Aldersgate and Athens: John Wesley and the Foundations of Christian Belief

Chapter 3. Faith and the Power of God

< 41 Faith and the Power of God Chapter 3 In his Aldersgate experience John Wesley was convinced that at least three things had happened to him. He had come to experience the fulfillment of divine promise that had been preached to him by Peter Böhler and the Moravians. He had come to perceive the love of God for himself, so much so that he could with integrity and sincerity call God “Abba, Father.” And he had come to experience the power of God, giving him a measure of victory over sin that he had not known before. Wesley was not content, however, to leave his Aldersgate experience in merely autobiographical terms. He was also interested in unpacking how these experiences constituted evidence for the truth of the Christian faith. Two kinds of arguments surface when we attend to what is at stake. First, there is the argument from the fulfillment of divine promises. I put the argument formally in this fashion : If many people have satisfied to a significant extent the conditions laid down for a sense of pardon from the guilt and power of sin, and if they, or a large proportion of them, then receive such a sense of pardon and power, this provides 42 Aldersgate and Athens us with evidence for the truth of the claim that this promise was indeed made by a being with the wherewithal and the will to make good on that promise. The argument can be readily reformulated to include the second element of Wesley ’s experience. Therefore we can run it not just in terms of the promise to experience pardon and power, but also in terms of the promise to perceive the love of God for oneself. If many people have satisfied to a significant extent the conditions laid down for perceiving the love of God for themselves, and if they, or a large proportion of them, then receive such perception of the love of God for themselves, this provides us with evidence for the truth of the claim that this promise was indeed made by a being who has the wherewithal and the will to make good on that promise. Second, there is the argument from the nature of faith or from the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, where the heart of the matter is captured by the claim to perceive God. In this instance Wesley unpacked the argument as a quasiempirical argument in which perception of the divine was secured as reliable by exploring the nature of ordinary sensory perception. Thus Wesley held that if one accepted the reliability of sense perception of the natural world, then one had good reason to accept the reality of spiritual perception of the invisible world. Spiritual perception of the divine provided good prima facie evidence for claims about the nature of the divine. This perception is not incorrigible; it can be overridden in various ways. But the default position is that it is reliable until we have good reason to believe otherwise. We turn now to a third argument that showed up in Wesley ’s writings in and around Aldersgate, namely, the argument from the power of God at work in our lives. We can also, in fact, capture this argument in terms of the fulfillment of divine promise. Indeed our formulation has already caught this in the argument from divine promise, for that argument centers on sensing divine pardon for sin and divine Faith and the Power of God 43 power over sin. However, I want in this chapter to explore a different network of arguments from divine power, namely, an argument from conspicuous sanctity or holiness in others and an argument from what Wesley would have called the extraordinary gifts of the Holy Spirit. The evidence in this case goes beyond any signs of grace in our own lives and focuses on the power of God to produce holiness and supernatural phenomena. While I shall go beyond what Wesley has to say, especially in formally identifying the logic of the argument, I want to report that what Wesley does have to say, particularly on the argument from charismatic phenomena , is absolutely fascinating.1 What is the argument from divine power? Essentially it is an abductive argument to the best explanation. In encountering conspicuous sanctity and purported direct divine action in charismatic phenomena, we find that the phenomena involved are best explained in terms of the activity of the Holy Spirit. Thus the phenomena provide relevant and persuasive evidence of the reality of God. The phenomena make sense if we believe in God; otherwise they remain unexplained and anomalous. The evidence does not constitute proof, but it does carry weight in its own right; it can therefore play a legitimate part in cumulative case arguments for the truth of Christian doctrine. Before I give details, it should be noted that we are dealing here with phenomena that often play a critical role in conversion. It is generally recognized that many people come to faith not because of propositional evidence but because they have come to know someone who loves the socks off them or someone who generally exhibits a life of holiness. Equally, we know lots of cases where people are brought significantly toward faith because of the manifestation of the power of God in miracles, healing, exorcisms, prophecies , visions, speaking in tongues, and words of knowledge. What we want to know is why this is the case. Is this simply 44 Aldersgate and Athens a matter of emotional or psychological impact? Or is there something intellectual and cognitive at stake? Wesley was very clear that the latter was the case.2 What we are doing in what ensues is following his lead on the matter. The evidence from conspicuous sanctity arises in this way. Suppose we meet someone who exhibits the kind of loving , self-sacrificing sanctity that catches our attention and takes our breath away. Due to this encounter our skepticism about God may be checked, and we may well be drawn to believe in God. Here is how Wesley made this point: The beauty of holiness, of that inward man of the heart which is renewed after the image of God, cannot but strike every eye which God hath opened, every enlightened understanding. The ornament of a meek, humble, loving spirit will at least excite the approbation of all those who are capable in any degree of discerning spiritual good and evil. From the hour men begin to emerge out of the darkness which covers the giddy, unthinking world, they cannot but perceive how desirable a thing it is to be thus transformed into the likeness of him that created us. This inward religion bears the shape of God so visibly impressed upon it that a soul must be wholly immersed in flesh and blood when he can doubt of its divine original.3 So let’s suppose the skeptic or the agnostic meets a saint; or they encounter someone who exhibits the kind of life that Wesley expounds on a host of occasions as real Christianity, entire sanctification, unspotted holiness, the recovery of the image of God, and so on. How is the skeptic or agnostic to understand this phenomenon? More generally, we ask, what is the cause of this phenomenon? The saint has an immediate response to this question. We are to see this phenomenon (he or she insists) as causally brought about by the grace of God. Thus the phenomenon is to be explained in terms of the power of God. It is certainly not a matter of his or Faith and the Power of God 45 her own doing. As Paul puts the issue succinctly: “But by the grace of God I am what I am. . . . I worked harder than any of them—though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”4 The best explanation is furnished by the avowals of the agent that this is not his or her doing, it is the grace of God. In the absence of a better explanation, we have evidence of the agency of God. But why should we accept this description and explanation ? Perhaps the saint is lying to us. However, this will not work simply because we would not grant the initial description of sanctity if the person involved was a liar. Saints who persistently lie are not saints; we would have to drastically alter our initial impression or description. So this route is not very promising; we have no good reason to change our initial impression or description. The critic, then, will have to try another tack. Perhaps there are possible natural causes at hand. The saint’s goodness (it will be said) is attributable to various psychological and sociological factors that on their own explain the phenomena of sanctity. However, while this is not an impossible way out, it is subject to serious objection . First, we need a specific, relevant psychological or sociological explanation for the phenomena in question; it is not enough to wave a hand with mere possibilities. As yet we do not have such explanations available to us; certainly I know of none. Second, even if we did have explanations that invoked the relevant, specific factors at hand, we would need an additional argument to show that these are the only factors at work. This kind of reductionist move is notoriously difficult to secure; especially so when conceptually it is clear that the agency of God can work in, with, and through the natural order. Hence in the absence of a compelling alternative , the robust theist has in hand a compelling case to accept the best explanation available, namely, an explanation in terms of the power of God. The theist has a good abductive argument for Christian doctrine from the existence of 46 Aldersgate and Athens conspicuous sanctity. As Wesley noted, “This inward religion bears the shape of God so visibly impressed upon it that a soul must be wholly immersed in flesh and blood when he can doubt of its divine original.”5 So much for the argument from conspicuous sanctity. How now shall we run the argument from charismatic activity ?6 Wesley gives explicit attention to this argument in his remarkable response to the essay of Conyers Middleton entitled “Free Inquiry.” Middleton had essentially argued that there was no good argument for the existence of charismatic phenomena in the history of the church beyond the apostolic age.7 Wesley was clearly annoyed by the essay, for he took time out of his busy schedule to write an extended reply. Middleton ’s strategy took the form of refuting all claims to extraordinary spiritual phenomena across the whole history of the church, right up to the New Testament period. He deployed a kind of nuclear strike that would in one stroke eliminate supernatural phenomena in the history of the church. His nuclear strike took the form of an argument against historical testimony. Wesley accurately summarized the move in this way: “The credibility of facts lies open to the trial of our reason and senses. But the credibility of witnesses depends on a variety of principles wholly concealed from us. And though in many cases it may reasonably be presumed, yet in none can it be certainly known.”8 Middleton’s crucial point here is that given that we can never know if historical witnesses are reliable, we should be agnostic regarding the value of their testimony. Wesley smelled a nest of rats lurking below the surface; he sent in his intellectual ferrets to bring them out into the open. He rightly noted that Middleton’s whole argument on the nature of testimony would in time undercut all historical investigation. “Sir, will you retract this, or defend it? If you defend, and can prove, as well as assert it, then farewell the credit of all history, not only sacred but profane.”9 Faith and the Power of God 47 Middleton has clearly proved too much. He has undermined the testimony to miracle by undermining all historical testimony . Wesley also astutely recognized that you could not allow skeptical historical investigation to reach back into the second century and then suddenly cry halt when it knocked at the door of the first century, that is, to Jesus and the apostles . In the central section of his rejoinder he took on the specific arguments of Middleton as those related to matters of fact and the quality of the patristic witnesses. Here Wesley narrowed the field to the first three centuries, digging in resolutely to defend his great heroes of the faith prior to the fall of the church with Constantine in the fourth century .10 What is of interest here is how Wesley weighed the arguments from charismatic phenomena and then made a fascinating epistemological comment. Wesley worked through the evidence for Christian belief as it related to miracles, healing, exorcisms, prophecies, visions, speaking in tongues, and words of knowledge. It suffices in this context to see what he does in the case of divine healings. Middleton focused on cases where miraculous healing occurred in the context of anointing with oil. Hence the form of the argument is clearly an argument for the best explanation. If a healing occurs after anointing with oil (and the implied invocation of the Holy Spirit), then an obvious way to explain the healing is in terms of the activity of God. Certainly this is how the robust Christian theist might read the situation. The phenomenon of healing is best explained by seeing it as caused by the Holy Spirit. Middleton challenged this initially by positing a natural explanation, that is, by attributing the healing to the natural efficacy of the oil itself. Wesley was unconvinced. “Be pleased to try how many you can cure thus, that are blind, deaf, dumb, or paralytic; and experience, if not philosophy, will teach you, the oil has no such natural efficacy as this.”11 Middleton then tried another explanation: the whole matter 48 Aldersgate and Athens was a cheat from the beginning to end. Wesley found the arguments deployed in defense of this option equally unconvincing . Whatever else we may say, the witnesses in the first three centuries were not cheats; there were too many of good standing to dismiss in this cavalier fashion. Then Middleton tried out another possible explanation: maybe we are dealing with cases of spontaneous cures. Then negatively, he argued that unless we know precisely the real bounds between nature and miracle, we will not be able to posit that the best explanation is one given in terms of divine agency. Here is Wesley’s reply: . . . although we grant, that some recover, even in seemingly desperate cases; and, that we do not know, in any case, the precise bounds between nature and miracle; yet it does not follow, therefore I cannot be assured there ever was a miracle of healing in the world. To explain this by instance: I do not precisely know how far nature may go in healing, that is, restoring sight to, the blind; yet this I assuredly know, that if a man born blind is restored to sight by a word, this is not nature, but miracle. And to such a story, well attested, all reasonable men will pay the highest regard.12 Even without an explicit criterion, Wesley insisted that when we attend to specific, particular examples of healing, they are convincingly read as miracles. Wesley’s argument was a modest one. If healing occurs in response to anointing with oil, provided we are dealing with witnesses that we have no reason to challenge ab initio, and provided there are no good specific, naturalistic explanations available, and provided we have no other defeaters, then we have evidence of the power of God at work in history .13 Mutatis mutandis this argument can be applied to the whole gamut of charismatic phenomena in the history of the church. Faith and the Power of God 49 Yet Wesley did not stop there in his analysis. In the concluding section of his response to Middleton, he made two supplementary comments that are exceptionally interesting . First, he clearly preferred the evidence from the fulfillment of divine promises and the evidence from perception of the divine to the argument from charismatic phenomena. Here is a felicitous restatement of the two arguments (that of promise and perception of the divine) put together. The faith by which the promise is attained is represented by Christianity, as a power wrought by the Almighty in an immortal spirit, inhabiting a house of clay, to see through that veil into the world of spirits, into things invisible and eternal; a power to discern those things which with eyes of flesh and blood no man hath seen or can see, either by reason of their nature, which (though they surround us on every side) is not perceivable by these gross senses; or by reason of their distance, as being yet afar off in the bosom of eternity.14 It was this kind of evidence rather than historical or traditional evidence from charismatic phenomena that Wesley preferred to advance. Even then, Wesley did not cast aside what he terms here “traditional evidence.” He thinks that there is merit in it: “I do not undervalue traditional evidence. Let it have its place and its due honour. It is highly serviceable in its kind, and in its degree.”15 So why did he think this sort of evidence was inferior? He had two reasons. The first focused on the issue of time: It is generally supposed, that traditional evidence is weakened by length of time; as it must necessarily pass through so many hands, in a continued succession of ages. But no length of time can possibly affect the strength of this internal evidence. It is equally strong, equally new, 50 Aldersgate and Athens through the course of seventeen hundred years. It passes now, even as it has done from the beginning, directly from God into the believing soul. Do you suppose time will ever dry up this stream? O no! It shall never be cut off: Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum. [It flows on and will forever flow.]16 The second reason had to do with the issue of complexity. Traditional evidence is of an extremely complicated nature, necessarily including so many and so various considerations , that only men of a strong and clear understanding can be sensible of its full force. On the contrary, how plain and simple is this; and how level to the lowest capacity! Is not this the sum: One thing I know; I was blind, but now I see? An argument so plain, that a peasant , a woman, a child, may feel all its force.17 Essentially, then, Wesley thought that historical evidence is weakened by time; and the evidence is much too complicated compared to the contemporaneity and simplicity of the inward evidence. These are fascinating moves. Second, Wesley made an intriguing theological and cultural comment to fill out his analysis. I have sometimes been almost inclined to believe, that the wisdom of God has, in most later ages, permitted the external evidence of Christianity to be more or less clogged and incumbered for this very end, that men (of reflection especially) might not altogether rest there, but be constrained to look into themselves also, and attend to the light shining in their hearts. Nay, it seems (if it may be allowed for us to pry so far into the reasons of the divine dispensations) that, particularly in this age, God suffers all kind of objections to be raised against the traditional evidence of Christianity, that men of understanding, though unwilling to give it up, yet, at the same time they Faith and the Power of God 51 defend this evidence, may not rest the whole strength of their cause thereon, but seek a deeper and firmer support for it. Without this I cannot but doubt, whether they can long maintain their cause; whether, if they do not obey the loud call of God, and lay far more stress than they have hitherto done on this internal evidence of Christianity , they will not, one after another, give up the external , and (in heart at least) go over to those whom they are now contending with; so that in a century or two the people of England will be fairly divided into real Deists and real Christians.18 What Wesley was doing here in this little piece of cultural analysis was welcoming the assault on the traditional historical arguments for Christian doctrine. He displayed at this point a remarkable historical sense of the development of Christian thought as under the care of providence. He was happy to let Middleton’s skeptical rats eat away at the traditional arguments because this may then create the space for a proper appreciation of the truly significant evidence in favor of Christian doctrine, namely, the evidence from the fulfillment of divine promises and the evidence from perception of the divine. Indeed Wesley went so far as to use Middleton’s skeptical arguments as a way of waking nominal Christians from their dogmatic slumbers and forcing them to decide between Deism and real Christianity. Once the arguments from the Deists and rationalists have had their effect, God may have a real chance of getting through to them. Go on, gentlemen, and prosper. Shame these nominal Christians out of that poor superstition which they call Christianity. Reason, rally, laugh them out of their dead, empty forms, void of spirit, of faith, of love. Convince them, that such mean pageantry (for such it manifestly is, if there is nothing in the heart correspondent with the outward show) is absolutely unworthy, you need not say 52 Aldersgate and Athens of God, but even of any man that is endued with common understanding. Show them, that while they are endeavouring to please God thus, they are only beating the air. Know your time; press on; push your victories, till you have conquered all that know not God. And then He, whom neither they nor you know now, shall rise and gird himself with strength, and go forth in his almighty love, and sweetly conquer you all together.19 This was surely a remarkable and daring comment; it shows a side of Wesley that we do not often see, that is, a subtlety that often escaped him. Let me begin my own commentary and final assessment of Wesley’s argument by noting the obvious relevance of Wesley’s cultural comment to what has happened in the two hundred years since his death. To his astonishment Wesley may well have gotten his wishes. On the one hand, the tough rationalist and empiricist critique of the last two hundred years of robust forms of Christianity has been both persistent and effective in the West. We can legitimately read the decline of the Christian faith in Europe as intimately related to the brilliant attacks on the Christian gospel that developed in a host of forms in the nineteenth and twentieth century . The story is a complex one, but it is accurate to say that one crucial part of the attack has focused on the intelligibility and rationality of believing what Wesley called the “traditional evidence.” Historical and philosophical arguments against Wesley’s robust form of theism litter the landscape, many of them developed by historical critics and professional theologians in the name of truth and intellectual virtue.20 On the other hand, while much of the argument against such evidence remains in place, the acids of postmodernity and the unexpected resurgence of Christian philosophy within the analytic tradition have called into question the confidence that once marked this kind of work. These, Faith and the Power of God 53 of course, are strange bedfellows, for analytic philosophers and postmodern critics are not usually seen within earshot of each other. Yet the combined effect of their work is beginning to bite deep into the standard opposition of charismatic phenomena. More importantly, we now have the extraordinary development of forms of Christianity that unapologetically lead in their witness with appeals to the present power of God in our lives. In the West this occurrence is represented by a resurgence of some forms of Evangelicalism and by the appearance of the Charismatic Movement and Pentecostalism . Outside the West it is represented by the extraordinary growth of forms of Christianity that unashamedly give testimony to personal encounter with God and that look to signs and wonders as authenticating evidence for the truth of the gospel. It almost looks as if God has fulfilled Wesley’s aspiration noted above: “And then He, whom neither they nor you know now, shall rise and gird himself with strength, and go forth in his almighty love, and sweetly conquer you all together.” If this is true, I hope Father Wesley (in keeping with his workaholic eschatology) has been able to eavesdrop and lend a hand. Given this radically altered landscape we now need to go back and see if Wesley’s views need revision. Recall what his central claims were. The appeal to the power of God in charismatic phenomena has epistemic weight, but compared to the appeal to fulfillment of divine promises and to inward perception of the divine, it is too remote and too complicated to be of value today. Thus we should let it fade into the background for a time and work off the stronger and simpler forms of evidence available to the ordinary believer now. Is Wesley right here? His first argument (the argument from distance) no longer holds in our contemporary situation. We have a wealth of charismatic phenomena available to us in the contemporary church. Hence the argument from distance or from the 54 Aldersgate and Athens weakening of time is no longer available to him. Put more positively, we should not make the concession that Wesley did to Middleton. Of course, the relevant material can be dismissed (as it often is) without examination as credulity and superstition; but this is simply (as Wesley might say) beating the air with words. It is the mere ipse dixi of the critic, rather than the rational examination of pertinent evidence. We can and should expect this kind of intellectual hostility, and I shall return to this at the end. Wesley’s second argument (the argument from complexity ) is also extremely weak when we explore it with care. The argument from charismatic phenomena is as complicated or as simple as the argument from personal experience of God. Wesley was clearly well aware of the complexity at issue in the case of the argument from perception of the divine. He knew that while the claim is initially “simple,” that is, it is an appeal to inward perception of the divine, the articulation and defense of this evidence was complicated. Many of his readers would have failed to get the point of his analogy between sense perception and perception of the divine. The work of the last generation in, say, figures like Plantinga and Alston, makes it clear that the theist does not have a “simple” argument. Providing an account of the logic of the argument and overturning defeaters is inescapable in any development of what is at stake. The argument from charismatic phenomena is complicated and none the worse for that. All of these arguments are complicated in the sense that articulating them takes effort and thought. However, this does not mean that the force of these arguments is not in a real sense obvious to the ordinary believer or to the genuine seeker of truth. Nor does it mean that they should not have real force in our lives; they are indeed evidence that strikes us intuitively and cogently. In all of these arguments, the evidence is more often than not tacit rather than articulated; it is implicit rather than explicit; it is Faith and the Power of God 55 person-relative rather than universal. The force of all these arguments tends to strike us as fundamentally similar in this respect. There is no relevant difference in logic between them; hence one is not to be preferred over the other. So Wesley was mistaken in his assessment of their relative merits . In exalting the case for the fulfillment of divine promises and inward perception of the divine, he too readily undersold the value of the argument from divine power. The good news is that once his mistakes are removed, we strengthen rather than weaken his overall case. We need, that is, to retrieve and restate the argument from charismatic phenomena. Yet someone might still want to say that the evidence from charismatic phenomena is altogether more sensational and therefore wobblier than the evidence from promise fulfillment and inward divine perception. The more spectacular the evidence, the more abnormal it will appear, and therefore the more precarious it will appear to the seeker of truth. So should we not leave aside charismatic phenomena for fear that we may invite charges of credulity and superstition ? If we do not do so, it might be said, we lose before we even begin. I do not find this at all convincing. Precisely the same worry besets the argument from fulfillment of divine promises , inward perception, and conspicuous sanctity. Sometimes these take the form of what we can only call spectacular phenomena. Wesley himself knew this in that he was aware that Christian conversion (a term we may use here as a summary for what was at stake) could indeed be spectacular. Equally, it is often the case that the saints exhibit sanctity that can only be described as spectacular. On the other side, much of what counts as charismatic phenomena is far from spectacular. In my own experience as a witness of divine healing, exorcism, and speaking in tongues, for example, the evidence was quiet and unsensational. I can, of course, with a bit of blarney dress it up to look spectacular; but this 56 Aldersgate and Athens is a rhetorical matter rather than straight description. The accounts of charismatic phenomena are generally made out to be spectacular because they are so little known and because we are used to anecdotal evidence that often deliberately focuses on the spectacular. So the relevant distinction between the spectacular and the non-spectacular does not bear careful scrutiny. We have both spectacular and non-spectacular examples of the relevant data. What we need here is a more nuanced account of the relation between the spectacular and the ordinary in all of the phenomena we have examined. Basil Mitchell has expressed the point at issue with exemplary felicity with respect to the relation between sanctity and grace. Noting that we need a more broadly theological approach that teaches us that we cannot presume to limit the divine activity to those instances in which it may be discernible to us, he continues: Such instances (remarkable and striking manifestations of sanctity) may be clearly revelatory . . . yet they are revelatory of the God, whose activity we believe on general grounds, to underlie even the most tentative and inarticulate movements of the human soul towards conformity with the pattern of Christ. They are like the phosphorescent crest of a wave which enables us to detect a sea whose boundaries we could not chart. Having made an entry for the concept of grace by tracing it as it breaks through more or less spectacularly into human experience , we are led to extend its application to all good works, whether characterized by the numinous or not, whether or not associated with religious belief or not. It is enough that they tend in the direction of that complete holiness, which is the “fruit of the spirit.”21 We can surely broaden this observation. Whenever we encounter the spectacular power of God in conversion and Faith and the Power of God 57 charismatic phenomena we see but the phosphorescent crest of a wave that enables us to detect a sea of divine action and activity whose boundaries we cannot chart. We are led through these special acts of God to extend our sense of divine action in creation and providence, whether characterized by the spectacular or not. Hence they lead us into that wider vision of God that Wesley insisted was central to the whole theistic vision of the world and ourselves. Even with this qualification, there may still be reservations about my overall revision of Wesley’s vision and about my claim that we should not shy away from appeal to the argument from divine power as represented by charismatic phenomena. Clearly we may well invite ridicule and dismissal in intellectual circles when we proceed boldly down this path. Even in Christian circles mention of charismatic phenomena can set a lot of listeners’ teeth on edge. In the middle of the last century in my adopted city of Dallas the two major seminaries (one generally identified as “conservative” and one as “liberal”) were agreed in rejecting the existence of charismatic phenomena. Excellent scholars were fired or refused employment in both institutions because they had experienced charismatic phenomena or because they took them seriously in the history of the church. Interestingly and ironically, both institutions rejected them on epistemological grounds. The conservative seminary rejected them on the grounds that such phenomena were no longer needed once the Scriptures were canonized. Charismatic phenomena provided evidence for divine revelation in Jesus and the apostles , but now that we have an inerrant record of the divine revelation and special divine revelation has ceased, claims about such phenomena must be dismissed as demonic or as misrepresentations of natural phenomena. The liberal seminary rejected charismatic phenomena on the grounds that there was no good evidence for such phenomena, and more 58 Aldersgate and Athens precisely, on the grounds that there could not be good historical evidence for such phenomena because they violated the intellectual requirements of historical criticism.22 What might Wesley say at this juncture? Against the first he made it clear that charismatic phenomena were not intended merely for a short time in history. He explicitly agreed with John Chrysostom that the reason for the absence of charismatic phenomena in the history of the church was “for want of faith, and virtue, and piety in those times.”23 In addition he mused over whether God had allowed the evidence of charismatic phenomena to be clogged and encumbered so that another kind of evidence might get attention. Against the second, Wesley made it clear that he did not find the epistemological arguments on offer in his day at all convincing . While he lived before the full onslaught of certain kinds of historical criticism, he clearly had deep intuitions that were at odds with the assumptions that became embedded in much historical investigation and that are already visible in the work of Conyers Middleton. Therefore we can be confident that Wesley would be equally opposed to both the conservative and liberal opposition to charismatic phenomena. There is a deeper point, however, to be made. Wesley insisted that when it comes to matters touching our relation to God, we are never disinterested spectators merely weighing evidence. We are dealing with phenomena that call for moral and spiritual transformation. Human beings are complex truth-detecting organisms who are subject to cognitive malfunction because of the noetic effects of sin. Hence the presence of good evidence in itself will not bring us to truth or to faith. Human agents have all sorts of ways of ignoring , denying, belittling, and ridiculing evidence that is genuine . We invent both vulgar and sophisticated constructions to keep the truth at bay. We can see this manifest in individual lives; and we can see it manifest in social, academic, Faith and the Power of God 59 and political life. Recent work that flies under the banners of postmodernism and of feminist epistemology has alerted us to the way in which such factors as gender, social location, and power relations can blind us to the truth about who we are and what is really the case. Intellectuals as diverse as Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Lorraine Code have highlighted the way entrenched claims to impartiality, objectivity , neutrality, and the like, have served as ideological cover for commitments that are far removed from reality. The relevance of these remarks is this: opposition to charismatic phenomena is not a neutral, objective affair. Charismatic phenomena are more than spiritual curiosity items; they signal the active presence of God in a way that invites repentance and faith. Thus opposition is to be expected. Moreover, we can anticipate that this opposition will be expressed in public and academic institutions. Cognitive malfunction is not just an individual or personal phenomenon; it is also a social and institutional phenomenon . Intellectual vice is not just personal; it is also social in nature. Much opposition to charismatic phenomenon is a matter of cognitive malfunction in the normative conventions , gate-keeping mechanisms, ethos, and practices of scholarship. Thus we must be on guard and on the lookout for deep structural problems in the grammar and technology of scholarship in this domain. Given that intellectual opposition is well nigh inescapable , and that it is likely to mask its intellectual vice under the guise of intellectual virtue, the last thing we should do is run away and hide. To be sure, we need to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. To be sure, it is important not to cast our pearls before swine. We need to expect to have to bear our crosses and suffer the contradiction of opponents. To be sure, we know that many will not believe should even someone rise from the dead. However, today is not a time for reserve and retreat but for advance and renewal. This is 60 Aldersgate and Athens not a time for faint hearts and minds but for rigorous, intellectual boldness. This is not a time for fear but for faith. We best serve the academy not by hiding the light and power of God under a bushel but by giving a reason for the hope that is within us. We best serve our cultures not by cutting back on the evidence but by patiently making all the evidence at our disposable available. We best serve the gospel not by shying away from the promises of God but by the fulfillment of those promises (all the promises) in our midst today. Included is the promise of the power of God, a God who can do more abundantly than ever we ask or think. ...