Through the Christian Year with Charles Wesley

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By Jennifer Woodruff Tait

Hopefully, many of you are signed up to receive our daily quotes and stories from church history in the mail. This year we've been focusing on quotes from collections of devotionals. I hope they've expanded your reading list for daily study and prayer.

Something else recently crossed my desk which will also help expand your reading list: Murray Adamthwaite's Through the Christian Year With Charles Wesley. Adamthwaite is an Australian pastor and scholar: his academic area is Old Testament, but he also obviously has a great love for Wesley. As a card-carrying Charles Wesley fan myself, I approve. (How do you become a card-carrying Charles Wesley fan? Join the Charles Wesley Society!)

The heart of the book is the selection of 101 hymns and psalm versifications by Wesley. They begin with hymns for morning and evening prayer, scripture study, and Sunday worship in general, and then move through the church year. There is also a nice selection of Wesley's Eucharistic hymns. Adamthwaite has found Scriptural references for nearly every line of each hymn—no small feat, since Wesley scholar J. Ernest Rattenbury once remarked, "A skillful man, if the Bible were lost, might easily reconstruct it from Wesley's hymns."

In addition, the book contains a lot of useful supplemental material: a short biography of Wesley (hewing to the traditional rigorous-legalistic-Anglican has-strong-evangelical-conversion line; folks should be aware that some of this is debated in Wesley studies), a study of his hymns as poetry, some notes on the kinds of music they would have been sung to, a list of archaic words and phrases Wesley uses, and discussions of theological issues in the hymns. An aside on music: Adamthwaite doesn't much care for contemporary worship music. If you happen to care for it more, you will still profit much from the book, but you will run into a few pointed barbs in your direction. Incidentally, quite a few people and groups have arisen who have been setting Wesley texts to contemporary tunes, and in this former choir director's opinion they rock (sometimes literally). Check out the names Matthew Sigler, Swee Hong Lim, Kevin Twit, the site High Street Hymns, and the CDs Love Divine and Prisoners of Hope.

Quite a bit of Adamthwaite's theological commentary, as well as the introduction by Alan Harley, include efforts to explain to Reformed believers that the Wesleys were really not that far off from the Reformed and can profitably be read by Reformed Christians. As a Wesleyan-Arminian myself, some of this made for interesting reading (especially the section on Christian perfection, with which I respectfully disagree).

But John Wesley did say he was a "hair's breadth from Calvinism" regarding ascribing all good to God's free grace, and I am all in favor of the more folks reading Wesley the better. I concur with Adamthwaite that Calvinists and Arminians can unite around the core doctrines of the Christian faith, and that Wesley is well worth reading by both when he "exalts Christ, affirms his deity, proclaims salvation through his atoning blood, rejoices in his resurrection and ascension, points us to His second coming and the heavenly home, and adores the Triune God." I heartily recommend this book as helping all of us do all of that!