A THOUSAND TONGUES
The Wesley hymns as a guide to scriptural teaching
By John Lawson. Paternoster. 208 pages. £12.99
ISBN 978-1-84227-550-4
Evangelical Methodists will most appreciate this book, reprinted and lightly revised from its 1987 edition. Its core is the text of some 140 hymns, most by Charles Wesley, with a Scripture reference attached to almost every line and some lines meriting two or more. ‘Some Wesley hymns…’ would be a better subtitle.
It is the arrangement which marks out this labour of love as a distinctive Wesleyan document, since the 53 themes under which the hymns are arranged, from ‘God the Sovereign Creator’ to ‘The Second Advent’, are expounded in a broadly biblical but distinctively Methodist way. The length of these doctrinal prefaces varies from two or three lines (on ‘The Unseen World’, ‘The Old Testament’ and ‘The Creative Word’) to more than two pages on ‘Holiness’ and four on ‘The Lord’s Supper’. In these longer sections the author appears to struggle, as indeed anyone does who tries to present the rather fluid Wesleyan theology as a consistent and scriptural whole.
