“The Deepest Part of the Holy Scripture”: Wesley, Wesleyans, and 1 John

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Whenever Wesley wrote about 1 John, he did so with remarkable enthusiasm. On 18 July 1765, he noted in his journal: “In the evening I began expounding the deepest part of the holy Scripture, namely, the first Epistle of St. John, by which, above all other, even inspired writings, I advise every young preacher to form his style. Here are sublimity and simplicity together, the strongest sense and the plainest language!” Two years earlier he had exclaimed, “How plain, how full, and how deep a compendium of genuine Christianity!” In 1772 he called it “that compendium of all the Holy Scriptures.” And in 1787, near the end of his life: “I love St. John’s style as well as matter.”

Consider the numbers. 1 John runs to about 2,150 words in the Greek text, yet Wesley refers to it almost 440 times in his sermons. Five of his sermons take their texts from this letter: “The Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God” (3:9), “On the Trinity” (5:7), “The End of Christ’s Coming” (3:8), “Spiritual Worship” (5:20), and “Spiritual Idolatry” (5:21). One gets the impression that, were Wesley stranded on a desert island with only one book of the Bible, he would choose this one.

Why? Wesley never tells us directly, but it is not hard to guess. So many of his defining concerns emerge in this little letter that it is difficult to say whether he loved 1 John because it voiced his theology or he held his theology because he had been so thoroughly formed by 1 John. We probably should resist choosing between these options.

Three concerns stand out—shared by John and by Wesley.

The first is assurance. John writes “so that you can know that you have eternal life” (5:13), and he offers three marks by which Christ-followers may know it: obedience (2:3), love for one another (4:12), and the witness of the Spirit (3:24). Wesley taught that believers could know they were God’s children, too. John writes, “Those who keep his commandments dwell in God and God dwells in them. This is how we know that he dwells in us, because of the Spirit he has given us” (3:24). Writing on this verse in his Explanatory Notes, and with a clear nod to Romans 8:16, Wesley observes that the Spirit “witnesses with our spirits that we are his children, and brings forth his fruits of peace, love, holiness.” And the Spirit’s witness is borne out in the other two marks.

The second is the unity of theology and ethics. The false teachers John opposes apparently denied that Jesus Christ had “come as a human” (4:2). In his Explanatory Notes, Wesley observes that this confession “presupposes, contains, and draws after it the whole doctrine of Christ.” And what follows from the incarnation is not only a doctrine of God but a view of life in this world. If God became flesh, then this life matters. Sin matters. Holiness matters. Love for each other matters.

The third is sin in the lives of believers. The Greek verb “to sin” is more concentrated in 1 John than in any other New Testament book. Yet the letter is addressed to believers. What are we to make of Christ-followers who sin? For Wesley, whose teaching on holiness was at stake, few questions mattered more.

Wesley’s Notes on 1 John

What are the hallmarks of Wesley’s approach to 1 John in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament? Several invite our reflection.

(1) Wesley’s literary-theological orientation.

Wesley opens with a formal outline of the epistle’s architecture, traces how its parts “frequently begin and end alike,” and observes how earlier sections anticipate and later sections recapitulate. He reads the epistle as an intentionally crafted literary whole, with the body of the letter organized around the Three-One God: “Of communion with the Father” (1:5–10), “Of communion with the Son” (2:1–3:24), “Of the confirmation and fruit of this abiding through the Spirit” (4:1–21), and, finally, the testimony of the Father, Son, and Spirit (5:1–12). He devotes little energy toward the historical circumstances of the letter, preferring instead to trace John’s message structurally and to locate its message theologically.

(2) Wesley’s telos-driven interpretation.

From the outset, Wesley identifies the governing aim of 1 John: “to confirm the happy and holy communion of the faithful with God and Christ, by describing the marks of that blessed state.” (The duo, “happy” and “holy,” appear in tandem repeatedly in his Notes, demonstrating his interest in human flourishing, and the dependence of human flourishing on holiness.) He then reads individual verses in light of this stated telos. His exegesis is purposive (and not, say, impartial or theoretical).

(3) Wesley’s Christocentric and Trinitarian framework.

Every major doctrinal node is Trinitarian—the Father as light, the Son as advocate and atoning sacrifice, the Spirit as the inner anointing who teaches. He repeatedly refers to the Three-One God, revealing the centrality of the Trinity to the “Analogy of Faith” by which he reads not only 1 John but all of Scripture. Christ is simultaneously the epistemic foundation (the Word of Life witnessed by eyewitnesses) and the moral exemplar (“so to walk, even as he walked”).

(4) Wesley’s soteriological concreteness.

Wesley is especially precise about the mechanics of salvation: forgiveness removes guilt, cleansing removes the power of sin, and so on. Both are distinguished. The progression from pardon to purity—justification and sanctification—is everywhere present in his interpretation, even though Wesley does not cram John’s own message into a rigid system.

(5) Wesley’s perfectionist reading of sin and love.

On 3:9 (“whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin”), Wesley does not soften the text: the divine seed “abideth in him; and, so long as it doth, he cannot sin.” On 4:18 (“there is no fear in love”), he articulates a developmental schema—natural person (no fear, no love) 🡪 awakened person (fear without love) 🡪 babe in Christ (love and fear) 🡪 father in Christ (love without fear)—showing how his doctrine of entire sanctification emerges from the text.

(6) Moral-practical formation as the primary goal.

Wesley rarely lingers on what we might call “theoretical commentary.” His Explanatory Notes characteristically move from textual observation to ethical consequence—for example, from light to walking in holiness, and from love to concrete acts of mercy (“the very sight of want knocks at the door of the spectator’s heart” [at 3:17]). This is consistent with Wesley’s view of Scripture’s overall purpose: the formation of holy character.

(7) Experiential and affective register.

On John’s declaration at 4:8, “God is love,” Wesley writes, “This little sentence brought St. John more sweetness, even in the time he was writing it, than the whole world can bring.” Clearly, Wesley reads Scripture through and for the transformed heart. Exegesis cannot be reduced to an armchair, intellectual enterprise; it reaches into one’s experiences and dispositions, and it is transformative.

(8) The inner witness of the Spirit as epistemological anchor.

The Holy Spirit is the one who “witnesses with our spirits that we are his children” (3:24) and “brings forth his fruits.” The Spirit’s anointing gives believers access to truth (2:20), not as a substitute for the written word but as its internal confirming witness.

(9) Intensive intertextuality within the Johannine corpus.

Wesley draws constantly from the broader Johannine witness of the New Testament—from the Fourth Gospel, the Johannine Epistles, and Revelation. His movement back and forth among these books is his attempt to demonstrate “the great similitude, or rather sameness, both of spirit and expression, which runs through St. John's Gospel and all his epistles….”

(10) No constraints on love.

On 4:21, Wesley defines bigotry as “the want of … pure and universal love” and insists that a brother or sister is to be loved “whatever his opinions or mode of worship be, purely because he is the child, and bears the image, of God.” Wesley thus reads 1 John against sectarianism.

Watching Wesley Read: 1 John 3:9

Every way of reading is tested by hard texts, and 1 John supplies one of the hardest. On the one hand: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1:8). On the other hand: “Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him: and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.” (3:9). Readers have wrestled with this tension for centuries.

Wesley’s general rule was to follow the literal sense of a text unless it contradicts other texts; then, the obscure is to be read in light of the plain. Behind that rule stood the Analogy of Faith—that is, for Wesley, the general tenor of Scripture’s teaching about sin, the salvific journey, and the Trinity. Wesley does not let the one statement of John’s cancel out the other. Instead, his note on the first (1:8) applies it to “any child of man, before his blood has cleansed us”; no one may claim to have no need of Christ’s cleansing. He goes on to add that “we are to retain, even to our lives’ end, a deep sense of our past sins” (at 1:10). Yet the later claim (3:9) retains its plain force: The one born of God “doth not commit sin,” because “the divine seed of loving faith abideth in him.”

Wesley has more to say about this in his sermon, “The Great Privilege of Those That Are Born of God.” He begins with a distinction between justification and new birth. They happen together in time, but they are different in kind: “Justification implies only a relative, the new birth a real, change. God in justifying us does something for us: in begetting us again he does the work in us.... The one restores us to the favor, the other to the image of God. The one is the taking away the guilt, the other the taking away the power, of sin.”

The new birth, Wesley says, is “a vast inward change,” so radical that “we are, as it were, in another world.” His favorite image for this new life is breathing. The Spirit of God is “breathed into the new-born soul; and the same breath which comes from, returns to God. As it is continually received by faith, so it is continually rendered back by love, by prayer, and praise, and thanksgiving—love and praise and prayer being the breath of every soul truly born of God. And by this new kind of spiritual respiration, spiritual life is not only sustained but increased day by day.”

Then comes a definition. By “sin” (3:9), Wesley means “an actual, voluntary ‘transgression of the law’ ... of any commandment of God acknowledged to be such at the time that it is transgressed.” Concerning those born of God, Wesley writes that, “while they abide in faith and love and in the spirit of prayer and thanksgiving,” they not only do not but cannot sin in this sense.

What about David? What about Peter? Wesley does not dodge the objections that are sure to be raised. Neither does he soften John’s words. Instead, he reads 3:9 (“Those born from God don’t practice sin”) alongside 5:18 (“We know that everyone born from God does not sin, but the ones born from God guard themselves, and the evil one cannot touch them”). As long as those born of God “guard themselves,” which they are able to do by God’s grace, “the evil one cannot touch them.” Alternatively, if they do not guard themselves, they may sin like anyone else.

With remarkable insight, Wesley traces in his sermon what he calls “the unquestionable progress from grace to sin.” David is on the roof of his house, “probably praising the God whom his soul loved,” when he sees Bathsheba. He feels a temptation. The Spirit warns him. He yields “in some measure to the thought.” He sees God “still; but it was more dimly than before.” The warning voice grows “fainter and fainter.” At last, “the eye of his mind was now closed again, and God vanished out of his sight,” and “he rushed on as a horse into the battle, and knowingly committed the outward sin.” Wesley’s conclusion: Inward sin leads to the loss of faith, and the loss of faith to outward sin. The remedy is the continual breathing of the soul: “God’s breathing into the soul, and the soul’s breathing back what it first receives from God.”

Wesley may limit “sin” to the voluntary outward act, but his analysis takes us deeper, into the “tempers” and “affections,” the settled patterns of thinking, feeling, and believing from which our actions grow. And John’s own text supports this central point. The claim that believers do not sin rests first on the work of Christ, who “was revealed to take away sins” (3:5) and “to destroy the works of the devil” (3:8), and then on the believer’s abiding in Christ (3:6) as God’s seed abides in the believer (3:9).

Apprenticing Ourselves to Wesley

Wesley read with the tools and assumptions of the eighteenth century, and at points we will read differently. But his interpretation of 1 John offers important insight and direction for contemporary Wesleyans.

The first question: What is Scripture for?

As with all of Scripture, Wesley came to 1 John wanting to know “the way to heaven.” Recall his single-minded aim: “I want to know one thing,—the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach me the way... Let me be a person of one book,” as he put it in his preface to his Sermons on Several Occasions. Looking for “the way to heaven,” in 1 John he found the marks of communion with God.

Contemporary scholarship has taught us to hear 1 John within a particular setting: a network of churches unsettled by false teaching and a painful departure (2:18–19; 4:1–6). And we have no need to set aside the good gains of scholarship subsequent to Wesley’s time. But Wesley reminds us that historical reconstruction is not the goal of reading, and neither is the defense of the text for its own sake. The goal is to hear the God who addresses the church through this text, including the church gathered this Sunday, and to be drawn into holy and happy communion with that God. Scripture’s authority, for Wesley, is shown in its power to save and transform.

Let theology shape what we look for, and let the text push back.

Wesley’s Father-Son-Spirit outline of 1 John is not one most scholars would adopt. Today, we tend to think that this letter circles back around on itself more than it marches in a straight line from beginning to end. Something similar happens in his note on 2:12–14, where “little children,” “young men,” and “fathers” become for Wesley stages of Christian maturity, a reading that fits Wesley’s way of salvation more neatly than it fits John’s own rhetoric. Moreover, in his Explanatory Notes and in his sermon “On the Trinity,” Wesley builds on 1 John 5:7, a verse that text critics now recognize as a later addition.

So we learn from both Wesley’s strengths and his limitations. His instinct is right: Theological reading is not a postscript to be added after the “real” exegesis is done. Our convictions about the Three-One God and the way of salvation shape what we notice in the scriptural text. Our challenge is to guard and, indeed, to nurture that instinct while letting the text discipline our theology.

Hold hard texts together.

Some may find Wesley’s definition of sin overly narrow. Today, we have a stronger sense of how much of human behavior arises from processes below conscious choice; neuroscientists have even begun to identify the neural correlates of the traditional “deadly sins.” Anyone who has wrestled with even a mild addiction knows the struggle between long-term aims and short-term desire.

Even so, it is worth recognizing how Wesley’s account of David anticipates much of this. The outward act is the last step, not the first. We can learn from his larger understanding of sin’s progression. And we can learn from his refusal to resolve the tension between John’s claim that everyone sins (1:8) and his counterclaim that those born from God do not (3:9). Wesley does not silence either text, but leaves standing both the warning and the promise. Accordingly, his engagement with these texts becomes not only a doctrine to affirm but a diagnosis for the work of sanctification and, indeed, for the work of Christian leaders everywhere.

Preach commands as promises.

Wesley famously called the commands of Scripture “covered promises”: Whatever God requires, God also promises to give. The “cannot sin” of 3:9 is not an impossible burden laid on weary believers. Rather, it describes what grace accomplishes in those who abide in Christ. God forgives and cleanses, Wesley notes (on 1:9), because God is “faithful,” having “promised this blessing.” And “his commandments are not grievous” (5:3).

This is, of course, John’s own logic. Every imperative in the letter rests on an indicative: God is light (1:5), God is love (4:8), the Son was revealed to destroy the works of the devil (3:8). In his sermon, “The End of Christ’s Coming,” Wesley takes that last verse as the purpose of the incarnation itself: not only pardon, but the restoration of God’s image in us.

Some Wesleyans find themselves tempted in one direction or another. Others hear “holiness” as moralism, a ladder of performance. Like the little engine that could, they think they can, think they can, by adding effort upon effort. Others, in reaction, have quietly dropped the language of holiness altogether. Wesley’s reading of 1 John refuses such paths. Holiness is neither optional nor self-made. Holiness is not the consequence of human ingenuity or machination. Holiness is what God’s grace looks like in a human life.

Read in the Spirit, testing what the Spirit says.

On the Spirit’s anointing (2:20), Wesley writes of “an inward teaching from the Holy Ghost.” The Spirit who inspired Scripture must also open its readers to Scripture’s significance. We read well as those who are continually receiving God’s life and, in turn, are practicing love, praise, and prayer.

Yet Wesley never leaves inward experience to float free. Experience confirms doctrine, and Scripture tests experience: “Try the spirits,” says John, and Wesley adds, “By the rule which follows. We are to try all spirits by the written word: ‘To the law and to the testimony!’ If any man speak not according to these, the spirit which actuates him is not of God” (at 4:1).

Many are marked either by an anxious piety that never quite trusts God’s embrace or by a complacent one that never asks whether anything has changed. Wesley’s reading of 1 John speaks to both. Assurance is real, and it is recognizable in obedience and love.

Keep doctrine and life together.

The letter closes, “Guard yourselves from idols!” (5:21). Wesley extends the warning to “every inward idol,” “from loving, desiring, fearing anything more than God”; and he devoted a sermon to it (“Spiritual Idolatry”). Right belief and rightly ordered love are bound up with each other. Confessing that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh cannot be separated from how we live in the flesh.

Make it plain.

And all of this, Wesley insists, can (and must) be said plainly. In the preface to his sermons, he urged that all who speak in God’s name “should speak as the oracles of God.” And if they would imitate any part of Scripture above the rest, “let it be the first Epistle of St. John.” Let them aim, he says, at “no more ornament than they find in that sentence which is the sum of the whole gospel: ‘We love him because he hath first loved us.’”

Breathing In, Breathing Out

To read 1 John with Wesley is not to repeat his conclusions at every point. No, it is to learn a way of reading—as people addressed by God, seeking the way of salvation, attentive to theology, honest about hard texts, confident in grace, dependent on the Spirit, and aimed at love. Wesley described this process as respiration: breathing in the grace of God through the Scriptures, breathing out love, praise, and prayer.

For Wesley, John captured the whole gospel in one sentence: “We love because God first loved us” (4:19). That’s a good place for contemporary Wesleyans to begin, too.

Joel B. Green is Senior Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Fuller Theological Seminary and a member of the Firebrand editorial board.