Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Background of Experience
- Part II The Autonomy of Experience
- Part III The Universality of Experience
- Part IV The Explanation of Experience
- Part V The Unraveling of Experience
- Conclusion: The Capital of “Experience”
- Some Afterwords …
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Sources
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- Part I The Background of Experience
- Part II The Autonomy of Experience
- Part III The Universality of Experience
- Part IV The Explanation of Experience
- Part V The Unraveling of Experience
- Conclusion: The Capital of “Experience”
- Some Afterwords …
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the evening, I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for 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.
(Wesley 1988, 249–50)So wrote John Wesley (1703–91), in what scholars call his conversion narrative, concerning an experience that reportedly took place during a meeting (somewhat like a modern day Bible study) in London on the evening of Wednesday, May 24, 1738. At that time, Wesley, the son of a clergyman, was himself a Church of England minister who had recently returned from a (not altogether successful) three-year assignment as a missionary in Savannah, Georgia (at that time a British colonial possession). Reporting that he had “continual sorrow and heaviness of heart” on the days preceding that evening meeting in late May, Wesley recounts in this famous journal entry how—as that evening's speaker was addressing Martin Luther's commentary on Paul's letter (or, from the Greek, epistle) to the early Christians who were in Rome—he had experienced a “strange warming” of his heart—a phrase that has become famous, especially among historians of Methodism, the originally British but now worldwide Protestant denomination that John and his younger brother Charles (1707–88) went on to establish.
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- Information
- Religious ExperienceA Reader, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012