A Mind Strangely Warmed

By Stephen Rankin

I love John Wesley’s journal entry of May 24, 1738 on his famous Aldersgate experience, which many of us recently commemorated. It just so happens, for us in the West, the event coincided with Pentecost this year. The convergence of these two events makes for a good opportunity for considering the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives.

Hear again (or maybe for the first time) Wesley’s memorable words from Aldersgate: “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for my 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.”

Christians, especially of the Wesleyan/Methodist sort, love to talk about the heart. I certainly do. Wesley famously talked about “heart religion” in sharp contrast to the doctrinal and moral formalism of his day. For example, within his long testimony, recorded as part of the entry for May 24, 1738, he writes, “When I was about twenty-two my father pressed me to enter into holy orders. At the same time, the providence of God directing me to Kempis’s Christian Pattern [also known as The Imitation of Christ], I began to see that true religion was seated in the heart, and that God’s law extended to all our thoughts as well as words and actions.”

One prevailing problem in contemporary Christianity is that too many people want to talk about the heart in virtual opposition to the head, as if the two operate in separate domains. Just think of how often people say, “My head says one thing, but my heart says another.” Or, more disturbingly, the advice to “do what your heart says.” Our culture has been permeated by something sociologists like Robert Bellah and, more recently, Christian Smith, call “expressive individualism.” It goes with the value of authenticity. To be authentic, you must express what you feel, which, in the dominant way of thinking, is to go with your heart.

In a number of ways, this sentiment of expressive individualism, with its ironically shriveled understanding of the heart, has infected the church and causes people to misunderstand the larger significance of Wesley’s Aldersgate experience. This is why, in my recent essay, I tried to explain why the renewal of our minds is so central to how we feel about life, or, to use Wesley’s words, to experience true heart religion. When we understand the work of the Spirit in salvation, we begin to see that to renew the mind is to renew the heart.

To see my point, let’s go back a couple of months before Wesley’s May 24 heartwarming and look at conversations he had with the Moravian, Peter Boehler. This larger historical context is crucial to what occured at Aldersgate. Wesley had recently returned to England from his disastrous experience in Georgia. He had come to realize that the Moravians he met knew something in their relationship with God that he did not know and did not see in his own life. Their witness got him thinking, and, in subsequent conversations with Boehler, a theological question came into focus: what is the nature of true saving faith?

Let’s pause here for a moment and look at the basic and close linkage between thought and emotion. On the feeling side, Wesley is suffering real discouragement. That feeling is intimately connecting to his thoughts in the form of his judgments about his failures: “I came to America to save the Indians,” he wrote in his journal, “but who will save me?” The disappointments of Georgia and his feeling of failure led to his recognizing the inadequacy of his understanding of true faith. Enter Peter Boehler. He challenges John and his brother Charles to recognize their lack of understanding that was blocking the experience of their hearts.

Notice the inevitably intellectual dimension of this background to Aldersgate. Early in the discussions, John, we would say, is “dug in” with his entrenched views about faith as a kind of rational assent, a simple agreement with what the church teaches. It took a while for Boehler’s argument to click, but Wesley eventually realized that the saving faith that transforms is more than mere rational assent. We see, then, a kind of intellectual and theological conversion that the lays the ground for Aldersgate. Wesley records the outcome in his Journal of March 4 and 5, 1738:

“I found my brother at Oxford, recovering from his pleurisy; and with him Peter Boehler. By whom (in the hand of the great God( I was on Sunday the 5^th clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of ‘that saving faith whereby alone we are saved,’ with the full Christian salvation.”

This change of mind opened Wesley to what occured on May 24. He experienced a change mind that opens the heart.

Reflecting on this concept, we must ask ourselves what might this view of Wesley’s Aldersgate experience do to help us with our own faith? Some of us lead with thoughtful reflection that eventuates into deepened feeling, to enriched experience of love for God. Others lead with feelings and then do the work of thinking to make sense of their powerful experiences. The sequence doesn’t matter. What does matter is that we see the essential value of careful thinking for rich, vibrant heartfelt faith.

Let me risk stating what may seem obvious: to think is to experience. Thinking is not some “head trip” detached from life. Yes, we all have sat through boring sermons or teachings that seemed too “heady” and detached from practical life. But notice: the very sense that something is boring or irrelevant is a judgment based on prior understanding. The feeling of being bored cannot be separated from the intellectual (I use this word purposefully) conclusion, even if the ground for that conclusion remains outside one’s conscious thoughts in the moment. The work of understanding – of coming to a belief, a conclusion – is buried under the feeling of boredom, but a belief is there, operating.

I think it is worthwhile, therefore, to understand Wesley’s Aldersgate experience in light of what happened a couple of months earlier, when – dare I say it? – his mind was strangely warmed. The crying need of our age is to practice thinking carefully about the contents of the faith. Yes, it is slow, time-consuming work, but imagine what God might do in our hearts if we did so.