When Our Forbears Talked about ‘Christian Perfection’: A Wesleyan Perspective on our Mental Lives
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Christians talk about transformed lives, especially in relation to the classic Wesleyan teaching on Christian perfection, is sometimes so exalted that it intimidates people. No matter how committed to Christ someone is, she or he winds up feeling discouraged by testimonies of dramatic change. Who among us has not had the sense, at one time or another, that God works very powerfully in other people’s lives, but not so much in our own? It tempts us to give up on the doctrine of Christian perfection altogether.
Take this example from John Wesley’s journal. It refers to a revival with particular impact on experiences of Christian perfection, from the summer of 1762, while Wesley was in Ireland. He records excerpts from nine letters written by an itinerant preacher, John Manners, over about a two-month period just prior to Wesley’s arrival in Dublin:
(John Wesley) “I rode to Dublin and found the flame not only continuing but increasing” (as Manners had described).
(John Manners) “The people are all on fire. Such a day as last Sunday I never saw. While I was at prayer in the society, the power of the Lord overshadowed us…”
(John Manners) “The fire catches all that come near.”
(John Manners) “[A man] continued wrestling with God…when he felt a glorious change and the Spirit of God witnessing that the work was done.”
(John Manners) “The power of God first seized [a Mrs. Tate] and constrained her to cry aloud till she heard the still, small voice.”
This language describing revival is familiar and gives us a certain impression of how these subjects experienced God’s power. Amy Caswell Bratton’s historical descriptions of Christian perfection offer analysis of how best to understand these accounts. If you were to read this short work (and I recommend it), you would see that exalted experiences are peppered with seasons of struggle, which is a good thing for all of us to remember.
Bratton tells of a George Clark, who chronicles his experience of Christian perfection to John Wesley in a 1774 letter. He joined a Methodist society and began to experience a spiritual awakening over a period of several months. Then, one February morning, he writes that, while attending a Methodist society morning chapel service, “The love of God so over-powered me, that I could not bear up under the weight of it” (Amy Caswell Bratton, Witnesses of Perfect Love: Narratives of Christian Perfection in Early Methodism, [Toronto: Clements Academic, 2014], 67).
If we stopped here, we would get the usual impression about powerful experiences, but Braswell notes Clark’s subsequent struggle: “A fluctuation between feeling sinful and feeling God’s love characterized his spirituality for decades (67). Fifteen years later, with numerous ups and downs described, Clark experiences Christian perfection, appropriately enough, on Pentecost Sunday:
I pleaded with [Christ]…to make me a partaker of his sanctifying love, by removing the bitter root of pride, self-will and unbelief…While I was thus agonizing in prayer, the power of the Lord came upon me, so that my whole trembled under it…I felt the Spirit of God enter my heart with mighty power…to accomplish that purpose, “I will take away the heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh: the old heart being taken away, and God himself taking possession of my soul in fullness and love… (68-9).
This testimony reveals classic Wesleyan teaching and experience. The language of the heart is extremely familiar to us and yet I am convinced that, given our educational formation, we little understand what it meant then and what it could and should mean for us now. Exploring what scripture and John Wesley say about the heart is an enormously fertile exercise, with much more to say than I can say here. Let me offer a little morsel. It has to do with the language available to us to understand the contents of our mental lives.
In modernity (or postmodernity, if you prefer), we most often associate “heart” with intense feeling, with emotion. We associate emotions with feeling states provoked by specific circumstances, without taking the extra step of noticing that they connect to particular thoughts. I am happy if my team won and sad (or angry) if they lost. Being happy or sad or some other emotion often goes unexamined because it seems so obvious as to what is taking place.
This way of thinking, however, has two flaws. First, in separating “heart” from “head,” we devalue doctrine in preference for experience, for what seems more real and practical. This is a false move and damaging to our faith. Second, when applied to our Christian walk, it seems to give us only two ways of thinking about our mental lives. Thought and emotion are construed as compartments of experience sealed off from one another.
We need an enriched vocabulary for understanding our mental lives. We find it in the Wesleyan tradition with terms like religious affections and holy tempers. These terms refer to integrated mental processes, that is, to (1) thoughts that have (2) emotional tonality that lead to (3) actions. I’ve been pondering this subject matter for a while and I don’t yet know of any modern terminological analogues. We need to re-learn what our tradition has forgotten.
“Affection” comes from the Latin affectus, which refers to human responsiveness to events to states of affairs. We are affective beings. We are affected by all sorts of things. I’m tempted to say that, since we are affective beings, we feel thoughts and we think feelings in ways that lead to specific responses.
I’m pointing in the direction of emotional tonality of certain thoughts. If you find yourself interested in a topic, it is the affection working. Let’s say that you want to learn to play the guitar, so you take it up. What happens? You feel a certain pleasure when you successfully master a chord fingering. You feel frustrated about your clumsy fingers. You are, are you not, feeling a thought and thinking a feeling? Doesn’t this reflection of your mental life drive you toward some action? You practice more. You try a new technique. It can be any number of responses. The point here is, your “heart” is fully engaged without any separation between thoughts, feelings, and actions.
This description tells us something desperately important about our Christian lives. “Affection” speaks to the way God made us and here we turn to Wesley. We are made to desire God, to be drawn toward God’s ordering governance. This desire is as much a thinking function as it is a feeling function. In terms of our creation, there is nothing more “natural” for us than to love and serve God. Through Christ’s atoning work, imparted to us by the Holy Spirit’s action, we can have that love for God restored. This is the heart of the Gospel.
Our affections, redeemed by Christ and sanctified by his Spirit, can be exercised into patterns that Mr. Wesley called holy tempers. We tend only to think of “temper” as “hot-“ or “even-,” but in this case, it is neither. Holy tempers in a Wesleyan perspective refers to consistent patterns of mental activity that manifest in steady Christian action. They demonstrate Christlike character, not just in behavior but in attitude, in feeling. As we engage in the means of grace, God shapes our hearts and grows us, by the Spirit, into the full stature of Christ. We call this Christian perfection, or having the mind of Christ and walking as Christ walked.
If you want a full dose of John Wesley’s reflection on this topic, read his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection. As you read, notice the emotional tonality of the words he uses to describe the kind of sanctification to which all Christians can and should aspire. But if you want a shorter piece to start, read his sermon, “The Circumcision of the Heart” and notice how he describes the “whole package” of the mental lives of Christians fully in love with God.
My point is this: by expanding the vocabulary for our mental lives and by understanding more fully how Mr. Wesley used those terms to describe the goal of the Christian life, we not only will have a better grasp on our tradition, but also a more realistic hope for experiencing the blessed privilege of entire sanctification ourselves. We can read the testimonies of our forbears and, rather than thinking, “Oh that was just a special moment” or “He/she was just a really spiritual person,” we can know that God’s transforming work is just as much for us as it was for them. We can, with full confidence, joyfully expect to be made perfect in love in this lifetime.
Dr. Steve Rankin is founder of the Spiritual Maturity Project.