Much of my research time is now taken up preparing lectures I'm scheduled to deliver at South Wales Baptist College in a few weeks time. Given the general title Evangelical Spirituality, I've chosen to explore the role of Charles Wesley's hymns in helping give shape and content to emergent Evangelical spirituality. The combination of experience, theology, scriptural discourse and rhetorical skill are all evident in the remarkable literary achievement of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists.
Edited by his brother John, Charles wrote most of the hymns gathered and orgainsed into a handbook of the spiritual theology and theological experience of the Evangelical Revival; it is a key source of early Evangelical theology. Charles Wesley is too easily eclipsed by John, but in recent years there has been a revival of scholarly activity focusing not only on his hymns, which are magnificently presented in the Bicentennial Edition, but on other aspects of Charles life and contribution to the Evangelical revival. The critical notes, Introduction, and comprehensive indices of the Bicentennial Edition have made this book one of my most cherished possessions, especially since mine is the early Oxford Edition, beautifully bound in Oxford blue and decorated with John Wesley's monogram. This month S T Kimbrough and others publish the first full critical edition of Charles' Journal in two volumes; and a few years ago Oxford printed a critical edition of his sermons. Then too, several important biographical and theological studies add to the growing list of monographs and secondary studies. It's a good time to be studying the hymns of Wesley, and I'll do a post soon of the key resources, primary and secondary.
My own specific interest at present is the rhetorical and polemical use of language, poetic skill and device, and the pastoral strategy that can be discerned in Charles' work. Theological imagination, speculative mysticism reined in by biblical constraint, doctrinally definite assertion having to accommodate bold even reckless aspiration for all and every blessing made available by an infinite grace. Charles' theology is not for the faint hearted conservative scared of overstating the divine readiness to bless. Amongst his more adventurous efforts are a number of hymns on the Triune God, in the form of prayers that the eternal Trinity come in renewing power to indwell and renew the human heart. The renewal of God's image in the redeemed, renewed and perfected heart is the definitive goal of Charles Wesley's theology. He never, ever, underestimated the possibilities of divine grace and eternal love as they worked on fallen, fallible human nature with redemptive intent. If that gave his hymns an unsettling note of extravagance, Charles would have preferred that to a theology always wanting to qualify and limit grace to the reach of human reason, even the sanctified reason of the theologically timid.
Come, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
Whom one all-perfect God we own,
Restorer of thine image lost,
Thy various offices make known;
Display, our fallen souls to raise,
The whole economy of grace.
.
O that we now, in love renewed,
Might blameless in thy sight appear;
Wake we in thy similitude,
Stamped with the Triune character;
Flesh, spirit, soul to thee resign
And live and die entirely thine!
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