Dale Coulter, who teaches at Pentecostal Theological Seminary and is ordained in the Church of God, wrote wonderfully in Providence this week about Wesleyan political theology from an Augustinian perspective.
Here Coulter explains what’s unique about Wesleyan political theology, how it differs from Calvinist, Lutheran and Catholic perspectives, why it’s so rarely articulated despite Methodism’s transformative political impact, and how it’s being enacted globally through surging Pentecostalism.
Enjoy this fascinating conversation!
Tooley: Hello this is Mark Tooley, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy, with the pleasure today of talking to Dr. Dale Coulter who is a professor at Pentecostal Theological Seminary and also ordained in The Church of God, who wrote a fascinating piece for Providence about Wesleyan Augustinian political theology. Wesleyans, of course, are not typically known for their articulated political theology, so perhaps this article and this conversation with accelerate growing studies on this important topic. But Dale, thank you so much for your article and for joining this conversation.
Coulter: Thanks Mark, it’s great to be here with you. Tooley: So, if you had to summarize what is Wesleyan Augustinian political theology, how would you do that summary? Coulter: Well, I would say the Augustinian bit is that Wesley’s notion that human beings have to have ordered emotions and desires in order to be whole I think is straight in line with what Augustine himself said. And Wesley’s acceptance of natural law I think is also in line with Augustine. So, the Augustinianism of Wesley is stemming from those two streams as they come together in his thought, and he puts that with the emphasis on mobilizing the laity to reform the church, which I think gives rise to a populism within Wesleyanism. And so, it’s the fusion of those two that to me make for a distinctive Wesleyan approach to political theology.
Tooley: And if you had to contrast Wesleyan political theology with Calvinist political theology, or Catholic political theology, or Lutheran political theology, how would you draw those lines and what do the Wesleyans contribute uniquely?
Coulter: Well, that’s a great question. So, most reformed political theology I’d say, at least these days, is Kuyperian or neo-Kuyperian from Abraham Kuyper, and there’s a real hard line that is drawn between the work of the spirit and creation and the work of the spirit and salvation. That stems from a doctrine to divine election that conservative reform folks, Kuyper certainly held to, and many conservative reform folks hold to, and those two don’t meet, so there’s more of a, I’d say, a division between the orders of grace and the orders of creation than there would be within a Wesleyan discourse, because of Wesley’s notion of the universal convenient activity of the spirit and the Christological structure of the human person- the fact that human rationality is modeled on divine rationality, on Christ who is the logos of God. So, that would be a distinction I would say with certainly the reform camp and within Lutheranism I think for Wesley, it wouldn’t operate so clearly with a two kingdoms model like you would have within at least a traditional Lutheran understanding of how these two operate. Again, I think it’s because of the distinctive Wesleyan approach, which fuses together the orders of creation and the orders of grace, and those are interlaced with one another in a way that they wouldn’t be for reformed or Lutheran, and makes Wesleyanism actually more Catholic than either of those two most likely, even though Wesley has what I consider to be a very strong Augustinian doctrine of sin because of his notion of prevenient grace- that there is no nature apart from grace. He, that mitigates a little bit against this strong Augustinian doctrine because the spirit is already at work. So, with the Catholic notion, I think this is where two things probably emerge. Number one- it’s the Protestant side of Wesley and the emphasis on, he is, he does, hold to justification by faith. But it’s really the populism piece I think that is critical for Wesley. And that populist piece, especially when it comes into Wesleyanism as it develops in the United States, means that non-conformity or disestablishment Christianity is the order of the day rather than a kind of establishment Christianity that Catholicism was engaged in, at least throughout the nineteenth century up and through until Vatican II, when they started to reverse things under John Courtney Murray and others. And the influence that they had on Vatican II’s development, so the common ground, would be natural law, and then on top of that, the further common ground would be the way in which Wesleyanism links up with certain movements or trends within Catholic thought. In particular, the trend coming out of what’s called the nouveau theology, the French group and where they wanted to hold together this, the orders of creation in the orders of grace, so that would be the common ground. But I think it’s the populism piece, that and the disestablishment non-conformity that makes Wesleyan distinctive with Recusancy Catholicism.
Tooley: And do you think the Wesleyan impact on political theology is the most egalitarian and most democratic of the major Christian traditions in political theology?
Coulter: Well, I begin by saying this- Wesleyans don’t have to do what John Courtney Murray did and what some Catholics, George Weigel and others, are still trying to do. Which is to say to Catholics, “Catholicism in its fundamental structures is compatible with the democratic experience, or experiment, of the United States of America.” Because Wesleyanism takes root in that, in the democracy I would say, especially in the United States, it’s part of its own life and ethos. In fact, I would say within Wesleyanism there’s an inherent suspicion of institutionalization, and that inherent suspicion is probably even more pronounced in the Pentecostal stream of Wesleyanism than it is, let’s say, in the Methodist stream of Wesleyanism thinking of these various streams. But you can find it pronounced in, for example, in Orange Scott when he’s speaking against the Methodist Episcopal Church on the issue of abolition, and he rails against the bishops in the Methodist Church. And this leads him to want to not only come back to Wesley’s more what I’d call natural law approach, but it also leads him to want to revision the way in which Wesleyan ecclesiology and Methodist ecclesiology gets structured, which minimizes more the role of bishops. So, there’s a deep suspicion I think of this kind of establishment institutionalization, because it’s easier to sell out to culture, I think. That’s my read of how Wesleyanism operates essentially.
Tooley: And is there built into the Wesleyan perspective a perfectionist streak that can lend itself to almost political utopianism? Coulter: Certainly, if you remove the notion of encounter, which is a critical piece in Wesley himself. And usually that removal of the notion of encounter as a dramatic in breaking of the spirit upon the person, giving rise to faith, usually that starts with an attack on Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification. If you remove that from the equation and just simply talk about process, this slow transforming process, then I think Wesleyanism becomes right for the kind of perfectionism that we find happening at the end of the nineteenth century in certain forms of Wesleyanism; actually certain forms of Methodism which leads to understanding of human progress and this slow movement into “we’re going to get better and better and better,” that sort of thing. So, you definitely see that, but you have to remove what I consider to be an essential piece of Wesley’s own theology in the Wesleyan dynamic, which is the dynamic in breaking of God in order to complete the process or in order to fuel the process. That’s why I think there’s a kind of political realism within Wesleyanism that is key to that idea both in the life of the human person and in the level of society. So, there’s a kind of apocalyptic realism that we can’t actually realize a utopia. God has to bring about the new heavens and the earth in a dramatic in breaking, or it will not be realized. And we can’t do it on our own. What we can do is work within the structures of creation, given grace, but event that we recognize in our own lives that there’s got to be a dramatic in breaking in order to reorder human affection and desire, and that same thing has to happen in society. So, it’s the removal of that that leads to the kind of perfectionism that would cause Wesleyanism to kind of move into just human progress itself.
Tooley: And so, Wesleyans would be apocalyptic realist, as you put it, but at the same time there’s this great sense of hope that fuels their constant desire to reform society.
Coulter: Yeah, I think there’s certainly a fundamental optimism, because that optimism is ground in how grace intersects with nature and the constant movement of God within the human heart, and therefore within society, and the fact that no human person is devoid of the Holy Spirit. And therefore, even in the conscience that is the most seer, the spirit is still at work trying to order that person toward the good and toward the true. And so, Wesley and Wesleyans operate in society with that as a fundamental assumption moving in that when we speak and proclaim and talk about truth, justice, those sorts of things, holiness, that we are doing so in cooperation with the work of the spirit that is already happening. And so, you know the extreme to which that emphasis can move. You know, there are two extremes. Here one is to remove encounter from the process, so that you have a kind of theory of human progress. And the other is to kind of move into, and this is where the Pentecostal stream of Wesleyanism, you can get into this sort of too much, of a victorious Christian living that’s all victory, victory, victory and there’s no real sense of realism going on here that should be guiding you in how you’re approaching it. And so, that can lead I think to a detachment from how things are going, as though, you know, we’re just moving from one degree of victory to another degree of victory because of this optimism of grace, God’s always going to carry us through in some dramatic fashion. And I think that that has its end results in the particular versions of Pentecostalism in the charismatic movement with prosperity- that’s where that line of thought would end.
Tooley: Is there an aspect of Wesleyan belief that guards against political extremism? It seems like Methodists by and large are known in their political activism for being rather sensible and in the middle.
Coulter: Yeah, that’s I think, well ideally the way Methodism works. And the gift of Methodism to the whole Wesleyan movement is that we have connectionalism that is supposed to keep us together, keep us anchored in scripture as understood through tradition. You know, that’s the way Wesley, I think, thought about discipleship with his Christian library. And those works and the way they move you through tradition, if you read them, that’s supposed to be how it works. Of course, we know in practice, and I think if you look at the history of Wesleyanism, both in its Methodist and its Pentecostal and its holiness, there are three I think, three streams of Wesleyanism: the Methodist stream, the Holiness stream, the Pentecostal stream. Those are the three streams that overlap with one another, and if you look within them, the danger that connectionalism doesn’t always guard against is it doesn’t guard against the way in which growth can lead to what Don Dayton has called “in bourgeoisie,” where it’s capitulation to the culture as we grow and become better. That’s what happened in the late nineteenth century, from let’s say, from well the early nineteenth century, over the issue of slavery as the Methodist Episcopal Church grew. And then as you move to the late 19th century, then you have different forms of Methodism, moving into liberalism not all but certainly some. And now we have, I think, Pentecostalism beginning to capitulate in some ways, and prosperity gospel again is a good example of that kind of capitulation to larger cultural ideas. So, ideally it’s connectionalism, but connectionalism has to be rooted in this understanding of scripture as read through the lens of tradition. And so, I think absent a rootedness of connectionalism in that, then we can easily succumb to the larger culture. And let me just add one more thing here, in you know, in a positive way experience is supposed to fuel this, but experience in the sense of spiritual encounter. So, when you again remove encounter from the equation, then experience can be reduced to just the sum total of what my, you know, what I as a human being in a particular location encounter. So, it’s not my encounter with God so much as my encounter with life, given the makeup of who I am as a human being, and so that notion of experience trumps the notion of spiritual experience, which is for Wesley the one that is really should be the driver of it all. So, I’d say connectionalism, grounded in this scripture, read through tradition, but experience is a kind of driver- spiritual experience as a driver, and all of that.
Tooley: And how Christians look at politics often is determined, are influenced in part by their attitude towards the Parousia, in terms of are they on millennial, post-millennial, pre-millennial. I suppose much of traditional Methodism was on millennial, later becoming post-millennial. Much of Pentecostalism is pre-millennial. So, how does all that play out politically?
Coulter: Well, I would say the common ground between those various positions on the millennium is that there has to be some sort of dramatic in breaking of God. So, even in the revivalist stream where you get this movement into a kind of post-millennialism, on the tail end of the success of these revivals- the fact that camp meetings are occurring and the national movement for the national promotion of camp meetings; that you have John Inskip and other Methodists behind it actually starts succeeding. And on its success, there’s a movement into a kind of, or abrasive post-mill as part of that. Even with that, I would say the common denominator is still the idea of a dramatic in breaking to bring about the fullness of the end, and that even revivalism in and through the people is not going to fully realize it. There must be a final move to bring the end, and therefore a final move by God. So, all of the revivals are gestures toward the end. They are what you could call proleptic realizations of the end, proleptic in-breakings, but they are not the end. And I’d say that’s what probably connects. Now, having said that, the pre-mill position in and of itself does provide a little further guard against a move into certain kinds of perfectionism wedded to the theories of human progress. At least as I read Methodists who become members of the holiness movement, when they adopt perfect, the pre-mill position, one of the reasons they do so is because it prevents them from moving into secularization. And they are honest about that. They say one of the strengths of the pre-mill position is that it requires you to acknowledge a divine in breaking, to realize the millennium. And thus, if the millennium symbolizes some sort of perfection, the consummation of all things when justice is fully realized, then the pre-mill position forcefully points to a divine in breaking prior to that. However, I still think that the revivalism that is thread throughout the whole movement points in that same direction and connects these various positions; even if we have different conclusions over precisely how that end is going to develop, we all tend to agree that it’s going to occur through a final day of the Lord which will realize it. And that I’d say is a driver of a political realism, even more so than a strong Augustinian doctrine of sin, like you might have with a neighbor who recovers that Augustinianism in order to, as a kind of antidote for the liberalism that he was coming out of. I’d say it’s that apocalyptic realism that connects everybody.
Tooley: And do you think that Wesleyanism has a special gift of particularly expanding and generating civil society?
Coulter: I would, but I would say that its gift is by cultivating and renewing folk culture. And what I mean by that is the emphasis on the people and the populism leads to the need to develop, reform, and renew regionalism and localism, and that the cultures that emerge from them, Wesleyans, instinctively not only draw from folk cultures- the whole hymn tradition of hymn writing within Wesleyanism- but also as they’re drawing, they develop them and they spit out new cultural forms. And you can see this in particular in certain forms of Pentecostalism where, especially in African-American Pentecostalism at the turn of the 20th century, you have sanctified blues and you have the beginnings of jazz, because they’re bringing guitars into the church house in a way that other forms of Christianity were not. That was, other forms of Christianity were still focused on the organs, on organ playing, things like that. And that to me is true to the way in which Methodism brought these fortunes into the writing of hymns and appropriated them. So, there’s a strong sense in which Wesleyanism cleaves to the people- to see that the future of the life of any nation is grounded in the richness of its regionalism, the richness of its localism, and the folk cultural forms that are present there, and seeks to revive, renew, and cultivate. So, there is a sense in which mission is cultural formation for Wesleyans, but that cultural formation is always at the level of folk. Are the people, and just one other point here that I think is important, I think disestablishment Christianity as it comes to exist within Wesleyanism in the three steams drives this, and it also means that it also corresponds to a historical reality that is that there is no form of Wesleyanism that has ever been part of an establishment kind of Christianity at least. And now you can talk about the way in which Wesley- John Wesley, Charles Wesley- develops Methodism to revive Anglicanism. As long as Methodism remains part of Anglicanism, its part of establishment. But I’m thinking about when you get into those later phases of the eighteenth century and you have the break off of, you know, the earlier American republic, and then within Britain you have this movement into a disestablishment form. As Methodism comes out of Anglicanism, you don’t really have this movement itself in some establishment mode, unlike Lutheranism, unlike Reformed Christianity, unlike Catholicism, unlike Orthodoxy. So, in that respect there’s something going on within this Wesleyan dynamic that forces it to cleave to the people and drive the formation of a nation through its people as they live on the ground in particular cultures, and all of that. And I think that’s why there’s an implicit, inherent multiculturalism going on within this Wesleyan world that you don’t find in Lutheranism or Reformed Christianity. The only counter to it is really within Catholicism, which can cleave very close to the people in the certainly full Catholic forms.
Tooley: And two final questions for you. Firstly, Wesleyans obviously have historically transformed societies, and yet strangely, there’s very little formal articulation of Wesleyan political theology, which is what made your article so interesting. And secondly, is global Pentecostalism basically enacting Wesleyan political theology around the world?
Coulter: Wow okay, so I think because Wesleyans cleave very closely to the people, that has at times prevented a full-orbed realization of a political theology because it’s always there in multiple forms. I think you can find it in these ad hoc forms of doing theology that’s intrinsic to Wesleyanism. You can find it in the sermons that, the sermon collections, that are put together. You can find it in the way in which someone like Phoebe Palmer does theology through autobiography or through testimony, right. So, you can find it in the testimonies, the autobiographies, and through sermons- those sorts of things. I would say that’s not to say that you can’t find a Wesleyan who’s writing sophisticated systematic theology. You can, of course. They’re certainly present within the movement, but I would say that inherent to the movement is this preference for certain forms, certain ways of doing theology. There is narrative that’s inherited, narrative theology in this basic sense of theology, through storytelling, through preaching, preaching a storytelling autobiography, that sort of thing. And so, when you have that, you don’t have as many people offering a more systematic kind of frame. Maybe the other thing that’s, and this is just, I’m just going to speculate here, so I want to make it clear what I’m doing. I think that the other thing could very well be that because Wesleyanism has never been established in any sort of formal sense, you haven’t had someone taking up that charge to try and wrestle with this question- the questions implicit to a political theology about the relationship between church and state- those sorts of things. Now coming back to your final question about global Pentecostalism- so, I said a few moments ago that there’s never been a form of establishment Christianity within Wesleyanism, but you do have now, especially in Africa, forms of Pentecostals, and in South America. Brazil I’m thinking of, and Guatemala I’m thinking of. You now have Pentecostals who are political leaders. The prime minister of Ethiopia at one point was a Pentecostal. The president of Guatemala, the president of Brazil was connected to a form of Pentecostalism. So, you’ve got, you’ve now got, people moving into those areas, and so you also have these interesting situations, like in South Africa, where you had Pentecostals on both sides of the divide when it came to apartheid. And you actually had Pentecostals, white Pentecostals, persecuting African-American Pentecostals. I think all of that has created a need for a more developed version of some sort of political theology. I would say what you have are the seeds of it already present within the movement itself, within Pentecostalism. But absent a former colleague of mine, Amos Young, who wrote a book on political theology from within a Pentecostal perspective, I don’t find, I haven’t found, a lot of Pentecostals trying to fully reflect. Because again, they’ve just sort of come into this status at this point where they now are a majority in a nation, and again it’s the African continent where you find that happening most; although, it is in South America, too.
Tooley: Dale Coulter, professor at Pentecostal Theological Seminary, thank you for a fascinating Wesleyan conversation.
Coulter: Thank you Mark, it’s been great to be with you.
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