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 it? 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.
Humans cannot become in a void of relations. The tragedy of children isolated from all human contact in extreme abuse is a negative image of a world without the Trinity of God present encouraging, enabling us to dream, hope, creatively seek and do good works.
The systemic and personal insecurities, prejudices, addictions would leave us creatures of Instinct only were it not for an awareness within and beyond each of us that we are valued and capable of the very best.
Whats so important about Prevenient grace?
The usual reasons given explore the reality that all/each of our journeys are a continuum along a linear line; we are all being saved and so the older line between saved and unsaved becomes meaningless. In short, it levels the playing field, opening dialogue between the “revealed” faith traditions and those that arise from within human cultures hungry to know. It is the Samaritan woman at the well moment in our communal human journeys. With Jesus we can declare, “You Samaritans (or ___________) worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth”” (John 4:22-24 NIV).
Such a view is foundational to the uniquely Wesleyan understanding of Jesus life, passion, death, resurrection and continuing high priestly engagement with the whole world as simply true, acting in all relationships, cultures, faith traditions and agnostic traditions to draw women and men into love and hence within the effective and affective reach of God’s initiative to save. Hence, we reject an exclusive claim that unless you say the right words or jump through the right theological hoops one is inevitably damned. Nor do we hold easily that all roads lead to heaven; only that the Jesus event changes everything for everyone and is grounded in the love of the God who is and as importantly, is Communal, Three unique persons so inter-dependent in love as to be One in essence.
The early church‘s thinking about salvation focused on the day of the Lord, when all things are renewed in the resurrection of all who are asleep in righteousness wake up to a world of reconciled relationship, of justice and Shalom. They came to understand that Jesus Incarnational surrender to Roman crucifixion and subsequent resurrection by the Father “when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come” changed everything, including Rome and death itself. The purpose of the Church was to live into this new emerging world precisely because “God placed all things under his (Jesus) feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way” (Ephesians 1:20-23 NIV). In this way and through the Church “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose that he accomplished in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Ephesians 3:10-11 NIV).
In short, God was reconciled—at great cost to The Trinity of God—to the whole world, every person and institution, including Rome (i.e — Rulers and powers). The restoration long promised was breaking in upon the earth and so everyone is saved provisionally, the only thing left being the proclamation of this life giving word, which scandalously challenged Rome as the church faithfully lived into this reign of love. The only question was who would and who would not live reconciled to God and neighbor?
I've sat in revival meetings aplenty and funerals where the question of who is saved and who is not divides the listeners into camps of the righteous and unrighteous, reducing this incredible Gospel of restorative humanity into a transactional bargain based upon a guilty human confession instead of an affirmation of God’s kindly heart and fully aware that our human heart is corrupt, needing healing and cleansing if we are to love as our Heavenly Father loves. The purpose of repentance is to realize within what God has already provided, forgiveness, acceptance, holiness, love.
It is the difference of night and day; of sin as offense carrying legal penalties or sin as a living against love, de-humanizing ourselves, our neighbor, culture, the land itself. Did Jesus death save us from God’s anger, good cop, bad cop or did Jesus death represent a multi-level inevitable struggle in both Divine and human hearts and lives to overcome shame, injustice and death itself by sacrificing love?
The earliest kerigma or proclamation of the Church is that sin is about how we are oriented around God’s love most fully seen in Jesus. Because we hmans are so deeply invested in our broken, lonely power-centric ways of being the ultimate cost of our redemption is the Eternal goodness of God made real within, between and around us. That—for the Trinity of God and us is costly—necessarily. Redemption from our systemic and personal wounds and evil cannot be accomplished by power, only love.
We Wesleyans properly keep a distance from atonement as substitution for sin’s penalty—Jesus satisfying The Fathers wrath—as if God’s both schizophrenic and an eternal jail warden. What we must not shy away from is the awareness that:
1) Human sin (wounds, self-centric, arrogance, rebellion) is costly, and;
2) Both God and we bear a differing but real responsibility, and;
3) Reconciliation, freely given and universally applied is both risky and costly, and;
4) Only Love, fully engaged interiorly and between and around humanity can atone or bring about restoration of God’s image and sacredness imprinted on human civilization, and;
5) Living into this restored earth involves our own sacrificial love as the new world freely given in Jesus continues to bump up against the powers of this world.
Blessings! Terry
If interested in exploring you may wish to access my book “Cross Purposes: Incarnational Atonement, Renewal & Communal Salvation”—https://www.amazon.com/Cross-Purposes-Incarnational-Atonement-Salvation/dp/1521793360/ref=tmm_pap_sw
OR:
My 4 Video Podcasts on Why Did Jesus Die?
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