DID YOU KNOW?
This week’s Did You Know is taken from a South Bend History professor’s soon to be released book, “Changed by Grace”:
A.A. revitalized the great discovery, made by Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley in the 1730s, that human character could be changed. This is what Changed by Grace, is about.
My own research in this area goes back a great number of years, and there are a number of people who have helped me along the way. It would only be right to give acknowledgement to some of them.
I owe perhaps the greatest debt of gratitude to Professor Albert C. Outler at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University for giving me my first introduction to John Wesley’s thought. Prof. Outler was one of the founders of modern Wesleyan studies, and in fact came out with his first major work on that figure in 1964, when I was a young seminary student in my twenties and he was my mentor and advisor. I continued to learn more about John Wesley in later years as I gave lectures on his life and theology to the Methodist students at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary during the 1980s and early 1990s, and gave public lectures under their aegis on topics such as, “John Wesley’s Aldersgate Experience: What was He Converted From and To?” and “Methodists and Obsessions: John Wesley’s Use of John Locke’s Theory of the Association of Ideas to Deal with the Problem of Obsessive Thoughts and Compulsive Behavior.”
I am also grateful to Professor Donald B. Marti, my colleague for over thirty years at Indiana University, for all the things he taught me about Calvinist theology in colonial New England—Jonathan Edwards’ world—and about the history of American religion in general.
I should also thank Professor Henry Warner Bowden at Rutgers University for asking me to do a chapter in the book he edited in 1988 on “A Century of Church History,” which forced me to learn a good deal about the major currents in nineteenth century Christian theology.
While doing that I was able to explore in more detail some of the immediate precursors of the ideas which the Oxford Group taught. My student days at Oxford University put me there thirty years too late to experience the peak of the Oxford Group, but it enabled me to recognize the colleges and the atmosphere in which students and faculty were attracted into the movement by Frank Buchman’s missionary work in Oxford. It was a world with which I was intimately familiar. So this too ended up being useful in its own way to the writing of “Changed by Grace.”
During the summer of 2005, I discovered V.C. Kitchen’s extremely insightful book on the Oxford Group, which I had never before read. As I read this book, I jotted down a number of notes and observations about the various connections which appeared between the beginnings of the modern evangelical movement in the 1730s, the rise of the Oxford Group during the 1920s, and the development of Alcoholics Anonymous during the later 1930s. I posted these early thoughts on the internet, and was surprised to see a number of other web sites all around the world picking up this material and making it available on their sites as well. This was the first indication that I received that this material would be of interest to anyone much other than me.
So I went more deeply into the subject, and begun reading more in that area.
To be continued…
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