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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
For Wesley there was nothing strange in the idea of a
continuing process of Grace. Modern research workers have
welcomed the evidence that his own conversion is to be seen as
part of a continuing development. A Swedish theologian,
Harald Lindstrom,’ thinks, on the other hand, that Wesley did
experience an evangelical conversion. In 1725 he underwent a
revival ‘according to the Law’ that was accompanied by a
change brought about by an act of will, while an ‘evangelical’
conversion followed by an important development in religious
insight and spontaneity occurred in 1738.
Were the thirteen intervening years one long groping after
salvation characterised by dead orthodoxy and sterile
ecclesiasticism, while the event of 24th May 1738 marked the
beginning of a life of faith and practical religious mysticism in stark
contrast with the earlier period?
That Wesley experienced something new on 24th May can
hardly be denied. It was not a moral reformation: although we
know he had had a number of setbacks, he was not morally
bankrupt. It was not a change of cult. He did not break with
the life or ideals that took shape in ‘The Holy Club’ at Oxford.
Nor was his reorientation due to any change of creed, though
Luther’s foreword to the Letter to The Romans played so great a
part in the events of the memorable evening in May. John
Wesley lived and died a clergyman of the Church of
England.
But at his conversion John Wesley moved from a state of
Christian living governed by law to another marked by a
strict and single-minded evangelism. 24th May marked the
boundary line between a religious past and present. Such an
experience is often the sequel to a puberty conversion or an
earlier religious crisis of decision.
The whole history of John Wesley’s religious development
well illustrates the importance, both from the psychological and
the religious standpoint, of what may be called the ‘pre-history
of conversion’. |
Where conversion itself is regarded as a stage in a process of
Grace it is taken for granted that certain religious states have
preceded it. There has been a ‘call’ and a ‘revival’. A person
may remain in one of these more elementary states because he
1 John Wesleys omvăndelse, Stockholm, 1938.
204
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