John Wesley's Theology Pushed to Its Limits and Beyond: The Metaphysics of the Redeemed Self

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[The following is an adaptation of a lecture given by Dr. Kenneth J. Collins at his installation as the inaugural Paul S. and Jean R. Amos Endowed Chair in Wesleyan Theology at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY on September 14, 2026.]

The subject before us is the theology of John Wesley. But the question I want to ask this morning is not simply, what did Wesley teach? It is a bit more searching than that. I want to ask: what kind of human self is brought into being by the transforming, redemptive graces of God?

That question may sound unusual at first. We are accustomed to speaking about salvation in terms of God: God's mercy, God's grace, God's forgiveness, God's holiness, God's love. And rightly so. Christian theology must always begin with God. But salvation concerns a relationship, and a relationship always has at least two sides. If grace comes from God; it is received by human beings. If God reconciles then someone is reconciled. If God sanctifies a soul, then a human self is actually changed, transformed in being. This relationship has always entailed not one but two. I will therefore take the anthropological turn this morning but always mindful of the being and grace of God. 

This matters not only for academic theology but also for preaching, pastoral care, and Christian formation. Many people in our churches today know how to say, "I am forgiven." Fewer have been taught to ask, "What kind of person is God’s grace making me?" 

That question is the burden of this lecture. I want to explore not only what God does for sinners, but also and more pointedly what the Most High does for the saints. Wesleyans have often spoken with great care about prevenient grace, convincing grace, justifying grace, regenerating grace, sanctifying grace, and even glorifying grace. Yet the redeemed self itself - the person who is actually awakened, convicted, forgiven, renewed, purified, and restored - has often remained underdeveloped. It is almost as if we have described the doctor as well as the medicines of salvation without giving appropriate attention to the patient who is being made whole. It’s time for that to change. That time is now. 

So this morning I want to speak of the metaphysics of the redeemed self. By metaphysics I do not mean something remote, technical, or merely speculative. I mean the reality of the self before God: what the self is, what has gone wrong with it, and what it becomes as grace restores it. Wesley gives us, I believe, a profound account of this journey. It is laid out carefully in his order of salvation as displayed in the key sermon, “The Scripture Way of Salvation.”  I will, however, have to suggest and add some language that John Wesley, himself, never used.  In that sense, this current effort comes in as a species of constructive theology, richly informed by historical theology; that is, it will by necessity go beyond Wesley but never against Wesley.

I should also say at the outset that this lecture moves quickly. The full scholarly argument requires more documentation, more notation and nuance, than any public lecture can ever offer. So this morning I will keep the footnotes in the background and bring the main theological architecture to the foreground. My aim is not to flatten the argument, but to let the central line of thought be heard.

The Conflicted Self

Let us begin with what I am calling the conflicted self. Wesley considered this present condition as the legal state, that is, the state of one who is under the law. Here the self becomes conflicted. The person is no longer asleep. God has touched the heart by some providence, or by the Word applied through the Holy Spirit. The eyes of the understanding begin to open. The veil is partly removed. The person now sees what they did not see before. But this is not yet gospel healing. It is awakening without deliverance. The soul sees enough to fear, but not yet enough to rest in Jesus Christ; enough to be troubled by sin, but not yet enough to be free from it; enough to fear God but not enough to love God. 

Wesley stated the person is terribly shaken out of sleep and awakened to a consciousness of danger. They now see that the loving and merciful God is also a consuming fire. This is a painful awakening. The self is stripped of its pretenses. It is stripped of the fig leaves it had sewn together to cover its guilt. It is stripped of excuses, false narratives, and the flattering accounts of itself blazing across social media. The heart is laid bare. The person sees that sin is not simply a matter of outward actions. Sin has depth. It lives in the tempers, desires, motives, dispositions, and the hidden movements of the heart.

Here the soul is awakened but troubled. The will is active but bound. The tempers and dispositions of the heart are known for what they are but they have not yet been made holy. The awakened person truly desires to break loose from sin, but cannot. Wesley put it with unforgettable psychological precision: “he resolves against sin, but yet sins on. He fights, but does not conquer. He repents and sins, and repents and sins again, until at last he can only cry with Paul, "O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"  

This is one of the more profound aspects of Wesley's account. The legal state is not a failure of grace. It is actually a work of grace. It is a genuine advance over the natural state because the self has been brought into the truth. The legal state takes the self to the end of its own resources—and it has been found wanting.  Pastorally, this is crucial. There is a kind of misery that is not yet saving faith but is nevertheless a species of grace--what Wesley called “convincing” grace. One must first be awakened from false peace before one can ever enjoy true peace.

The Complex Self

We move on to the complex self, a phrasing that John Wesley never employed though it is wonderfully indicative of his meaning. The evangelical state marks the first great ontological transformation of the self. Here the person is no longer under the law but under grace, regenerating grace. Here the miserable bondage ends. Here the Spirit of adoption is received, whereby the believer cries, "Abba, Father." They see their iniquities laid upon Christ and they behold the Lamb of God taking away their sins, not simply some, but all their sins. Here, Wesley stated, end both the guilt and the power of sin.

That last sentence is crucial: both the guilt and the power of sin. Justification, the forgiveness of sins, entails freedom from the guilt of sin. Regeneration is freedom from the power or dominion of sin. The person is forgiven, yes, but not simply forgiven. The person is also born of God. The will is set at liberty. The tempers begin to be reordered. The believer is now holy! 

This transition from the legal state to the evangelical state is different from the transition from the natural state to the legal state. The one transition is awakening: from ignorance of God to the fear of God. The other transition is regeneration or the new birth: from sin to initial holiness. To be sure, the new birth is not simply a change of opinion, a new moral resolution, or a heightened religious feeling. It is a “work of omnipotence,” to use Wesley’s own language. It is not a natural change but a supernatural change. It is not a little more of what already was. Something new is now in place. The person becomes what he or she was not before, namely, holy. 

At this point the language of ontology is not too strong. Wesley is after all describing a change in being. Yet this holiness, this freedom from the power of sin, is not entire holiness. And that is why this self, though born of God, must be referred to as the complex self. 

The believer is holy, but not entirely so. The child of God is indeed free from the guilt and power of sin in terms of actual sins (plural) and yet sin in the form of sin singular (inbred sin) still remains. That is the complexity that I am referring to. The believer is truly alive to God, truly regenerated, truly holy. And yet an enemy, yes, an enemy, remains within. Wesley calls this enemy inbred sin or original sin. 

Indeed, Wesley's entire order of salvation in one sense is structured around this twofold problem of sin in terms of both act and being. Did you realize that for many, unfortunately, do not? Actual sins (plural), the kind of sins we commit, both inward and outward, of omission and commission, are addressed by justification and regeneration: freedom from the guilt of sin and freedom from its power. Inbred sin (singular) requires a second great work of grace: freedom from the being of sin, entailing even entire sanctification or heart purity.

The Complex Self in Transition

We turn now to the complex self in transition. Wesley understood growth in grace. He expected believers to grow in holiness through the means of grace, through prayer, searching the Scriptures, receiving the Lord's Supper, through Christian conferencing, fasting, works of mercy, and serving the poor. The seed of every virtue is sown in the soul at the new birth, and those seeds must grow. Believers become more loving, more patient, more peaceful, more gentle, and more kind as the fruit of the Holy Spirit ripen. 

But we must be very careful here. Growth in grace is real, but growth in grace, growth in holiness, is not the same thing as entire sanctification. The process of sanctification weakens the carnal nature, to be sure, but it does not finally cleanse it away. The believer may become holier by degrees, as they participate in the sacramental life of the church, and as they minister to the needy, and yet still find within an unsettling impurity, an inward bent toward pride, self-will, resentment, lust, or inordinate affection. The complex self is holy, yet not entirely so. It is alive to God, and yet it is constituted of both holiness and the inbred sin that remains even in a child of God. 

This is why John Wesley's theology is so distinctive. He took the Reformation insight that we are justified by grace through faith alone, and he applied it not only to the guilt of actual sins (plural) but also to the cleansing of inbred sin (singular), that is, entire sanctification. In "The Scripture Way of Salvation," Wesley clearly affirmed, "Exactly as we are justified by faith, so are we sanctified by faith. Faith is the condition, and the only condition of sanctification, exactly as it is of justification." That is one of the more important theological sentences that John Wesley ever wrote!

Entire sanctification is therefore not simply the last stage of gradual growth. It is not a little more of what already was. It is a qualitatively distinct gift. Something new is now in place. And because entire sanctification is a gift, it can be received by the saints, and only by the saints, now.

And yet, as Wesley clearly knew, many believers do not receive perfect love now. They receive it late in life, often near death. John Wesley was very realistic about this. He said that the greater part of those he had known were not made perfect in love until shortly before death, what I have called elsewhere “the long journey.”  Wesley acknowledged that a person is usually converted long before he or she is made perfect in love. He could say that the instant of entire sanctification is often the moment before death, but that it may also be ten, twenty, or forty years before death. Why the delay? Why, if this grace is a gift, and God is willing, then why do believers hesitate? I would like to suggest three reasons why this is so. 

First, the complex self, the one who is born of God though not pure in heart, may learn to relate to God instrumentally. In other words, God is sought as the power by which one overcomes actual sins, maintains assurance, and lives in victory. That may be enough for some believers—at least for now. But entire sanctification asks for something more, for something deeper. It asks not merely that God help the self to become free in a number of ways, free from the guilt and power of sin, and free to love God and neighbor, but that the self should also become utterly given to God, pure in heart.

Second, believers often confuse gradual growth in holiness, the process of sanctification, with the gift of heart purity. They suppose that if they grow long enough, cooperate with God’s grace well enough, thereby becoming holier by degrees, then inbred sin will at some point just simply fade away. It will not. Indeed, for John Wesley, entire sanctification is not the last degree of incremental growth. It is not a little more of what already was. It is a distinct work of grace; something new is now in place, namely the qualitatively distinct grace of heart purity. Simply put, the process of sanctification must not be confused with entire sanctification. 

Third, fear bars the way. The complex self imagines that entire sanctification will result in loss. If the self has become accustomed to defining itself by struggle, conflict, and the victory enjoyed over actual sins, then the cleansing of inbred sin may appear to be the loss of identity itself. The self may fear that perfect love is a void, an emptiness, even a kind of death. And in one sense, it is a death: not the death of the person, but the death of inbred sin’s claim upon personhood; its false claim upon the very self of a child of God.

The Simple Self

We transition finally to what I call the simple self.  Indeed, when John Wesley defined holiness the words purity and simplicity were never far behind. Entire sanctification then entails the second major ontological transformation of the self. In justification, one’s sins are forgiven and the guilt of sin is taken away. In regeneration, the power of sin is broken and one becomes holy. In entire sanctification, the being of sin - inbred sin, the inward antagonist - is cleansed away. It is clean gone. In other words, the complex self becomes the simple self in a flush of purifying graces. However, the self is simple not in the sense of being psychologically uncomplicated, not simple in the sense that only God is loved to the abandonment of the neighbor, but simple in the sense of being undivided in the love of God, that all loves are ordered and find their purpose, their telos, in the divine love and majesty. The entirely sanctified self, the simple self, loves God with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength and the neighbor as oneself. 

What dies in entire sanctification then is not the person. What dies is the complex self as inwardly divided by holy love and inbred sin. What perishes are the remains of self-will, self-sovereignty, and the carnal nature's false claim upon both identity and personhood. When inbred sin is cleansed away, the self may appear at first as an emptiness, a void. But this emptiness is not nihilism. It is not the Buddhist doctrine of no-soul. It is not the dissolution of the creature into the Creator, like a river flowing into the sea. The entirely sanctified person remains a particular creature: embodied, historical, relational, responsible, and personally addressed by God.

Quoting a 17th century Roman Catholic priest, Abbe de Saint-Cyran, Wesley wrote the following in his Farther Thoughts on Christian Perfection: “For what is the most perfect creature in heaven or earth in thy presence, but a void capable of being filled with thee and by thee.” What is this emptiness? What is this void? It is the emptiness that bespeaks of perfection. It is the emptiness of a cleansed vessel. It is the emptiness of a temple swept clean and prepared for the holy presence of God, the shekinah glory. 

Here we see why the mystery of God has also been a mystery of the self. Therefore, to neglect the self and the consequences upon it in its relation to God is not humility, no, not at all. It is rather inattention, poor stewardship, and neglect, yes neglect, of those who have been created in nothing less than the precious image and likeness of God. “Persons in relation,” hear me now, is a phrase expressive of who God is as revealed to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. The Most High does not save us by annihilating personhood. God saves us by healing, purifying, and fulfilling personhood in a perfection of holy love!

John Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy

This brings me to one final observation, and it is an important one. Some scholars have rightly noticed similarities between John Wesley’s theology and Eastern Orthodoxy. Wesley, being the good Anglican that he was, loved the church fathers, especially the Ante-Nicene ones. He shared with the Eastern tradition a strong account of healing, holiness, and participation in God. There are real convergences here. But there are also two major differences--and they matter! The first concerns how entire sanctification is received. Eastern Orthodoxy has a profound account of transformation, ascetic struggle, sacramental life, liturgical sensibilities and participation in divine grace. John Wesley also affirms growth, discipline, the means of grace, and the sacramental life of the church, as we have already seen. But Wesley insists that entire sanctification, like justification, is received by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. In fact, it is a species, not of cooperant grace but of free grace. It is a gift, an utter gift. 

Recall the language cited earlier: "Exactly as we are justified by faith, so are we sanctified by faith. Faith is the condition and the only condition of sanctification exactly as it is of justification." That is John Wesley's remarkable theological move. He assimilates the holy living tradition to sola fide. No one, no one, had ever done that before. It is not that John Wesley created new doctrine. He did not. Rather, he arranged old doctrines in new ways that highlighted the strength and giftedness of free grace. Heart purity is not achieved by works as its grounding basis; it is not the last degree of cooperating grace. It is received, and that is the right word, as the utter gift that it is by grace through faith alone in Jesus Christ.

The second difference is even deeper. It concerns whether the redeemed ever know God in the divine essence. In Wesley's reckoning, God is love - or, better yet, God is holy love. Therefore, the redeemed, especially in the highest realizations of grace, truly know this holy love. The simple self, cleansed from inbred sin and made pure in heart, does not merely know something about God. It knows God in the truth of who God is. Since God's essence is holy love, to know God's holy love is, in a real though never exhaustive sense, to know the divine essence itself. This is not speculative mastery. It is not comprehension. It is not the creature containing God. The pure in heart never exhaust the infinite fullness of the Divine Being. God remains God. The creature remains a creature. There is no confusion of substance. And yet, God's essence as holy love is indeed communicable even though it is not fully comprehensible. 

Gregory Palamas, representing the Eastern tradition, speaks differently, much differently. For Palamas, God's essence remains utterly transcendent, incommunicable, and beyond creaturely knowledge. The redeemed do not know or participate in the divine essence. They participate in the divine energies. This distinction is crucial. The uncreated energies are truly God as God creates, sustains, illumines, sanctifies, and deifies. But the energies are not God's essence. So Palamas can say that God is truly participated in by grace, but not in terms of the divine essence. 

John Wesley pressed further; he pressed further in a way that Palamas did not. If God's essence is holy love, and if believers truly participate in holy love, then they participate really, though not exhaustively, in the divine essence itself. That is a bold, wonderful and deeply satisfying claim coming from the heart of the Wesleyan theological tradition for it is at the center, the very center, of John Wesley's theology. Such a claim is bounded by the Creator-creature distinction. It is guarded by the difference between knowledge and full comprehension. It is made possible only by grace, free grace. And it makes John Wesley’s practical theology enormously powerful—and wonderful! Why? Because such a theology ever leads us to the grace of Jesus Christ, a grace that reveals who God is in all manner of holy love. Wesleyan theology, then, is not only powerful, it is also deeply beautiful!

This is the theological height of the argument. John Wesley's vision is not simply that the self becomes morally improved or holier. It is that the self is invited, yes invited, and brought into the knowledge and love of God in such a way that the pure in heart truly see God as Jesus Christ himself had promised; they know the Divine Being.  In short, the greatest gift of all is none other than the Gift-Giver, himself, tabernacling in human hearts.

Conclusion: The Redeemed Self Restored in Holy Love

What, then, is the metaphysics of the redeemed self? It is the account of the human person as awakened, forgiven, regenerated, reordered, purified, and finally restored in holy love, that is, in the holy love and knowledge of God. When pressed to its constructive limits, Wesley's theology yields a remarkably rich account of the redeemed self at the highest reaches of grace. 

The simple self, then, is not a diminished self. It is a rightly ordered self, no longer divided by competing loves, no longer tempted, confused or deceived by inbred sin, and therefore free to be centered in the relations of the love of God and neighbor. At the highest levels of sanctification and holiness, the redeemed self is the whole person restored, even though further changes await the body in glory due to present and ongoing infirmities. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit is dwelling within, unveiling and revealing the essence of Who God is. Creator and creature are now in full communion, the full communion of holy love. 

This, I believe, is John Wesley's great contribution to a Christian metaphysics of the self. The self is most truly itself not when it stands alone, not when it is self-legislating, not when it retreats after the early victories of grace, but when it is wholly given to God, and consequently to the neighbor, especially the poor, in holy love. 

There have always been two in this relationship, not just one. The deep mystery about God has become a deep mystery about ourselves as beings created in the precious imago Dei. And now we know, through a careful examination of John Wesley’s theology, that God is in earnest, in earnest, in Jesus Christ and through the Holy Spirit, to reveal the very divine essence, that is, holy love, to the purified, humble and receptive soul. 

We have now come full circle. And so I would like to close in citing the words of another famous John, not John Wesley, but John Calvin, yes John Calvin, who declared in the opening lines of his Institutes: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and [the knowledge] of ourselves.” 

Kenneth J. Collins is Professor of Historical Theology and Wesley Studies, and holds the Paul S. and Jean R. Amos Chair in Wesleyan Theology at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, KY. He is a member of Firebrand’s editorial board.