In reading John Wesley, and in reading what the best historians and theologians have to say about Wesley, one can’t get very far without learning that he frequently felt constrained to DE-emphasize creed. I do not mean to say that Wesley was dismissive of or indifferent to doctrine. That’s ridiculous. But if we’re in search of common ground — and we ought to be — it is surely worthwhile for Methodists-at-large to learn, and to embrace with gratitude, that one of Wesley’s deepest convictions was that “Methodism” should be understood primarily as “the religion of the heart.”[1] By this, as he later explained, Wesley meant that “we do not lay the main stress of our religion on any opinions, right or wrong; neither do we ever begin, or willingly join in, any dispute concerning them. The weight of all religion, we apprehend, rests on holiness of heart and life.”[2]

It is important that all United Methodists hear and digest this bedrock Wesleyan perspective, particularly in the face of the widespread messaging that argues that remaining in community while holding different perspectives on human sexuality issues violates some “covenant” with our founder. In truth, Wesley’s perspective on what binds us as Methodists tends in the opposite direction, as is reflected in the following passage, which I realize is well-known (and sometimes misused) in some circles, but which I suspect remains virtually unknown to most rank-and-file Methodists, whose church family (after all) some are threatening to tear asunder:

The distinguishing marks of a Methodist are not his opinions of any sort. His assenting to this or that scheme of religion, his embracing any particular set of notions, his espousing the judgment of one man or of another, are all quite wide of the point. Whosoever, therefore, imagines that a Methodist is a man of such or such an opinion, is grossly ignorant of the whole affair ; he mistakes the truth totally.[3]

That was Wesley himself speaking. And it is words such as those, joined by so many others to the same effect, that leave no doubt that Professor Robert Cushman was right when he concluded, “We are probably warranted in the judgment that John Wesley, more thoroughly and more cogently than any Christian thinker since St. Paul, exposed the vanity, flaccidity, and spiritual futility of an identification of Christian truth and piety with its mere intellectual formulation as creed, or its indoctrination conceived as the way of salvation.”[4]

[1] John Wesley, “Thoughts Upon Methodism,” reprinted in John Emory, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. VII (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831), 315.

[2] John Wesley, “A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion,” reprinted in John Emory, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. V (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831), 172.

[3] John Wesley, “The Character of a Methodist,” reprinted in John Emory, The Works of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. V (New York: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831), 241.

[4] Robert E. Cushman, John Wesley’s Experimental Divinity: Studies in Methodist Doctrinal Standards (Nashville: Kingswood Books, 1989), 174.