OK Drew old chum - I’m in for a penny and in or a pound so I’ll plonk the post on the holiness Movement down here first (I wrote it originally for Sherman’s attention)
I quote from the very fascinating book, ‘One with God: Salvation as Deification (Theosis) and Justification’ by the Lutheran Ecumenist Veli-Matti Karkkainen (pages 74-77)
‘Wesley drew from the well of Eastern spirituality in his readings of the Eastern father’s spiritual texts; in fact he preferred the Eastern teachers over the Westerners. These included Athanasius [and not the bloke or committee of blokes who wrote the Creed], Basil, Jon Chrysostom, Clement of Alexandria, Clement of Rome, Dionysus the Areopagite, Gregory of Nazianzus, Ephraem Syrus [that is ‘the Syrian’], Origen, and others…
…[But] like any Western revivalist of [his] time [Wesley] was very critical of several features of the Eastern Church and abhorred, for example, its rigid liturgy, as he saw it.
However, Wesley learned s many spiritual lessons from the Eastern fathers, for example from Clement of Alexandria that there are three kinds of persons; the unconverted, the converted but immature, and the mature or perfect Christian…In John and Charles Wesley’s Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), a poem is titled ‘On Clement of Alexandrians’ description of a Perfect Christian’…
…This kind of taxonomy, of course, sets his theology in tension with the standard Protestant view of justification. Wesley, of course, knew the category of ‘justification’ and… gave due attention to it. Even though his own spiritual journey was not marked by anything desperate like that of Luther’s – for Wesley the agony was over the ‘deeper life’ rather than guilt as such – [his] emphasis on entire sanctification and perfection led him to highlight the importance of pardoning and being justified too. But, together with his experiential emphasis, Wesley preferred to centre the Christian life around sanctification rather than justification. IN this insistence on the need for a real transformation of the believer’s life, Wesley not only approaches the ethos of the Eastern Orthodoxy tradition but also the part of Western spirituality that has marked by Roman Catholic theology…
…It is interesting to note how Wesley as the leading champion of modern Protestant revivalist traditions ended up cherishing the kind of spiritual exercises that have always been treasured dearly in both Eastern and Western mystical and spiritualistic traditions…’Like the ancient Greek Christian ascetics, Wesley believed that the soul’s therapy could be facilitated through ascetic cures…
…Jurgen Moltmann correctly notes that for Wesley sin is a sickness that requires healing rather than a breach of the law requiring atonement. Therefore, Wesley is less interested than Reformation theology in the permanent justification of the sinner and more interested in the process of moral renewal. Ted Campbell has argued that Wesley regarded the Gospel as a ‘medicine’, a cure. The result was that Wesley ‘developed something like a scientific taxonomy of spiritual problems with which his ministers could diagnose and cure.
…By participating in the life of grace, a life given by the Holy Spirit, the Christian is enabled to love God, other people, and the whole of creation with perfect love. It is noteworthy that for Wesley this vision of the transformation of life not only encompassed individual life but also the whole creation – another indication of similar orientations between the East and Wesley. In fact, for Wesley the category of ‘new creation’ combined in a critical way both individual and cosmic aspects of salvation. His was a vision of the very real transformation in the creature and the world that salvation brings about. The note of hope and expected transformation virtually sings its way through any f the sermons produced by Wesley in the final years of his long life. The following passage from his 1783 sermon ‘The General Spread of the Gospel’ echoes this hope in a most beautiful way:
‘God is already renewing the face of the earth: And we have strong reason to hope that the work he hath begun, he will carry on unto the day of the Lord Jesus; that he will never intermit this blessed work of his Spirit, until he has fulfilled all his promises; until he hath put a period too sin, and misery, and infirmity, and death; and re-established universal holiness ad happiness, and caused all the inhabitants of the earth to sing together, ‘’Hallelujah, the Lord God omnipotent reigneth!’’
As is clear in this passage, the new creation is cosmic in its overall dimensions and implications, but is focussed for Wesley in the renewal of persons. “Ye know that the great end of religion is to renew our heart in the image of God,” he proclaimed. The renewing of the face of the earth begins, therefore, with the renewing of its inhabitants. This is the pattern followed by the Eastern fathers, linking cosmic redemption to human salvation’
Now I quote from me: ‘Wesley was not a Universalist – but certainly his hell fire and damnation stage belonged to his youth; and as he matured he believed in the wider hope, a fully inclusive vision of who God might save. He had a truly Ecumenical vision and a heart filled with truly ecumenical charity. After he died the Methodist movement split in Britain into factions nobly the establishment and socially conservative Wesleyan Methodists and the more radical and working class Primitive Methodists (which later gave birth to the Salvation Army). Certainly the worldwide Methodist traditions today – particularly those that stress Wesley’s teachings on holiness/sanctification/theosis (and this would include parts of the Charismatic movement) – have rich resources to draw on in Wesley for a faith that can include Universalism and, indeed, concern for the environment. Indeed the pre-Keswick Broadlands conferences of Christian Universalists owed much to Wesley as well as to William Law and to Quaker spirituality’.