Category Archives: Book Review

REJOICING IN LAMENT

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J. Todd Billings is the Gordon H. Girod Research Professor of Reformed Theology at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, MI.  He is an award-winning author of various books including Union with Christ: Reframing Theology and Ministry for the Church http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/union-with-christ/327520.

Todd’s latest book, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer & Life in Christ http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/rejoicing-in-lament/349560 framed this interview.

Moore: Please give our readers a sense of why Rejoicing in Lament is not the kind of book you thought you would ever write.

Billings: At age 39, married and with two children ages 1 and 3, a diagnosis of incurable cancer seemed unimaginable. I never imagined that I would write Rejoicing in Lament because it’s not how I imagined my life-story. Of course, throughout my life I’ve imagined all sorts of possibilities about my death. Reading novels and watching films can make you go there. But a cancer diagnosis is an odd way to enter into dying: it’s a bit like a death-sentence, but one that may come soon or relatively far down the road. It’s unpredictable.

After my diagnosis, my feeling was not of self-pity, as much as of lament. I lamented for my children in particular. My prayer was an adaptation of Psalm 102: Why, O Lord, would you take away their dad midcourse through their childhood? I’m incredibly grateful for the gift of life, and the goodness the Lord has lavished upon me in 40 years. I recognize that many people never live to 40. But my love for my family drove me to lament.

Lamenting with the Psalms led me down a path that I never expected to walk. The psalmists led me to ask questions like: “O Lord, why do you cast me off? Why do you hide your face from me?” (Ps. 88:14) What are we to make of apparently “senseless” suffering and death, in light of God’s promise? And ultimately: how do our stories of suffering — with all of the broken edges — fit into the story of God in Christ? These are not abstract questions, but ones that I asked with urgency in the early days of my diagnosis and they are the questions that guide the pages of Rejoicing in Lament.

Moore: From my own ministry and personal suffering I know that no two sufferers are identical in what best brings comfort.  We all desire compassion and a confidence that there is “a bigger purpose,” but how that is all conveyed varies from person to person.  For example, some people want to talk about things while too much talk exhausts others. To further complicate matters the same person can be encouraged one day by something, which another day brings discouragement, even anger.  Help us to better navigate these tricky waters.

Billings: Each path of suffering is its own. For some, the suffering comes through a traumatic event. For others, it’s the dripping faucet of anxiety, eating away at one’s well-being day by day. So, we need to get over the idea that there is one “perfect thing to say” to anyone who is suffering, because the paths of suffering are diverse.

So, my general advice is this: Be present. Listen. Pray. And pray, specifically, with the Psalms. Don’t try to be the hero to someone who is suffering by trying to fix everything yourself. And don’t assume that the person just wants to weep or mourn. They may want to laugh. They may want to tell stories about good times, or make jokes. You won’t know if you set the agenda for the conversation and fail to be present and listen first. After my cancer diagnosis, my own feelings were beyond my own ability to express. I was incredibly grateful for each moment; and yet I was overwhelmed with the physical and emotional effects of the intensive chemotherapy. And yet simultaneously I was also lamenting for my family. Paul says we are to “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15). I used to think that the rejoicing and the weeping are two different sets of people. But for many who are suffering, they are both at the same time.

Pray. We cannot handle a calamity on our own. Advice won’t fix a crisis. And talk can be cheap in the end. Praying on behalf of someone else is an incredible gift, bringing them before the Almighty even if they may feel too weak or overwhelmed to go there by themselves. And pray the Psalms. The Psalms keep us away from prayers that can sound cliché or sentimental to the sufferer. They are the real deal. They come before God in trust in a way that brings our whole, complex range of emotions into the presence of our gracious Lord.

Moore: You make it clear that we need to disabuse ourselves of thinking there is a satisfying answer to suffering this side of eternity.  Job, of course, makes that case quite convincingly.  In light of our limited understanding, how do we cultivate confidence that God truly is loving, kind, and has our best intentions in mind?

Billings: I work with the problem of suffering, or the problem of evil, in several chapters in the book. In sum, I think that scripture teaches that we should not give a theoretical answer to the problem. The answer lies beyond human wisdom. In saying that, I’m not saying, “the Bible addressed it, but didn’t come up with an answer.” No. I’m saying that as the Bible addresses the problem of evil (in the book of Job, for example), we are taught that we should not pretend we know God’s mind about why he would allow evil and suffering.

Instead of a theodicy, scripture gives us a prayer book. The Psalms shape our response to evil through laments, which focus our eyes upon God’s promise to make things right, even when things are a mess and through thanksgiving, which rightly recognizes that we are not “entitled” to good things, but the goods of creation and redemption come from the gracious hand of God. I think that we cultivate our confidence in God and his promise through prayer, through worship – feeding upon Christ by Word and Sacrament in community – and through compassionate service. As I say at one point in the book, “we should not pretend that we are the authors of history who can say what reasons could possibly justify this [evil]. We don’t know. But there is one thing that Christians know without a doubt: that suffering and evil require our compassionate response.”

Moore: Pardon the length of my thoughts here, but I think it is necessary for this one.

The best teaching I’ve heard on Job came from an agnostic Jewish scholar.  He was perfectly fine leaving the loose ends hanging.  Too many evangelical preachers I’ve heard like to underscore how it all worked out in the end for Job because he got his health back, lived a long life, and had ten more children.  Those certainly are wonderful things that should not be diminished.  Even the commentary in Job underscores that with the final line of “And Job died, an old man and full of days.”  But mystery remains, right?  Why did Job have to go through all of this suffering?  Who is excited about losing their present children for a new batch?  Not me.  So it seems we Christians can presume we know a whole bunch more than we really do.

Billings: The book of Job should cut through our pretensions that the righteous do not suffer unjustly. (And of course, the life and death of Jesus should break through that pretension in an even more powerful way!) Even at the end of the narrative, Job has no idea of the “reasons” as to why God could allow this evil to befall him– and neither do the readers of Job receive a reason. But in many ways, that’s the point.

Postulating “God’s reasons” for allowing suffering is moving beyond human wisdom. It’s dangerous. It forgets that God is God and we are not. And in the midst of my own cancer journey, when people have said “this must be the reason God has allowed the cancer,” it has not encouraged my life of faith. We don’t know. We want to know. But we don’t know why the Almighty, good God has allowed suffering that appears senseless. To admit this is not a statement of unfaith – as the Psalmists remind us repeatedly – it’s a sign of trust to admit the limits of our understanding and to bring our questions and complaints to the Lord. In the words of the complaint of Psalm 73: “Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all day long I have been plagued, and am punished every morning.” At the end of the Psalm, the psalmist declares in trust that the Lord will set things right. That is our trust and hope. But things are not yet right, and the Psalmist doesn’t know why.

Moore: Job’s friends were at their best when they silently sat with Job (Job 2:13).  Unfortunately, they went from compassionate friends to presumptuous theologians.  I tend to think that Job’s friends were more mature spiritually than many of today’s Christians.  If I am remotely close in my assumption, then how can we be wise in the counsel we receive, especially during times of suffering, when we are the most vulnerable and impressionable?

Billings: Yes, at the beginning of Job, his friends show astonishing solidarity and wisdom: “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great” (2:13) Things went downhill from there. I think that there is a place for talking with the suffering – especially for prayer, and the Psalms, as I noted above. But that’s after first being present to the sufferer and listening to them. Ultimately, the goal of our care of the suffering should not be the opportunity to share our clever theological ideas. The goal of our care of the suffering should be the same as the goal of all of the Psalms: to honestly bring who we are, with all of our confusion and turmoil, before the face of the Almighty.

Moore: Years ago, I read A Sacred Sorrow by Michael Card.  One of my marginal notes reads, “American Christians know how to cry, but not lament.”  In my estimation one of the most important truths you underscore is that Job’s repentance did not include repenting over his lament.  Unpack that some for us.

Billings: In the book I draw upon Ellen Davis, Roland Murphy and others who translate Job 42:6 as a recanting of Job’s case before the Almighty, but not a repentance for lamenting. “I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes.” In the words of Carol Bechtel, in this act Job “admits that his own wisdom is limited; he bows to a God whose wisdom is limitless.”

The irony is that rather than rebuking Job for his lament, God twice declares that Job’s friends – who are trying to defend God –  “have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (42:7-8).  God judges the friends for the presumption of speaking for God in a way that assumed Job was somehow to be blamed for his own suffering. Thanking God, lamenting to God – those are healthy human, creaturely things to do. Giving a theoretical theodicy which claims to know God’s reasons for suffering – that is sophistry based on a denial of our finitude and creatureliness. As I mention in the book, I think that there can be a place for a “defense” of the basic rationality of the Christian faith, showing how it can be rational to believe in a good, almighty God even if we don’t know the reasons for evil. But giving a theodicy proper which claims to actually know God’s reasons for allowing evil is dangerous – to our relationship with God and with others. Instead of joining Job’s friends, we can join the Psalmists in bringing grief and protest and joy and thanksgiving before the God of the universe.

Moore: Your book does not shrink from describing the raw realties of suffering.  Like parallel train tracks, it also makes clear that we can truly trust God in the darkest places.  Thanks Todd for writing both an honest and hopeful book!

Pray for Todd: I asked Todd how the Jesus Community could pray for him and here is what he shared: I would welcome anyone to join me in praying Psalm 27, praying that God would continue to graciously show his face to my family and me as we continue to struggle with the enemy of cancer, and I undergo chemotherapy treatments as I teach and write. 

 

 

HITLER’S CROSS

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Hitler's Cross: How the Cross Was Used to Promote the Nazi Agenda - By: Erwin Lutzer<br />

Lutzer, the longtime pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, has made an important contribution to our understanding of Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s Cross is a troubling account of how moral decay and timidity results in disaster. And the disaster, as was the case in Nazi Germany, is usually far more reaching than we could ever imagine.

I appreciated this book very much except for the author’s desire to tie Nazi ideology to a certain view of end times. For those who don’t hold to dispensational theology, they might be tempted to write the author off, and thus would sadly miss an important book.

SEXY NEW YORK CITY!

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New York City is indeed a sexy place.  Since my wife is from the northern part of New Jersey, I have made many trips into the Big Apple.  It never disappoints, but that is the problem…at least for Christians.
Bowman has written a wonderful book on the temptations and trials of Christians who tried to keep pace with the city who could offer an alternative religion of sorts.  And the religion New York City had to offer one hundred years ago (and still does) can seem more compelling than the one that offers a set of beliefs and a Person who has not been seen for 2000 years.
Read about the struggle to make sense of the Christian faith amidst the city that never sleeps.  There is much for us Christians to consider in this well-written book.

LIVING MANY LIVES

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My Patheos review of a very important book:

WHAT A PILGRIMAGE!

A Change of Heart: a Personal and Theological Memoir by Thomas C. Oden

By David George Moore

I first encountered Tom Oden via his courageous and prescient book, After Modernity…What?  Several years later, I did a radio interview with Chris Hall on his terrific book, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers.  Hall who did his Ph.D. with Oden at Drew University, would both team up with a number of scholars to produce the wonderfully conceived, Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture.  The vision and preparation which went into that commentary series is a gift to the body of Christ.  Even though some voiced skepticism about whether such a commentary could be done, the international team of scholars assembled, and its goal to reach a wide audience, came to fruition.  On the latter, a half million copies of the commentary sold during its first ten years, and it is available in languages which cover half the world’s population.

During my radio interview with Chris Hall, I was able to find out more about Oden.  Oden’s pilgrimage from restless radical to courageous enthusiast of all things truly orthodox makes him worthy of close attention. 

What a thrill to find out that InterVarsity would be publishing Oden’s book, A Change of Heart: a Personal and Theological Memoir.  If you have the least bit of interest in listening to someone who is thoughtfully theological and lived many lives in one, then be forewarned.  This book may keep you up late for several nights.  As I read, I had to put governors on how much I read.  “Only twenty-five pages tonight Dave.”  Oden’s book is the type I copiously highlight along with my own marginal system of note taking.  Encouragement and brilliant ideas are on almost every page as my red pencil and black pen attest.

Oden’s memoir is divided by chapters which each cover a decade, from the 1940s, 1950s all the way through to the 2010s.  Oden’s insatiable hunger for learning, his work ethic, commitment to various causes (some terribly misguided as he himself would discover), candor, and friendships, pepper his journey throughout.  

Along with Oden’s move out of radical thought and into Christian orthodoxy you meet all kinds of people.  Oden personally interacted with the likes of Barth, Bultmann, Packer, and Pannenberg.  Those four individuals are emblematic of Oden’s theological and spiritual pilgrimage. 

Oden’s friendships, mentors, and his family life put flesh and blood on his brilliant career.  None is more important than the Jewish scholar, Will Herberg.  Herberg played a formative role in Oden’s life.  As Oden underscores, it is a great irony that Herberg was encouraged to study Judaism by the Christian Niebuhr, and the Jewish scholar Herberg is the very one who encouraged Oden to more deeply study the roots of his Christian heritage. 

Seeking to remind his Methodist denomination that Christian orthodoxy is not only their rightful heritage, but also that which gives stability, has indeed been challenging.  Reading about the Sophia worship that occurred at Oden’s longtime place of employment, Drew University, is arresting and profoundly sad.  Oden tried to address this and other concerns, but he increasingly found his robust orthodoxy on the margins, except with his students.  During Oden’s tenure at Drew he taught a cadre of young scholars (Oden calls them “young fogeys”) who reveled in the riches of the Christian faith which had been rejected by the hubris of modernity.

The Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT) receives some attention.  It is fascinating to hear Oden’s reflections.  Oden shares some of the controversy surrounding ECT, but ends with this: “A year after the second ECT document was published, most of the opposition had died down.”  This is certainly true, but I would have liked to hear Oden’s reflections on whether this was due to ECT never rising to official status in Protestant or Roman Catholics circles.  Oden’s rather breezy account keeps moving along to other issues.

Oden is honest about the tough stuff of life like his beloved wife’s death.  Oden’s partnership and friendship with his beloved Edrita is beautiful to read.  Oden clearly understands suffering, but his hard-won orthodoxy offers an unfailing hope which he now joyously declares to any who will listen.

If you want to learn about a brilliant theologian who is courageous, can write in an endlessly fascinating and accessible manner, and appreciate life stories with all kinds of twists and turns, then this book is for you. 

David George Moore is the author of three books, the most recent being The Last Men’s Book You’ll Ever Need.  He blogs at www.twocities.org and is a regular contributor on the Jesus Creed/Patheos.

 

 

 

 

 

JOHN WESLEY

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The following interview appeared on Patheos:

Fred Sanders is a theologian who teaches in the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University.  Fred’s twitter handle is @fredfredsanders.   His personal web site is www.fredfredfred.com, and he blogs at www.scriptoriumdaily.com.

The following interview was based on Fred’s recent book, Wesley on the Christian Life: The Heart Renewed in Love.

Moore: Years ago, I heard John Piper say that the Arminians of today are nothing like the Arminians of Wesley’s day.  His comment centered on an appreciation for the bigness of God.  What do you think about Piper’s observation?

Sanders: Reading John Wesley can certainly make you look around at contemporary preaching and wonder where all the serious business went. The judgment he pronounced on university students in his day –“you are a generation of triflers, triflers with God, with one another, and with your own souls”–strikes a nerve for us.

But as for Piper’s genial, if somewhat backhanded, compliment to eighteenth-century Arminians in particular, I do think he’s right, especially if he was thinking of “the bigness of God.” Wesley and his ilk were moved by a vision of God’s holiness. That’s what gave them their profound understanding of the depth of sin, their high estimate of the holiness of heart and life that Christians should strive for, and their urgency about proclaiming to gospel. If you take away that vision of God’s holiness, what you’re left with is the dry bones of Arminian doctrine: an overestimation of human capability, a politicized social agenda, a redundant message, theology with the lights dimmed. In brief introductions, I still prefer to call myself Wesleyan rather than Arminian, because there’s a chance the word “Wesleyan” might conjure the image of the older, stronger, nobler kind of Christian.

Then again, I’d be honored to be counted alongside the kind of contemporary Arminians whose work and character are consistently animated by that vision of God’s holiness: Robert Coleman and Tom Oden, for example, or Tim Tennent.

Moore: Your book has endorsements from well-respected Calvinists like Michael Horton and Carl Trueman.  How can Calvinists benefit from reading your biography of Wesley?

Sanders: I was glad to get generous endorsements from a couple of Reformed thinkers who nobody is going to suspect of secretly sliding off in the direction of Arminian theology. I hope those blurbs help Calvinist readers know they can take up this book without catching a disease from its pages.

In the first chapter, I also gathered endorsements of John Wesley from well-respected Calvinists: John Newton’s testimony that “I know of no one to whom I owe more as an instrument of divine grace,” Charles Spurgeon’s striking claim that “if there were wanted two apostles to be added to the number of the twelve, I do not believe that there could be found two men more fit to be so added than George Whitefield and John Wesley,” and J.C. Ryle’s admission that “whether we like it or not, John Wesley was a mighty instrument in God’s hand for good; and, next to George Whitefield, was the first and foremost evangelist of England a hundred years ago.”

I think Calvinist evangelicals need to hear the voice of Wesley because Wesley is unique; God used Wesley’s ministry in a singular way. That means you can’t just find a “Calvinist version” of him and make do with that. You might be able to mash together parts of Whitefield and Edwards to get a lot of what’s great in Wesley, but you’d have to already know what you were looking for. He combined thorough preparation, fluency in Scripture, keen spiritual insight, and a powerful communication style. One modern commentator put it this way: “Parental influence, a classical education, a methodical nature, and a personal crisis on a Pauline scale all combined to make him a man with something to say.”

That’s why, among my other goals for this book, I tried to make it a very Calvinist-friendly introduction to Wesley.

Moore: Why did Wesley marry Molly without consulting Charles, especially when they made an agreement to get the other’s approval beforehand?  John Wesley promoted a rather intense form of accountability in his small group structure, but it seems he violated his own commitment to it.

Sanders: Alas! Wesley married badly, there’s no doubt about that. I remember that when this subject came up in classes at Asbury Theological Seminary during my MDiv, the professors would sadly admit that this great man of God had feet of clay. Acting against the strong advice of his brother Charles and in contradiction to the wishes of his supposedly rigorous accountability group, John Wesley chose to marry, and chose a wife who could not possibly be pleased with his ministry lifestyle. Wesley could have been, and should have been, one of the greatest examples of consecrated singleness in Protestant history. Instead, this aspect of his life is at best a cautionary tale. Actually, the Wesley chapter in your wife’s book Good Christians, Good Husbands? helped me see some of the right lessons to draw from this part of Wesley’s life  ( http://www.amazon.com/Good-Christians-Husbands-Marriage-Ministry/dp/1857924509).

Moore: For those who are mystified by different aspects of Wesley’s theology, none is probably greater than his teaching on Christian perfection.  If this did not mean sinless perfection, what did it mean?

Sanders: What Wesley taught under the heading of Christian perfection was the idea that the process of transformation that begins in regeneration can move forward and reach its goal: entire sanctification. He had an “optimism of grace” about the possibility of experienced growth in Christlikeness, and considered holiness of heart and life to be one of the benefits of union with Christ.

But a lot of things we associate with the term “perfect” Wesley goes on to repudiate: Christian perfection, unlike absolute perfection, is a state that can be improved on the one hand and lost on the other. Why call if “perfection” if you’re going to backpedal in that way? As far as I can tell, Wesley’s answer is that he was using clear and direct biblical terminology. He habitually read the New Testament in Greek, where the teleios word group is abundant. English translations, in Wesley’s day and even more so in ours, handle that word group very flexibly: it gets translated sometimes as perfect, sometimes as mature, sometimes as complete, and so on. Wesley was pretty dogmatic about making the word “perfect” cover that full range of meanings. As a result, his controversial writing on the subject can sometimes be tedious: A Plain Account of Christian Perfection is one of his masterpieces, but it’s also a document he assembled by cutting and pasting all the arguments he’d had about this word over the course of his ministry, and gathering up all the things he does not mean by the word “perfect.” To make Wesley’s vision of radical personal transformation really work in our era, you’d have to paraphrase it conceptually and re-contextualize it. I think Tom Noble’s recent book Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting (http://www.amazon.com/Holy-Trinity-Theology-Christian-Perfecting-ebook/dp/B00BNE00T8) does a good job at that task.

Moore: Reading about the massive influence of the Puritans on Wesley was fascinating.  Would you unpack that some for us?

Sanders: This was a fun part of the research for me: I became convinced that Wesley’s church renewal program is best understood against the backdrop of the Puritan movement, especially the so-called “Church Puritans” who stayed within the Church of England. Previously I had thought of him as a British version of continental Pietism. The Pietist linkage is real, but the Puritan connection is more organic: Wesley’s grandparents on both sides were Puritans who had been in various ways censured for being too red-hot in their evangelicalism for the Church of England: one grandfather was imprisoned for refusing to use the Book of Common Prayer, and the other was ejected by the Act of Uniformity and suffered the confiscation of his property for hosting an unauthorized small group (conventicle)!

But in the following generation, both of Wesley’s parents rejoined the Church of England, and were Anglicans by conviction.  In some ways John’s Methodism was a synthesis of the two generations, helping bring Puritan practices and sensibilities into the Church of England mainstream. As Gordon Rupp says, “The Puritans had used itinerant preachers, lay preachers, field preaching; in their smaller conventicles they exercised a stricter Christian discipline than that of formal Christianity. They had been exponents, in a vast and impressive literature of spiritual and moral and dogmatic theology, of doctrines of ‘inward religion,’ of a personal walk with God, of conversion, assurance, perfection.”

In other words, one way to look at Wesley’s success as a reformer is that he and his people “got away with” Puritanism inside the Church of England.

Moore: Related to the former question, what did Wesley mean by “heart religion” and was it similar to the teaching of Jonathan Edwards on the affections?

Sanders: Yes, Wesley’s teaching on “heart religion” was very similar to what Edwards taught about the religious affections. The main danger in his time was an emphasis on external religion, a kind of formalism that reduced Christianity to a set of doctrines plus a set of duties plus liturgy. Against this, Wesley insisted that true religion was a supernatural intervention of God’s grace in the innermost core of a person’s being: the heart. And that invisible, inward work of God necessarily brought with it a transformation that could be registered on an emotional level. As Wesley and Edwards insisted, you can’t have the fruit of the Spirit without your emotional life being transformed: love, joy, peace and the rest may not be merely feelings, but they can’t possibly be less than feelings.

Moore: Wesley hated slavery.  Whitefield used slaves for his orphanages.  Do we have any record of the two discussing the topic of slavery?

Sanders: Great question, since these two greatest figures in the Great Awakening had such opposite views on the issue of African slavery in the colonies. I grew immensely in my appreciation of George Whitefield during the writing of this book: I used to think of him as a second rate, down-market knock-off of John Wesley, frankly. But Whitefield was actually several steps ahead of Wesley on a number of crucial points, taking the early lead in outdoor preaching and understanding the strategic importance of the international scope of the revival. But there’s no covering up Whitefield’s role in supporting colonial slavery. We even have letters from him advocating the re-legalization of African slave labor in Georgia after the period in which it had been outlawed.

From Wesley, on the other hand, we have his published denunciations of the system, plus the last letter he ever wrote: a letter to Wilberforce encouraging him to carry on with his “glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature… Go on in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.”

I’m not aware of any letters or discussions between Wesley and Whitefield on the subject of slavery. Wesley’s outspoken position really takes away the possibility of saying that Whitefield was just a man of his time and shared the same moral blind spots of his contemporaries. Wesley was a man of the same times, and came very definitely to opposite conclusions.

Moore: In researching and writing this book, was there anything that surprised you, or even caused you to change your mind on Wesley?

Sanders: I started the research by re-reading a lot of Wesley’s own writings, just getting immersed in the primary texts again, most of which I hadn’t read since seminary. I had a hunch that while Wesley was a great organizer and activist, he wasn’t really gifted at systematic thought or strict consistency. I’d still say that he doesn’t exactly lead with systematic-theological rigor –after all, he bequeathed to the movement not a systematic theology, but a set of sermons, a Bible commentary, and a hymnal. Nevertheless, I found a kind of key to his thought that really helped me pull together everything he wrote and did. Here’s the key: He was devoted to the letter of First John, and considered it the capstone of progressive revelation, the New Testament’s final word on the Christian life. It functioned for him not so much as a canon with the canon, but as the synthesis of all that had gone before. He modeled his preaching on its combination of profundity and simplicity; he habitually located doctrines within the dynamics of its argument; and he eagerly integrated Paul’s theology into a larger Johannine framework. I call John Wesley the theologian of First John, and I have come to see that as the key to his whole program.

I think it’s hyperbolic, and in poor theological taste, to pick a figure from church history and say that God was saying something to his church through that figure. But insofar as one of the saints shapes his or her ministry around the distinctive message of a portion of scripture, I think we can say something like this: he heard what God said in that book of the Bible with more acuity and sensitivity than anyone before him, and by doing so he put the theology of First John into action in the world.