Book Review: John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity

Abstract

John Wesley in America: Restoring Primitive Christianity. By Geordan Hammond. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xvii + 237 pp. $85.00 (cloth).John Wesleys 1730s sojourn in Georgia ended badly: he fled the colony less than two years after arriving, his heart broken and a clutch of colonial magistrates pondering various charges against him. This story is typically narrated as Wesleys spiritual nadir, best known for prodding the young cleric into his Aldersgate experience of the assurance of his salvation, which in turn helped to enflame the successful evangelical mission that Wesley and his fellow Methodists would undertake in the decades to come. However, Geordan Hammond, Director of the Manchester Wesley Research Centre and Senior Lecturer in Wesley Studies at Nazarene Theological College, Manchester, England, believes there is more to be gleaned from this chapter in Wesleys life. John Wesley in America, based on Hammonds doctoral dissertation, argues that Wesley used his mission in Georgia to test his views of primitive Christianity. The colony, says Hammond, became Wesley's laboratory for introducing to a parish community what he believed to be the practices of the earliest Christians. While Wesleys attraction to Christian antiquity has been previously probed by scholars, and his Georgia mission is famous (or infamous), Hammonds approach is unique in interrogating the Georgia experience in light of Wesleys consuming passion for Christian primitivism. The result is an engaging work that offers a new lens for interpreting this difficult period in John Wesleys long and colorful life.The first chapter sets Wesleys devotion to primitive Christianity in the context of the priority assigned to apostolic Christianity by some eighteenthcentury Anglicans, particularly High Church Non-Jurors (clergy who had refused to swear an oath to William and Mary, having sworn allegiance to the deposed James II). Wesleys parents instilled a deep reverence for the early church in their children. John was determined to practice an authentic faith and, influenced by a radical wing of Non-Jurors, became an eager student of primitive Christianity. He studied the ante-Nicene theologians and pored over early ecclesiastical handbooks, especially the Apostolic Constitutions, which he took to be of apostolic origin (they have since been dated to the late fourth century). He began to pray the hours, to fast two days per week, and to include a prayer of oblation in his eucharistie celebrations.The next three chapters take us along on Wesleys Georgia mission, beginning with his four-month journey across the Atlantic with three fellow Oxford Holy Club members, and tracing his relations with Moravians and Lutheran pietists in Georgia. …