a mostly german debate on conversion and salvation as a condition for salvation, but first and overwhelmingly good works. The prime task of the church was also not to lead individuals to salvation, but to teach them how to live a good life and be good, and thereby, by the grace of God, be saved.674 To make the distinction from the idea of salvation by merit they thought was the Roman Catholic dogma they claimed that God was not obliged to save because of merit, but instead freely choose to save due to good deeds.675 In contrast to these findings, Bruce Hindmarsh emphasises ”the capacity demonstrated by evangelicals throughout the eighteenth century to see condemned prisoners in spiritual and therefore human solidarity with themselves”.676 He also notes that known Methodists on several occasions sought or accepted contact with the condemned, also accompanying them to the execution site. Charles Wesley when he in 1738 had visited Newgate wrote that he had arrived there bearing ”prejudices against the possibility of a deathbed repentance”, and therefore lacked hope of the condemned meeting mercy, but there he was changed by ”a sudden spirit of faith” and he preached repentance and the forgiveness of Jesus Christ.677 The presuppositions Wesley carried to Newgate says something about the theological environment in England at the time. Though not directly related to repentance or the scene at the execution, but anyhow of interest is that at the sermons held at assizes in England before 1800 many of the preachers that argued that death sentences always should be executed were Methodists. André Krischer in the same study also concludes that with the Enlightenment the theology of the sermons no longer contained a theology of court proceedings and judgment, but instead a theology of punishment. The vital importance given in the seventeenth century to mercy and grace no longer existed.678 674 Scholtz 1988-89 p 188 sqq, 199 sqq. 675 Scholtz 1988-89 p 191 sqq. 676 Hindmarsh 2018 p 203. 677 Hindmarsh 2018 p 188 sqq, 203, 205 sqq (quotation of Charles Wesley p 206). Hindmarsh also notes that in a collection of manuscripts, most of them letters to Charles Wesley, there are nine descriptions of deathbed conversions, two of them ”of dying malefactors”, Hindmarsh 2012 p 130. 678 Krischer 2012 p 273 sqq. 193
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