Going On to Perfection
Over the course of many centuries now, Wesleyans have talked about sanctification. I discovered Wesley because of this ongoing conversation. Growing up in the Church of the Nazarene, I heard about “holiness” all the time. But when I was in high school, I finally asked my pastor, himself a devout and holy man, for materials that I could read to get a better grasp of the concept. Being a dutiful Nazarene, he gave me a number of books by Nazarene authors, and as I read these authors, all of whom were published by Nazarene Publishing House with its then-distinctive type setting, I noticed that they all cited Wesley. So I started reading Wesley.
What I discovered over the course of years of study is that Wesley’s vision for holiness of heart and life, sometimes called perfect love, sometimes called Christian perfection, is a beautiful vision of a life made whole by the holy love of God. Some people get bogged down in questions of “sinlessness,” but that was never the focus of Wesley’s vision. His vision is grounded in the love of God—the holy love of God, to use Kenneth J. Collins’ useful corrective—such that God’s love renews our hearts, our lives, and brings us into the new creation in such a way that sin no longer reigns in our hearts. Wesley described this holy transforming love made possible by faith and wrote that “if it have its perfect work,” this holy love fills the believer “with all goodness, righteousness, and truth. It brings all heaven into his soul; and causes him to walk in the light, even as God is in the light” (“The Law Established by Faith, II”). It’s a beautiful vision of freedom; our lives take on a Christ-like character.
But what’s often missing in the preaching of this “grand deposit of Methodism” is not the what, but the how. There are many reasons for this, especially in the American context. The revivalists of the 19th c. in the US focused so heavily on the instantaneous aspect of Wesley’s doctrine that they almost entirely forgot about the process. In response to an overemphasis on the instantaneous, however, much of mainline Methodism focused so heavily on process that they ceased to teach that perfection was attainable in this life; thus, like their revivalist counterparts, they presented a truncated vision.
I’ve used this story many times in my career, but I recently used it in a sermon on holiness that I gave at the Church of the Ascension and St. Agnes in Washington, DC. My first trip to Britain was in 2007 when I attended the Oxford Institute of Methodist Theological Studies as a graduate student. During that conference, I attended Sunday morning worship at Christ Church Cathedral with Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen Westerfield Tucker. This is the cathedral where both John and Charles Wesley were ordained; John to the deaconate and the priesthood, and Charles to the deaconate before his priestly ordination at the hands of the Bishop of London.
During a particularly boring sermon, I noticed tiles in the floor of the chancel—we were sitting in choir—that led up to the high altar. Later, with the permission of the clergy, I asked to give these tiles a better look. And what I discovered was something that can best be described as an architecture of holiness.
Walking toward the altar, one is led there by the virtues, beginning with fortitude and moving on to justice, temperance, prudence, mercy, and humility. These virtues lead to the three theological virtues laid out before the altar itself, with faith and hope on either side of the central tile, which is love. What this architecture of holiness declares is that the practice of the virtues leads to Christ. Empowered by God’s grace, the believer practices the virtues, being led to Christ and life that looks like his. As Wesley said, “truth and love united together are the essence of virtue or holiness” (“An Israelite Indeed”). It’s a beautiful vision of the process of sanctification. But note that it doesn’t lead to an impossible destination. It implies that one will move toward holiness. In many ways, it enshrines Wesley’s vision.
Wesley’s heirs have not always held together his balance of the instantaneous and the progressive. For example, the failure of leading 19th c. revivalist Phoebe Palmer, despite every good intention, was the inability to grasp the progressive element of Wesley’s vision. Her first mistake was to base her theology on experience; in this case, the heart-wrenching deaths of her children. Her second mistake was an Americanized vision of holiness that focused on an altar experience and not the communal “economy of grace” that Wesley himself created within the Church of England.
One of the fundamental problems with this approach is that it calls for and expects the attainment of the ultimate goal without providing the means to attain it. It’s like expecting someone to cross a great river without telling them about the bridge just around the bend.
In early Methodism, struggle was real. There’s growth; there’s progress. Wesley wrote to Damaris Perronet in 1771 that “If there is no fight, there is no victory.” Reading through the conversion narratives and the sanctification narratives of early Methodism, there is a realization that holiness, or wholeness, is not something easily attained. At the same time, there is the expectation that God can sanctify someone at any moment.
In the late 1730s, Wesley split with English Moravians over the question of Quietism. This was the belief that before one had experienced an assurance of faith, one needed to wait for it without partaking in any of the means of grace. Those waiting were not to read their Bibles, nor to pray, or attend worship services, but to wait. Wesley believed that this was highly mistaken and argued for what he called “active waiting.” To wait on the Lord is to partake in the means of grace, waiting not to act but to receive the gift that God has promised. It’s a wonderfully Wesleyan approach from a man who had no patience for any form of idleness.
But the doctrine doesn’t simply pertain to assurance. It pertains to all of the Christian life. God has promised us many things in Scripture and he is faithful. Our task is actively to wait. This can be seen in a letter that Wesley wrote to Jane Catherine March in June 1760. He wrote that “Every one, though born of God in an instant, yea and sanctified in an instant, yet undoubtedly grows by slow degrees both after the former and the latter change.” So while we are regenerated and even sanctified, entirely, in an instant by faith (this is God’s work after all) we should expect to grow in grace, before and after. In the same letter, Wesley does say that we should expect this to happen at any moment, but the message is clear: growth is a part of the Christian life.
Wesley’s vision for growth can be seen not only in his many letters, but in the structure of early Methodism itself. Early Methodism was a renewal movement within the Church of England and should be seen as such. The structure that Wesley envisioned included bands, classes, and societies, all within the larger embrace of the Church. This four-fold structure reveals Wesley’s vision for growth in grace, or Christian maturity. Within this larger structure, Wesley envisioned a life infused with the grace of God, which is nothing less than the power of the Holy Spirit.
The bands provided, in various ways, accountability to journey with others in the Christian life. Classes provided similar accountability and were required of all Methodists. It is within the classes and bands that early Methodists “watched over one another in love,” meaning they watched over one another’s growth in Christlikeness and also over each other’s welfare. The societies, within which the classes and bands were organized, were designed for edification, for preaching and hymn singing. This is where the Wesley brothers and their army of lay helpers preached to the faithful. Finally, the societies of Methodism were within the parish structure of the Church of England with its beautiful liturgy, the rhythms of its calendar, the historic and authoritative creeds, and the sacraments of the Church.
Moving backward this time from larger to smaller, the Methodist faithful who participated in this economy of grace partook of the liturgical and creedal formation of the Church and encountered Christ in the sacraments. They heard preaching and sang “spiritual songs” in the societies, and in the classes and bands they not only confessed to one another and held one another accountable in their walk with Christ, but cared for one another. This is Wesley’s holistic and grace-infused vision, and it is within this vision that he expected believers to participate in the means of grace and grow in grace unto perfection.
The means of grace, a broad and expansive category, encompass all the various ways that God channels his grace—again, the power of the Holy Spirit—to the faithful. God has given us these means that we might grow in him. Wesley categorized these various means into works of piety and works of mercy. Under piety, he listed the primary means as prayer, fasting, meditating on Scripture, and partaking of the Eucharist. Works of mercy included feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and visiting the sick. These are just larger categories and subcategories, however. It can be argued that hymn singing is a means of grace, as is holy friendship. All of these are channels of God’s transforming power.
Baptism communicates regenerating grace, but it is not listed under the means because it can only be performed once. But Wesley called the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, the “grand channel of grace” and saw it as vital to the Christian life (post-baptism) and the attainment of wholeness in this life. He described running to the altar table to meet Christ there. Arguably, the Methodist revival was as much about reviving what Wesley termed “constant Communion” as it was about holiness of heart and life. The two are linked. They are inseparable because they are both focused on Christ, receiving him in something as common as bread and wine, and living a life shaped by him in love made perfect.
The call of Methodism is to wait actively and expect that God will work in his time even now. Wesley may have said, “Be a Methodist still, expect perfection now,” but he knew full well that the process of being made whole in Christ was itself a process of growth. In fact, it's both. We continue to grow even after we’re sanctified as we continue to walk with Christ, with one another, and learn even into eternity to live in “God, that ocean of love.”
As Wesleyans today, we have this rich heritage, this holistic vision. And we have a basic pattern, or an economy of grace, that would not be difficult to emulate in our varied contexts today in any congregation that desires both to preach holiness and to enable the faithful to experience it in their lives. In this we will heed Wesley’s words to a friend in 1790 when he wrote that holiness of heart and life “is the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propagating this chiefly He appears to have raised us up.”
Ryan N. Danker is the Director of the John Wesley Institute in Washington, DC, and Assistant Lead Editor at Firebrand.
Suggested sources from John and Charles Wesley:
John Wesley sermons
- “The Scripture Way of Salvation”
- “The Means of Grace”
- “The Duty of Constant Communion”
Charles Wesley
- Hymns on the Lord’s Supper