Blacks embraced Methodism when the first Wesleyan preachers arrived, in 1766, from England to colonial America. The conversion of Betty, a slave in New York City, that same year demonstrates that blacks were among the first Americans to affiliate with the Methodist movement. Moreover, Captain Thomas Webb initiated revivals in Brooklyn in 1766 that laid foundations for a biracial congregation that eventually emerged as the African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church. Through developments like this, African Americans quickly moved beyond being introduced to Methodism by third parties. They were exposed to Wesleyan hymnody, sermons, doctrine, and discipline first hand in innumerable camp meetings, revivals, and chapel services. As early Methodist members, blacks drew emancipationist themes from Wesleyan beliefs and embedded black spirituality in Wesleyan worship and devotional practices. These interpretations, blacks believed, showed that their understanding of Methodism was the linear embodiment of what John Wesley intended for his religious movement. Piety, deep and expressive spirituality, and social holiness became for African Americans the distinctive marks of Methodism and a basis to judge the authenticity of Methodist professions and practices from both white institutions and white individuals.

In his Journal under the date of April 12, 1789, the elderly John Wesley clarified and defended the intention of the Methodist movement and the course it had taken: “Being Easter Day, we had a solemn assembly indeed, many hundred communicants in the morning and in the afternoon, far more hearers than our room would contain, though it is now considerably enlarged. Afterwards, I met the society and explained to them at large the original design of the Methodists, viz., not to be a distinct party, but to stir up all parties, Christians or heathens, to worship God in spirit and in truth, but the Church of England in particular to which they belonged from the beginning. With this view I have uniformly gone on for fifty years, never varying of choice - but of necessity - from the doctrine of the church at all nor from her discipline.” / In this retrospective, Wesley gave central place to the revitalization of worship in the Methodist project. To worship God “in spirit and in truth” (cf. John 4:23-24) meant to “love him, to delight in him, to desire him, with all our heart and mind and soul and strength; to imitate him we love by purifying ourselves, even as he is pure; and to obey him whom we love, and in whom we believe, both in thought and word and work.”

John Wesley stands alone among the originators of the major protestant denominations in his concern for the world lying beyond the boundaries of the old Christendom. Unlike the sixteenth-century reformers, he had been an overseas missionary. Serving with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, John Wesley arrived in Georgia in February 1736. In addition to his pastoral duties, he recorded in his Journal his intention “to teach the Georgian Indians the nature of Christianity.” This particular episode may be deemed a failure. The indigenous people of Georgia were not the docile innocents of eighteenth-century imagination and Wesley was hardly equipped with an adequate missiology for dealing with non-European cultures. But the sense of a world beyond Europe remained with him to the end of his life, and he consistently looked upon all the world as his parish. Furthermore Wesley expected that a new age was about to break in, when the kingdoms of this world should become “the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ” as George Frederick Handel's Hallelujah Chorus had proclaimed in 1742. Wesley's own expression of this “dawn of the latter-day glory'” is found in his 1783 sermon “The General Spread of the Gospel.”

John Wesley (1703-91) is a prominent figure in the history of Western Christianity. Educated at Oxford University and ordained a priest in the Church of England, Wesley became one of the leading architects of the Evangelical Revival in eighteenth-century England. The “Methodist” wing of the revival that he led became known for their rigorous spiritual practices, their personal piety, and their concern for the poor, the imprisoned, and the uneducated. Although these traits were ridiculed by some in the early years, by the end of his life, Wesley had emerged as one of the most significant religious figures in England. Wesley's significance within broader Western Christianity is grounded, in part, in the phenomenal growth and spread of Methodism after his death. What began as a meeting of a few students at Oxford who were seeking spiritual accountability has blossomed into a worldwide movement consisting of more than 100 denominations, which minister to more than 75 million people. When one adds to this the Pentecostal and Charismatic churches that trace their heritage from Methodist roots, the number of Christians who can be regarded as Wesley's spiritual or ecclesiastical descendants is staggering. These descendants have made Wesley part of the physical landscape in churches, private homes, and on university and seminary campuses around the world - preserving his memory in the form of paintings, busts, and life-sized statues (see cover and Figure 1).

The importance and extent of John Wesley's career as an editor and publisher have long been known to historians of Methodism, although not perhaps to historians of literature. Three key individuals, two in the nineteenth century and one in the mid twentieth, established the main facts. Thomas Jackson edited and published the extended second edition of Wesley's Christian Library (1819-27), as well as the third edition of Wesley's Works (1829-31). Richard Green compiled the first chronologically ordered bibliography of The Works of John and Charles Wesley (1896; 2nd ed., rev., 1906). Building on Green, Frank Baker compiled A Union Catalogue of the Publications of John and Charles Wesley (1966), which provisionally - and very ambitiously in the pre-electronic age - listed all known editions and the whereabouts of surviving copies. The second edition of Baker's Union Catalogue (1991) added some additional materials that had been located and finalized the numbering system for Wesley's publications being used in The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley. The two-volume bibliography for this edition will include Baker's extended descriptions of the text history of many of these items. In the early twenty-first century, thanks to the online English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC),we have a much clearer idea both of the numbers of religious books published in the eighteenth century in relation to the whole field of publications, and of the sheer size of Wesley's output as editor and publisher.

The parents of John Wesley, Samuel and Susanna (nee Annesley), were raised in Puritan dissent, although both made their way back to the Church of England as young people. Deeply principled in many respects, Samuel and Susanna created a family environment at the Epworth rectory in Lincolnshire that eventually produced three priests for the church they so loved. John Wesley was born in Epworth on June 17, 1703 (according to the Julian calendar), and was the fifteenth of eighteen or nineteen children. Something of a disciplinarian, Susanna Wesley believed that conquering the will of her children was the only strong foundation for a religious education. When this was done properly, the child could then be governed by the reason and piety of its parents until its own understanding came to fruition. Susanna had many opportunities to exercise strong leadership in the family and she cared for her children according to rule and method. Six hours a day were spent at school where instruction was serious and thorough and where loud talking and boisterous playing were strictly forbidden.

The civil wars and constitutional dislocations of the mid-seventeenth century exercised an enduring influence over British politics and religion from which neither John Wesley nor his progenitors were exempt. Wesley's great grandfather (Bartholomew Westley) and grandfather (John Westley) were victims of the great ejection of nonconforming clergy in 1662; his father Samuel was an ex-Dissenter turned “high church” Anglican priest; and his mother Susanna, the daughter of an eminent Dissenting minister, also turned tables when she became a “high church” Anglican with thinly disguised Jacobite sympathies. Although both of John Wesley's parents were high church Tories, they fell out over William, Prince of Orange's legitimacy as king, which his father accepted and his mother rejected. The seriousness of their disagreement, which was anything but a mere marital spat, indicates how profoundly divided Anglicans were over their increasingly incompatible devotion to divine right monarchy on the one hand and their hostility to Roman Catholicism on the other. The Catholicism of the later Stuart monarchs forced Anglicans to make a most unwelcome choice, which could bifurcate consciences, friends, and families. In this way, the vicissitudes of the Stuart dynasty played out in family squabbles within the Wesley household - with its large number of children, variously estimated between seventeen and nineteen, the great majority female.

To understand and appreciate John Wesley, it is imperative to locate his life and work within the intellectual, social, and political context of England's long eighteenth century. Other essays in this volume deal at length with Wesley's social and political context. This essay will focus primarily on the ways in which Wesley inhabited and deeply enriched a particular theological tradition, namely, English Arminianism. To that end, it is important to begin with a few background considerations. / Background Developments / One of the most intractable disputes within Wesleyan studies has to do with where to locate John Wesley within the wider Christian theological tradition. For example, whereas some scholars insist that Wesley belongs to the magisterial Protestant tradition, others maintain that he was deeply indebted to Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. Among those who associate Wesley primarily with Protestantism, there is a lively debate concerning which of the Protestant traditions he inhabited most deeply. For example, some argue that he was essentially Lutheran in outlook, whereas others suggest that he is best understood within the Reformed tradition. Nor does the debate end there. Thus, some scholars insist that Wesley belongs specifically to the German-Pietist tradition, whereas others contend that he was ultimately a Puritan in outlook

On October 3, 1749, Charles Wesley married Grace Murray to John Bennet. It was a devastating moment for John Wesley. Despite a host of earlier reservations about getting married, he had concluded that Grace Murray was indeed the woman for him. So much so, that he had even entered into various legal commitments to her. However, Charles had intervened and stopped any future developments in its tracks by literally carrying her off and marrying her to Bennet, a rival suitor. John worked through his distress in two ways. He wrote a moving poem that vented his suffering on God. More significantly, he returned to his work as a preacher. Such was Wesley's commitment to preaching, that one can well believe that this brought some relief amid of deep personal grief. As he noted in 1757, “About noon I preached at Woodseats, in the evening at Sheffield. I do indeed live by preaching.” Such is the legacy of preaching in his ministry that much of Methodism even to this day looks upon their ministers first and foremost as preachers. Failure in this arena spells failure overall. The legendary statistics are well known. Wesley rode up to 20,000 miles a year on horseback. He preached 800 sermons a year to crowds as large as 20,000. In a typical day he was up at 4.00 a.m., he preached at 5.00 a.m., and he was on the road to the next assignment at 6.00 a.m. Consider this neat snapshot of his work taken from Wednesday, July 21, 1779.

It is clear that the small movement called “Methodism” that began in the eighteenth century within the Church of England has had a lasting impact. Millions of Christians today identify with or can trace their roots to Methodism in some way. As the primary leader and organizer of the original Methodists, John Wesley has a place in the histories of many churches and movements within Christianity, and, in this sense, his legacy is quite impressive. His legacy as a theologian, though, is less clear. As Methodism spread and splintered, the theological views of each new body that formed were shaped by new contexts. Because each context is itself complex, a multiplicity of theological views are held by members within the same ecclesial body, and not simply across ecclesial bodies. The variety that exists among these descendants raises the question: Along with the historical legacy that ties many churches and movements to Wesley, is there also a legacy of shared theological commitments? One way to think about this question is to start with the meaning of “legacy” itself. The word has several meanings in English usage, among the most common being “something handed down” or a “gift.” In this case, a legacy is received by someone, was valued by the giver, and is probably valued by the recipient. But, in the world of technology, a somewhat different meaning has recently come into use.

The elderly John Wesley, just a few months shy of his eighty-sixth birthday, asked a crowd of Irish Methodists gathered in Dublin a classic question from an unlikely source - the Calvinist Westminster Confession: “For what end did God create man?” One simple answer, Wesley insisted, should be “inculcated upon every human creature: 'You are made to be happy in God.'” Wesley then tendered advice to parents. Even when a child first begins to speak or to run alone, a good parent follows behind saying, many times each day, “He made you; and he made you to be happy in him; and nothing else can make you happy.” What is the happiness for which humans were made? Wesley insisted that just “as there is one God, so there is one religion and one happiness.” This one human happiness and true religion is the love of God and the love of neighbor. It is, “in two words, gratitude and benevolence; gratitude to our Creator and supreme Benefactor, and benevolence to our fellow creatures.” The active benevolence toward others that is born of our gratitude to God is for Christians the wellspring of the moral life and of human happiness. Happiness is impossible without this grateful love of God and benevolent, active love toward others. And the moral life is one with this happiness.

The expression “know yourself” served as an epitome of ancient wisdom according to which appropriate self-knowledge is the ground of all other knowledge. This sentiment also came to expression in Christian theology and spirituality. Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola began his Spiritual Exercises with a week of exercises designed to bring a retreatant to consciousness of her or his many sins. The Protestant Reformer John Calvin - whose career at the University of Paris may have overlapped that of Ignatius Loyola by a few weeks in the summer of 1535 - began later editions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion with a consideration of “The Knowledge of God and of Ourselves Mutually Connected” and Calvin's point was that there is no proper knowledge of the self except in relationship to God: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 1:7). Thus, John Wesley wrote to one of his correspondents in 1768, “The knowledge of ourselves is true humility.” Wesley's mature understanding of the “way of salvation” involved not only a spiritual “awakening,” by which a sinner came to know himself or herself in the eyes of God as desperately needing divine grace, but also the “repentance of believers” according to which the believer has continually to “acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness.” The careful examination of one's own experience was a critical component of the Christian life as Wesley taught it.

The twentieth-century explosion of holiness, pentecostal, and charismatic movements may be the most significant recent development in world Christianity. By some estimates, pentecostalism in particular, which recently marked the centenary of its birth in a boisterous revival in Los Angeles in 1906, now comprises nearly one-fourth of Christians worldwide. This amounts to about half a billion people. The only larger Christian group is Roman Catholicism. The phenomenal growth rate of these movements is only part of the story. They are changing the face of global religion. Scholars have begun to study the “pentecostalization” of world Christianity. Describing the rapid spread of pentecostal and charismatic groups in the southern hemisphere, the historian of religion Philip Jenkins notes: “these newer churches preach deep personal faith and communal orthodoxy, mysticism and puritanism, all founded on clear spiritual authority.” For such initiates, “prophecy is an everyday reality, while faith-healing, exorcism, and dream-visions are all basic components of religious sensibility.”

John Wesley famously called himself homo unius libri, “a man of one book.” He was, of course, an Oxford-educated man of many books, who assembled, edited, and then published a well-stocked Christian Library for ministers of the Methodist movement. What he meant by this self-appellation is that the Bible was always the one book close at hand, an indispensable auxiliary of the Spirit's formative work throughout his life and gospel ministry. Yet, Wesley never wrote a treatise or preached a sermon on the doctrine of Scripture. In part, this omission reflects a former day when the Bible's authority was widely assumed and the skepticism that emerged during the nineteenth century had not yet taken hold. The biblical criticism of early modern England was interested in the more modest tasks of discerning genuine from embellished texts, and orthodox from spurious interpretations, according to the standards established by the ancient Church and reaffirmed during the Protestant Reformation. Jane Shaw has made the case that England's initial reception of the Enlightenment at the beginning of its long eighteenth century was not centered in philosophers' academic discourse, but in discussions among ordinary believers who gathered together in the teahouses and alehouses throughout England to debate whether local testimonies of dramatic conversions or healing miracles were credible according to biblical teaching and the rules of reason.