It is about 285 years since John Wesley (1703–1791) experienced for the first time an assurance that his sins were forgiven. He famously wrote in his Journal for 24 May 1738:

In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.1 I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.2

But, despite this emphatic and memorable statement, some modern scholars have been hesitant to accept Wesley’s explanation of Aldersgate’s significance or to give it the prominence that it clearly had for him; to put it more pointedly, they are uncertain about the continuing centrality of justification by faith to the thinking of the more mature Wesley.3 This hesitation has, in some cases, been partly due to their own theological presuppositions,4 but also, no doubt, due to several enigmatic factors emanating from Wesley himself.5

These factors include, first and foremost, Wesley’s surprising footnotes to the ‘pessimistic’ January 1738 entries concerning his spiritual state, in the 1774 edition of his Journal;6 second, his modified, post-Aldersgate doctrinal emphases, often perceived as confusing and even idiosyncratic; and third, his occasional, post-Aldersgate expressions of self-doubt. Wesley was also not immune from lapses of memory or the retrospective revising of details impinging on his past actions, particularly in apologetical contexts.7

Wesley’s theologising after Aldersgate was often complex and at times inconsistent. But, as his own soteriological understanding developed, he never jettisoned Aldersgate’s evangelical significance, whatever caveats and nuances he later incorporated into his writings. For example, in 1785 he preached:

Salvation begins with what is usually termed (and very properly) preventing8 grace; including the first wish to please God, the first dawn of light concerning his will, and the first slight transient conviction of having sinned against him. All these imply some tendency toward life; some degree of salvation; the beginning of a deliverance from a blind, unfeeling heart, quite insensible of God and the things of God.

Salvation is carried on by convincing grace, usually in Scripture termed repentance; which brings a larger measure of self-knowledge, and a farther deliverance from the heart of stone. Afterwards we experience the proper Christian salvation; whereby, ‘through grace’, we ‘are saved by faith’.9

This complex statement, with its own rather unique understanding of how grace works, invites further analysis (beyond the scope of this article), but what is clear is that, for Wesley, salvation culminates in ‘the proper Christian salvation; whereby, “through grace”, we “are saved by faith”’. Wesley’s description, here given in old age, of ‘the proper Christian salvation’ coheres well with his account of what happened at Aldersgate.

However puzzling the enigmas, to undervalue what Aldersgate meant to Wesley is to misunderstand both the man and his ministry, and to help perpetuate an unhelpful trend in Wesley studies, which John W. Wright highlighted in a wider context:

During John Wesley’s life and within the early nineteenth century and onward, polemic has accompanied the question of how to situate the texts and practices of John Wesley as interpreted by friend and foe alike. His heirs have proven a most fractious group. They have abandoned Wesley’s seemingly fundamental commitments, consequently taking the movement in radically different directions.10

If wrong perceptions concerning John Wesley’s fundamental commitments, especially his relationship to faith, have gained traction, they need correction, both for the sake of historical accuracy and because, despite any eccentricities, Wesley stood for theological centralities that matter as much in the present as the past.

For all his shortcomings, Wesley’s role was that of a pioneer leader of the eighteenth-century evangelical awakening in Britain, reinforced by energetic longevity, strong leadership and organising abilities,11 and perpetuated by the vigorous impact of Wesleyan Methodism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 All these factors stamped Wesley’s influence on evangelicalism for well over two centuries, so that his legacy was felt in both Established and Nonconformist churches.13 And, arguably, even today Wesley’s influence as a ministerial role model for an evangelical awakening is still commended among some Protestant churches by means of serious literature.14

So this article first treads familiar ground by recalling uncontested but now relatively neglected historical data—including the writings of Peter Bohler (1712–1775), an important eyewitness—surrounding Wesley’s ‘conversion’. Second, it assesses some more recent interpretations of Aldersgate by influential Wesley scholars, from the perspective that the best interpretations must relate robustly to the primary historical sources. It is this author’s conviction that this aspect of Wesley scholarship urgently needs revisiting.

1. February–April 1738

Two days after landing at Deal after his mission to Georgia (1735–1738), Wesley arrived in London.15 His journal entry for 3 February 1738 acknowledged that God had humbled and used him and taught him various lessons, including to ‘beware of men’. In addition, he recorded, ‘All in Georgia have heard the word of God. Some have believed and begun to run well’.16

Despite this relatively upbeat entry, Wesley had, in fact, returned from the colony with a deep sense of personal failure. This is apparent in his January 1738 journal entries made during the voyage home.17 It also becomes apparent when, nearly four months later, spiritual failure is the prevailing theme of most of his lengthy autobiographical memorandum, written for readers of his Journal to help them ‘better understand’ what happened at Aldersgate. The flavour of this account is exemplified by the memorandum’s ninth section:

All the time I was at Savannah I was thus beating the air. Being ignorant of the righteousness of Christ, which, by a living faith in Him, bringeth salvation ‘to every one that believeth’, I sought to establish my own righteousness; and so laboured in the fire all my days. I was now properly ‘under the law’; I knew that ‘the law’ of God was ‘spiritual; I consented to it that it was good’. Yea, ‘I delighted in it, after the inner man’. Yet was I ‘carnal, sold under sin’…. In this vile, abject state of bondage to sin, I was indeed fighting continually, but not conquering.18

In London Wesley met with the Georgia Trustees and informed them of the ‘truly deplorable’ state of the colony and his reasons for leaving it. Then on 7 February he, for the first time, met Moravian missionary Peter Bohler, who was a 25-year-old theology graduate of the University of Jena, as well as three other Moravians—Georg Schulius, Abraham Richter and Wensel Neisser—all ‘just then landed from Germany’.

Wesley helped the Moravians find lodgings in London.19 Their stay in England was to be brief, while they awaited departure for America. Bohler and Schulius were en route to minister to the negroes of Purrysburg, Carolina, and Neisser to join those Moravians already in Georgia. While in England, Bohler intended to preach to the students at Oxford.20 He later reported that his Oxford preaching led to an awakening among both the students and ‘more than a hundred citizens’.21

Wesley’s Journal shows that, from February until Bohler’s departure for Carolina on 8 May,22 their conversations were of crucial significance in reorientating his understanding of salvation away from works-righteousness to salvation by faith alone. The same was to be the case for his brother Charles.

John wrote, ‘From this time I did not willingly lose an opportunity of conversing with [the Moravians], while I stayed in London’.23 He journeyed to Oxford with Bohler on 17 February and ‘conversed much’ with Bohler (in Latin, since Bohler was still learning English),24 but ‘understood him not, and least of all when he said, “My brother, my brother, that philosophy of yours must be purged away”’.25 Bohler described the Wesley brothers to Count Zinzendorf:

The elder, John, is a good-natured man; he knew he did not properly believe in the Saviour and was willing to be taught. His brother, with whom you often conversed a year ago, is at present very much distressed in his mind, but does not know how he shall begin to be acquainted with the Saviour. Our mode of believing in the Saviour is so easy to Englishmen that they cannot reconcile themselves to it: if it were a little more artful, they would sooner find their way into it…. Of faith in Jesus they have no other idea than men generally entertain. They justify themselves; therefore they always take it for granted that they believe already, and would prove their faith by their works; and thus so plague and torment themselves that they are at heart very miserable.26

Wesley was still binding himself by ‘Holy Club’ rules and on 28 February ‘renewed’ his ‘former resolutions’.27 But on 4 March Bohler recorded this significant conversation:

I took a walk with the elder Wesley and asked him about his spiritual state. He told me that he sometimes felt certain of his salvation, but sometimes he had many doubts; that he could only say this, ‘If what stands in the Bible be true, then I am saved’. Thereupon I spoke with him very fully; and earnestly besought him to go to the opened fountain, and not to mar the efficacy of free grace by his unbelief.28

Wesley recorded his conversation with Bohler the next day:

March 4, Sat. I found my brother at Oxford, recovering from his pleurisy; and with him Peter Bohler, by whom (in the hand of the great God) I was, on Sunday the 5th, clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved. Immediately it struck into my mind, ‘Leave off preaching. How can you preach to others, who have not faith yourself?’ I asked Bohler whether he thought I should leave it off or not. He answered, ‘By no means’. I asked, ‘But what can I preach?’ He said, ‘Preach faith till you have it; and then, because you have it, you will preach faith’. Accordingly, Monday the 6th, I began preaching this new doctrine, though my soul started back from the work.29

That Wesley called justification by faith a ‘new doctrine’ reveals that, while professedly adhering to his Church’s Articles, he did not fully grasp what they taught. Article XI of the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion expressly states,

We are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only, is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

In contrast, Wesley’s spiritual life up to 1738, including his ‘new seriousness’ from about 1725,30 his Holy Club activities31 and his participation in the Anglican mission to Georgia, was driven, albeit unconsciously, by works-righteousness rather than by ‘salvation by faith’.

After three months of following Bohler’s unexpected advice, to ‘preach faith till you have it’, Wesley noted that ‘preaching this new doctrine’ offended at least four, and probably six, congregations.32 That Wesley should have encountered this response demonstrates that the doctrine of salvation by faith was equally ‘new’ to these congregations. By the early eighteenth century, few Church of England ministers were vigorously promulgating justification by faith as set forth in the Articles.33 Gregory F. Scholtz has written of that era:

Hundreds of eighteenth-century sermons repeat this theme—that faith without works cannot satisfy the conditions of salvation, but I have not encountered a single Anglican sermon that asserts the sufficiency of faith alone. For although it is true that no one denies the necessity of faith for salvation, few if any preachers emphasize it, and all reject even the suggestion that salvation might be by faith only…. According to Archbishop Tillotson, ‘To make men truly good, and to teach them to live well’ is ‘the great business of religion’.34

On 23 March, Wesley said:

[Bohler] now amazed me more and more by the account he gave of the fruits of living faith, the holiness and happiness which he affirmed to attend it. The next morning I began the Greek Testament again, resolving to abide by ‘the law and the testimony’ and being confident, that God would hereby show me, whether this doctrine was of God.35

Wesley’s recourse to ‘the law and the testimony’ at this point reflected an important change of mind, concerning the relative authority of Scripture and tradition, from how he began his Georgia mission. From childhood his parents had inculcated in him a high esteem, not only for the Scriptures and Church of England, but for the early Church Fathers.36 This esteem was enhanced through a select reading list recommended to him by his father in preparation for ordination.37 During the next few years a zeal to recover the ‘Primitive’ Christianity of the early church took hold of Wesley and directed many of his actions in Georgia. In this John Wesley was heavily influenced by Holy Club member John Clayton (1709–1773) and his Manchester-based associate Thomas Deacon (1697–1753). Deacon’s writings directed Wesley to the usages of the Primitive Church.38 Wesley wrote in May 1738 that, from spring 1731 he ‘began observing the Wednesday and Friday Fasts, commonly observed in the ancient Church; tasting no food till three in the afternoon’.39 His ‘Primitive’ focus became ‘so well-known that in 1730 [Wesley’s] friend Mary Pendarves nicknamed him “Primitive Christianity”’.40 Despite the parameters laid down by Article XXI of the Church of England,41 Wesley’s ‘primitivism’ was heavily influenced by tradition.

Then, in September 1736, Wesley’s thinking was radically changed through reading Bishop Beveridge’s (1637–1708) Pandectae Canonum Conciliorum. He now agreed that ‘both Particular and “General Councils may err, and have erred” … and that things ordained by Councils as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless they be taken out of Holy Scripture’.42 Sola Scriptura was now key to the thinking of Wesley in the weeks leading up to Aldersgate.

On 27 March John Wesley and Charles Kinchin (c. 1711–1742) preached faith and prayed with a condemned man at Oxford Castle. Here Wesley saw for himself the positive impact of the ‘new doctrine’:

After a space [the convict] rose up, and eagerly said, ‘I am now ready to die. I know Christ has taken away my sins; and there is no more condemnation for me’. The same composed cheerfulness he showed when he was carried to execution; and in his last moments he was the same, enjoying a perfect peace, in confidence that he was ‘accepted in the Beloved’.43

On Saturday 22 April, Wesley met with Peter Bohler again. He had become convinced from Scripture that what Bohler said concerning the nature of faith was true:

But I could not comprehend what he spoke of an instantaneous work. I could not understand how this faith should be given in a moment: how a man could at once be thus turned from darkness to light, from sin and misery to righteousness and joy in the Holy Ghost.

I searched the Scriptures again touching this very thing, particularly the Acts of the Apostles: but, to my utter astonishment, found scarce any instances there of other than instantaneous conversions; scarce any so slow as that of St Paul, who was three days in the pangs of the new birth. I had but one retreat left; namely, ‘Thus, I grant, God wrought in the first ages of Christianity; but the times are changed. What reason have I to believe He works in the same manner now?’

But on Sunday the 23rd, I was beat out of this retreat too, by the concurring evidence of several living witnesses…. Here ended my disputing. I could now only cry out, ‘Lord, help Thou my unbelief!’44

Wesley’s final capitulation came when Bohler brought some Moravian brethren to testify personally of their instantaneous conversion. He was now fully persuaded that it was possible to receive faith ‘in a moment’; he was also persuaded that he had not yet received it. He asked that those present should sing, ‘My soul before Thee prostrate lies’.45 Bohler wrote that:

During the singing of the Moravian version, he often wiped his eyes. Immediately after he took me alone into his own room, and declared, ‘that he was now satisfied of what I said of faith, and he would not question any more about it; that he was clearly convinced of the want of it: but how could he help himself, and how could he obtain such faith? He was a man that had not sinned so grossly as other people’. I replied that it was sin enough that he did not believe on the Saviour: he should not depart from the door of the Saviour until He helped him…. He wept heartily and bitterly, as I spoke to him on this matter, and (insisted that) I should pray with him. I can say of him, he is truly a poor sinner, and has a contrite heart, hungering after a better righteousness than that which he has till now possessed, even the righteousness of Jesus Christ.

Bohler recounted how that same evening Wesley preached what he had found so difficult to accept:

In the evening he preached from 1 Cor. 1:23: ‘But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block’, &c. He had above four thousand hearers and spoke upon this subject until the congregation was astonished, because no one had ever heard such things from him…. There have been many awakened by it.46

2. May 1738

On 25 April there was heated disagreement between the Wesley brothers about instantaneous conversion. Charles wrote,

We sang and fell into a dispute whether conversion was gradual or instantaneous. My brother was very positive for the latter, and very shocking; mentioned some late instances of gross sinners believing in a moment. I was much offended at his worse than unedifying discourse. Mrs Delamotte left us abruptly. I stayed and insisted a man need not know when first he had faith. His obstinacy in favouring the contrary opinion drove me at last out of the room.47

But by 3 May John was able to write, ‘My brother [Charles] had a long and particular conversation with Peter Bohler. And it now pleased God to open his eyes; so that he also saw clearly what was the nature of that one true living faith, whereby alone, “through grace, we are saved”’. On 8 May, Bohler, who had departed for America, wrote to John: ‘Delay not, I beseech you, to believe in your Jesus Christ; but so put Him in mind of His promises to poor sinners that He may not be able to refrain from doing for you what He hath done for so many others’.48

John’s and Charles’s spiritual progress was now increasingly inter-connected. On 13 May Charles recorded: ‘At night my brother came, exceeding heavy. I forced him (as he had often forced me) to sing an hymn to Christ, and almost thought He would come while we were singing’. Charles wrote the next day: ‘I longed to find Christ, that I might show him to all mankind; that I might praise, that I might love him’. A few days later, on Wednesday 17 May, he wrote,

I first saw Luther on the Galatians, which Mr Holland had accidentally lit upon. We began, and found him nobly full of faith…. Who would believe our Church had been founded on this important article of justification by faith alone? I am astonished I should ever think this a new doctrine; especially while our Articles and Homilies stand unrepealed, and the key of knowledge is not yet taken away.

Two days later Charles experienced another bout of pleurisy. Then on Whitsunday 21 May John received the ‘surprising news that my brother had found rest to his soul. His bodily strength returned also from that hour’. This was Charles’s ‘Day of Pentecost’.

Charles wrote, ‘I now found myself at peace with God, and rejoiced in hope of loving Christ’.49 The next day he wrote, ‘My brother coming, we joined in intercession for him. In the midst of prayer, I almost believed the Holy Ghost was coming upon him. In the evening we sang and prayed again. I found myself very weak in body, but thought I ought to pray for my friends, being the only priest among them’.50

At 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday 24 May John read the words of 2 Peter 1:4 in his Greek New Testament: ‘There are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises, even that ye should be partakers of the divine nature’. He wrote, ‘Just as I went out, I opened [the Bible] again on those words, “Thou art not far from the kingdom of God”.’ In the afternoon at St Paul’s the words of the anthem were Psalm 130.51 As hopeful as these biblical texts must have seemed to John, he wrote later that day to a friend,52

I know that I, too, deserve nothing but wrath, being full of all abominations, and having no good thing in me to atone for them or to remove the wrath of God. All my works, my righteousness, my prayers need an atonement for themselves…. Yet I hear a voice … saying, ‘Believe, and thou shalt be saved. He that believeth is passed from death unto life. God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life’…. Does ‘His Spirit bear witness with our spirit that we are the children of God’? Alas! with mine He does not.53

John was convinced that he did not yet have saving faith and of his need to believe in God’s only begotten Son. No longer was he hoping to achieve righteousness by his good works. A revolution in his thinking had taken place.

Then, at about 8:45 p.m. on 24 May, at the society meeting in Aldersgate Street, the climax came. John felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ and that he did trust in Christ alone for salvation. After describing this momentous realisation, John continued: ‘I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart’. Before long he was buffeted with doubts and temptations, but could write,

[God] ‘sent me help from His holy place’. And herein I found the difference between this and my former state chiefly consisted. I was striving, yea, fighting with all my might under the law, as well as under grace. But then I was sometimes, if not often, conquered; now, I was always conqueror.

Thur. 25. The moment I awaked, ‘Jesus, Master’, was in my heart and in my mouth; and I found all my strength lay in keeping my eye fixed upon Him, and my soul waiting on Him continually.54

Charles’s journal entry for 24 May said: ‘Towards ten, my brother was brought in triumph by a troop of our friends, and declared, “I believe”. We sang the hymn with great joy and parted with prayer’.55

Both brothers had attained ‘a sure trust and confidence which a man hath in God, that through the merits of Christ his sins are forgiven and he reconciled to the favour of God’.56 Both had experienced ‘the inward witness’ that their dying father Samuel Wesley (1662–1735) had more than once spoken of.57 Nearly 30 years later John preached that, ‘The testimony of the Spirit is an inward impression on the souls of believers, whereby the Spirit of God directly testifies to their spirit that they are children of God’.58 This he experienced on 24 May 1738.

3. Interpretations of Aldersgate

However, not all scholars take a conversionist view of what happened at Aldersgate Street.59 In fact, there is a surprising variety of interpretations of this event.60

3.1. Albert C. Outler (1908–1989)

Writing in 1964 at the height of the twentieth-century ecumenical movement, Albert Outler observed that: ‘“The Aldersgate Experience” … has come to be the most familiar event in Wesley’s life’. He then proposed, ‘It often goes unnoticed, however, that it actually stands within a series of significant spiritual experiences, and is neither first nor last nor most climactic’.61

But an examination of Wesley’s writings shows that he considered Aldersgate not merely one ‘significant experience’ among many, but as an experience pivotal to his whole ministry. Two examples suffice to illustrate this. First, in a letter to Thomas Church, Wesley compared his preaching before and after the year 1738:

(1) From the year 1725 to 1729 I preached much, but saw no fruit of my labour. Indeed, it could not be that I should: for I neither laid the foundation of repentance nor of believing the gospel; taking it for granted that all to whom I preached were believers and that many ‘needed no repentance’. (2) From the year 1729 to 1734, laying a deeper foundation of repentance, I saw a little fruit. But it was only a little, and no wonder: for I did not preach faith in the blood of the covenant. (3) From 1734 to 1738, speaking more of faith in Christ, I saw more fruit of my preaching and visiting from house to house than ever I had done before; though I know not if any of those who were outwardly reformed were inwardly and thoroughly converted to God. (4) From 1738 to this time—speaking continually of Jesus Christ; laying Him only for the foundation of the whole building, making Him all in all, the first and the last; preaching only on this plan, ‘The kingdom of God is at hand; repent ye, and believe the gospel’—‘the word of God ran’ as fire among the stubble; it ‘was glorified’ more and more; multitudes crying out, ‘By grace are ye saved through faith’.62

And, second, in correspondence with ‘John Smith’ he said,63

It is true that, from May 24, 1738, ‘wherever I was desired to preach, salvation by faith was my only theme’, that is, such a love of God and man as produces all inward and outward holiness, and springs from a conviction, wrought in us by the Holy Ghost, of the pardoning love of God; and that, when I was told, ‘You must preach no more in this church’, it was commonly added, ‘because you preach such doctrine!’ And it is equally true that ‘it was for preaching the love of God and man that several of the clergy forbade me their pulpits’, before that time, before May 24, before I either preached or knew salvation by faith.64

Aldersgate was, in Wesley’s thinking, an unmistakable turning point.

3.2. Henry D. Rack

In his influential 1989 biography of Wesley, Reasonable Enthusiast, Henry Rack’s discussion of Aldersgate is thorough but over-cautious. Rack posits that, in considering Aldersgate in terms of intellectual, theological, spiritual and psychological factors affecting Wesley, it is wise to ‘avoid one-sided, doctrinaire, unitary interpretations and to allow for eclectic and, if necessary, inconsistent positions on Wesley’s part, subject also to changes in the light of his subsequent experience’.

Rack is wary of regarding Aldersgate exclusively as an ‘evangelical conversion’, although he does not altogether rule that aspect out. He suggests that ‘Wesley’s religious problems and the solutions he found for them were conditioned by his upbringing and psychological development’. He enlarges on the phrase ‘evangelical conversion’, saying: ‘“Evangelical” conversion, in fact, really originates no earlier than the very end of the sixteenth century, at least in England, and may almost be said to have been invented by some late Elizabethan Puritans, notably William (“Drunken”) Perkins’.65

Rack is no doubt technically correct in locating the phrase ‘evangelical conversion’ among more modern conversion narratives,66 but his discussion bypasses the phenomenon itself. To imply that ‘evangelical conversion’ only arrived in the late sixteenth century would be to neglect the catholic (that is, wider) perspective of church history.67 The word ‘conversion’ (and its derivatives) is found as early as the Bible itself, and nearly always in an ‘evangelical’ context.68

The idea of personal evangelical conversion was intrinsic to the Reformation, since one of its results was to move the Mediaeval Church from a works-based to a faith-based approach to salvation. When, in 1517, the first of Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) 95 Theses proclaimed, ‘When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” (Matthew 4:17), he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance’, it was referring to a personal repentance, not mere participation in a church rite.69

The need for evangelical conversion was, by implication, documented even earlier, for example, by the early Church Father Augustine of Hippo (354–430)70 and in the pre-Reformation teaching of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153),71 John Wycliffe (c.1330–1384)72 and Thomas Bradwardine (c. 1290–1349, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1349). Bradwardine wrote concerning Romans 9:16,73 ‘I had no liking for such teaching, for towards grace I was still graceless … but afterwards … the truth before mentioned struck on me like a beam of grace’.74 

3.3. Vivian H. H. Green (1915–2005)

Vivian Green’s otherwise valuable study of 1961, The Young Mr Wesley, also failed to do justice to Wesley’s account of Aldersgate. Green presented his experience mainly as ‘psychological reassurance’, that is, as Wesley gaining confidence in the truth he was preaching.75 In his later book, John Wesley, Green described Wesley’s experience as ‘a spiritual breakdown which by liberating pent-up emotion would bring a re-integration of personality, so setting free creative forces strong enough to change the world around him’.76

But neither Rack nor Green interacted in detail with Wesley’s theologically rooted descriptions of his spiritual experiences immediately prior to and at Aldersgate. Rack almost caricatures Wesley for his May 1738 memorandum, as having a ‘harsh valuation’ with ‘self-excoriation’ on his pre-conversion religion. And Geordan Hammond (see below) seems to do something similar in using the phrase ‘self flagellating autobiography’ to describe Wesley’s self-analysis.77 But these perspectives do not relate meaningfully to Wesley’s deliberate and sustained use of Romans 7 categories to describe his pre-Aldersgate experience, for example:78

I was now properly ‘under the law’; I knew that ‘the law’ of God was ‘spiritual; I consented to it that it was good’. Yea, ‘I delighted in it, after the inner man’. Yet was I ‘carnal, sold under sin’. Every day was I constrained to cry out, ‘What I do, I allow not: for what I would, I do not; but what I hate, that I do. To will is’ indeed ‘present with me: but how to perform that which is good, I find not. For the good which I would, I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do. I find a law, that when I would do good, evil is present with me’: even ‘the law in my members, warring against the law of my mind,’ and still ‘bringing me into captivity to the law of sin’.79

In Wesley’s later Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (1755), his comment on Romans 7:14 no doubt reflected how he saw his own experience:80

St Paul … interweaves the whole process of a man reasoning, groaning, striving, and escaping from the legal to the evangelical state. This he does from Romans 7:7, to the end of this chapter. ‘Sold under sin’—Totally enslaved; slaves bought with money were absolutely at their master’s disposal.81

Wesley was, in 1738, using such categories to identify himself as convinced of sin but not a real Christian. This self-identification remained consistent with his later understanding of how grace works, as described in his 1785 sermon (already quoted):

Salvation is carried on by convincing grace, usually in Scripture termed repentance; which brings a larger measure of self-knowledge, and a farther deliverance from the heart of stone. Afterwards we experience the proper Christian salvation; whereby, ‘through grace’, we ‘are saved by faith’.82

To be brought by the Spirit to ‘convincing grace’ is to be brought within reach of the goal of attaining ‘the proper Christian salvation’. For Wesley in 1738, Aldersgate marked the attainment of that final goal.

3.4. Richard P. Heitzenrater

After May 1738, justification by faith was at the centre of John Wesley’s theologising. But, if this doctrine is conceived as occupying the centre of Wesley’s soteriology, there is a marked centrifugal tendency in Henry Rack’s and Vivian Green’s evaluations of Aldersgate, since to different degrees they displace Wesley’s experiential discovery of justification by faith from the centre.

The same cannot be said of Richard Heitzenrater’s interpretation of Aldersgate, since he argues quite helpfully that the primary issue at Aldersgate was one of assurance, that is of Wesley becoming assured that he was a child of God.83 But Heitzenrater’s insight needs qualifying: Wesley was indeed seeking assurance, but attaining ‘salvation by faith’ is not the same thing as experiencing assurance of salvation (even though for Wesley they seemed the same thing that May evening), in that, conceptually at least, one follows the other. Assurance is not the essence of salvation, but the fruit or result of salvation at work in the soul.

Before Aldersgate, Wesley realised his deepest problem was that he did not have salvation: ‘I know that I, too, deserve nothing but wrath, being full of all abominations, and having no good thing in me to atone for them or to remove the wrath of God’. Wesley continued his lament: ‘Oh let no one deceive us by vain words, as if we had already attained this faith! By its fruits we shall know. Do we already feel “peace with God” and “joy in the Holy Ghost”?’84

Although in 1738 Wesley accepted a Moravian identification of true faith with full assurance, his autobiographical account for 24 May 1738 was not of someone seeking assurance concerning the reality of his faith, but of someone who believed (rightly or wrongly) Aldersgate to be the place where he actually received saving faith. He had said only a few weeks before Aldersgate:

By the grace of God, I resolved to seek it unto the end, (1) By absolutely renouncing all dependence, in whole or in part, upon my own works or righteousness; on which I had really grounded my hope of salvation, though I knew it not, from my youth up; (2) by adding to the constant use of all the other means of grace, continual prayer for this very thing, justifying, saving faith, a full reliance on the blood of Christ shed for me; a trust in Him, as my Christ, as my sole justification, sanctification, and redemption.85

Whenever exactly that saving faith was communicated, Wesley’s assurance was the existential vehicle by which he was at last convinced that he had it.

This explanation coheres with Wesley’s inward disturbance (only a day after his heart had been ‘strangely warmed’) at the thought that the requisite evidence of true faith might not yet be within him: ‘“But is not any sort of fear”, continued the tempter, “a proof that thou dost not believe?”’

However, Wesley successfully confronted these fears with the ‘words of St Paul, “Without were fightings, within were fears”’. Aldersgate now marked the point when he realised he had become ‘more than conqueror’ over his temptations, rather than being conquered by them.86

3.5. Geordan Hammond

In 2014 Geordan Hammond published a monograph, John Wesley in America, Restoring Primitive Christianity, demonstrating that Wesley’s ministry in Georgia was focused on planting ‘Primitive Christianity’ in the new colony. In this book Hammond characterises Wesley’s Georgia ministry as, in broad terms, a success rather than a failure.87 But for Wesley, looking back on his voyage home in 1737–1738, Georgia was a place of failure:

All the time I was at Savannah I was thus beating the air. Being ignorant of the righteousness of Christ, which, by a living faith in Him, bringeth salvation ‘to every one that believeth’, I sought to establish my own righteousness; and so laboured in the fire all my days.88

In his ascription of success to the Georgia mission Hammond fails to interact fully or convincingly with Wesley’s ‘pessimistic’ self-analyses. He cites silence in other first-hand, contemporary accounts from Georgia as to any impending theological crisis in Wesley as part of his evidence. He avers, ‘Wesley left little evidence for his own assessment of himself in his writings contemporary to the Georgia mission’.89 But neither Wesley’s Journal nor his Diary were intended as ongoing commentaries on his state of mind. His Diary is usually highly cryptic and his Journal objective in focus. Only his traumas over the two colonists Beatre Hawkins and Sophy Williamson spill, at times, into the two documents. In the absence of further evidence, Wesley’s January and May 1738 spiritual self-analyses are not so easily set aside.

Whatever Wesley’s state of mind during the Georgia mission, there is evidence enough in his only extant Georgia sermon90 and in his detailed counselling of a young woman in South Carolina that works-righteousness was the predominant theme of his colonial ministry.91 Both during and after his return voyage to England Wesley was at pains to make his sense of spiritual failure clear to his readers, so that the transformative work of grace at Aldersgate may be ‘the better understood’ by his readers.92

Hammond refers to Wesley’s 1778 sermon, ‘The Late Work of God in North America’,93 as exemplifying a more positive recollection of Georgia—the inference being that Wesley no longer looked on Georgia as a scene of failure. But Wesley’s autobiographical reference leaves open the exact nature of his role in God’s ‘work of grace’ in 1736. He said,

In the year 1736 it pleased God to begin a work of grace in the newly planted colony of Georgia, then the southernmost of our settlements on the continent of America. To those English who had settled there the year before, were then added a body of Moravians, so called; and a larger body who had been expelled from Germany by the Archbishop of Salzburg. These were men truly fearing God and working righteousness. At the same time there began an awakening among the English, both at Savannah and Frederica; many inquiring what they must do to be saved, and ‘bringing forth fruits meet for repentance’.

In the same year there broke out a wonderful work of God in several parts of New England. It began in Northampton, and in a little time appeared in the adjoining towns. A particular and beautiful account of this was published by Mr Edwards, Minister of Northampton. Many sinners were deeply convinced of sin, and many truly converted to God. I suppose there had been no instance in America of so swift and deep a work of grace, for an hundred years before; nay, nor perhaps since the English settled there.

The following year, the work of God spread by degrees from New England towards the south. At the same time it advanced by slow degrees, from Georgia towards the north. In a few souls it deepened likewise; and some of them witnessed a good confession, both in life and in death. In the year 1738 Mr Whitefield came over to Georgia, with a design to assist me in preaching, either to the English or the Indians. But as I was embarked for England before he arrived, he preached to the English altogether, first in Georgia.

Wesley is explicit here concerning the positive contribution of the Moravians and Salzburgers to the awakening and, later in the sermon, highly commendatory of George Whitefield: ‘All men owned that God was with [Whitefield], wheresoever he went; giving a general call to high and low, rich and poor, to ‘repent, and believe the gospel’.94 But his words hardly negate his 1738 reflections concerning Georgia. In fact, they leave open the exact part he played in any incipient revival.

4. After Aldersgate, Wesley’s Legacy

After Aldersgate, Wesley was a changed man, and his ministry integral to the eighteenth-century evangelical awakening in Britain—an awakening that realised the hopes of the Puritan remnant of the late seventeenth century. Wesley’s legacy was felt in Britain, America and the rest of the world well into the twentieth century. The Gentleman’s Magazine wrote of Wesley in April 1791:

By the humane endeavours of [John Wesley] and his brother Charles a sense of decency in morals and religion was introduced in the lowest classes of mankind, the ignorant were instructed and the wretched relieved and the abandoned reclaimed…. He was one of the few characters who outlived enmity and prejudices, and received in later years every mark of esteem from every denomination…. His personal influence was greater perhaps than any private gentlemen in the country…. Instead of being an ornament to literature he was a blessing to his fellows: instead of the genius of his age, he was the servant of God.95

Wesley inculcated the many converts with sobriety, clean living, hard work, piety, accountability and a humanitarian concern for prisoners, slaves, the poor, sick and aged, and children. All this was, from one perspective, the outworking of saving faith at Aldersgate in his life and ministry.96 But the greatest impact was indirect and delayed.

Between 1791 and 1840 the stream of converts to evangelical Christianity in Britain became a flood, as up to one and a half million people were gathered into the Nonconformist chapels of England and Wales.97 A substantial part of this converting impulse, especially among unskilled labourers and the poor, came through the Primitive Methodists. This movement looked back to Wesley’s example and named their denomination after a phrase Wesley used in one of his last sermons. On 6 April 1790, in preaching at Chester to a gathering of Methodist preachers, Wesley used these closing words:

Fellow labourers, wherever there is an open door, enter in and preach the gospel, if it be to two or three, under a hedge or tree; preach the gospel—go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in the poor, and the maimed and the halt, and the blind: and the servant said, Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.

He then lifted up his hands, and with tears flowing down his cheeks, repeated, ‘And yet there is room, and yet there is room’, and added, ‘and this is the way the primitive [first] Methodists did’.98 ‘Primitive Methodism’ was, according to Primitive Methodists, Methodism as John Wesley would have wanted it and Methodism as first practised after Aldersgate.

The Primitive Methodists’ most famous convert would be the 15-year-old Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–1892), converted after turning in unexpectedly, due to snow, to a morning service at Artillery Street Primitive Methodist Chapel, Colchester, on 6 January 1850. Spurgeon became one of the most influential Baptist preachers of the nineteenth century and, in an indirect sense, part of Wesley’s legacy of faith in the late nineteenth century.99

5. Conclusion

Those alternative interpretations of the significance of Aldersgate which downplay Wesley’s own interpretation of that event are unsupported by convincing historical evidence.100

Wesley never stopped thinking of Aldersgate as the pivotal occasion when he became aware that he had true faith. Only on 24 May 1738 was he able to say: ‘An assurance was given me that [Christ] had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death’. From 1738, during over 50 years of pioneering ministry, he never lost his hold upon justification by faith. As J. E. Rattenbury put it, Aldersgate was ‘equally a terminus ad quem and a terminus a quo. He reached a goal and found a starting point’.101

Where Wesley’s legacy concerning the nature of real faith has been forgotten, loss to the global church has resulted. A rediscovery of both the doctrine and the experience that John Wesley articulated at Aldersgate in 1738 would be highly salutary for the spiritual health of today’s churches.