The Changing Wesley & The Unchanging God: Regeneration and Repentance in the Wesleyan Way

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When I was in college, I would often debate theology on internet forums. Usually, my debate opponents were Calvinists or proponents of unconditional eternal security (“once saved, always saved”). Although one of the central distinctives of Wesleyan Christianity is the idea that “all can know that they are saved,” that assurance of salvation was possible and even normative, I frequently saw Wesleyan-Arminian soteriology caricatured as spiritual schizophrenia, where you were unsure whether you were saved or unsaved on a moment-by-moment basis. That idea, of course, is just as erroneous as the Calvinist’s contention that a Christian will be saved in the end, even if they commit apostasy and never repent. But there are some grounds for their exaggeration of the Wesleyan-Arminian position in this way.

In the early days of the Wesleyan Revival, John Wesley staked out a position that multiple regenerations were possible in his sermons “The Almost Christian” (1741) and “The Marks of the New Birth” (1748). This flowed out of his adherence to the doctrine of the Church of England, which declared that baptism always resulted in regeneration in infants. He was unwilling to abandon the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as it applied to infants, but this flew in the face of the revival preachers’ experience. All too often, a person baptized as an infant would grow up to live an ungodly life, which Wesley regarded as evidence that they were “children of the devil,” even if they had been made “children of God” in infant baptism (“The Marks of the New Birth,” IV.5).

For a time prior to Aldersgate, Wesley even regarded himself as such an individual. Then, at Aldersgate, he “felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death” (Journal, May 24, 1738). But rather than a more general call to repentance, his solution to this seeming inconsistency between his own church’s position that infants were born again in baptism and his own personal experiences with baptized Christians who lived ungodly lives was to call those same adults to be “born again” again: “Lean no more on the staff of that broken reed, that ye were born again in baptism. Who denies that ye were then made children of God, and heirs of the kingdom of heaven. But, notwithstanding this, ye are now children of the devil. Therefore ye must be born again” (“The Marks of the New Birth,” IV.5).

The idea that an infant, who had been born again in baptism, could need a second born-again experience (though not a second baptism, since baptism is not a repeatable rite) when he or she is older lends itself to the charge of spiritual schizophrenia, of which Calvinists sometimes accuse Wesleyan-Arminians. But outside of Wesley, there is scant support for this idea. The great Methodist systematic theologian of the Victorian era, W. B. Pope, comes closest in that he does not completely close the door on the possibility. In A Compendium of Christian Theology, Pope wrote that the Bible “declares the impossibility of renewal unto repentance, in the case of certain apostates, though not of renewal generally; also that it describes the extinction of the Spirit’s life as very difficult. The renewal of regenerate life, however, is never absolutely denied. The theory of the Gospel as laid down by our Lord Himself indicates one regeneration and constant renewal unto its perfection as a full birth of God. But the infinite grace of the new covenant is not bound to that one theory: the highest ideal is not to be rigorously pressed” (III.i.ii.iv).

Renewal vs re-rebirth

There are obvious practical and pastoral considerations to concern ourselves with here. Is sin possible in a believer, or does any sin instantly make an unbaptized Christian an unsaved soul consigned to hell again? Is there a certain threshold where we remain a Christian even while we sin, and if so, what is it? Is it possible to know that we are saved, even if we continue to lapse into sin periodically? How do we encourage those who have stumbled in their Christian walk?

It is a theme throughout the Bible that even believers need to repent, but also that the unsaved are spiritually dead, incapable of believing or doing anything that pleases God. For a Christian to need to be “born again” again, to experience regeneration a second (or more) time, it would mean that the Christian had become spiritually dead again, with no faith and no ability to believe in God or to repent. Pope argues that the Bible does not say that a person can experience regeneration only once, but the writer of the Book of Hebrews certainly seems to say that no further repentance is possible for those who apostatize from the Christian faith: “For if we willfully persist in sin after having received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgement, and a fury of fire that will consume the adversaries” (10:26-27 NRSV). Pope himself also observes that “the extinction of the Spirit’s life [is] very difficult” (Compendium III.i.ii.iv). Even Wesley, in his Treatise On Baptism (1756), states that in baptism “a principle of grace is infused, which will not be wholly taken away, unless we quench the Holy Spirit of God by long-continued wickedness” (II.iv).

So while repentance and renewal may be necessary to repeat, it seems much more difficult to argue that multiple regenerations are needed. Wesley himself seemed to have come to this conclusion later in life as well, as the shift in language from sermons and writings early in the Wesleyan Revival to the language used in later sermons like 1787’s “The More Excellent Way” and 1788’s “On Faith” showed. If the early Wesley’s soteriology regarded anything less than a full-orbed evangelical conversion to be inadequate to save a person from hell, the mature Wesley came to view even the earnest seeker to be secure from hell’s fires—though largely on account of an anticipated future evangelical conversion. 

In this way, the mature Wesley’s views on multiple regenerations and baptismal regeneration in infants seem to align with the later theologian W.B. Pope’s theology of the same: “If what may be loosely called the germ of grace is regeneration in the infant, then it becomes new birth in the adult” (Compendium III.i). It is worth observing that Pope seems to be using the term “new birth” here as a synonym for evangelical conversion and profession of faith, rather than regeneration (as he does elsewhere, even in the same chapter). Although Pope writes “Calvinism and Sacramentarianism and Latitudinarianism strangely agree, therefore, in denying the possibility of the repetition of regeneration” (III.i.iii.ii),  it would make no sense to say in the same chapter that “[t]he theory of the Gospel as laid down by our Lord Himself indicates one regeneration and constant renewal unto its perfection as a full birth of God” (III.i.ii.iv) and then declare that the norm is for multiple instances of regeneration in a baptized infant’s lifetime.

The later Wesley’s reevaluation

The mature Wesley tempered his views on his own pre-Aldersgate spiritual state. For a time, the younger Wesley regarded himself as an unregenerate soul prior to Aldersgate, saying in “The Almost Christian” that he—by this point in his life a baptized, confirmed Christian, and an ordained clergyman—himself had only been “almost a Christian” before Aldersgate (II.13). But he seems to have reassessed himself in the 1770s. As Stephen Dawes footnotes in a paper for the European Methodist Theological Commission entitled “The Spirituality of ‘Scriptural Holiness,’” Wesley added annotations to a number of early journal entries later in life. In a note added during the 1770s to his entry for October 14, 1735, Wesley wrote, “I had even then the faith of a servant, though not that of a son;” similarly, he later annotated the entry of January 31, 1738, writing “I am not sure of this” about the original entry’s “I…was never myself converted to God,” and “I believe not” about the original entry’s observation that he was “a child of wrath.”

Wesleyan scholars have generally placed humanity into three categories in terms of their spiritual disposition: natural, legal, and evangelical. The human being in a natural state was fallen, sinful, and bound for hell. The human being in a legal state was awakened, aware of God’s existence, and seeking to follow God as best s/he could, but did not have saving faith in Jesus Christ (Wesley referred to such a person’s faith as “the faith of a servant”). The human being in an evangelical state had come to have saving faith and was thus regenerate, an adopted child of God and an heir of the kingdom of heaven. 

Where the later Wesley differed from his younger self was in the eternal destination of the person in a legal state. In Sermon 106, “On Faith” (1788), Wesley argued that even the faith of a servant is enough that the wrath of God” no longer “abideth on him” (I.10). He even went so far as to say that the early Methodist preachers of fifty years prior had gone too far in saying that such faith was inadequate: “They did not clearly understand, that even one ‘who feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted of him.’ In consequence of this, they were apt to make sad the hearts of those whom God had not made sad” (I.11). As such, the mature Wesley could also look back upon his own pre-Aldersgate spiritual state—and those of other backslidden baptized Christians—and say that he (and they) were not children of wrath, but accepted by God even then.

The more excellent way

So if the mature Wesley came to regard multiple regenerations as unnecessary, what conclusions did he come to about the wayward, backslidden baptized Christian? In sermons like “On Repentance in Believers” and “The More Excellent Way,” Wesley instead stated that outward sin (sin in word, thought, or deed, rather than inward disposition or temptation) is not possible in a Christian who has experienced regeneration, but that anything that fell short of God’s perfect standard required renewal. He still called his hearers to repentance, but instead of charging them with needing a new experience of regeneration, he allowed that they were still saved even in spite of the presence of sin in their lives, and in spite of any actions which fail to live up to God’s standards, whether properly sin or not. 

It should be noted that Wesley defined sin in a specific way, as “the willful violation of any known law”—much of his doctrine of sin in believers relies upon this peculiar definition, along with nuances between “inward sin” (sinful dispositions and attitudes) and “outward sin” (sins of thought, word, or deed). A more natural reading of Scripture would place trespasses as “the willful violation of any known law,” as this is what the English word means in general usage. The Greek word translated “sin” is hamartia, literally “to miss the mark”—in this case, the mark is the two great commandments to “love your neighbor as yourself” and to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength” because “on these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40 NRSV). 

A more biblical definition of sin would be that it is everything (whether thought, word, deed, or inward dispositions and attitudes) which are not motivated by perfect love for God and neighbor. And by the same token, perhaps Wesley set the bar too high, even if we were to say that it is impossible for a regenerate Christian to trespass rather than to sin. Certainly, there is no height of grace from which a human being cannot fall (1 Corinthians 10:12). But instead of telling a backslidden brother or sister in the faith “You must be born again!” again, we can instead console them, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9 NRSV). And for the awakened seeker with only the faith of a servant, we can say with Wesley, “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.’” (“On Faith,” I.11).

James Mahoney is an ordained Elder in the Western States Annual Conference of the Global Methodist Church.