Theopedia

Wesleyan perfectionism

“Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”

— Philippians 3:12 (ESV)

Definition

Wesleyan perfectionism, also called entire sanctification or Christian perfection, is John Wesley’s doctrine that a believer may, in this life, be entirely freed from every voluntary transgression and inward disposition to sin, loving God and neighbor with an undivided heart. Wesley distinguished this “entire sanctification” from freedom from every “involuntary transgression”: mistakes, ignorance, and the ordinary infirmities of mortality remain and still need Christ’s atoning blood, but no willful rebellion does.1 Reformed confessional theology holds instead that sanctification, though real and progressive, remains imperfect in every believer until death.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession devotes its thirteenth chapter to sanctification, describing it as real, personal holiness worked in believers “through the same virtue [of Christ’s death and resurrection], by His Word and Spirit dwelling in them.”2 It then states plainly that this holiness is never completed before death:

“This sanctification is throughout the whole man, yet imperfect in this life; there abideth still some remnants of corruption in every part, whence ariseth a continual and irreconcilable war; the flesh lusting against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.”3

The Westminster Confession states the identical point in nearly identical wording,4 so this is the shared witness of the wider Reformed confessional family, not a distinctively Baptist position. The Westminster Larger Catechism presses the same clause further, asking directly what causes this imperfection and answering that it “ariseth from the remnants of sin abiding in every part of [believers], and the perpetual lustings of the flesh against the spirit; whereby they are often foiled with temptations, and fall into many sins, are hindered in all their spiritual services, and their best works are imperfect and defiled in the sight of God.”5 Even so, the 1689 confession does not describe a losing battle: “through the continual supply of strength from the sanctifying Spirit of Christ, the regenerate part doth overcome,” so that “the saints grow in grace, perfecting holiness in the fear of God,” without ever reaching sinless completion before death.6

Biblical Basis

Scripture states this in several ways. Solomon writes, “Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins” (Eccl. 7:20), and Solomon’s own prayer at the temple’s dedication says plainly, “there is no one who does not sin” (1 Kings 8:46). John writes to believers, not outsiders: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). The verb is present tense, describing an ongoing condition rather than only past guilt already forgiven.7 James includes himself in the same confession: “we all stumble in many ways” (James 3:2). Paul, writing near the end of his ministry, denies having “already obtained this or [being] already perfect,” describing himself as still pressing on toward the goal (Phil. 3:12-14), and elsewhere narrates an ongoing war between the mind that delights in God’s law and “sin that dwells within me,” crying out, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Rom. 7:14-24). David, called a man after God’s own heart, prays to be cleansed from faults hidden even from himself, “Who can discern his errors? Declare me innocent from hidden faults” (Ps. 19:12), and confesses fresh sin decades into his own walk with God (Ps. 51:1-5). Every believer, without qualification, is taught to pray “forgive us our debts” (Matt. 6:12), a petition Charles Hodge argues would make no sense for someone already entirely free from sin and in no need of forgiveness.8

Historical Development

Patristic origin: Pelagius

The claim that believers can, in this life, perfectly fulfill their obligations to God did not begin with Wesley. Pelagius (fl. early 5th century) denied that the fall had corrupted human nature or left it morally unable to obey God, so a man might, by natural powers assisted only by grace that made obedience “more easy,” live from birth to death without sin.9 The Council of Carthage (A.D. 418) condemned this teaching, among other points, for reducing the apostle John’s confession of ongoing sin (1 John 1:8) and the Lord’s Prayer’s petition for forgiveness to mere expressions of humility rather than genuine need.10

Rome and the Council of Trent

The medieval and Reformation-era Roman church, formalized at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), taught that baptismal grace removes the guilt of original sin and that the remaining “concupiscence” is not itself sin but only an incentive toward it.11 On this account, the law binding believers is accommodated to their present, weakened powers, so it can be perfectly kept; sins that do fall short of even this lowered standard are merely “venial,” not condemning.12

Remonstrant Arminianism

Jacobus Arminius himself, by his own account, left the question of present perfection “in suspense.”13 His Remonstrant successors went further. Episcopius taught a “perfection of degrees… proportioned to the powers of each individual,” and Limborch defined it as keeping the gospel’s precepts “in such degree of perfection as God requires of us,” not the “sinless or absolutely perfect obedience” the original law demanded.14 Both measured perfection against a law already adjusted to fallen human power rather than against Adam’s own original standard.

Wesley and the doctrine of entire sanctification

John Wesley (1703-1791) set out “entire sanctification” at length in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection and related tracts and sermons, building on but sharpening the Remonstrant account.15 The doctrine became, alongside conversion, “the great, all-controlling idea of Methodism.”16 Carried into nineteenth-century America, it became the founding conviction of the Holiness movement, which recast Wesley’s “entire sanctification” as a distinct, instantaneous second work of grace following justification.

The Oberlin theory

A further, distinct nineteenth-century American theory arose at Oberlin College under Asa Mahan and Charles Finney. Rather than measuring perfection against a gospel law mitigated by grace, as Wesley had, the Oberlin theory held that God’s original moral law is itself, as a matter of strict justice rather than grace, always adjusted to each person’s present ability, so that “disinterested benevolence,” the settled purpose to promote the highest good, constitutes full, attainable perfection on its own terms.17

Opposing Views

Wesley defined perfection positively as “the loving God with all the heart, mind, soul, and strength,” such that “no wrong temper, none contrary to love, remains in the soul; and… all the thoughts, words, and actions, are governed by love.”18 He argued the case for its attainability from several directions: God commands it and never commands the impossible (Matt. 5:48); the gospel already provides everything needed for complete sanctification; God promises to cleanse his people “from all your filthiness, and from all your idols” (Ezek. 36:25-29); and Scripture calls certain believers “perfect” or “blameless” without visible qualification, among them Noah (Gen. 6:9), Job (Job 1:1), and Zechariah and Elizabeth (Luke 1:6).19

Wesley was careful, though, to distinguish two senses of sin: “sin, properly so called, i.e., a voluntary transgression of a known law,” and “sin, improperly so called, i.e., an involuntary transgression of a divine law, known or unknown.” Entire sanctification, on his account, excludes only the first. “I believe there is no such perfection in this life as excludes these involuntary transgressions, which I apprehend to be naturally consequent on the ignorance and mistakes inseparable from mortality.”1 Even the wholly sanctified believer’s obedience, he held, “can not bear the rigor of God’s justice, but needs atoning blood,” so that the holiest Christian “must continually say, ‘forgive us our trespasses.’”20 This perfection, Wesley taught, “is always wrought in the soul by a simple act of faith, consequently in an instant. But… there is a gradual work, both preceding and following that instant.”20 He held the whole of it to be a matter of grace rather than natural human ability: Christ’s atonement secures the lower standard by which the believer is measured, the Holy Spirit supplies the power to meet it, and Christ’s ongoing priestly intercession covers the involuntary transgressions that remain.21

Objections and Responses

Every believer is taught to pray “forgive us our trespasses,” and that petition presupposes being a sinner still in need of forgiveness. Wesleyan writers such as Richard Watson answered that the prayer remains fitting for the entirely sanctified because it addresses only the original, unmodified law’s higher standard, not the gospel’s lower one. Charles Hodge judges this answer self-defeating: it treats what the believer confesses and asks pardon for as not actually sin, which is “saying that sin is not sin.” Whatever genuinely needs atoning blood and forgiveness meets Scripture’s own definition of sin, regardless of what a system chooses to call it.8

Calling a transgression “involuntary” rather than “voluntary” does not make it not sin. Archibald Alexander Hodge presses the same point against Wesley’s own distinction: the Wesleyan theory “denies that mistakes and infirmities resulting from the effects of original sin, are themselves sin, yet admits that they are to be confessed, forgiveness implored for them, and the atonement of Christ’s blood applied to them… Surely this is a confusion of language, and abuse of the word sin.”22

Measuring perfection against a “law of Christ” rather than the original moral law lowers the standard rather than fulfilling it. Hodge grants that believers are no longer under the original law as a “condition of…salvation,” since Christ fulfilled it for them, but denies this changes what personal holiness requires: “the question of perfection… relates to our personal character, not to our relations; it is moral and inherent, and not forensic.” Christ’s satisfying the law’s demand for justification does not lower what it still requires as “our rule of action.”23

Scripture’s own “perfect” saints are shown, in the same breath, to sin. Noah, called “blameless” (Gen. 6:9), is shown drunk and exposed soon after (Gen. 9:21). Job, called “blameless and upright” (Job 1:1), curses the day of his birth (Job 3:1) and later repents “in dust and ashes” before God (Job 42:5-6). David laments hidden faults (Ps. 19:12), Moses is barred from the promised land for one act of unbelief (Ps. 90:8), and Paul publicly opposes Peter’s hypocrisy (Gal. 2:11-14). General declarations such as “there is not a righteous man on earth” (Eccl. 7:20) and “we all stumble in many ways” (James 3:2) apply to every believer without exception, “to babes in Christ and to mature Christians” alike, not merely to those still outside the faith.7

The universal experience of the Church tells against the doctrine. Every form of Christian worship, in every age, includes confession of sin.24 And it has “notoriously” been the case that “the best Christians have been those who have been the least prone to claim the attainment of perfection for themselves”; growing holiness produces greater, not lesser, sensitivity to remaining sin.25

A doctrine that Scripture nowhere records anyone actually reaching carries real practical dangers, even when its advocates are otherwise faithful. Hodge judges that perfectionism as a system tends toward low views of God’s law, an inadequate sense of sin’s seriousness, and spiritual pride, while explicitly crediting the Wesleyan version specifically with being least prone to these dangers, “from the amount of pure gospel which in that instance the figment of perfectionism alloys.” He goes further, honoring Wesleyan believers’ “exalted views, and earnest advocacy of the duty of pressing forward to the highest measures of Christian attainment” even while judging the doctrine itself mistaken.26

Christ himself, not an instantaneous experience, is the true ground of sanctification’s completeness. Bavinck answers that a proper doctrine of sanctification begins from the conviction that Christ is “our righteousness, holiness, and redemption” (1 Cor. 1:30): a complete, all-sufficient Savior who imparts holiness really, but progressively, “until we have been fully conformed to the image of his Son,” rather than granting instantaneous completion in this life.16

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 35, “Sanctification,” Question 30, 532, quoting John Wesley. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 13, “Of Sanctification,” para. 1. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 13, para. 2. ↩

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 13, “Of Sanctification,” para. 2. ↩

  5. The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 78. ↩

  6. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 13, para. 3. ↩

  7. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. XVIII, “Sanctification,” 244-245. ↩ ↩2

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:247-248. ↩ ↩2

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:248-249. ↩

  10. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:249. ↩

  11. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:249-250. ↩

  12. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:250-251. ↩

  13. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Question 28, 531, citing The Writings of Arminius, trans. James Nichols (n.p., n.d.), 1:256. ↩

  14. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:251-252, quoting Episcopius and Philip Limborch. ↩

  15. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Questions 29-32, 531-533. ↩

  16. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 20, “Justification, Sanctification, and Perseverance.” ↩ ↩2

  17. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:253-255, citing Asa Mahan, Scripture Doctrines of Christian Perfection, and Charles Finney, Oberlin Evangelist 4, nos. 15 and 19. ↩

  18. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:252-253, quoting John Wesley. ↩

  19. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Question 35, 535. ↩

  20. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Question 30, 533, quoting John Wesley, “Tract on Christian Perfection,” in Methodist Doctrinal Tracts (n.p., n.d.), 294, 310, 312. ↩ ↩2

  21. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:254. ↩

  22. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Question 39, 538. ↩

  23. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Question 39, 537-538. ↩

  24. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3:246. ↩

  25. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Question 42, 539. ↩

  26. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chap. 35, Questions 39 and 43, 537, 539. ↩