1

JOHN WESLEY AND HIS ANTECEDENTS:

THE EASTERNIZATION OF BIBLICAL SANCTIFICATION

Mark Snoeberger Detroit Baptist Seminary

Introduction: In my presentation yesterday I suggested that the doctrine of regeneration and sanctification did not develop as rapidly in the earliest days of the Reformation as did the doctrine of justification. Specifically, I suggested that due to their fixation on justification, some popular expressions of the Lutheran branch of the Reformation flirted with the error precipitated by Paul in Romans 6:1—“Continuing in sin that grace may increase”—and earned a reputation (probably harsher than was deserved) for being “antinomian.”

Though this popular Lutheran error survives today, especially among those who see progressive sanctification as a matter of “reckoning on” or rehearsing Christ’s justifying work, I suggested that the majority of the Reformers (those of the Reformed branch of the Reformation especially, but also most from the Lutheran branch and many from the Anglican branch too) adopted a corrected model that recovered the importance of Christ’s regenerating work as the experimental or animating seat of progressive sanctification. Note the diagram below:

The Reformed corrective, however, was not the only historical solution to the primitive Lutheran problem. On the continent, especially, pietism emerged as the major populist solution to the “de-sanctification of the world.”1 As important as pietism was in John Wesley’s development (and also that of his brother Charles), however, it was his enthrallment with the ancient mysticism of

1Carter Lindberg fingers this as the singularly defining feature of the pietist movement in his “Introduction” to The Pietist Theologians, ed. Carter Lindberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 2.

Justification (the forensic benefit)

Sanctification/ Holiness

Regeneration/Definitive Sanctification (the

experimental benefit)

Union with

Christ

Righteousness/ Right Standing

2

the Eastern Church that was likely the more substantive influence on his thinking. In this presentation we will look at both of these antecedents to Wesley’s theology.

Wesley, the Via Media, and Links to Eastern Orthodoxy John Wesley was a lifelong Anglican, and felt the influence of that church from infancy to his grave. And while Wesley’s novel ideas strained his Anglican ties at times,2 Wesley opposed separating from Anglicanism3 and ever insisted that the doctrines of Methodism were the doctrines of the Church of England.4

Of course being an Anglican did not necessarily settle Wesley’s soteriology. The Church of England was scarred by bitter division during the seventeenth century between Laudian “high” churchmanship and English Puritanism. The differences between the two groups were manifold, but centered about three major issues: (1) the issue of centralized Church authority, which the Puritans resisted and the Laudians asserted; (2) discrepancy between eastern and western church influence in the sphere of soteriology, with the Puritans emphasizing a “Western, forensic, and juridicial soteriology” and the Laudians a “more Eastern, imparted, and therapeutic soteriology”;5 and a related issue, (3) conflict over Calvinism and Arminianism, on which issue the Puritans were almost unanimously Calvinistic and the Laudians inclined toward Arminianism. On the first issue Wesley was a bedfellow with the Puritan nonconformists, but on the latter two issues, issues more critical to this study, Wesley sided with the Laudians against the Puritans.6

Laudian Anglicanism, with its emphasis on ancient church tradition and centralized authority is something of an anomaly within the Reformation. Many historians, in fact, choose not to recognize Anglicanism as a branch of the Reformation at all because of these features, as they are arguably incompatible with the spirit of the Reformation. Nonetheless, Anglicanism found distinction from Rome in what they often called a via media, rejecting many of the Western traditions central to Romanism and adopting distinctively ante-Nicene and Eastern traditions. As such, Anglicanism proved more susceptible than other Reformed groups to the unique deviations

2For a comprehensive survey of which see Frank Baker, John Wesley and the Church of England (London: Epworth, 1970).

3See esp. Wesley, “Reasons Against a Separation from the Church of England,” in WJW 13:225–32; also the following from a personal letter on the topic: “It is very possible to be united to Christ and to the Church of England at the same time; that we need not separate from the Church, in order to preserve our allegiance to Christ; but may be firm members thereof, and yet ‘have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward men’” (Letter of January 10, 1758 to the Rev. Mr. Toogood of Exeter, in WJW 10:506). As late as 1787 Wesley would write, “When the Methodists leave the Church of England God will leave them” (Letter of March 25, 1787 to Mr. Samuel Bardsley, in WJW 12:504).

4This theme he reiterates time and again. See, e.g., his Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, in WJW 8:46–247.

5William H. Shontz, “Anglican Influence on John Wesley’s Soteriology,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 32.1 (Spring 1997): 36. Shontz argues that this is the primary point of division between the sparring parties. Indeed, while authority is often argued as the key point of disagreement, it probably would not have come to so sharp a head had conflicting soteriologies not served as a catalyst and fuel for dissent.

6In should be noted that with the rise of “evangelicalism” (Arminainism/Wesleyanism) and decline of Puritanism in the Anglican Church, the “low” church developed both in character and name into a “latitudinarian” or broad church. With this shift the low view of historical tradition continued, but the originally Calvinistic character of the earliest “low” churchmen was replaced by a decidedly anti-Calvinistic one. For now, however, the early, Puritan expression of the “low” is of immediate interest to this study.

3

of Eastern Orthodoxy, and specifically for our study, (1) the idea of iterative “states” of Christian experience and (2) the orthodox doctrine of theosis.7

Wesley reflects this tendency, following his father’s lead in asserting the priority of the early Church Fathers, chiefly those “who wrote before the Council of Nice,” but also “St. Chrysostom, Basil, Jerome, Austin; and, above all, the man of a broken heart, Ephraim Syrus.”8 Of these, Ephraim and also his fellow-desert ascetic Macarius provide the greatest influence (at least in terms of citation) on Wesley.9 A few notable highlights merit observation here.

Wesley and the Alexandrian Tradition: Clement of Alexandria Wesley’s study in the Church Fathers was broad, extending from the second century forward, with Clement of Alexandria (c. 155–c. 220) his earliest major influence. Clement’s influence in Wesley is well documented, most thoroughly in Neil Anderson’s Definitive Study of Evidence Concerning John Wesley’s Appropriation of the Thought of Clement of Alexandria.10 Wesley claimed to have used a text from Clement as the basis for his Character of a Methodist,11 and he

7Theosis is the doctrine that the end of salvation is realized in the deification of the believer. The doctrine is generally attributed first to the statement of Irenaeus that “we have not been made gods from the beginning, but at first merely men, then at length gods” (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.38.4, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, 1:522; cf. also 3.19.1, in ibid., 1:448–49). Capitalizing on texts such as 2 Peter 1:4 (that believers “become partakers of the divine nature”), this understanding was adopted by Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and countless other lesser-known fathers of the Eastern tradition. Some of these, following the lead of neo-platonic principles, expressed the idea of theosis in almost pantheistic terms. However, most orthodox theologians have withdrawn from this extreme expression, choosing instead a kind of theosis describable in terms of the communicable attributes of God, including not only immortality and divine “energies,” but also the prospect of true impeccability (perfection) and “perfect love” before surrendering the human nature, i.e., in the present life (see, e.g., Daniel B. Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox Christianity [Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003], 117–37; Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. members of the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius [London: J. Clarke, 1957]).

The claim to theosis in Wesley has been rejected by some Wesley scholars (see, e.g., Kenneth J. Collins, John Wesley: A Theological Journey [Nashville: Abingdon, 2003], 199). But as we shall see below, Wesley’s foremost informing sources (both orthodox and Anglican) and especially the language of his hymnody make the charge of theosis in Wesley an eminently believable one (see, e.g., Harald Lindström, Wesley and Sanctification [reprint of the 1946 Nya Bokförlags Aktieforlaget ed.; London: Epworth, 1950], 159; Albert Outler, ed., John Wesley [New York: Oxford University Press, 1964]; Ted A. Campbell, Wesley and Christian Antiquity [Nashville: Abingdon, 1991]; Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley’s Practical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994); an entire issue of Wesleyan Theological Journal (issue 26.1 [Spring 1991]); and, S. T. Kimbrough, ed., Orthodox and Wesleyan Spirituality, (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002).

8“An Address to the Clergy,” in WJW 10:484. Austin (Augustine) stands out here as the only distinctively Western Father among these (Jerome might be included here as one of the principle doctors of the Western Church, but his extensive sojourns and training in the East render him nearly equally a product of the East as of the West).

9For a helpful cataloging and sense of the respective “weight” of these influences on Wesley, see the indices to Wesley’s Works; also Campbell’s catalog of Wesleyan antecedents in Wesley and Christian Antiquity, 125–34.

10Texts and Studies in Religion, 102 (Lanham, Md.: Mellen, 2004). See also Michael Christensen, “Theosis and Sanctification: John Wesley’s Reformulation of a Patristic Doctrine,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 31.2 (Fall 1996): 76–78; David Bundy, “Christian Virtue: John Wesley and the Alexandrian Tradition,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 26.1 (Spring 1991): 139–63; idem, “Visions of Sanctification: Themes of Orthodoxy in the Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal Traditions,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 39.1 (Spring 2004): 108–10.

11“The Character of a Methodist,” in WJW 8:339–47. His claim of Clementine influence on this essay is found in a March 5, 1767 entry in his Journal, also in WJW 3:273.

4

also included the poem “On Clemens Alexandrinus’ Description of a Perfect Christian,” which calls for the believer’s entry into a state of perfect “peace,” in his Hymns and Sacred Poems.12 One can also see plainly in Wesley the stages of Christian progress detailed in Clement’s chief works: Protreptikos, Paedagogos, and Stromateis, the first to the unconverted pagan; the second to the immature, simple-minded, or even lapsed believer; and the third (the longest and least cohesive) to the maturing believer aspiring to be a true Gnostic. Clement also proposed a final book, Didaskalikos, for the perfected man or “true Gnostic,” but died before writing it.13 Several historians have noted tight similarities between Clement’s “true Gnostic,” who experiences deification,14 and Wesley’s “entirely sanctified Methodist,” who experiences “perfect love” and freedom from the pollution of inbred sin. It seems nearly certain that there is some dependence, direct or indirect, here.15 Outler is most pointed on this issue, opining, “It is almost as if Wesley had read ἀγάπη in the place of the Clementine γνῶσις, and then had turned the Eastern notion of a vertical scale of perfection into a genetic scale of development within historical existence.”16

Wesley and the Early Eastern Tradition: Chrysostom

In was early in the nineteenth century that Alexander Knox first proposed that Wesley’s model of sanctification was a confluence of Eastern and Western traditions—a via media between Augustine’s emphasis on forensic pardon and Chrysostom’s emphasis on participation in God.17 Together these emphases created in Wesley what Albert Outler describes as a “pardon in order to participation.”18 Chrysostom, a favorite of John Wesley’s father, Samuel Wesley, was foisted

12John and Charles Wesley, Hymns and Sacred Poems (London: William Strahan, 1739), 37–38, and is accessible today in Anderson, Wesley’s Appropriation of Clement, 299–300. The authorship of the poem is disputed. One of the Wesleys may have written it, but there is reason to believe it may be authored by one John Gambold (see the editor’s note in The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley: Reprinted from the Originals with the Last Corrections of the Authors; Together with the Poems of Charles Wesley Not Before Published, collected and arranged by G. Osborn, 13 vols. [London: Wesleyan Methodist Concern, 1868], 1:34–35). At any rate, the Wesleys may be assumed to have regarded the text with some sympathy in order to have included it with their own.

13See, e.g., Eric Osborn, “Clement of Alexandria,” in The First Christian Theologians, ed. G. R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 127–28. Michael Christensen argues, based upon the three books that Clement actually published, that Clement held to three human states only—unconverted, simple-minded, and Gnostic—which corresponds more favorably to later holiness models (Christensen, “Theosis and Sanctification,” 76–77). In view of Clement’s desire to publish a fourth book, this is probably incorrect. Origen’s threefold gradation of believers from “simple” to those who “have commenced to make considerable progress” to the “perfect” state, corresponding to the physical, soulish, and spiritual aspects of tripartite humanity (Origen, De Principis 4.1.11, in The Antenicene Fathers, 4:359) is a more likely fit than the Clementine data.

14See, e.g., Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogos 1.6.1 in The Antenicene Fathers, 2:215. 15Christensen, “Theosis and Sanctification,” 77; Campbell, Wesley and Christian Antiquity, 42; Outler,

John Wesley, 31; and esp. Anderson, Wesley’s Appropriation of Clement, 205–89. Bundy suggests that Clementine influence on Wesley was less than direct, and comes chiefly through Anthony Horneck, an Anglican minister whose very Clementine Happy Ascetic Wesley included in his Christian Library: Consisting of Extracts from and Abridgements of the Choicest Pieces of Practical Divinity Which Have Been Published in the English Tongue, comp. John Wesley, 50 vols. (Bristol: Felix Farley, 1749–55), 1:290–432. See Bundy, “Visions of Sanctification,” 110; cf. his “Christian Virtue,” 144–49.

16Outler, John Wesley, 31. 17Remains of Alexander Knox, Esq., 4 vols. [London: Dundan and Malcolm, 1844], 3:152–53. 18Albert Outler, “The Place of Wesley in the Christian Tradition,” in The Place of Wesley in the Christian

Tradition, ed. Kenneth E. Rowe (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1976), 29–32.

5

upon the younger Wesley from his youth as a model of theology and homiletics.19 And while strict dependence of Wesley on Chrysostom on specific topics is not clean, parallels can and have been discovered, most substantially in the works of Kelly McCormick.20

As McCormick notes, the Manichaeanism of Chrysostom’s day, with its Platonic distinction between two worlds (the material here and the spiritual other), created in the fourth century a moral milieu much like that of Wesley’s day—one in which religion largely failed to touch societal ethics, whether Christian or pagan.21 Both Chrysostom and Wesley addressed this problem by stressing that mankind need more than an external declaration of righteousness; he needs instead an ongoing, interpenetrative transformation of real righteousness. That there is a point of initial justification and new birth is not denied by either, but practically speaking, these preliminary features of soteriology become almost inconsequential.22 Far more important than the beginning of salvation is its process and end. It is for this reason that historical attempts to discern Wesley’s ordo salutis (an idea that deals principally with particularizing and ordering the relationship of fine details of initial salvation to one other) have regularly ended in frustration.23

19See the discussion and documentation in McCormick, “Theosis in Chrysostom and Wesley,” 50–51. 20In addition to the articles just cited, see also idem, “John Wesley’s Use of John Chrysostom on the

Christian Life: Faith Filled with the Energy of Love” [Ph.D. dissertation, Drew University], 1984. 21Idem, “Theosis in Chrysostom and Wesley,” 56–61. 22Wesley’s conception of justification at times sounds quite Reformed (note the oft-cited claim in his May

14, 1765, letter to John Newton: “I think on Justification just as I have any time these seven-and-twenty years; and just as Mr. Calvin does. In this respect I do not differ from him a hair’s breadth” [Journal, in WJW 3:212]). However, there are times, particularly in the later Wesley, in which he snaps at the idea of imputation as though it were more a nuisance and distraction than the centerpiece of the believer’s acceptance before God. For instance, he would write, “Does not talking about a justified…state tend to mislead men? Almost naturally leading them to trust in what was done in one moment? Whereas we are every hour and every moment pleasing or displeasing to God ‘according to our works’” (“Minutes of Several Conversations Between the Rev. Mr. Wesley and Others from the Year 1744, to the year 1789,” in WJW 8:338). Writing against one James Hervey, who insisted that “justification is complete the first Moment we believe, and is incapable of Augmentation,” Wesley replied, “Not so: There may be many Degrees in the Favour as in the Image of God” (“Preface to a Treatise on Justification,” in WJW 10:320) adding, “The particular phrase, ‘the imputed righteousness of Christ’…is not scriptural; it is not necessary.… It has done immense hurt. I have abundant proof that the frequent use of this unnecessary phrase, instead of ‘furthering men’s progress in vital holiness,’ has made them satisfied without any holiness at all—yea, and encouraged them to work all uncleanness with greediness” (Letter of October 15, 1756, to James Hervey, in WJW 10:318).

Likewise, while Wesley did not deny the need for regeneration, he wrote that there is “no excuse for those who continue in sin, and lay the blame upon their Maker, by saying, ‘It is God only that must quicken us; for we cannot quicken our own souls.’ For allowing that all the souls of men are dead in sin by nature, this excuses none, seeing there is no man that is in the state of mere nature” (“On Working Out Our Own Salvation,” WJW 6:512, emphasis added). For Wesley, the fact of universal “preventing” grace means that there is “no man that is in the state of mere nature,” and no one can be denied his status as one of the “children of God, and heirs of the kingdom of God,” including even those who have never been exposed to the Gospel (Wesley cites here the Amalekites and Gibeonites). All men, in Wesley’s model, have been “washed,” but through neglect, “those who were made the children of God” need “yet again [to] receive ‘power to become the sons of God’” (“Marks of the New Birth,” in WJW 5:222–23). As such while far from being unimportant for Wesley is neither permanent nor efficacious. It may be lost, and those who wish finally to be saved must either retain or reacquire it as necessary. As such, appeal to one’s regeneration as the irrevocable foundation for advance in sanctification is not only ill advised, but deleterious to Christian sanctification. Far more important than the momentary events of justification and regeneration, for Wesley, is the believer’s persistent life and death in a state of grace.

23See, e.g., Randy Maddox, Responsible Grace, 158; But see Kenneth J. Collins, The Scripture Way of Salvation: The Heart of John Wesley’s Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1997), 185–90.

6

For Wesley, as with Chrysostom, there is more appropriately a via salutis, that is, a “way” or “path” leading from corruption to incorruption—one concerned not nearly so much with the forensic absolution of corruption in justification and incidental fact of new birth as with the real and lifelong mitigation of corruption in sanctification culminating in perfection.24 Christ did not become a man in order to simply acquit people of sin and multiply coteries of nominal “Christians,” but to actually restore men to the original divine likeness.

This restoration, for Chrysostom, begins not with regeneration, but (1) with “our conscience, and our power of choice,” implanted in man’s nature as part of the imago dei, and rendering him “without excuse.”25 This divine image (defined as that capacity of choice and communion with God) then (2) cooperates with God’s gracious gift of energizing love and facilitates the believer’s response of faith and repentance. This in turn (3) precipitates the restoration of the divine likeness (participation in the communicable aspects of the divine nature), eventually (4) making “it possible [by means of theosis] even for one with a mortal body not to sin” even though he remains “subject to death.”26

One cannot help but see Wesleyan’s reliance on Chrysostom. Like Chrysostom Wesley seizes on (1) the “faint glimmering ray” of conscience, not so much as a part of the imago dei but as the universal expression of prevenient or as he typically called it, “preventing grace.”27 This initial expression of divine grace is then supplemented by (2) an infusion of divine love or “convincing grace” with which man cooperates (3) to receive grace upon grace, viz., “justifying grace” unto “proper Christian salvation,”28 whereupon the believer embarks on a journey that culminates, in this life in (4) the reception of “perfecting grace” by grace unto the “second rest,” in which believers may “from [their] works for ever cease, perfected in holiness.”29

Wesley’s theosis language is not so overt in his writings as Chrysostom’s is, and is largely restricted to Wesley’s hymnody and his manifest appreciation of his brother Charles’s hymnody.30 Nonetheless, there is in Wesley a mystical strain that verges on theosis in its zeal to

24See esp. the via salutis idea both the title and substance of Wesley’s famous sermon, “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” in WJW 6:43–54.

25Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statutes 13.8, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, 9:429. 26Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans no. 11, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene

Fathers, 1st series, 11:410. 27Wesley, “On Working Out Salvation,” in WJW 6:512; cf. his entire sermon “On Conscience,” in WJW

7:186–94. 28Wesley, “On Working Out Salvation,” in WJW 6:509. 29 Wesley, Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:392. 30See the discussion in Robert V. Rakestraw, “Becoming Like God: An Evangelical Doctrine of Theosis,”

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40.2 (June 1997): 264–65. Note the following representative selections of Charles Wesley’s hymns taken from John Wesley, comp., A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (London: Wesleyan-Methodist Book-Room, 1889), hymns no. 390 and 685, respectively (also available online at http://www.ccel.org/w/wesley/hymn/jw.html):

He deigns in flesh t’appear, Heavenly Adam, Life divine, Widest extremes to join; Change my nature into thine! To bring our vileness near, Move and spread throughout my soul, And make us all divine: Actuate and fill the whole! And we the life of God shall know, Be it I no longer now For God is manifest below. Living in the flesh, but Thou!

7

sedate self and partake of divine perfections. Wesley went far beyond standard Reformed appeals of the “Christ-life” (i.e., internal operations of God on the believer’s own nature [in nobis] to effect the gradual extirpation of sin), and instead sought to render the sin nature wholly inert through a mystical, proxy, and perfect “life of God” (extra nobis). For Wesley, those who achieve perfection “feel that ‘it is not they’ that ‘speak, but the Spirit of’ their ‘Father who speaketh’ in them, and whatsoever is done by their hands, ‘the Father who is in them, he doeth the works.’ So that God is to them all in all, and they are nothing.… [Their] soul is full of God.” Later in the same work Wesley exclaimed, “Let all I am in thee be lost: let all be lost in God.”31 Such language surely bears marks of Eastern mystical influence that are absent in the Lutheran and especially the Reformed traditions.

Wesley and the Eastern Ascetics With the notable exceptions of Chrysostom and Augustine, Ted Campbell notes that John Wesley “understood true Christianity after the age of Constantine to lie principally in isolated pockets of Eastern Christendom.”32 It is within these “isolated pockets” that he discovered the ascetics Macarius and Ephraim the Syrian, both mentioned above as having received praise from Wesley. Wesley explicitly praised Ephraim the Syrian “above all” for his contributions, but in terms of citation clearly privileged Macarius.33 This observation is further by the affective intensity with which Wesley cited Macarius,34 Wesley’s publication of substantial excerpts from twenty-two of Macarius’s homilies in his Christian Library,35 and his frequent appeals to Macarius in his most important treatments of soteriology.36 Several Wesleyan scholars have focused legitimately on differences between Wesley’s and Macarius’s respective understandings

31Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:379, 382; see also his discussion of Galatains 2:20 in

ibid., 377. 32Campbell, Wesley and Christian Antiquity, 50. 33Bundy, “Visions of Sanctification,” 110–15; Christiansen, “Theosis and Sanctification,” 85–87; Moore,

“Development in Wesley’s Thought,” 32–33; David C. Ford, “Saint Makarios of Egypt and John Wesley: Variations on the Theme of Sanctification,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 33.3 (Fall 1988): 285–312; Mark T. Kurowski, “The First Step Toward Grace: John Wesley’s Use of the Spiritual Homilies of Macarius the Great,” Methodist History 36.2 (January 1998): 113–24; Ernst Benz, Die Protestantische Thebais: Zur Nachwirkung Makarios des Agypters in Protestantismus der 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in Europa und Amerika (Wiesbaden: Verlag der Academi der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, 1963); Howard A. Snyder, “John Wesley and Macarius the Egyptian,” Asbury Theological Journal 45.2 (Fall 1990): 55–60. Randy Maddox refers to Macarius on 19 separate pages of his Responsible Grace, but not once to Ephraim. Cf. also R. Newton Flew, Idea of Perfection, 315.

34Wesley, Journal and Diaries I: 1735–1738, in The Works of John Wesley, Bicentennial ed., 30 vols. [projected], ed. W. Reginald Ward and Richard Heitzenrater (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984–), 18:405–6 [hereafter WJW, BE].

35Macarius of Egypt, Primitive Morality: Or, The Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian, trans. Thomas Haywood, in A Christian Library, 1:81–155.

36In addition to Wesley’s dependence on Macarius in his sermon “The Scripture Way of Salvation,” note also the glowing words of commendation Wesley heaps upon Macarius’s understanding of sanctification in his introduction to Macarius’s homilies in A Christian Library: “There is visibly to be distinguished in [Macarius] a rich, sublime, and noble vein of piety, but that perfectly serious, sober, and unaffected; natural and lively, but sedate and deep withal. Whatever he insists upon is essential, is durable, is necessary. What he continually labors to cultivate in himself and others is, the real life of God in the heart and soul, that kingdom of God which consists in righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Christian Library, 1:71).

8

of Christian perfection;37 still, Wesley’s frequent revisitations of the desert father argue for significant dependence.

The identity of Macarius is uncertain. Some argue for Macarius “the Egyptian,” a fourth-century desert father and early/pre-Messalian, others more convincingly for a fifth century Messalian ascetic (or group of ascetics) from Syria writing under Macarius’s name.38 The latter is more likely (though Wesley did not know it). The debate is incidental: in either case, Messalian themes such as passivity, progression through Christian stages, and the hope of perfection abound.39

Macarius’s “stages” of the Christian, are awakening, struggle, and finally a perfection described as the believer’s absorption into God. For Macarius this process is gradual and more-or-less seamless,40 and as such contrasts with Wesley’s more event-centered scheme that is carried forward in grace-faith events;41 nonetheless, the stages are identical.42 And while Macarius’s theosis language is noticeably muted by Wesley,43 the Macarian idea of a perfect state, in which certain of God’s communicable attributes (chiefly love) are possessed by the believer perfectly, has remarkable similarity to Wesley’s understanding. To conclude, even though Wesley’s view was not identical to the Macarian model, his dependence on the desert ascetic is both frequently asserted and demonstrable.

37E.g., Ford, “Makarios and Wesley”; and Kurowski, “First Step Toward Grace,” 113–24. Kurowski makes

much of the “distinctive issue which separates Macarius the Great and John Wesley,” namely that, for Macarius, “humanity is able to turn to God first without promptings of grace,” while for Wesley, “grace must first prepare any action of the human free will” (113). But as has already been noted above, Wesleyan theology allows for no living human who lacks this preparatory grace. As such, this “distinctive issue” becomes somewhat moot: neither writer sees fallen man in need of any grace additional to what he receives at birth to begin his faith journey.

38See Werner Wilhelm Jaeger, Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: Brill, 1954), 145–230; Outler, John Wesley, 9; New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Macarius the Egyptian,” by A. A. Stephenson, 9:3–4.

39Messalians or “praying people,” were a Quietist, ascetic vagrants, living between the fourth and seventh centuries, who sought to liberate their souls from indwelling demons common to all sinners in Adam’s train through “concentrated and ceaseless prayer, the aim of which was to eliminate all passion and desire.” Messalianism was condemned at Ephesus in 431, but persisted well beyond this time (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd ed., s.v. “Messalians,” 906).

40Macarius disparages “fancied justification and faith” and regards the new birth and circumcision of the heart as the end, and not the beginning of sanctification (see, e.g., Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter, trans. and ed. George A. Maloney [New York: Paulist Press, 1992], homily 48). Nor does Macarius allow for a place of perfection that is entered by faith and held permanently. While one might possibly reach the top of the 12-step ladder of sanctification such that “perfection is entered upon,” Macarius opined, God immediately acts upon such a believer so that “he comes down by one step and stands on the eleventh.” This backward step is actually a manifestation of grace so that the believer does not become “intoxicated” with his standing in the divine and thus become useless to his fellow believers (ibid., homily 8).

41Wesley, as we shall see below, observed distinct events that vaulted the “legal man” to his new status as the “evangelical man” and consequently to his final status as the “perfected evangelical man,” which are “always wrought in the soul by a single act of faith; consequently, in an instant” (Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:446).

42See also the opinions of Ernst Benz, Die Protestantische Thebais: Zur Nachwirkung Makarios des Agypters in Protestantismus der 17 und 18. Jahrhunderts in Europa und Amerika (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1963), 121–24; and esp. Ford, “Makarios and Wesley,” 289–99.

43Bundy, “Visions of Sanctification,” 114; Campbell, Wesley and Christian Antiquity, x.

9

Wesley and the Laudian Divines Wesley had, in addition to direct contact with the writings of the early and especially Eastern Church Fathers, the spiritual guidance of several early Anglican divines. Building on the foundation of the Eastern Fathers and to some extent the European mystics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these men perpetuated Eastern thought, mixing it at times with Western categories, and exercised considerable influence on Wesley’s conception of sanctification. Included here (in addition to the substantial influence of Wesley’s own parents) are the works of William Beveridge, whose two-volume Synodikon introduced countless young Anglicans to the Eastern Fathers after its publication in 1672;44 also William Cave’s Primitive Christianity;45 Anthony Horneck’s The Happy Ascetick;46 and possibly also the works of Lancelot Andrewes, whose more primitive Anglicanism reflects heavy Eastern influence.47 Of greatest influence on Wesley during his formative years (particularly his five years as leader of the Oxford Methodist “Holy Club”),48 however, are the works of Jeremy Taylor and William Law.49

44William Beveridge, Synodikon, sive, Pandectæ Canonum SS. Apostolorum, et Conciliorum ab Ecclesia

Græca Receptorum (London: Guilielmi Wells & Roberti Scott, 1672). Wesley appeals specifically to Beveridge as having rescued him from “these well-meaning, wrong-headed Germans” and their extreme emphasis on sola fide that resulted in antinomian failures in Lutheran and Reformed models of sanctification (Wesley, Journal and Diaries I, in WJW, BE 18:212; see also references to Beveridge’s influence in Wesley in ibid. 18:171–72; 422, 424).

45William Cave, Primitive Christianity, or, The Religion of the Ancient Christians in the First Ages of the Gospel, 2nd ed. (London: J. M. for Richard Chiswell, 1675). Wesley thought so highly of this work that he abridged it between the years of 1749–1750 and included it as volume 31 of his Christian Library (see also his Journal and Diaries III, in WJW, BE 20:265, 363). See also idem, Journal and Diaries I, in WJW, BE 18:408, for his use of this title in a counseling setting.

46Anthony Horneck, The Happy Ascetick: or, The Best Exercise Together with Prayers Suitable to Each Exercise: To Which Is Added a Letter to a Person of Quality, Concerning the Holy Lives of the Primitive Christians, 3d ed., corr. and enl. (London: for Henry Mortlock, 1693). Wesley likewise edited this work and included it as volume 29 of his Christian Library.

47Little commends direct influence of Andrewes on Wesley (save a brief reference to him in Wesley’s Journal and Diaries IV, in WJW, BE 21:517). As one author notes, “I am not claiming that there was any special link between John Wesley and Lancelot Andrewes. I do not know even whether he had read him” (A. M. Allchin, “The Epworth–Canterbury–Constantinople Axis,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 26 [Spring 1991]: 30). Nonetheless, Allchin joins a growing number of Wesley scholars in regarding similarities between Andrewes and Wesley fruitful ground for research (see also, e.g., Shontz, “Anglican Influence on John Wesley”; G. Clinton Walker, III, “John Wesley’s Doctrine of Justification in Relation to Two Classical Anglican Theologians: Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes” (Ph.D. dissertation, Baylor University, 1993); Nicholas Lossky, “Lancelot Andrewes: A Bridge Between Orthodoxy and the Wesley Brothers in the Realm of Prayer,” in Orthodox and Wesleyan: Scriptural Understanding and Practice, ed. S. T. Kimbrough, Jr. [Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2005], 149–56).

48The group derogatorily so dubbed began in 1729 under the leadership of Charles Wesley, flourished under the leadership of his brother John (who joined shortly thereafter), and dissolved when the Wesleys left Oxford for Georgia in 1735. The group was perhaps best known for a benevolence so unsparing that its own members were often left in severe want, but also engaged in the zealous, daily study of the Scriptures and various Christian classics.

49Wesley explicitly mentions Taylor and Law in his descriptions of the development of his doctrine of sanctification (Wesley, Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:366–67). Scougal’s influence is less well-defined, but reflects strongly in Wesley; further, Wesley’s personal reading of Scougal in 1732 prompted him to interrupt the Holy Club’s study of William Law in order that they might read Scougal (see the discussion in Moore, “Development in Wesley’s Thought,” 30–31; also Martin Schmidt, John Wesley: A Theological Biography, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk, 2 vols. [New York: Abingdon, 1962], 1:48).

10

Wesley and Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667) The primary impetus for Wesley’s interest in sanctification and perfection (so he later claims) begins with his 1725 reading of Jeremy Taylor’s twin works, The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying.50 Jeremy Taylor, Laudian Anglican divine and “Chrysostom of England,”51 was a man of great intellectual capabilities, but one who chafed at the deep theological and philosophical inquiries of the schoolmen of his day—inquiries that failed to touch the life of the church. This is not to say that Taylor was theologically naive, for he was not; however, like many of his admirers Taylor was primarily an “experimental theologian.” This interest, coupled with the fact that “in the question of original sin, he was in some respects a Pelagian,”52 proved a combination that would reproduce itself in Wesley.

Wesley was not impressed evenly with Taylor’s works, and even questioned the books’ core ideas.53 Two points of Taylor’s theology, however, emerge as links to Wesley’s view of sanctification. First, Wesley was moved by Taylor’s commendation of “intentions” driven by “perfect love,”54 making explicit reference to this idea on multiple occasions in his writings.55 Upon his 1725 reading of Taylor’s work, Wesley became consumed with the pursuit of the state of “perfect love,” making it a centerpiece of his theology. Second, Wesley adopts Taylor’s proposal of “two states of love to God”56 in the progressing Christian life. Taylor proposed that while all believers truly possess love immediately at regeneration, they must mature into a “greater state of love,” namely, the “zeal of love.” This “zeal of love” is not received at regeneration; in fact, zeal expressed “at the beginnings of our spiritual birth” is viewed by Taylor as affected and, as such, “suspect.”57 This idea would again come of age in Wesley’s proposal of a second and chronologically distinct work of grace unto entire sanctification.

Wesley and William Law (1686–1761)

A second significant (and more contemporary) Anglican influence that Wesley claimed upon his doctrine of sanctification is the “greatest of all our English mystics,” William Law.58 Wesley would ultimately prove critical of Law on several points of theology, especially his later

50These works have been published many times, often together in a single volume. The editions I used appear as The Whole Works of the Right Rev. Jeremy Taylor, D.D., Lord Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore, with an Essay, Biographical and Critical, 3 vols. (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1835), 1:399–515; 1:516–609, respectively [hereafter WJT]. Wesley explicitly identifies Taylor as the initial impetus for his distinctive understanding of sanctification (Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:366).

51A clever designation that incorporates not only his rhetorical skill, but also his theological proclivities. 52“An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Jeremy Taylor,” in WJT 1:xlviii. 53In fact, the “rules” that so dominate Taylor’s twin works as the answer to the antinomianism of the day

proved a subject of concern and criticism in Wesley’s Letter of June 18, 1725 to his Mother, in WJW 12:8–9). 54Taylor, Rules of Living and Dying, WJT 1:406–9. 55See, e.g., Wesley, WJW 3:212; 11:366. 56Taylor, Rules of Living and Dying, WJT 1:472. 57Ibid. 58Such is the description afforded Law by R. Newton Flew in his Idea of Christian Perfection, 304.

Wesley’s debt to Law in this area is acknowledged, once again, in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:367.

11

writings,59 but approved substantially of Law’s two most practical works, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life,60 and A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection.61

William Law’s theology is not easily established, and at times conflicts internally on issues central to Protestantism. Further, scholars generally recognize two stages in Law, an earlier stage marked by greater orthodoxy (during which period the two treatises cited above were written), and a later stage influenced heavily by the mysticism of Jakob Boehme.62 Mystical themes are not new in Law, however, upon his interaction with Boehme. Law’s predisposition to the mystical in the “first stage” of his theological development was clearly exacerbated by Behmen influence in the second.

Law begins his Christian Perfection with the premise concerning the “Nature and Design of Christianity” that “its sole End is to deliver us from the Misery and Disorder of this present State, and raise us to a blissful Enjoyment of the Divine Nature.”63 Flowing both logically and expressly from this basic premise are two key inferences. First, while many Christians presently exist in a “lower State of Piety which in some Persons may be accepted by God” without achieving perfection,64 this is not God’s highest intent. Further, a laissez-faire attitude toward this “low State” might even effect the lapse of a believer from his “low State of Piety” back into “a high state of Impiety.”65 Second, the perfect state, in which a believer is enabled unto “the right Performance of all the Duties of Life, as is according to the Laws of Christ…; a living in

59See esp. Wesley, “An Extract of a Letter to the Reverence Mr. Law, Occasioned by Some of His Late

Writings,” in WJW 9:466–509. These differences are detailed most thoroughly in Eric Wilfred Baker, Herald of the Evangelical Revival: A Critical Inquiry into the Relation of William Law and John Wesley and the Beginning of Methodism (London, Epworth, 1948); also John B. Green, John Wesley and William Law (London: Epworth, 1945); Schmidt, Wesley: A Theological Biography, 246–54.

60William Law, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, Adapted to the State and Condition of All Orders of Christians, vol. 4 of The Works of William Law, 9 vols. (Setley: G. Moreton, 1892).

61Idem, A Practical Treatise upon Christian Perfection, vol. 5 of The Works of William Law, 9 vols. (Setley: G. Moreton, 1892).

62Jakob Boehme (1575–1624) was a German Lutheran mystic/theosophist/astrologer/alchemist whose understandings of theology proper, anthropology, and soteriology intersect in something of an absorptive realization. God’s nature pervades all, and raises the human will from darkness to a state of confliction by means of the divine light of God. The conflicted soul then strives mightily but unsuccessfully to raise itself to God, and then resigns its will to a passive weakening unto death, with the result that the restrictive darkness too weakens and dies. At that point, the soul will “sink your own will back into the One out of which you came in the beginning. You now lie captive in the creature. When your will forsakes this, the creatures that presently keep you from coming to God with their evil inclination will die in you. If you do this God will send you His highest love that He revealed to the humanity in Jesus Christ. This will give sap and life to you again, so that you can sprout forth again and rejoice again with the living things of God. You will also receive again the image of God.” This mystical “out-birth” is the goal of salvation (Jakob Boehme, “A Conversation Between an Enlightened and Unenlightened Soul,” in The Way to Heaven, trans. Peter Erb, Classics of Western Spirituality [Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1978], 236.

63Law, Christian Perfection, 11. 64Ibid., 10. 65Ibid. Law’s denomination of the various states is not consistent, but a reading of the first chapter of

Christian Perfection seems to divulge three identifiable states: (1) the “State of Darkness,” “Natural State,” or “State of Impiety”; (2) the “State of Peace and Favour with God,” “State of Redemption,” “State of Probation,” or “Low State of Piety”; and (3) the “State of Perfection” or “glorious Participation in the Divine Nature.”

12

such holy Tempers, and acting with such Dispositions as Christianity requires,”66 while to be earnestly sought,67 is the believer’s not by active choice, but by passive acceptance.68 Nor is this state of perfection something done by the believer (though it may be precipitated by right “performance” and “dispositions”),69 but something accomplished in and through a complicit believer by a divine nature not properly his own.70

66Law, Christian Perfection, 6. 67Law’s promotion of thequest for perfection as necessary of all true believers is heightened still further in

his Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, which is riddled with the concept of “intentions,” the great impetus which moved Wesley to renounce his own perceived lethargy as an “almost” or a “half way” Christian and to earnestly “intend” to pursue perfection, an “intention” without which he would prove to be no Christian at all.

68Ibid., 10. The means to escaping the second, “Low State of Piety,” for Law, are chiefly “Renunciation of the World, and all worldly Tempers” and “Self-Denial,” subjects which fill six chapters of Christian Perfection (approximately half the volume). The confirmation and furtherance of the higher state, then, is “Purity and Holiness of Conversation,” “Prayer and Devotion,” and the “Imitation of Christ,” topics which complete the work.

69Like Wesley, Law maintained that an ordinary, unperfected believer “cannot sin” (1 John 3:9), not in the sense of “an absolute State of Perfection,” but in the sense that “he that…is possessed of a Temper and Principle, that makes him utterly hate and labour to avoid all Sin; he is therefore said not to commit Sin” (Law, Christian Perfection, 27; cf. Wesley, “Marks of the New Birth,” in WJW 5:214–16).

70Law reflects in this point the influence of Henry Scougal (1650–1678), an Anglican moderate regarded highly by both the Puritan and Laudian branches of Anglicanism (see The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church, rev. ed., s.v. “Leighton, Robert [1611–1684],” by J. D. Douglas, 589; also The Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology, s.v. “Scougal, Henry [1650–78],” by D. B. Calhoun, 762). Scougal’s ministry, while brief, produced an extremely popular book on this topic, The Life of God in the Soul of Man: Or, the Nature and Excellency of the Christian Religion, ideas from which reflect clearly in Law. In this small volume Scougal reflects Puritan influence in stressing the simultaneous “removal of distemper” and impartation of a “godlike nature” (the component elements of regeneration) as the only “event” necessary to live the spiritual life (Life of God [repr., Harrison, VA: Sprinkle, 1986], 36–39, 45–49). He departs from the Puritan emphasis, however, by adopting theosis terminology to describe this impartation as the “life of God in the soul of man” (hence the title). “The nature of religion,” he writes, “can[not] be more fully expressed, than by calling it a divine life” (34). This “divine life,” which Scougal describes as “an inward, free and self-moving principle,” is one that transcends “external” constraints and legal standards except “in its infancy and weakness” (36, 38). Holiness is not found in legal strivings, but is instead the instinctive result of the believer’s being filled with perfect love. Thus, when the Puritans placed acute emphasis on mortification, Scougal instead found “the true way to improve and ennoble our souls [in] fixing our love on the divine perfections that we may have them always before us and derive an impression of them on ourselves” (63). This pursuit of “divine love” and desire to see Christ living vicariously in the believer is for Scougal the essence of religion, which he defines as “a resemblance of the divine perfections, the image of the Almighty shining in the soul of man: nay, it is a real participation of his nature, it is a beam of the eternal light, a drop of that infinite ocean of goodness; and they who are endued with it, may be said to have ‘God dwelling in their souls,’ and ‘Christ formed in them’” (40).

Scougal’s appeals for cruciformity and Christocentrism in the pursuit of holiness are not easily critiqued—after all, an abundance of texts call for these virtues (e.g., Gal 2:20; Heb 12:2), and there is nothing novel in his appeal to the believer’s union with Christ as a motivation to sanctification. Further, it must be admitted that criticism of legal strivings in the sanctification process cannot rightly be called antinomian—Scougal did promote obedience, but not by striving; instead, the believer passively allows God to live the life of obedience through the believer. In D. Marselle Moore’s analysis, Scougal promoted “a kind of self-dereliction, a wandering out of ourselves, a kind of voluntary death, wherein the lover dies to all self-interest, that he or she may please God” (Moore, “Development in Wesley’s Thought,” 31). Moore has captured the fact that, when Scougal is compared with most of the Reformers before him, it may be discovered that he replaced personal obedience stemming from the believer’s own new nature as the principle feature of sanctification with assent to a proxy working of Christ’s Spirit as that principle feature.

Wesley was regularly exposed to Scougal in his early life (Scougal was one of his mother’s favorites), and

13

Like Law, Wesley would come to see three states of man: the “natural man” (the man who neither fears nor loves God), who, by means of “awakening” becomes the “legal man” (the man who fears God only), and subsequently the “evangelical man” (the man who loves and fears God) after receiving justification/regeneration.71 As we have noted above, Wesley adds a fourth, which we might call the “perfected man” (the man in whom perfect love has cast out all fear), so it is impossible to precisely compare Law’s categories with Wesley’s. Further, Law’s awakened man istruly a believer, and does not match Wesley’s “legal man” who, while “awakened” and “striving without conquering,” is “not yet a believer in Christ.”72 Further, while Wesley’s emphasis on receiving the grace of entire sanctification by faith and not by works mirrors Law’s understanding, Wesley’s mysticism is decidedly less pronounced than Law’s. Despite these significant variations, however, Wesley still pointed to his reading of Law as a critical chapter in the development of his mature doctrine of the believer’s quest for perfection, even some fifty years after he first read Law’s Christian Perfection.73

Wesley and Continental Pietism

Much attention has rightly been given to John Wesley’s experiences with the continental pietists, and in particular his dealings with the Moravians—his observation of their calmness on a series of harrowing experiences on the open sea, his years interacting with them while a missionary in Georgia, and his admitted dependency on their leader Peter Böhler—all of which anticipated the “strange warming” of Wesley’s heart at Aldersgate.74 That their distinctive teachings were a principal influence on Wesley’s understanding of progressive sanctification, however, is doubtful. Still, the interaction of Wesley with continental pietism, while brief, was critical to his developing understanding of initial sanctification. It is to this topic that we now turn. his Holy Club read the Life of God in the Soul of Man in 1732. Wesley comments little, however, on this work, decidedly preferring Taylor and Law in his discussions. Commenting on this silence is difficult (as it always is), but it seems plausible that Wesley viewed Scougal’s emphasis on passive holiness as too extreme. In Martin Schmidt’s words, Scougal practiced “a religion without obligations, not far removed from intoxication with feeling” that was not to Wesley’s liking (Wesley: A Theological Biography, 56). Nonetheless, remarkable similarities between Scougal and nineteenth-century Keswick theology seems to identify Wesley’s use of Scougal as a critical link.

71See esp. Wesley, “On the Spirit of Bondage and Adoption,” in WJW 5:98–111. 72Wesley, “On the Spirit of Bondage and Adoption,” in WJW 5:109. This is the condition in which Wesley

would eventually come to see himself as having lived between 1725 and May of 1738 (Aldersgate). Wesley, in fact, sent several censorious letters to Law in 1738 rebuking the elder theologian for failing to inform him of his need to seek justification by faith in order to escape the law and become an “evangelical man” by simple grace through faith. Wesley would even question Law’s own conversion, wondering whether Law had ever escaped the legal status that had so bound Wesley for these thirteen years (WJW 12:51–53).

73Idem, Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:367. 74For which see the entries in Wesley’s Journal, in WJW 1:20–23, 26, 28, 79–80, 98–104, etc. See also

extensive discussions in Clifford W. Towlson, Moravian and Methodist: Relationships and Influences in the Eighteenth Century (London: Epworth, 1957); F. Ernest Stoeffler, “Religious Roots of the Early Moravian and Methodist Movements,” Methodist History 24.3 (April 1986): 132–40; Warren Thomas Smith, “Eighteenth Century Encounters: Methodist-Moravian,” Methodist History 24.3 (Fall 1986): 141–56; and myriad biographical treatments, chiefly, Schmidt, Wesley: A Theological Biography. For treatments of Wesleyan interaction with pietism generally see Arthur W. Nagler, Pietism and Methodism (Nashville: Publishing House M. E. Church, South, 1918); F. Ernest Stoeffler, German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973); Kenneth Collins, “John Wesley’s Critical Appropriation of Early German Pietism,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 27.1–2 (Spring–Fall 1992): 57–92; and Dale W. Brown, “The Wesleyan Revival from a Pietist Perspective,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 24 (1989): 7–17.

14

Wesley and the Moravians Despite the brevity of their influence on Wesley,75 the Moravians made at least one major contribution to Wesley’s experimental theology, namely, they turned him away from a religion of works to a religion that commences with new birth and justification.76 By his own testimony, Wesley came, by 1738, to believe himself deceived by William Law’s model of salvation.77 He chiefly objected to Law’s failure to preface his material on “intentions,” “imitation,” and “love” with instruction on how to have a right standing before God in justification. As a result, he had been striving from the mid 1720s until 1738 as an “awakened” but “legal man.” What he discovered among the Moravians was that these expended efforts meant nothing apart from a righteous standing, secured by faith, and embodied in Christ’s imputed righteousness.

While Wesley was greatly helped by the discovery that simple belief was God’s one requirement for justification, he balked at the Moravian understanding that simple belief was God’s one requirement for sanctification.78 This understanding, Wesley averred, would result inevitably in antinomianism.79 Wesley also objected to two other “grand errors” of the Moravians, namely, universalism and “a kind of new-reformed Quietism.”80 The former is not pertinent to the topic at hand,81 but the latter is. Wesley viewed Quietism (1) as a kind of resignation to a sanctification of external divine “relief” rather than internal “conquest,” and (2) as a shortcut to perfection.82 These factors, together with Moravian fondness for modern (as opposed to ancient) mysticism,

75Influence began in 1735, and climaxed in Wesley’s conversion at Aldersgate in May of 1738. But

between his years in Georgia until 1740, Wesley’s estimation of the Moravians declined from an “unbosoming … without reserve” (Wesley, Journal, 1:331) to a thorough detestation of their deep-set guile and pride (ibid., 1:327, 329, 332). Within eighteen months after his conversion, Wesley had decisively severed all remnants of the once burgeoning Wesleyan-Moravian alliance, burning all bridges for possible rapprochement behind him (see Wesley, Journal, 1:326–35).

76See the discussion in Charles A. Rogers, “The Concept of Prevenient Grace in the Theology of John Wesley” (Ph.D. dissertation, Duke University, 1967), 71–89.

77Wesley, letters of May 14, 1738, and May 30, 1738, to William Law, in WJW 12:51–53. 78As shall be demonstrated below, Wesley saw a “simple act of faith” as the entry point to entire

sanctification (Wesley, Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:446). But he strongly emphasized active obedience and striving with sin as necessary to the everyday sanctification that preceded entire sanctification.

79Wesley makes this distinction clear in his Journal (WJW 1:334). Even after severing ties with the Moravians, Wesley continued to admire the restraint, simple faith, and principled conduct of the Moravians from a distance. What he objected to was their theological understanding that God had left Christians no rule of life, the rules of Scripture (both Mosaic and Christian) being unsuited to the present day.

80Ibid., 1:333. 81Though, interestingly, John Wesley’s affirmation of universal prevenient grace is based on the same logic

as Moravian universalism—necessity in the all-loving divine nature to make grace common apart from special revelation (see M. Elton Hendricks, “John Wesley and Natural Theology,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 18 [Fall 1983]: 7–17). This is not to say that Wesley offered no scriptural support for his position (see below); however, his conclusion seems based more on theological preunderstanding than on exegesis.

82Ibid. Cf. also Wesley’s conversation with Böhler and Spangenberg debating this point in Wesley, Journal, 1:308. Replying to the experiences of some Moravians who claimed freedom from corruption in entire sanctification Spangenberg “told them, (with great emotion, his hand trembling much,) ‘You all deceive your own souls. There is no higher state than that I have described. You are in a very dangerous error. You know not your own hearts. You fancy your corruptions are taken away, whereas they are only covered. Inward corruption never can be taken away, till our bodies are in the dust.’”

15

cultish isolationism and secrecy, and general lack of Christian love (especially toward unbelievers) quickly rendered Wesley antipathetic toward the Moravians.83

The one significant contribution of the Moravians to Wesley’s theology was thus their orthodox understanding of justification (which he embraced) and not their understanding of Christian spirituality (which he rejected). Nonetheless, Wesley emerges from his encounter with the Moravians with a confirmed understanding that real sanctification has as its initial expression neither justification (because it is legal not experimental) nor new birth (which Wesley still tied with baptism) but rather a point distinct from and subsequent to the first “awakening” of the soul.

Wesley and Other Contemporary Pietist Impulses

The pietist “movement” presents us with no monolithic doctrine of sanctification. In fact, there is nothing even close to a consensus as to why continental pietism developed and precisely what it is. Some suggest that pietism is a withdrawal from Reformationalism back to Romanism or a still more primitive ecclesiology; others a completion of the Reformation in its ethical dimension; others a grass-roots reaction to the heady scholasticism of the academy; and still others an alternative to English Puritanism.84 And depending on which particular pietist sect is in view, any one of these impulses might make sense.

There does, however, seem to be a seminal issue that unites the various sanctification models of pietism in distinction from other, non-Pietist Protestant models, viz., the idea that justification and sanctification are not coextensive. The Puritans, for instance, reacted to the spiritual malaise of their day by promoting a full-orbed, active faith consisting of notitia, assensus, and fiducia—acknowledgement, assent, and trust—that anticipated works of sanctification as necessary accoutrements of true saving faith.85 In this they resisted the popular reduction of saving faith to mere notitia. The pietists, on the other hand, warmed to the popular reduction of justifying faith to notitia, regarding the Reformed understanding of faith too “worksy” to represent the biblical ideal. Because of this, the pietists needed a separate work of grace to animate the Christian life and subsequently adorn it with good works. The identity of this additional operation was widely disputed within Pietism, but can reduced to two classes: (1) voluntarist (involving acts of sanctifying faith) and (2) quietist (involving the passive reception of sanctifying grace). Uniting both classes, however, was the basic understanding that justification by faith needed the supplementation of an independent, internal, and often mystical work of the Holy Spirit in order for the experience (or at least the full experience) of sanctification to move forward.86

83Ibid., 1:326–35. 84Among the myriad books and essays on pietism, the most comprehensive English treatments of the milieu

of early pietism and of the pietism of Wesley’s day, respectively, are two titles by F. Ernest Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden: Brill, 1965) and his German Pietism During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1973); but see also Dale W. Brown, Understanding Pietism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978) and Ted A. Campbell, The Religion of the Heart: A Study of European Religious Life in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Caroline Press, 1991). Among the definitive German sources see Albrecht Ritschl, Geschichte des Pietismus, 3 vols. (Bonn: Adolph Marcus, 1880–1886); also a current and comprehensive work by Martin Brecht, ed., Geschichte des Pietismus, 4 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993–2004).

85For this theological description of the milieu that produced especially German pietism see Stoeffler, Rise of Evangelical Pietism, 183.

86To cite Gerald Parsons, “Classical Pietism thus asserted on the basis of the Reformation’s prior

16

That Wesley was in the broadest sense a pietist has been affirmed already—he was part of Lindberg’s “history of Protestantism’s multiplicity of reactions to the de-sanctification of the world.”87 But it also seems possible to cautiously locate him in the narrower understanding of pietism as that anti-scholastic, pan-denominational, and self-referencing spirituality common especially among French, German, and Spanish mystics that flourished most visibly during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.88

Wesley read widely among the continental pietists, and gave many of them high praise. He listed his 1726 reading of The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis (c. 1380–1471), who might be described as chief among the proto-pietists, together with the writings of Taylor and Law as the principal basis of his doctrine of perfectionism.89 Spiritual Combat by Lorenzo Scupoli (c. 1530–1610) was a favorite of Wesley’s mother, and Wesley’s “Holy Club” studied it with profit in 1732.90 Wesley read August Franke’s Pietas Hallensis on his famed passage across the Atlantic to Georgia,91 lauding the author as having a “name [that] is as precious ointment.”92 Shortly thereafter he read Johann Arndt’s True Christianity with such profit that years later he would include an extract of the work in his Christian Library.93 Another prominent pietist, J. A. Bengel (1687–1752), Wesley described as “that great light of the Christian world.”94 To these may be added several “quietist” pietists, i.e., François de Sales (1567–1622), whose works the “Holy Club” studied in 1731, and also Miguel de Molinos (1640–1697) and Madame Guyon (1648–1717), whose works the “Holy Club” read and studied in 1735.

Wesley could, to be sure, be critical of these sources. He disapproved particularly those (e.g., the Moravians) who emphasized passivity to excess or who advocated spiritual isolationism to the neglect of the social dimension of the Christian life. But he also chafed at any voluntarism that threatened the doctrine of imputation and smacked of works righteousness.95 In the end, it is probably best to see Wesley as something of a conflicted soul with respect to continental pietism. reassertion of the personal nature of faith the need for a radically existential turn in Protestant life and experience” (“Pietism and Liberal Protestantism: Some Unexpected Continuities,” Religion 14.3 [July 1984]: 227).

87Lindberg, “Introduction” to Pietist Theologians, 2. 88This is in contrast to the ancient mystics, an affinity to which has already been seen in Wesley. 89Wesley, Plain Account of Christian Perfection, in WJW 11:366–67 90See the discussions in Outler, John Wesley, 251–52; Moore, “Development in Wesley’s Thought,” 30–31;

Schmidt, Wesley: A Theological Biography, 148–53. 91Wesley, Journal and Diaries I, in WJW, BE 18:319. 92Idem, Journal, in WJW 1:112. 93Idem, Journal and Diaries I, in WJW, BE 18:371, 373; cf. John Wesley, ed., Christian Library, 1:137–39.

Some have even posited that the extract’s appearance in the first volume of the Christian Library is reflective of Wesley’s peculiarly high regard for Arndt (see Collins, “Critical Appropriation,” 33).

94John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (reprint ed.; London: Epworth, 1950), 7. 95See, passim in Wesley’s works (in addition to the criticisms against the Moravians, cited above, see, e.g.,

WJW 1:74, 85, 347, 376; 2:14, 52, 71; 3:160; 6:90, 98; 9:466–518; 10:391, 403, 433, 438; 12:27, 211–16; 13:25–28; 14:319–22, etc.). No censure of Wesley’s is more severe, however, than his assessment that “all the other enemies of Christianity are triflers—the mystics are the most dangerous of its enemies. They stab it in the vitals, and its most serious professors are most likely to fall by them. May I praise him who hath snatched me out of this fire likewise, by warning all others that it is set on fire of hell” (Wesley, Journal and Diaries I, in WJW, BE 18:213).

17

As Kenneth Collins implies in the title of his aforementioned article, Wesley represents a “Critical Appropriation of Early German Pietism.” He was enamored by their practical expressions of holiness/love and by their zeal for “something more,” but critical of their mysticism, self-absorption, and legalistic tendencies.

Summary

I conclude this presentation with an understanding that it is incomplete. Specifically, I have not offered a robust, much less comprehensive, treatment of Wesley’s soteriology, without which the comparison is somewhat one-sided. Studies of Wesley’s soteriology have been published elsewhere, not least in John Aloisi’s workshop offered in this very conference. I also point the hearer to my Ph.D. dissertation, the fourth chapter of which consists largely of this presentation appended by a formal discussion (nearly equal in length to this one) of Wesley’s soteriology.96

What I believe I have done in this presentation, however, is firstly, to demonstrate that Wesley’s distinctive views on soteriology and specifically sanctification are not original with him. They are derived from a long succession of antecedents of Anglican, Pietist, Eastern Orthodox, and (perhaps most troublingly) Gnostic vintage. Secondly, this study has shown how the Wesleyan tradition has gutted sanctification of its “engine.” By sourcing life, however feeble, in either nature or baptism (prevenient grace), and by elevating justification to an unnatural place as the beneficium unicum of our temporal union with Christ, proponents of the Wesleyan tradition have been forced to invent new and extrabiblical means to impel Christian ethical progress (whether Wesley’s perfecting event that crowns a long life of struggle, or Keswick’s initiating event [baptism of the spirit, consecration, etc.] that offers a “shorter way” to perfection, albeit a temporary one).

Better it is to revert to the Reformed (and at the risk of sounding prejudicial, the biblical) concept of a duplex beneficium of union with Christ, complete with two distinct but paired benefits—forensic (justification) and experimental (regeneration). For a continuation of this study and explanation of its practical import, see my conference workshop yesterday in this selfsame conference.

96“Definitive Sanctification: Threading a Path Between Legal Fiction and Works Righteousness” (Ph.D.

Disseration, Baptist Bible Seminary, 2007).