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John Wesley Had Reverence For All God's Creation !



Mr. Hattersley's comprehensive biography adeptly covered many facets of John Wesley's life and works. I was especially intersted in learning that John Wesley was a vegetarian for moral reasons. He promoted conservation stewardship and accentuated that all life is interelated and humans have a responsibility to be caretakers of God's earth. Wesley abhorred cruelty to bears, dogs, horses and all helpless animals. He lamented the fall of man and man's ensuing despotic dominion over the earth. John Wesley was a seminal environmentalist and animal advocate. He wrote the mystical General Ressurection sermon which envisions all of creation ascending into an idyllic afterlife tantamount to the Garden of Eden. There is no doubt that John Wesley had problems with female companions and other vexations, but it is amazing how visionary and humane he was for an 18th Century Preacher. Most importantly, I need to mention that John Wesley detested slavery. John Wesley was rife with flaws but he was also replete with compassion and a great sense of social justice and respect for life !

Perhaps his most widely read book, though, was the story of his own religious-theological journey. In Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (1968), Gilkey narrates his departure from the liberal Protestant belief system during World War II when he was made a prisoner of war for two-and-a-half years. In China to teach English, Gilkey was interned by the Japanese shortly after Pearl Harbor. It was this experience that led to his subsequent rethinking of Christianity in the modern “time of trouble.” Acutely responsive to the need to reconsider such traditional symbols as sin and grace in the turbulent and so often barbarous 20th century, Gilkey renewed and revivified the classical Reformation insights – largely ignored by optimistic liberal theologians – into individual, societal and historical estrangement, self-delusion and sin.