Jitterbugging for Jesus

I think it’s always good to get back to the basics of everything in life — the basics of Christian salvation included.

I happen to believe that John Wesley’s blunt take on salvation hits the basic mark. He wrote:

“By salvation I mean, not barely (according to the vulgar notion) deliverance from hell, or going to heaven, but a present deliverance from sin, a restoration of the soul to its primitive health . . . the renewal of our souls after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy, and truth.” (From Wesley’s “Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.”)

In the next Lenten post or two, I’ll explore John Wesley’s brilliant take on personal salvation with all its moving parts like preceding grace, justification, sanctification and perfection in this life.

I’m not saying Warren’s book and the followup The Purpose Driven Church have no merit whatsoever. There is a lot of good stuff in both books.

Yet I’m sure that Wesley — whose teachings on Christian faith and tradition will be remembered long after Rick Warren and his books are forgotten — would have had issues of his own with Warren.

Wesley strongly believed, as do I, that salvation has a social as well as individual dimension, that it’s not just about me and my ticket to heaven.

Wesley’s sermons and teachings strongly emphasized holiness, and he quite famously asserted that “there is no holiness but social holiness!”

The great Catholic Dorothy Day, who is up for sainthood, immersed herself in John Wesley’s sermons and teachings on social holiness not long after she left communism for Catholicism.

This goes back to that part of his definition of salvation being “the renewal of our souls after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness, in justice, mercy, and truth.”

This is what drove him to fight so fiercely against the social injustice of slavery.

This is what drove Wesley to resist the social and political systems that sucked the life out of the poor and powerless in the bleak society of his time.

A society that looks a lot like our own in America these days.

I daresay Wesley would be involved in some of America’s current resistance movements which are dismissed as so much liberalism or socialism or “snowflake-ism.” He was constantly accused of being a heretic and worse. (And that’s not to say he wouldn’t be disgusted by some of the resistance tactics and the movements’ beliefs.)

The British “snowflake” was walking the dangerous back alleys of London in a snow storm, seeking out the poor and homeless, not long before he died in a life that covered almost the entire 18th century.

John and brother Charles Wesley well understood that Jesus came to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

I’ll have more to say about Wesley’s wonderful take on personal salvation, with all its moving parts involving grace, justification, sanctification, perfection and more, in the next Lenten post or two.