Hello, I'm Wilson Pruitt, and you are listening to the History of Methodism Podcast. Today’s Episode: Aldersgate.
If you walk directly north of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, you will follow along Aldersgate Street. Now it is a neighborhood in London, but it originally was a gate in the Roman wall. In Saxon, The gate at that location was originally called Ealdredesgate, or Ealdred’s Gate. James VI entered London through Aldersgate when he came to receive the crown. The area of Aldersgate is near Cripplegate, which is where Susanna grew up and where her father was famously a dissenting pastor. This was a neighborhood which the Wesleys knew and in which they often stayed while in London.
On May 24, 1738, John Wesley woke up for prayers and Scripture reading. It was a Wednesday so he was fasting until 3pm. In the morning, he read from 2 Peter. Here is an excerpt from that book to give us a sense of the language going through Wesley’s mind at the time.
2 Peter 1:1-8
Simon Peter, a servant and an apostle of Jesus Christ, to them that have obtained like precious faith with us through the righteousness of God and our Saviour Jesus Christ: Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord, According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness; And to godliness brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness charity. For if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In his Journal, John focuses on verse four, but the whole passage is instructive.
John then mentions opening to Mark 12:34. For context, here is Mark 12:28-34 in the King James:
And one of the scribes came, and having heard them reasoning together, and perceiving that he had answered them well, asked him, Which is the first commandment of all? And Jesus answered him, The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord: And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. And the scribe said unto him, Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God; and there is none other but he: And to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the soul, and with all the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. And when Jesus saw that he answered discreetly, he said unto him, Thou art not far from the kingdom of God. And no man after that durst ask him any question.
In his Journal, John then says that he “was asked to go to St. Paul’s”1 for the evening prayer service. This would have followed from the 1662 Prayerbook. It would have begun with a scriptural exhortation like Luke 15:18-19:
I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.
Psalm 130 was sung, most likely in the setting by Henry Purcell. Wesley quotes nearly the whole Psalm in his journal.
Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. 2 O let thine ears consider well: the voice of my complaint. 3 If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss: O Lord, who may abide it? 4 For there is mercy with thee: therefore shalt thou be feared. 5 I look for the Lord; my soul doth wait for him: in his word is my truſt. 6 My soul fleeth unto the Lord: before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch. 7 O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy: and with him is plenteous redemption. 8 And he shall redeem Israel: from all his sins.
There would have been Old Testament and New Testament readings, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles Creed.
There would have been the collect for Whitsunday, or Pentecost, which took place on May 21 of that year.
GOD, who as at this time didst teach the hearts of thy faithful people, by the sending to them the light of thy Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the same Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.
After the service, John writes: 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.
The editors of Wesley’s journals “suggest that this was a society which met weekly at Nettleton Court, Aldersgate Street…The reader is thought to be William Holland (died 1761) a devout Anglican who now introduced the Wesley brothers to Luther’s commentaries on Galatians and Romans. He was a founding member of the Fetter Lane Society.”2
The same preface to Romans had been instrumental in August Francke’s evangelical conversaion. Wesley had read Francke in Georgia, including Francke’s account of his own spiritual experience:
I fell once more upon my knees on this Sunday evening, and I appealed to God, whom I still did not know nor trust, for salvation from such a miserable state. Then the Lord, the living God, heard me from his throne while I was still on my knees. So great was his fatherly love that he chose, rather than to settle my doubts and the unrest of my heart gradually…instead to hear my prayer suddenly…Then all my doubt vanished as quickly as one turns one’s hand; I was convinced in my heart of the grace of God in Christ Jesus; and I could call on God not only as God but as my Father. All the sadness and unrest of my heart was taken away at once, and I was immediately overwhelmed as with a stream of joy so that from a full heart I praised and gave honor to God who had shown me such great grace.3
The document that was read was not Luther’s commentary on Romans but an introductory text about the book of the Bible that had been translated into English in 1594. The original english publication did not have page numbers and it is difficult to speculate which specific passage was read. Here are a few excerpts from the 1594 translation which will give us a sense of the text.
For God rather dooth love ande imbrace vs with a full favour and a right perfect good will for Christes sake, who is our mediator, earnest penney, and the first finites of the Spirit. Therefore though remnaunts of sinne doo dayly glister and shine in vs: yet never theless we are just before God,
or
They do but only imagine in themselves, certain cold works, which because they have no spark of faith in them, are void of all spiritual affections: as joy, peace of the conscience, and that bold trust and assurance in God, and are rotten fruits of a rot∣ten tree.
or
As many therefore of vs as are through faith iustified in Christ, we are both sinners and iust. Sinners by reason of the imperfect mortification of our fleshe, and for that in this lyfe (the reliques of sinne re∣mayning in vs) we cannot haue or attayne the fulnes of the Spirit.4
Wesley writes in his journal about this moment:
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. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation : and an assurance was given mo, that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of-sin and death. I began to pray with all my might for those who had in a more especial manner despitefully used me and persecuted me. 5
What precisely happened that day is not as clear as it may first seem.
The first letter that John Wesley wrote after his Aldersgate experience did not mention the experience at all. It was a letter to his mother and it followed the same pattern as all his previous letters.6 John relayed to her his travels in the Netherlands on his way to meet Zinzendorf. It is less than a month after Aldersgate and yet no mention of conversion was made.
As Frances Young notes, “Wesley hardly ever refers to this experience what has seemed to the myth makers of Methodism. The most important thing about Wesley does not seem to have been regarded in that light by himself.”7
As Young continues:
The emotional element was far less central than the myth has suggested. John Wesley’s desire for faith had been born as long conversations about the interpretation of Paul with his Moravian friend Peter Buller, and he had only been convinced that the faith his friend spoke of was something real and something he lacked when it had been proved from scripture and evidenced in the lives of people he actually met. He then began to pray for this gift.
The second thing we notice about Wesley’s account of it is that the immediate effect was that he began to pray for his enemies: in other words, it was far from a self-indulgent experience, as seem to be so many of the experiences that people claim are religious. Frances Young, 39.
Richard Heitzenrater offers a similar perspective. He writes:
The problem that confronted Wesley at Aldersgate was the question, how do I know I am a Christian? A child of God? How do I know that I am justified? Forgiven ? The issue was essentially that of assurance. He had been convinced as a young man that persons should be able to clearly to perceive, if they were in a state of salvation. His problem was, and one significant aspect, epistemological— how does one know? And given his philosophical tendencies in this matter, his approach was to look for evidence upon which to base his knowledge. What he was looking for, then, was the evidence that he was really a Christian.8
Henry Rack, in his biography, summarizes a number of psychological accounts of Aldersgate. He writes:
It seems reasonable to accept that Wesley’s spiritual development was entwined with his psychological development. A prolonged adolescence and recurring difficulties in attaining autonomy and maturity might be a reasonable summary of the situation, and in some ways, especially in relation to women, one might argue that maturity was never fully attained.9
Ultimately, all of these arguments are going to be inconclusive. Were we to interview John Wesley, I don’t think that we would be any nearer to the truth. John Wesley had an encounter with God on May 24, 1738. It didn’t change everything. As we have seen, there are deep continuities between the John Wesley of 1725 and future Methodist movements. John will later distance himself from any signal importance of May 24, 1738, but the churches he helped found will see that day as one of the singular differentiators of Methodism.
The really biblical question for us is: what are the fruits of Aldersgate? What happened on May 25? Next time on the History of Methodism.
- WW 18:249. ↩︎
- WW 18:249 n. 75. ↩︎
- Markus Matthias (ed.), Lebensläufe August Hermann Franckes (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1999, 29, in Pietist Theologians, 102-103. ↩︎
- Luther, A methodicall preface prefixed before the Epistle of S. Paule… ↩︎
- WW 18:250. ↩︎
- WW 25:551. ↩︎
- Young, 39. ↩︎
- Heitzenrater, Mirror, 108. ↩︎
- Rack, 152. ↩︎
Sources
Henry Rack
Richard P. Heitzenrater, Mirror and Memory: Reflections on Early Methodism (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989).
Francis Young, “The Significance of John Wesley’s Conversion Experience”, in John Wesley:Contemporary Perspectives, ed. by John Stacey (London: Epworth Press, 1988).