He radically affirms that Jesus passion covers the inter-generational sinfulness of our first parents and all the wounds that flow there from.
From this high regard for all human-kind, the reign of death from within our fallen selves and relations is atoned for. There is no culpability, not because we are innocent of actual choice—though embedded deeply inside the fears, consumerism, casual sexual games and pride from fallen humanity that informs our own proclivities—but because God’s holiness expressed as deep love looks beyond what is repugnant or offensive into us, our real and not yet realized beauty. In all our cross-generational, communal wounded sinfulness we are forgiven, reconciled in so far as our inherited deprivation and all the wounds that attend.
One of the distinctions that we should keep in mind is that it is not our sin (in systems-historic or personal) that is ever forgiven, as if that were possible. It is we who are forgiven.
So much lost time is spent arguing over “Penal Substitutionary Atonement” (which I find horrific as usually taught or as the starting place for reconciliation). Wesley, wether from intuition or a world newly emergnt from feudalism and still deeply embedded in the Divine rights of Kings, manages in his embrace of “atonement“ (however derived), to gift the Church with a view of both justification (forgiven, reconciled) and justification realized (sanctification) as restorative, cleansing, healing, human making.
Wesley attributes God’s atoning work for everyone of every race, gender and time in so far as our unity with Adam and the wounds that flow. If only we could grasp that this is the greater justice, equity of God’s broken heart from which all reconciliation flows. Wesley’s insistence on atonement universally given to communal humanity is essential to God’s provisional justification of our personal sin as a conscious choice. It is foundational to all that follows in Prevenient grace for the atonement of historic wounded humanity retains God’s sovereign relation and responsibility to humanity without the legal structure that turns God into a penal warden. Yet it has the merit of our deep human awareness that in fact we have wounded God, creation, our neighbor and ourselves in choosing to follow one or more of the traps set for us within our human, historic and communal brokenness.
Stated differently, for our post-modern believers; we are all “in”. There is no “other”. In the sense of our communal and inherited brokenness we are all “saved,” each of our personal and communal lives a turning into or away from this universally kind and genuinely good Father, Sovereign, Lord. Some are working it out within the Jesus Story as especially blessed to bless, as is our calling. Others, not so fortunate to grow up within Salvation history are working it out within differing cultural and religious experiences. But all, enabled by The Spirit, because of Jesus of Nazareth (human/eternal) and are thus enabled to live into or allowed to live away from, love—-the image of God. All who are responding to The Kingdom ever breaking in and thus being saved will with Thomas cry out “my Lord and my God,” not as a forced confession by power but as a grace filled expression of the One whom their hearts longed for all along.
I am not suggesting that John Wesley—in his Calvinist debates over imputed verses imparted righteousness—was laying out in any fully developed way the universal implications that God is fully reconciled, present to and acting with salvific grace toward every daughter of Eve and Son of Adam, the only question remaining is “personal sin—properly understood” as volitional. It’s all there, even so. He was, however, clearly trying to honor Calvinist sensitivity toward every thought, word or deed that does not flow from love as relevant, as accurately depicting the ground of our restoration. His emphasis upon volition allows for the relational bridge of integrity upon which the provisional “making real” grace flows.
Atonement: What are its core Acts?
1) God keeping faith with Creation by entering fully and experientially into the communal darkness that lives inside the vacuum of human meaning seperated from the actual experience of The Communal Divine. It is one thing to know in the abstract a knowledge of human depravity, quite another to taste the death inside lust, greed, pride, violence, prejudice. So atonement is the whole incarnation of the Trinity of God experiencing in Jesus of Nazareth, us—all of us. From the pre-born embryonic bio-chemistry to the spear that pierced his side in Roman violence God, who has only known ever creativity and hope and joy and reverence and innocence now fully knows and dies. God dies, literally impossible except by a full surrender to the taste of death itself—not as Neische claimed, in obscure irrelevance but as a vulnerable Diety, a Cosmic embrace, a kind of apology.
2) As God is changed by experience so may we in the Great Exchange—wherein we are communally aware of the value of all our neighbors and can enter increasingly into the Godly Sorrow or empathy of Divine wholeness, now freely available in the earth. “God caused the one who didn’t know sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we could become the righteousness of God”
(2 CorinthIan’s 5: 25). In short, God absorbs our wounded, twisted lives and we receive the wholeness of love in exchange.
3) The cross is the horrifying foci of all God‘s Incarnational Presence where Divine love surrenders to the wrath of sin. It is Isaiah’s suffering servant whom “we considered.. stricken by God, smitten by him and afflicted.“ The actual truth is that Jesus ”by oppression and judgment.. was taken away.” Rome conspiring with the religious elite of Israel resulted in his being “cut off from the land of the living.”
Does God ever feel profound anger at injustice, needless death, hunger, arrogance? Ofcourse, passionately so. But what is happening on the crucifix of the Cosmos is something very different. Here power is reverent in the face of chaos. “He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, as a sheep before his shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth” except to say “Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” So it is, on this Roman cross, on that Palestinian hill the Father—-Eternal Son—Holy Spirit was, in Jesus of Nazareth, “dispised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering.. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows.. But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53: 7b, Luke 23: 34, Isaiah 53: 3a, 4a, 5)
4) The only thing being judged at Golgatha was judgment itself as Jesus himself said “in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned “ (John 16: 11). Love and power kiss on that ancient hill and all of us and at great violence to the purity, gentleness and peace of our Communal God are justified freely in terms Adamic sin and the wounds that flow from within.
5) In this atoning act God has invited us in our own times to enter when chaos draws near; to “fill up in (our) my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church“ (Colossians 1: 24).
And so we who are blessed with the revelation of the gospel are given the privilege of being ministers of reconciliation. Where chaos still pursues, to lay down in its path, “For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body” (Corinthians 4:11 NIV).
A Reflection:
As a child and teen I was always demoralized by sermons that, following Wesley as they understood him, would distinguish between “mistakes“ and “sin“.
Cleary mistakes weren’t sin—duh. What I needed, at a very young age was how to deal with my emerging sexual feelings or need for approval or fear if I failed to work up the courage to hit the altar. Even worse, I was always pretty sure that even my mistakes resulted from a heart that skipped a few beats on the way to "loving God 1st, as no other and my neighbor as myself." Neighbors? I was afraid of them, cause they might need my Jesus or go to hell. That was a lot of responsibility and kept me focused on me..Big mistake. Can't love a neighbor from that space.
My very first sermon at the age of twelve and delivered on a Wednesday night was from the text that “perfect love casteth out fear.” So in that sermon I asked, what do I do with all my fears?
Now I know. I place them safely at the cross “where I first saw the light and the burden of my heart rolled away.”
Blessings, Terry
Visual Podcasts on Atonement
A Critique on PSA called: “God Died with us, not In Place of Us!” https://youtu.be/YurNxBTFieY
Good Friday Reading: https://youtu.be/3KqNffZiTCI
Palm Sunday Passion: https://youtu.be/okVW60_7dYk
Four Visual Podcasts on ”Why Did Jesus Die?
Session #1 https://youtu.be/PmkR7th4niU Session #2 https://youtu.be/hIsE5VLpvN8 Session #3 https://youtu.be/lt0uOjk_vco Session #4 https://youtu.be/5xYiz5xaGXE
Why Did Jesus Die Podcasts: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrtz4uDc_A5IxLy9WH_0CUwIBwWQrdOwd
If you’d like to read my book exploring these themes: https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Purposes-Incarnational-Atonement-Salvation/dp/1521793360/ref=sr_1_3?key
Comments