Five movements strike me about the message of this sermon after engaging with the previous sermons:
The Kingdom of God is a sense of peace (confidence).
This sense of peace is separated from “forms or ceremonies” and “orthodoxy or right opinions”.
“True religion is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” with righteousness being love of God and love of neighbour as yourself.
Yet such perfect obedience of “true religion” is impossible.
So, repent, believe and know the peace of the Kingdom of God
In this sermon, Wesley is clearly still struggling with the nature of faith. In that struggle, he re-affirms faith as a confidence in/from the heart that brings peace, joy and righteousness. Through this re-affirmation, faith, for Wesley, appears to remain firmly in the affective. Faith is not participation in the activities of the Christian life. It is not perfect obedience. It is not intellectual assent. In a sense, it is an “utter dependence” on God which recognises the futility of any other approach to reconciliation with God.
This sense of “absolute dependence” is generally more associated with the later work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), especially Der Christliche Glaube (The Christian Faith) (1830), but published in earlier forms (1821-1822). This sermon by Wesley is dated in the early 1740s.
The turn to the “affective” goes hand in hand with the turn to the rational of Enlightenment intellectualism, so confining an understanding of “absolute dependence” to an emotion or feeling (particularly as we understand emotions/feelings now) is perhaps too narrow. For the first time in my engagement with the sermons, I’m wondering whether Wesley’s call to a religion of the heart is not about an affective state but a volition state (a state of the will), notwithstanding that faith is always a gift of God’s grace. In this sense, Wesley’s notion of faith would fit far more closely with understandings of faith as metanoia, a changing of the mind (not intellectually, but self-consciously).
Indeed, for Schleiermacher, the sense of absolute dependence may be more “intuitional” than emotional:
I.3 The piety that constitutes the basis of all ecclesial communities, regarded purely in and of itself, is neither a knowing nor a doing but a distinct formation of feeling, or of immediate self-consciousness.
I.4 However diverse they might be, what all the expressions of piety have in common, whereby they are at the same time distinguished from all other feelings—thus the self-same nature of piety—is this: that we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent or, which intends the same meaning, as being in relation with God. (2016 Ed.)
Daniël P. Veldsman (2019) describes Schleiermacher’s understanding of faith thus:
For Schleiermacher, religious experience (as “feelings of piety”) is not founded either on intellectual doctrinal beliefs or on the acceptance of moral principles. In addition, its core is also not in the first place to be understood as thinking or acting. It is to be taken as intuition (i.e. an immediate non-conceptual engagement with the universe as its object) and feeling (i.e. the subjective affective tone which follows in the wake of such apprehension). The two are inseparable, although they can be separated in reflecting on their significance. (p. 2)
For Wilfred Cantwell Smith (Faith and Belief, 1979, Princeton University Press), faith as existing in the realm of volition is an earlier understanding than faith as intellectual or affective. Noting the origins of the Latin term credo as a compound of cor, cordis, “heart” and do “to put, place, set or give”, Smith observes the role of acts of allegiance in an early account of Christian baptism (Cyril of Jerusalem ca. 315-386):
There would seem little question but that as a crucial term used at a crucial moment in a crucial liturgical act of personal engagement—namely, Christian baptism—credo came close to its root meaning of “I set my heart on”, “I give my heart to” (“I hereby give my heart to Christ”; “I herein give my heart to God the Father”;…); or, more generally: “I hereby commit myself” (“to…”), “I pledge allegiance”. (p. 76)
Smith likens this creedal affirmation to the covenantal commitment of marriage (pp. 74-75), i.e. it is not an intellectual pledge, or an emotive pledge but a pledge of allegiance/commitment.
In this understanding, faith is not about assent to propositional statements (cf. “right opinions” in Wesley’s terms), or about feelings of the heart (popularist and persistent interpretations of Wesleyan faith), or about participation in the activities of the Christian life (“forms or ceremonies” in Wesley’s terms), but about a turning towards God made possible by the gift of awareness of relationship with God.
What does the gift of the consciousness of one’s relationship to God bring? For Wesley, it seems that repentance followed by belief is key; but is not “belief” (faith) already present if one has turned towards a consciousness of the dependence on God? There is a certain criss-crossing of ideas here. This sermon disrupts any easy understandings of what faith is for John Wesley. The journey continues…
Additional References
Schleiermacher, F. (2016). Christian faith : a new translation and critical edition (; T. N. Tice, C. L. Kelsey, & E. G. Lawler, Trans.). Westminster John Knox Press. https://www.vlebooks.com/vleweb/product/openreader?id=none&isbn=9781611646757
Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. 1979. Faith and Belief. Princeton University Press.
Veldsman, D. (2019). “To feel with and for Friedrich Schleiermacher: On religious experience.” HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies, 75(4), 5 pages. doi:https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v75i4.5537