Does a Wesleyan view of grace lead to a more missional worldview?

*For Part 2, "Does a Corporate View of the Doctrine of Election lead to a more missional worldview?" click here.

In his “Framework for Missional Christianity” series, Missional leader Alan Hirsch writes (bold mine):

One of the most basic assumptions of the incarnational missionary is to assume God is already involved in every person’s life and is calling them to himself through his Son. Our mindset should not be the prevalent one of taking God with us wherever we might go. Instead, our mindset should be that we join God in His mission.

This means that the missionary God has been active a long time in a person’s life. Our primary job is to try to see where and how God has been working and to partner with him in bringing people to redemption in Jesus.

This is basically the Wesleyan understanding of prevenient grace.

Of course, there is no need to call it Wesleyan. Nor is it unique to John Wesley. But unfortunately, this is not an assumption that all Christians share.[1]

How does Wesleyan Theology change our worldview?

I have written before that compared with Calvinism, I have found that Arminianism/Wesleyanism tends towards a more missional and evangelism-focused worldview.

While Calvinism tends towards a deterministic worldview, leading to what I and others have called a “theology of resignation”, Arminian theology encourages us to wear a “Gospel-lens” over all of our interactions, and thereby becomes a "theology of practice".[2]

As another Arminian blogger points out:

Arminianism, and especially Wesleyan-Arminianism, is missional in nature.  […] Arminianism very naturally gives expression to missionary endeavors, as God loves each and every person, and desires, according to Scripture, the salvation of each and every person. This biblical truth motivates the believer to witness to her or his faith in Christ toward the salvation of others. Evangelism is the heart of God and of Arminian theology.

United Methodist Pastor Omar Rikabi likewise has written, “the gospel doesn’t discount anyone from grace and salvation […] If we believe in prevenient grace—that Jesus is pursuing every person—we can only know what he’s up to by entering into their story through holy love.”

Arminianism, then, drives us, everyday and with every part of our lives, to engage those around us with the Gospel, knowing that God is already seeking them and we are cooperating in His pursuit.

What about Calvinism’s worldview?

Calvinist theologian Wayne Grudem, in his popular Systematic Theology, writes that Calvinism should encourage evangelism since it “guarantee[s] that there will be some success” (p 674):

Election is Paul’s guarantee that there will be some success for his evangelism, for he knows that some of the people he speaks to will be the elect, and they will believe the gospel and be saved. It is as if someone invited us to come fishing and said, “I guarantee that you will catch some fish – they are hungry and waiting.”

But does this actually work out in practice? In my estimation, this turns evangelism into a game: to a Calvinist’s mind, evangelism never really “snatch[es] them out of the fire” of judgment (Jude 23), since only those elected from eternity will respond, and those same will respond eventually to God’s irresistible grace/effectual call regardless. At best the Calvinist can take comfort in that they were the means God used to save the elect.  However, with this view, it is understandable why there is little real motivation for evangelism, especially in the face of persecution.  If it is only a game, maybe some might opt to play, but most seem content to pass.

What about those great gospel preachers Whitefield and Spurgeon?

As I’ve written before, both of these men were accused by the other Calvinists in their day of being “Arminian”-ish.

Leading Calvinist John Piper writes that to the Calvinist Baptists, “Whitefield’s Calvinism was suspect, to say the least, because of the kind of evangelistic preaching he did. The Particular Baptists spoke derisively of Whitefield’s ‘Arminian dialect.’”

Of Spurgeon, Baptist historian AC Underwood wrote (A History of English Baptists):

His sermon on “Compel them to come in” was criticized as Arminian and unsound. To his critics he replied: “My Master set His seal on that message. I never preached a sermon by which so many souls were won to God.... If it be thought an evil thing to bid the sinner lay hold of eternal life, I will yet be more evil in this respect and herein imitate my Lord and His apostles.”

Given these accusations from their contemporaries, it is obvious that Spurgeon and Whitefield were the exceptions to Calvinism’s practice of evangelism, rather than any sort of rule.


Endnote:
[1] While most Calvinists hold to "common grace", that is, grace common to all, this is not understood to have any salvific purpose.  As leading Calvinist scholar Tom Schreiner has written, "The Wesleyan understanding of prevenient grace differs from the Calvinistic conception of common grace in one important area. In the Calvinistic scheme common grace does not and cannot lead to salvation. It functions to restrain evil in the world but does not lead unbelievers to faith. For Wesleyans, prevenient grace may lead one to salvation."; see also: Ben Witherington, “The Reformed View of Regeneration vs. the Wesleyan Theology of Prevenient Grace”.

[2] For more on Wesleyanism vs Calvinism in practice, I recommend: Don Thorsen, Calvin vs Wesley: Bringing Belief in Line with Practice (Find in a library). You can read a review from Seedbed here, and one from Dr Olson here. There is also a short article online by the author here.

More resources:

• Charles Self, “Why John Wesley Matters for 21st Century Mission” (Missio Alliance);
• Alan Hirsch & Sean Gladding, "Missional Culture and Ministry Training" (Seedbed).

Related Posts:

• Lesslie Newbigin, "The Logic of Election", plus a free ebook;
• Recommended Sermon Series on Missions: Paul Lawler (Christ Church UMC), "Conversations: Living Intentionally in the Kingdom of God";
• Calvinism's Determinist Worldview: a "theology of resignation".

Lesslie Newbigin, "The Logic of Election", plus a free ebook

In his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society (1989), Reformed theologian & missionary Lesslie Newbigin includes a chapter entitled "The Logic of Election" (excerpts below) where he challenges the traditional Calvinist understanding of this doctrine.  Newbigin also addresses election in his books A Faith for this One World? (1961), and The Open Secret: An Introduction to the Theology of Mission (1978, 2nd ed. 1995).

From The Gospel in a Pluralist Society, pages 83-84 (bold mine):

What I have called the logic of election becomes very clear in that passage of the Letter to the Romans which has often been used as a basis for false teaching about election. I refer to Romans 9 through 11. For Paul it is axiomatic that God has chosen Israel uniquely among all the nations. And yet Israel has, as a nation, rejected God's Messiah. How is this to be understood? Does it mean that God's purpose has been defeated? No. How, then, are we to understand it? First, we must understand that God retains his freedom. Election does not give us claims against God. This has always been clear, for not all descendants of Abraham are chosen. No one can find fault with God for this. Like the potter working with his clay, God has the freedom to dispose of his creation as he will.  He could make some vessels for honor and some for destruction. Paul does not say that he has done so, but only that, if he did, we would have no ground for complaint. This is where false conclusions have been drawn from Paul. The whole passage makes clear that God has not done what he might have done. He has not made some for honor and some for destruction. What he has done is to consign all men to disobedience in order that he may have mercy on all (11:32). 

How can this be so? Again we ask: what is the meaning of Israel's rejection of the Messiah? Paul's answer is an astonishing one, but it fits exactly what I call the logic of election. God, says Paul, has hardened the heart of Israel so that the gospel which they reject will--so to say--bounce off to the Gentiles. This is exactly what has happening in city after city where Paul was turned out of the synagogues and went to the Gentiles. So the apostasy of Israel has brought salvation to the Gentiles. Does this mean that Israel is lost? No! Impossible! God can never cast off his chosen people. As proof of this he has kept a remnant (as so often in the past) as pledge that Israel is not rejected. The small company of believing Jews is the pledge that Israel is not cast off. And how is it all to end? The answer is that this hardening of the heart of Israel is until the full number of Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved (11:25). In the end, therefore, it is through the Gentiles that Israel will be saved. So the logic of election is complete. I said earlier that in the biblical view there could be no salvation straight from above through the skylight, but only as we open the door to the neighbor whom God has appointed to be the bearer of salvation. It might have seemed that this was not quite true, since Israel, in the person of Abraham, received the message direct and not through any human messenger. Yes indeed, but we learn that it is not enough to be descendant of Abraham. They have no privileged status. In the end the chosen people, the elect, will have to receive salvation through the nonelect--the Gentiles. The logic of election is complete. Not just at the beginning but all the way until the end, salvation involves us with the neighbor whom God chooses to be the bearer of salvation, and there is no salvation otherwise.

Newbigin then exposes and corrects "false ideas which have gathered around the doctrine of election and which have made it unacceptable to many Christians as well as others" (p 84). These include:

• "The idea that election is election to privileged status before God. This false belief is something against which the prophets of Israel had constantly to contend" (p 84);
• "Where those who are chosen and called do what is commanded, they have a claim on God that others do not" (p 85), rather:

God does not choose to save some and to destroy others. (He has consigned all to disobedience in order that he may have mercy on all). His grace is free and sovereign, and there is no place for an exclusive claim on his grace, a claim by which others are excluded. (p 85-86)

• And (pages 86-87): 

[T]here is a way in which the doctrine of election has been distorted by separating it from the doctrine of Christ. We surely go far astray if we begin from a doctrine of divine decrees based on an abstract concept of divine omnipotence (a concept which all too obviously falls into Feuerbach's description of theism as the projection of our own human ego onto the heavens). We have to take as our starting point, and as the controlling reality for all our thinking on this as on every theological topic, what God has actually done in Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus Christ that, as Paul says, we are elect from the foundation of the world. Jesus is not a latecomer into the world. He is the one in whom and through whom and for whom we and all things exist. And the things that happened when he took our human nature and came among us as a man make clear what the meaning of God's election is. It is, as Paul says in the passage we have been looking at, that God has consigned all to disobediance that he may have mercy on all. The cross of Jesus is the place where all human beings without exception are exposed as enemies of God, and the place where all human beings without exception are accepted as beloved of God, objects of his forgiving grace. No one is excluded from the scope of that prayer: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." It is for all. [...]    

To be chosen, to be elect, therefore does not mean that the elect are the saved and the rest are the lost. To be elect in Christ Jesus, and there is no other election, means to be incorporated into his mission to the world, to be the bearer of God’s saving purpose for the whole world, to be the sign and the agent and the firstfruit of his blessed kingdom which is for all. It means, therefore, as the New Testament makes abundantly clear, to take our share in his suffering, to bear the scars of the passion. It means, as Paul says elsewhere, to bear in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of the risen Jesus may be manifest and made available for others. It means that this particular body of people who bear the name of Jesus through history, this strange and often absurd company of people so feeble, so foolish, so often fatally compromised with the world, this body with all its contingency and particularity, is the body which has the responsibility of bearing the secret of God’s reign through world history. The logic of election is all of one piece with the logic of the gospel. God’s purpose of salvation is not that we should be taken out of history and related to him in some way which bypasses the specificities and particularities of history. His purpose is that in and through history there should be brought into being that which is symbolized in the vision with which the Bible ends–the Holy City into which all the glory of the nations will finally be gathered. But–and of course this is the crux of the matter–that consummation can only lie on the other side of death and resurrection. It is the calling of the Church to bear through history to its end the secret of the lordship of the crucified.

Newbigin was Reformed but, as you can see, held a view of election which is much closer to Arminianism than 5-point Calvinism.  Dr Roger Olson has listed him among,

“revisionist Reformed” theologians who, in my estimation, have left the traditional Calvinist interpretation of God’s sovereignty behind even as they eschew the label “Arminian”... theologians deeply embedded in the Reformed tradition who would not want to be labeled “Arminian,” but whose theologies of God’s sovereignty are so highly modified and attenuated that calling them “Calvinist” would stretch that label to the breaking point. (link [1])

Free ebook: A Missional View of Election

I first came across Lesslie Newbigin on election in JR Woodward's free ebook A Missional View of Election: How a Robust View of Election Leads to a Holistic Gospel and Meaningful Missional Engagement, where Lesslie Newbigin's missional view of election is contrasted with the 5-point Calvinist view as represented by Wayne Grudem in his Systematic Theology.

You can download the full ebook for free from V3 Church Planting Movement here.

Endnote

[1] In another post, Dr Olson commented:

Many modern, “moderate” Reformed theologians (i.e., theologians who self-identify as Reformed and are recognized theologians of Reformed churches) sound more Arminian than Calvinist: Lesslie Newbigin, Jürgen Moltmann, Adrio König, Alisdair Heron, Alan P. F. Sell, et al. (My apologies for “outing them” as closet Arminians! I realize they would not want to be so identified but I find their soteriologies much closer to classical Arminianism than to, say, TULIP Calvinism.). (link)

And on his interpretation of Romans 9:

But, as I said earlier, it is not only Arminians who offer exegesis of Romans 9 that conflicts with traditional Calvinist interpretations.  Lesslie Newbigin, for example (hardly an Arminian!), also explained Romans 9 in the Arminian manner (which is also how it was interpreted by ALL the church fathers before Augustine!)–as dealing with nations and service rather than individuals and their salvation. (link)

Related Posts:

• Questions to ask as you approach Romans 9 (with a little help from recording artist Flame);
• Derwin Gray, "ROMANS 9 is a Part of a Larger Story”;
• Video: NT Wright on Predestination, Election and Romans 9;
• Alan Hirsch & Sean Gladding, "Missional Culture and Ministry Training" (Seedbed).

Alan Hirsch & Sean Gladding, "Missional Culture and Ministry Training" (Seedbed)

I recently came across some of the material and lectures from missiologist Alan Hirsch, and I've found that I resonate with a lot of what he says. In this post I want to highlight part of his message, at this point just to emphasis the power of the gospel and the Holy Spirit working through the church to reach the world.

Back in 2012, Seedbed interviewed him in a 3-part video series.  Here is part three:

You can watch all three parts here.

In the above video, he mentions the example of the early church, the modern Chinese church, and the early Wesleyan/Methodist movement.  He uses these same examples in the first chapter of his book The Forgotten Ways, where he says (you can read the entire chapter for free on Kindle using Amazon's "Try a Sample"):

I attended a seminar on missional church where the speaker asked a question. “How many Christians do you think there were in the year AD 100?” He then asked, “How many Christians do you think there were just before Constantine came on the scene, say, AD 310?” Here is the somewhat surprising answer.  

AD 100 as few as 25,000 Christians  

AD 310 up to 20,000,000 Christians

He then asked the question that has haunted me to this day: “How did they do this? How did they grow from being a small movement to the most significant religious force in the Roman Empire in two centuries?”

[...]

So let me ask you the question—how did the early Christians do it? And before you respond, here are some qualifications you must factor into your answer.

• They were an illegal religion throughout this period. At best, they were tolerated; at the very worst they were very severely persecuted.

• They didn’t have any church buildings as we know them. While archaeologists have discovered chapels dating from this period, they were definitely exceptions to the rule, and they tended to be very small converted houses.

• They didn’t even have the scriptures as we know them. They were putting the canon together during this period.

• They didn’t have an institution or the professional form of leadership normally associated with it. At times of relative calm, prototypical elements of institution did appear, but by what we consider institutional, these were at best pre-institutional.

• They didn’t have seeker-sensitive services, youth groups, worship bands, seminaries, commentaries, etc.

• They actually made it hard to join the church. By the late second century, aspiring converts had to undergo a significant initiation period to prove they were worthy.

In fact they had none of the things we would ordinarily employ to solve the problems of the church, and yet they grew from 25,000 to 20 million in 200 years! So, how did the early church do it? In answering that question, we can perhaps find the answer to the question for the church and mission in our day and in our context. For herein lies the powerful mystery of church in its most authentic form.

On the Chinese Church:

But before the example of the early Christian movement can be dismissed as a freak of history, there is another, perhaps even more astounding manifestation of [...] that unique and explosive power inherent in all of God’s people, in our own time—namely, the underground church in China. Theirs is a truly remarkable story: About the time when Mao Tse-tung took power and initiated the systemic purge of religion from society, the church in China, which was well established and largely modeled on Western forms due to colonization, was estimated to number about 2 million adherents. As part of this systematic persecution, Mao banished all foreign missionaries and ministers, nationalized all church property, killed all the senior leaders, either killed or imprisoned all second-and third-level leaders, banned all public meetings of Christians with the threat of death or torture, and then proceeded to perpetrate one of the cruelest persecutions of Christians on historical record.  

The explicit aim of the Cultural Revolution was to obliterate Christianity (and all religion) from China. At the end of the reign of Mao and his system in the late seventies, and the subsequent lifting of the so-called Bamboo Curtain in the early eighties, foreign missionaries and church officials were allowed back into the country, albeit under strict supervision. They expected to find the church decimated and the disciples a weak and battered people. On the contrary, they discovered that Christianity had flourished beyond all imagination. The estimates then were about 60 million Christians in China, and counting! And it has grown significantly since then. David Aikman, former Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine, suggests in his book Jesus in Beijing that Christians may number as many as 80 million. If anything, in the Chinese phenomenon we are witnessing the most significant transformational Christian movement in the history of the church. And remember, not unlike the early church, these people had very few Bibles (at times they shared only one page to a house church and then swapped that page with another house group). They had no professional clergy, no official leadership structures, no central organization, no mass meetings, and yet they grew like mad. How is this possible? How did they do it?

On the early Wesleyan/Methodists:

But we can observe similar growth patterns in other historical movements. Steve Addison notes that by the end of John Wesley’s lifetime one in thirty English men and women had become Methodists. In 1776 fewer than 2 percent of Americans were Methodists. By 1850, the movement claimed the allegiance of 34 percent of the population. How did they do it?

More from Alan Hirsch:

• VergeNetwork playlist (YouTube);
• Keynote at the Worship Facilities Conference.

More from Seedbed: 

• Creating a Missional Culture: JR Woodward Interview;
• Seven Minute Seminary: What is the Missional Church? (Ed Stetzer);
• Mission resources.

Related Posts: 

• Recommended Sermon Series on Missions: Paul Lawler (Christ Church UMC), "Conversations: Living Intentionally in the Kingdom of God";
• Loraine Boettner's Postmillennial Vision of Ecological Health and the Great Commission;
• Irv Brendlinger, "John Wesley's theological challenge to slavery".

Recommended Sermon Series on Missions: Paul Lawler (Christ Church UMC), "Conversations: Living Intentionally in the Kingdom of God"

Another sermon series I want to recommend is "Conversations: Living Intentionally in the Kingdom of God" from Christ Church UMC.

Here is a snapshot of their church's vision:

Audio links to each message in the series are below. You can also download the audio or notes from the church website (the first message is from October 11, 2015).

1. The 360 Degree Kingdom;
2. The Kingdom & Intentional Living;
3. The Kingdom and The Mustard Seed;
4. The Kingdom and The Condition of Your Heart;
5. An Intentional Life;
6. The Kingdom of God and the Nations;
7. The Kingdom of God and Suffering.

Related Posts:

• Sermon Series: Todd Petkau, "Does Prayer Still Work?"