The British Pietistic movement, which originated in the seventeenth century, emphasized a living, personal relationship between Christ and the believer, along with a personal moral purity that was an outgrowth of spiritual union with Jesus. Through this personal relationship with Jesus, Pietism valued feeling and experience over reason in the
life of the Christian.1 Rooted in the Pietistic tradition, John Wesley (1703-1791) and the Methodist movement strongly emphasized the role of emotions in the Christian life, particularly in the moment of conversion.
In his journal entries recounting his legendary moment of religious conversion on Aldersgate Street in London, an event whereby Wesley experienced an emotional
confirmation of his faith, he describes this event with an emphasis on his personal
feelings: “I felt my heart strangely warmed…an assurance was given me that [Christ] had taken away my sins.”2 Shortly before this event, Wesley had recounted how he had long doubted whether this inner sense of salvific assurance was a necessary part of conversion, having been a practicing Christian from a young age onward. Shortly before his
Aldersgate experience, in the midst of a debate over this issue with Moravian missionary Peter Böhler, Wesley consulted scripture to clear up his confusion, attempting to explore Bible passages on conversion without bias toward his own beliefs. Finding he was wrong as far as scripture was concerned, he nonetheless believed “that experience would never agree with the literal interpretation of those Scriptures,”3 and thus he would still be correct that such an experience of conversion was not required for salvation. The next day Böhler introduced him to three individuals who testified to personal experience of conversion and Wesley became “thoroughly convinced”4 of the need for such a transformative religious experience. His prayers for evidence of his redemption were
1 For a fuller history on Victorian Pietism, see: Jay. The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel; Owen Chadwick. The Victorian Church. 3rd ed. 2 vols. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1971; and Valentine Cunningham. Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Clarendon, 1975.
2 John Wesley. John Wesley. Ed. Albert C. Coulter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980, 66.
3 Ibid, 65.
4 Ibid.
answered shortly thereafter at Aldersgate where Wesley experienced an emotional encounter with Christ that he believed confirmed his salvation.
It is particularly striking that at one point in his Aldersgate narrative, Wesley admits that he would only believe the words of scripture if they were supported by the experiences of individual believers. His statement bears resemblance to Immanuel Kant’s opening claim in his Critique of Pure Reason that “although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience”5 in that
Wesley’s understanding of a particular theological tenet begins with human experience which, in turn, verifies the pre-existence of that theological belief within scripture.
Wesley often taught the supremacy of scripture in the formation of theological doctrine,6 and in his Aldersgate story he emphasizes his interest in what response scripture has for his questions. Yet, in the end, he is dependent on contemporary human experience in order to verify the biblical text, thus elevating experience to at least an equal footing with scripture. Though it is impossible to say what his response to the theological question of conversion would have been had Böhler not offered him examples of individuals ready to affirm their embodiment of the doctrine in question, it is at least clear in Wesley’s
recounting of his story that he remained skeptical of the biblical teaching up until the point that he heard the testimonies of Böhler’s friends. Thus, Wesley is dependent on personal experience as an aid for the interpretation of the biblical text. In this case,
5 Immanuel Kant. “Revised Introduction, 2nd Ed.” Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, 136.
6 Wesley wrote, “Try all things by the written word, and let all bow down before it. You are in danger of enthusiasm every hour, if you depart ever so little from scripture; yea, or from the plain literal meaning of the text.” (John Wesley. John Wesley, 361.) The Wesleyan Quadrilateral, a concept developed by Professor Albert C. Coutler in the 1970s , theorizes that Wesley used four sources for formulating theological doctrine: Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and Experience, but that Scripture always was the prime source of doctrine for Wesley. (Ted A. Campbell. “Authority and the ‘Wesleyan Quadrilateral.’” T & T Clark Companion to Methodism. Ed. Charles Yrigoyen, Jr. London: T & T Clark, 2010, 61-62.)
though Wesley is coming from a different place, he echoes Strauss’ statement that what
“we experience as members of the Christian church is a strengthening of our
consciousness of God, in its relation to our sensuous existence”7 so that one’s “natural and social life” become the means of understanding God. In each case, the men look to experience as a means of forming theological beliefs. Throughout his preaching career, Wesley continued to emphasize that theology cannot be separated from the experiential, emotional life of the believer, using the phrase “religion of the heart” repeatedly to describe Christianity.8
John Wesley’s movement led religious revivals all over England; as such, Methodism proved influential not only with Dissenters, but throughout British culture as a whole. As Owen Chadwick has argued, the influence of Methodism was particularly felt among Evangelicals within the Church of England who adopted a pietistic emphasis on morality, daily scripture reading, and the role of ‘feeling’ in Christian conversion and life.9
Wesley’s interpretation of scripture through the lens of experience is not dissimilar to George Eliot’s response to the Bible as a young adult, influenced by both her Anglican upbringing and close relationships with her aunt, who was a Methodist preacher, and Maria Lewis, her teacher and close friend who was a pious Evangelical. As both Elisabeth Jay and Owen Chadwick have detailed, Evangelicalism, the so-called ‘low-church’ group within the Church of England, and its theological beliefs were largely shaped by the Pietistic movement and Dissenting groups such as the Methodists—though
7 Strauss. The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 789.
8 John Wesley. Sermons on Several Occasions. Hudson: William E. Norman, 1810, 46, 91, 201, 216, 218.
See discussion on Wesley’s use of the phrase: D. Stephen and Stanley Hauerwas. “Theological Ethics.” The Oxford Handbook of Methodist Studies. William J. Abram and James E. Kirby, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009, 639.
9 Chadwick. The Victorian Church, Vol. I, 440.
the Evangelicals remained within the Established Church.10 Thus, the main influences in the first two decades of Eliot’s life, her parents, aunt, and mentor Maria Lewis, laid a foundation emphasizing Pietistic values such as the importance of scripture, morality, and experiential feeling that were to have a life-long impact on her beliefs and writing. Eliot’s novels and letters, particularly the letters written in early adulthood, are filled with
references and allusions to scripture.Her early letters also frequently mention sermons and reflections on her developing spirituality.11 From an early age, her life experiences became a means of interpreting scripture; likewise, scripture became a means of interpreting her experiences—both scripture and experience contributing to a
hermeneutic that resulted in the embodiment of biblical narratives and symbols. As she noted many years later in a review of Robert Mackay’s Progress of the Intellect, religious ideas become dead if they are not related to the real-life experiences held by individuals within a culture. Eliot writes:
[I]f, by a survey of the past, it can be shown how each age and each race has had a faith and a symbolism suited to its need and its stage of development, and that for succeeding ages to dream of retaining the spirit along with the forms of the past, is as futile as the embalming of the dead body in the hope that it may one day be resumed by the living soul.12
Eliot here notes that just as society is constantly evolving, the religious needs of a particular culture change as well. Furthermore, she points out that the religious beliefs of each era become shaped in such a way as to address the collective needs of individual
10 See: Chadwick. The Victorian Church: An Ecclesiastical History of England, Vol. I, 441; Jay. The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, 16-19; and Jay. Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain, 1-23.
11 One such example is a letter to her uncle Samuel Evans, where Eliot writes: “I feel increasingly that nothing but the enjoyment of God’s favour, walking in the light of His countenance, and daily progressing fitness for His presence and the companionship of the saints in light, can give real satisfaction.” (“GE to Samuel Evans, Foleshill, 2 October 1841.” GEL. Vol. 1, 112.) Later in the letter, she quotes from the Psalms (113).
12 Eliot. “The Progress of the Intellect, as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews. By Robert William MacKay. London: John Chapman. 1850,” 354.
societies. Therefore, doctrine necessarily is constantly evolving, lest it becomes dead.
Eliot’s understanding of the development of religion connects these shifting beliefs to how individuals experience their lives. Eliot here echoes Strauss’ call for the authentic history of Christ to be found in the contemporary lives of His followers. Eliot’s statement demonstrates the influence Higher Critical theology had on her later understanding of religion, but it also reflects her earlier Pietistic upbringing with its stress on the centrality of personal experience in the life of the believer. John Wesley, with his emphasis on the universal applicability of the literal meaning of scripture, would not have agreed with Eliot’s statement, but, nonetheless, both he and Eliot allowed religious beliefs to be governed by strong ties to personal experience—ultimately emphasizing a desire for biblical narratives to find their true meaning within the embodied experiences of faithful followers of Christ.