John Wesley - the messed up Calvinist

On a day that falls between Aldersgate Day and John Calvin's birthday (a person who, for some strange reason, Methodists hear very little about!), it bemuses me to recall Phil Johnson - in one of his sermons - describing John Wesley as a "messed-up" Calvinist. What he meant is that Wesley sought to give God all the glory - yet inadvertently he stole some of it for himself through his Arminian beliefs.

This underlines an important distinction in understanding what Calvinism is all about. It's not so much about predestination (which is the mental pigeonhole most people assign it to) as it is about the glory of God. Calvin's greatest goal was to demonstrate the glory of God in everything - in vocation, in salvation, in election, in all of life. In this sense, John Wesley was a Calvinist as well as he, too, sought the glory of God in all that he did - it was just that he didn't think election and reprobation and limited atonement demonstrates the glory of God (it does). He had too low a view of God's glory and sovereignty.

In the end, Wesley's Aldersgate experience proves the truth of God's electing sovereignty: God met him and took hold of him, not the other way around!

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. 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.

Did John Wesley CHOOSE to believe and trust in Christ? Methinks not. He simply found that he did!