TJieodore W. Jennings, Jr. The Meaning of ... - Quarterly Review

with the baptismal regeneration concept personally. His Journal
entry of May 19, 1738, acknowledged, "I believe, 'til I was about
ten years old I had not sinned awav that 'washing of the Holy Ghost'
which was given me in baptism.'
Now, can the evangelical and catholic dimensions of John
Wesley's thought regarding baptism and the New Birth be balanced?
Maybe not. I believe that some of the confusion in our United
Methodist Church over the doctrine of baptism is that Wesley
himself did not square all his utterances in this regard because he
was "theologizing on the run" in eighteenth-century England. What
is patent about his situation is that he looked out on a nation of
baptized people whose lives, either by dissolute living or by open
disbelief, were separated from the gospel and church of Jesus Christ
as he understood them. He believed that baptismal grace ought to
yield living faith and its fruits of love. Wesley felt that the solution
was to bring these people, by the grace of God, to a conscious
awareness of God's forgiving and renewing grace in their lives. We
should not forget, however, that he was fully aware of the efficacy
of sacramental grace in bringing people to God.
This is the way a number of Wesley scholars read him today.
John Parris conceded that "Wesley was seeking a via media, in
which the extremes both of an ex opere operato concept of the
sacrament and that view which held that a sacrament was only a
'bare sign' were avoided." 38
Albert Outler stated that one must
compare Wesley's "mild allowance" of the doctrine of baptismal
regeneration in the "Treatise on Baptism" with the sermon "The
New Birth," which stresses a conscious adult experience of
regeneration. Outler concluded that Wesley held to both ideas. 39
Bishop Ole Borgen contends that "there is no doubt that Wesley
holds a doctrine of baptismal regeneration or new birth, of which
baptism is a sign and a means." 40
Borgen is in agreement with
Outler, seeing sanctification as "the gradual process of growth in
grace" to be a complement to regeneration received in baptism.
Colin Williams conceded that Wesley stressed the need for people to
come to a conscious acceptance of the work of regeneration which
God begins in infant baptism. That was reason enough to reduce but
not to eliminate Wesley's reference to baptismal regeneration. 41
1 am
satisfied that there is a doctrine of baptismal regeneration in John
Wesley, whose theology is foundational for United Methodists.
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