Introduction to John Wesley’s Doctrine of Assurance
Photo by Tori Lewis
You, Christians, have received the Spirit who transforms you into sons and daughters of God. The Spirit causes us to cry out, “Abba! Father!” He himself testifies directly to our spirit that we are, in fact, God’s beloved children.
Romans 8:15–16 (author’s paraphrase)
John Wesley’s doctrine of assurance is often misunderstood. Some regard it as an accessory to Christian faith—not necessary but still useful for bringing comfort and peace. Worse, others view it as an optimistic but unhelpful quest for certainty rooted in Enlightenment aspirations that should be discarded. These perspectives, among others, may be true, but they do not represent Wesley.
To reduce the confusion for those seeking an introduction to Wesley’s doctrine of assurance, I will summarize what I have found to be its most important features.
Assurance is what Faith is Like
During the years surrounding Wesley’s Aldersgate experience, assurance was a way of describing what faith is like. You cannot have faith, he argued, and fail to know that you have it (“1 Feb 1738” Journals); and you cannot “have such a sense of forgiveness and not feel it” (“Memoranda” 24 May 1738). This is because he did not define faith, like many do today, as the act of choosing to believe the things of the Gospel. At one time, he did think of faith that way (“The Promise of Understanding” 1730). By 1738, though, he had come to think of it as internally perceiving the things of the Gospel as true.
Imagine one moment feeling nothing but the weight of your own guilt and shame, your own rottenness. You know that if God really exists, then you are, as they say, up a rather unpleasant sort of creek with no paddle. In the next moment, however, and perhaps instantaneously, you are overwhelmed with an immediate awareness that not only does God in fact exist, but that he loves you and forgives you by the blood of Christ, making you his very own! You do not simply choose to believe this is the case; you see that this is true. In that moment, you cannot help but perceive that this wonderful circumstance is real.
Wesley described this experience as being born again and faith “as the eye of the newborn soul” (An Earnest Appeal §7). In other words, new spiritual existence comes with special senses with which to enjoy that reality. Having eyes of faith, a person now beholds God’s love for him or her in Christ.
If faith is personally perceiving or seeing the love of God in Christ, then assurance is just a way of describing what faith is like, of how it affects you and the sorts of things you know.
Assurance is about Present Salvation
People sometimes use assurance to describe the confidence a person has that he or she will one day go to heaven. Samuel Jr., Wesley’s older brother, thought Wesley had meant assurance in this way. Both believed that a person who has had faith may afterward forfeit their faith and cease to be a Christian. Samuel Jr. asked, therefore, how you could be assured that you would be saved if, potentially falling away, you wouldn’t finally be saved. In that case, you would have had an “assurance wherein the thing itself is not certain” (26 March 1739 Letters). He was accusing Wesley of what philosophers call a reductio ad absurdum—a claim that can be reduced to absurdity when clarified.
Wesley explained that he meant “an assurance that I am now in a state of salvation,” not that “I shall persevere therein” (4 April 1739 Letters). To avoid confusion, he sometimes preferred the Scriptural phrase “assurance of faith” (Heb 10:22) instead of “assurance of salvation” (28 September 1738 Letters). It is an assurance that all your “past sins are forgiven, and that you are now a child of God,” but it does not refer to the continuance of faith (“Free Grace” Sermons §14).
Assurance is Necessary for Obedience
An assurance of present faith implies present salvation, but it also does something else. Without assurance, Wesley believed, you cannot obey God in holiness.
Without faith we cannot be thus saved. For we can’t rightly serve God unless we love him. And we can’t love him unless we know him; neither can we know God, unless by faith. Therefore salvation by faith is only, in other words, the love of God by the knowledge of God, or the recovery of the image of God by a true spiritual acquaintance with him. (A Farther Appeal 1745, I.I.3)
Knowing means the same as assurance in this context and is directly related to faith. In the following passage, he made the same claim but replaced faith with the witness of the Spirit.
[W]e must love God before we can be holy at all; this being the root of all holiness. Now we cannot love God till we know he loves us: “We love him, because he first loved us.” And we cannot know his pardoning love to us till his Spirit witnesses it to our spirit. (“The Witness of the Spirit, I” 1746, I.8)
Above we saw that as a newborn soul, a person receives new spiritual senses (faith) for perceiving spiritual realities. Here we see that faith perceives what is presented by the witness of the Spirit—that God loves me in Christ. Faith perceives what the Spirit testifies to. Together these imply an assurance: I simply see or perceive that what God testifies to me is true.
Love is Necessary for Obedience and Assurance is Necessary for Love
Faith and the witness are necessary for obeying God in holiness because love is necessary. If you do not love God, you will not obey God in the manner that he desires. Love is a powerful force, and without loving God, you may desire what is good, but you will remain powerless to actually do good and avoid evil (Rom 7:14–23). Therefore, loving God is necessary to obeying him in the proper way, and for having sufficient desire to overcome sin (Mt 22:37–38; Jn 14:15–23).
Love matters for holy obedience, but why does assurance matter for love? Wesley argued that what causes you to love God is your recognition of his gracious love toward you in Christ. He does not think that forcing yourself to assent to this belief is sufficient. That God probably loves you is not enough. You must know it, must be assured of it.
Now, that we have our sins pardoned, if we do not know they are pardoned, cannot bind us either to love or obedience. But if we do know it, and by that very knowledge or confidence in the pardoning love of God are both bound and enabled to love and obey him, this is the whole of what I contend for. (A Farther Appeal 1745, I.IV.1)
Wesley sometimes suggested that the assurance is so strong that love follows necessarily.
Now if God should ever open the eyes of your understanding [to behold his love for you], must not the love of God be the immediate consequence? Do you imagine you can see God without loving him? Is it possible in the nature of things? (A Farther Appeal 1745, II.III.22)
Let’s return to our example above. Imagine you transition from the burden of guilt and shame to the freedom of God directly loving you in Christ by the Spirit. What Wesley suggests happens at that moment is that you immediately love God in return, a sort of automatic internal response. Your heart melts in God’s love and is raised up to new existence within that love.
This structure prioritizes grace, and it explains why Wesley can say that initial sanctification begins at the very moment of justification. At the same moment you perceive God’s pardon and love, you also begin to love God and, subsequently, obey him.
Assurance Leaves Room for Doubt
To have faith is to have an assurance that you are presently saved. It is a present confidence in the blood of Jesus applied to your account. He loves you, and you, in turn, now love him and begin to obey him. What happens, though, if you later begin to doubt this? What happens in a moment when you do not strongly feel what you previously felt? What happens when what you previously perceived clearly now appears cloudy? Wesley once wrote, “[F]aith implies light, the light of God shining upon the soul. So far therefore as anyone loses this light, he for the time loses his faith.” (“The First-Fruits of the Spirit” 1746, II.3)
Many struggled with this implication both theologically and practically during Wesley’s time, just as many might struggle with it today. Wesley himself is famous for periodic doubt (“4 January 1739” Journals). What, then, was his solution?
Wesley affirmed that real assurance and real doubt could co-exist in real Christians. Faith, he claimed, may exist in degrees. Suppose you see a yellow bird in the garden, but you are unsure whether it is a Western Tanager or an Eastern Goldfinch. You may be certain you see a yellow bird in the garden without being certain which particular bird it is. Or it may be that you thought you were seeing a Western Tanager but now that three days have gone by, you are not so sure. In this way, perceptions have certainties that are degrees and are impacted by memory. So it was, thought Wesley, with faith.
Why Assurance is Sometimes Weakened
There are three reasons why the assurance of faith may be weakened, why what you saw clearly before you see less clearly later. First, Satan often assaults our faith by spreading “a cloud over our understanding,” obscuring “the light of those truths which at other times shine as bright as the noonday sun” (“Of Evil Angels” 1783, II.4). Second, if we “will not attend to the light which he pours upon us: his Spirit will…leave us to the darkness of our own hearts” (“The Great Privilege of those that are Born of God” 1748, III.2). Finally, the witness may be withdrawn for various reasons (such as sin or temptation), leaving your faith to operate on the memory of the Spirit’s previous witness.
The facts stand thus: (1) A man feels in himself the testimony of God’s Spirit that he is a child of God. And he can then no more deny or doubt thereof than of the shining of the sun at noonday. (2) After a time this testimony is withdrawn. (3) He begins to reason within himself concerning it; next to doubt whether that testimony was of God; and perhaps in the end to deny that it was. (“To ‘John Smith’” [25 March 1747])
Whatever the case may be, it is okay, sometimes, for faith to operate on memory, as when under heavy temptation. The assurance I have that Julie, my wife, loves me does not disappear just because she is absent for a short period (though the longer the period the more vulnerable to doubt I become). In the same way, the periodic witness of God’s Spirit sustains our faith.
You can nevertheless protect your assurance of faith by “earnestly and continually watching unto prayer” among other things (“To ‘John Smith’” [10 July 1747]). As Wesley said elsewhere, “A clear conviction of the love of God cannot remain in any who do not walk closely with God” (“To Richard Tompson” 16 March 1756). He further cautioned against thinking that wilderness experiences are God’s best means for perfecting your heart. Rather, a “strong consciousness of [a clear communion with the Father and the Son] will do more in an hour than his absence in an age” (“The Wilderness State” 1760, III.12).
Full Assurance of Faith
Just as you may think you have no faith when you experience doubt, so you may think you have no sin when you experience assurance. When the Spirit is witnessing and faith perceiving, when assurance is at its highest, it is easy to believe that entire sanctification has occurred, that “because we feel no sin, we have none in us” (“The Wilderness State” 1760, II.[III.2]). Soon comes fresh temptation. “[I]nward sin revives” and the “more we grow in grace the more do we see of the desperate wickedness of our heart” (“Sermon on the Mount, I” 1748, II.3; I.13).
As inbred sin exposes itself, the witness of assurance may more or less withdraw. Those who press on through these times to perfection, however, will eventually experience a “fresh manifestation of his love: by such a witness of his accepting them in the Beloved as shall never more be taken away from them” (“Sermon on the Mount, I” 1748, II.4). Wesley explained,
But many doubts and fears may still remain, even in a child of God, while he is weak in faith; while he is in the number of those whom St. Paul terms “babes in Christ.” But when his faith is strengthened, when he receives faith’s abiding impression…; when he has received the abiding witness of the Spirit, doubts and fears vanish away. He then enjoys the plerophory, or “full assurance, of faith;” excluding all doubt, and all “fear that hath torment.” (“On the Discoveries of Faith” 1788, §15)
He described those who go on to full assurance as those who go on to perfection. Faith has an abiding impression that parallels an abiding witness. These result in an abiding assurance. If assurance is important for love and love for obedience, then it follows that abiding assurance is necessary for abiding (entire?) love and obedience.
Faith Not so Assured
Assurance remained a major component in Wesley’s thought. He once declared that to lose the direct testimony of the Spirit in preaching was to “get back again unawares into justification by works” (“To the Rev. Samuel Furly” [2 May 1766]).
Nevertheless, he also made room for a faith that is not so assured. In 1788, he reflected that he had been mistaken in the early days to teach that those who lacked the assurance of faith had no acceptance with God. I conclude with his words on the matter. May they guide those who lack assurance, even the memory of it, but who continue crying out to God while they wait.
It might have been said (and it is all that can be said with propriety) “Hitherto you are only a servant; you are not a child of God. You have already great reason to praise God that he has called you to his honourable service. Fear not. Continue crying unto him: ‘and you shall see greater things than these’.” And, indeed, unless the servants of God halt by the way, they will receive the adoption of sons. They will receive the faith of the children of God by his revealing his only-begotten Son in their hearts. (“On Faith” I.11–12)
Kenny Johnston is a PhD candidate at the London School of Theology and the Pastor of First Wesleyan Church in Gastonia, NC.