Wesleyan Heritage...

A Wesleyan Theology of Salvation and Social Liberation...

By Timothy L. Smith*
Former Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University
(A paper presented to the Caribbean Nazarene Regional Conference, n.d.)
(word count: 1,969; reading time: under 10 minutes)

Many argue that Christianity does not offer a solution to the social problems of the modern age. They insist that Christian reformers, acting on biblical principles, must accept an alliance with systems of thought based on human experience, whether Marxist, Rastafarian, or Voodoo. That is not true, at least for Wesleyans. Granted, the Bible is not primarily a book on social or economic policy, and “liberty” means something quite different to Christians and Jews than it does to the secular world. But any person who suggests that God’s Word does not reveal divine care and concern in this present world for the poor and oppressed is libeling the God of love whom we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The gospel of salvation and social liberation that we proclaim rests, first of all, upon a scriptural analysis of the condition of the poor. Poverty and the oppression and injustice that both the Bible and human experience tell us often accompany it stem from the rebellion of human beings against God. That rebellion is shared by men and women, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, whether they are white, black, or brown, and without regard to their places of origin on this planet. We all were there in the Fall. We are akin in sin. And we all may come together at the Cross, be joined together as living members of Christ’s Body, and be empowered by the Holy Spirit to build new lives of love and holiness for ourselves, and a kingdom of God for all humankind.

Moreover, the Word of God teaches that the oppression and exploitation of the poor is a persistent temptation to all those who have wealth or power. On this the Hebrew Scriptures are plainly in full agreement with the New Testament. Moses warned all Israel of that exploitation in the Book of Deuteronomy, the prophet Amos made ringing declarations against it, and Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel promised that the Messianic Age would deliver all of us from it.

This scriptural analysis, furthermore, deplores the tendency of both those who have much of this world’s goods and those who have little to defer any righting of the balance until the Second Coming. Our religion’s ethical judgment upon exploitation as it is practiced now forbids this deferral of doing right until that great day. The gospel is set to deliver us from all sin, now, including any willing participation in social or economic evil. In my country, a burst of millenarianism in both North and South 150 years ago undergirded an appeal that human slavery be accepted as a necessary evil in the present age. When Jesus appeared, these persons professed to believe, the proper time to strike the chains of bondage from persons of color would come. By contrast, those who believed we must join our efforts to the unseen ones of the Holy Spirit to prepare a Kingdom for the King stood against slavery, at last violently, it turned out. And the bloodiest war in human history until that date left a heritage of bitterness that even now has not fully gone away. If those whose social hopes were in Christ had followed His methods of love and forgiveness toward evildoers, they would have raised taxes to buy the Negroes their freedom and brought reconciliation to our land. So, today, in the Caribbean; we must contend with the powers of darkness in high places, but with weapons that are Christian, not carnal. And always we must put our hopes in the God of kindliness and mercy.

Secondly, Wesleyan religion, like that of the Early Church, preaches the biblical promises to the poor. Those promises are both individual and social, temporal and eternal. When Jesus appeared after His baptism at the synagogue in His home city, Nazareth, He asked for the scroll of Isaiah’s prophecy and said that the passage in Isaiah 61 was now fulfilled before their very eyes (Luke 4:18-21).

When George Whitefield and John Wesley set out to revive primitive Christianity in 18th-century England, they kept before them both the Christian ideology (that Christ’s kingdom was to spread over the whole earth) and the Christian ethic (that pure and undefiled religion was to care for the widows and orphans and keep oneself unspotted from the world).

Wesley’s first church building in London, the Old Foundery, was located outside the walls of the city, among the barrios, the shantytowns where the poor people lived. So was the beautiful chapel he later built three blocks away. His habit in moments of great spiritual blessing was to celebrate liberation from the love of money by calling for the collection plates to be passed to enable the congregation to buy wool and flax to give to poor widows to spin. When he decided he should be married, as Frank Baker’s recent complete edition of Wesley’s correspondence makes plain, he chose Grace Murray, a godly but poor person. She had proved her mettle both socially and spiritually, among the unemployed working people of Newcastle upon Tyne. The long correspondence revealing John Wesley’s deep sorrow and forgiving love of those who fetched her away from him because she was an impoverished commoner reveals the completeness of Wesley’s identification with the poor.

The same expression of perfect love characterized the Church of the Nazarene’s founding generation. The oldest congregation in what became the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene was organized at Providence, R.I. It was founded after the Methodist pastor and bishop refused to extend recognition to the mission to poor people that Fred Hillary and others had carried on. J.O. McClurkan, founder of Trevecca College and leader of the congregations in Tennessee that later became Nazarene but were then called the Pentecostal Mission, spent his lifetime lifting broken and poor people in East Nashville from the degradation and despair that sin had helped fasten upon them. Little wonder that when Phineas Bresee and other moderately well-off Methodists went “out under the stars” to found the California wing of the Nazarene denomination, he announced and carried on throughout his lifetime a church that would minister daily to both the bodies and souls of persons captive to sin.

It is so, today in Haiti, thanks in part to the role of missionaries and national leaders. Nazarene Compassionate Ministries, spreading from those who have responded to needs in this land and those of our other brothers and sisters in the Caribbean, are crying, “Justice,” all over the world. The promise of salvation we preach to the poor is both social and spiritual. In the Body of Christ it is not right to withhold anything that is wholesome and liberating from a person in need.

Finally, the ways in which the Wesleyan form of salvation theology gives hope to the oppressed needs careful reiteration. Its substance can be summarized in five points, an honorable number in Christian thought.

1. Temporal as well as eternal hope rests, in our view, upon the experience of sanctification. That experience, as Wesley never tired of saying, begins in the new birth, or regeneration, and continues daily as the Holy Spirit teaches us from the Scripture how to walk in Christlike-ness. It comes to a second climax, a ‘second blessing, properly so-called,” in the experience of cleansing from all that is properly called sin. But far from stopping there, as Wesley was wont to say, loving God with all our hearts enables us daily to deal with our human shortcomings, face up to our prejudices and long-held errors of judgment, and continually reexamine our ethical lives in the light of the glory that shines from the face of Jesus Christ. The result, of course, is power to live in ever-increasing holiness. To be daily delivered from the enervating effects of evil makes us better and more useful employees, more efficient in the use of our time, and triumphant over all those things that keep poor individuals from making the most of their lives. Such Christian liberation makes us better in our studies, in social relationships, in fellowship with other Christians, and in all aspects of our economic life. Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, and even the excessive use of harmless drugs like caffeine and sugar pose no threat to the well-being of such a redeemed person.

2. Christian prophets, whether laypersons or ministers, must recognize and challenge social or structural injustice wherever it appears. The poor are not oppressed simply by their sins but by an exploitative society. To face up to social wrong—unfair wages, desperate housing conditions, the reign of ignorance and deference to the idols of race or class or nationalism—is the obligation of every Christian. In both word and action we must resist evil, but always in loving willingness to turn the other cheek, go a second mile, and give our cloak to the one that demands our coat.

3. Another facet of Wesleyan liberation thought is deliverance from the terrible consequences of violence. The peaceableness of Jesus is as much our joy and duty to imitate as His courageous opposition to social sin. In Samaria long ago, beside a well, He spoke with both firmness and compassion to an immoral divorcée of a despised race. And He spoke the same way to the moneychangers in the house of the Lord. This righteousness and compassion, not a rope woven hastily of little cords, were the real symbols of His authority that day.

4. We are taught and enabled to rely upon the Holy Spirit’s refusal to compromise in any way with discrimination on account of race or sex or national origin; with injustice done by those who for the moment hold political, economic, or military power over other persons; or with the covetousness, the greed, of both rich and poor. Deliverance of the oppressed from such evils is God’s will, however slowly and incompletely we His creatures, including Christians, have managed to follow that will.

5. We Wesleyans, finally, hold that after all the good that we can do is done, life in this world will still often be unfair Job discovered this fact long ago. The real argument in that book was not between Job and his miserable comforters or Job and his wife, but between the man on the ash heap and God. His wife, indeed, realized that fact and said in so many words that if there was trouble between Job and God, she believed in her husband, and God was wrong. His Heavenly Father, however, taught Job that despite the general rule that good persons are better off even in this life than if they had been bad, those who love God with all their hearts sometimes suffer unbearably. At such times, as all the race knows, their only recourse is a vision of our eternal Redeemer standing in the latter day upon the earth and the assurance that with our own eyes we shall see Him and not another He is Lord. The King is coming. Maranatha.

Christians stand in wonder and thanksgiving before this vision. It is not an opiate, not simply pie in the sky. It is, at bottom, a far wiser estimate of human realities than either Marxism or the social gospel or professedly Catholic liberation theology ever thought of. It combines in the Christian’s gaze faith, hope, and love. That love will outlast both faith and hope. It is eternal.

*About Timothy L. Smith

(from the Nazarene Archives) Timothy L. Smith, considered by many “the dean of Nazarene church history,” passed away in 1997. Smith is the author of Revivalism and Social Reform, as well as Called Unto Holiness (1962), a history of Nazarene origins and early development.

Smith's first book, Revivalism and Social Reform, was a major publication and has been in print nearly continuously since 1957. In it, Smith countered then–prevalent ideas about revivalism. At the time, many scholars assumed that revivalism was a conservative force that impeded change, but Smith argued that revivalism often expanded visions and created energies that initiated, rather than hindered, social reform. He underscored the role of evangelical abolitionists like Charles Finney and Orange Scott in the antislavery campaign, and men and women with hearts for the poor like Phoebe Palmer and B. T. Roberts, who refused to forsake the city but saw it, instead, as their venue for service. Moreover, Smith was the first to draw attention to Mrs. Palmer’s leadership of the early Wesleyan-holiness movement.