The Difficult Path

By Brandon Brown

You may have heard the term via media, which means the middle way. While the specific term via media was not officially used until the nineteenth century, the concept can be traced to the early British reformers and most notably in Elizabeth I's religious tolerance edict which was her attempt to enforce peace between the Roman Catholic and Protestant factions in the U.K who had been at war with one another. This worked to an extent and led to Anglicanism being considered a middle way between the Roman Catholic Church and the more extremist Reformers. The Church in England incorporated many of the traditions of both and hold those ideas in tension without moving to either extreme. This was not a center position, but a middle position; it is a position in the middle but not centered between the extremes.

John Wesley was an Anglican Priest so, while he was labelled Methodist as a slur and his teaching and preaching led to the Methodist movement, he remained an Anglican priest his entire life. His ideas were grounded in his Anglican tradition and shaped by the middle way. Wesley himself worked with the via media as he shaped his theology and fleshed out his doctrinal understandings. One example is Wesley's understanding of salvation; it was not one which was the same as many of his Anglican contemporaries. Instead, it shared aspects of the Eastern Church and was shaped by that tradition's view of sin. Wesley walked a middle way between the West and the East when he preached we can be perfect as God is perfect in sanctification. Wesley's middle way continued to influence the Methodists and subsequent Wesleyan churches, even to the Holiness Movement and churches like the Church of the Nazarene.

The middle way is not an easy path because it is not simply walking the center line between two sides. The middle way is hard because the seduction of the extremes is alluring and seeks to pull us to those extremes. When we walk the via media we often find ourselves criticized for not being on one side of an extreme or another. Wide is the path outside the middle way, for it is broad and easy to walk; it does not take effort nor thought. The middle way takes effort because we always feel the tension of the extremes pulling us toward their orbits. The way of destruction lies in those extremes because they tear at the fabric of unity and even of holiness.

In the turmoil and chaos of our time, there is a need for those willing to walk the hard path of the middle way. There needs to be a church willing to proclaim the goodness of the middle way and call people to walk along with her. This is a call to the discipleship of Jesus and walking with him as the way, truth, and life. Yes, it is hard to walk the middle way, but it is worth walking and refusing to abandon the path of the middle way.