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JOHN WESLEY AND THE SECOND BLESSING

by

Timothy L. Smith 

Source: Wesleyan Theological Journal

Wesley Center Online

Wesley.nnu.edu

The dates assigned [in brackets] to sermons are drawn from my tentative efforts in “Chronological List of John Wesley’s Sermons and Doctrinal Essays,” The Wesleyan Theological Journal, 17 (Fall, 1982), 88–110.

Since the new, very expensive, and still incomplete Oxford and Bicentennial edition of John Wesley’s Works is used for many citations below, I have placed in parentheses after many of these citations alternative ones form John Wesley, Works (14 vols., London, 1872; reprinted, Kansas City, Missouri, 1978), hereinafter designated WW.

I will begin by stating two elementary principles of historical method: friends who have reason to disagree with a person on an important point or two usually provide the most objective evidence of what his or her opinions at a given time actually were; and considering facts in their chronological sequence is indispensable to establishing the nature and cause of any person’s changing views.

The second of these I have illustrated in an earlier paper before this society on the doctrine of holiness in the Wesleyan hymns. In that essay, I pointed out that in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection Wesley incorrectly dated the publication of the second volume of Hymns and Sacred Poems (whose preface he quoted prominently there) as 1741 rather than 1740. Since that preface provided so clear a description of a second work of sanctifying grace, we must conclude that the emergence of that doctrine took place sometime before the publication of the hymnbook in the spring of the latter year. The first observation I also illustrated in an earlier paper before this society, namely, the great significance of the Whitefield correspondence with Wesley in 1740 dealing with the experience of heart purity, a portion of which is available to all in Frank Baker’s Oxford edition of Wesley’s letters. Without regard to any of the other evidence of the origin of Wesley’s thought, this correspondence makes plain that something dramatic had happened in Wesley’s thinking shortly after Whitefield’s second departure for America , in September, 1739. Whitefield called Wesley’s new teaching, about which he heard in America , “sinless perfection,” an accurate term in his view of the issue raised by Wesley’s idea that a second work of grace brought cleansing from the remains of inbred corruption, or from inbred sin. Whitefield’s rejection of this idea hastened and was hastened by his growing identification with Calvinist evangelicals in America and Scotland . It led directly to the young evangelist’s public break with the Wesleys over both that issue and the doctrine of predestination on the eve of his return from America in January and February, 1741.[1]

These two pieces of evidence support my suggestion in that second paper that Wesley composed the substance of his first sermon on the limits and the nature of Christian perfection, not published until two years later, on November 7, 1739, when he recorded in his diary that he “writ Christian Perfection.”[2] The alternative argument—that he began then the condensation of William Law’s volume on that subject, since he records in the diary that later that day and on November 8 he “writ Law”—will not fit all the facts. For one, on November 12 and 17, Wesley told us in his Journal, he explained to small groups of his followers “the nature and extent of Christian perfection”—words that point to the famous sermon’s contents—and on August 10, 1740, he echoed those words in describing his discourse on its text, Philippians 3:12.[3] Moreover, he preached sermons in the following months from texts that he always thereafter used as vehicles to explain the doctrine of sanctification. These sermons prompted several persons in England and Scotland to alert Whitefield to the fact that Wesley was now proclaiming that the Bible taught that Christians may find purity of heart in this life.[4] Finally, the first chapters of Wesley’s condensation of William Law, published anonymously in 1740 under the title The Nature and Destiny of Christianity, dealt not with the second work of grace, which gave Whitefield and others of Wesley’s friends such problems, but with the doctrine of “the great salvation,” which they affirmed; and it allowed the idea that a process of growth, rather than an instantaneous second work of grace, was the method of achieving it. Wesley, of course, had always taught that Christians experienced gradual sanctification—so much so as to enable Gerald R. Cragg to say, and Albert C. Outler to imply, that he taught only or mainly progressive holiness.[5] But in the fall of 1739 he came to the clear conviction that a second and instantaneous experience was essential to that process. In that moment, believers were filled with the Holy Spirit, their hearts were cleansed from the remains of inbred sin, and they were perfected in love.

The assistance that a correct understanding of these events gives in the task of interpreting various aspects of Wesley’s teaching and behavior now requires spelling out. I wish, first, to stress the light they shed on Wesley’s own spiritual experience.

Wesley himself acknowledged his disappointment at the small measure of joy he had received when he thought the Holy Spirit bore witness to his regeneration at the famous prayer meetings in Aldersgate Street , London , in May, 1738. He was tempted to doubt whether he had actually experienced what the Scripture promised.[6] This fact has prompted some modern scholars to denigrate the Aldersgate event. It seems to me, rather, to have reflected the fact that Wesley at that point understood the Bible to teach only one instantaneous experience of saving grace and that, therefore, all the promises of Scripture concerning the righteousness, peace, and joy which were to flow from the presence and work of the Holy Spirit should have been evident immediately after he was assured of being God’s child. On the contrary, he found himself a few days afterward nearly “sawn asunder” by doubt, temptation, and the absence of joy. He went to Germany a few days after he preached his sermon on “Salvation by Faith” before Oxford University , hoping to find in the Moravian experience some resolution of the intellectual as well as the spiritual problems that stemmed from his unwarranted expectations.

What Wesley soon learned was that the Moravians believed that the witness of the Spirit to regeneration was usually bestowed sometime after one was forgiven and enabled to have victory over sinning. In his letter of October 30, 1738 to his brother Samuel, he equated that witness with “‘the seal of the Spirit,’ ‘the love of God shed abroad in my heart,’ and . . . ‘joy in the Holy Ghost,’ joy which ‘no man taketh away,’ ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory.’” He told Samuel he could not doubt “that believers who wait and pray for it will find these Scriptures fulfilled in themselves,” and added: “My hope is that they will be fulfilled in me.” Such a degree of faith, he had written Samuel from Germany , “purifies the heart” and “renews the life after the image of our blessed Redeemer.”[7] Here was the germ of what became a year later his doctrine of entire sanctification. But at this point, Wesley was still thinking only of degrees of saving faith. He reported to the Moravians at Herrnhut in late October, 1738 that he believed ten ministers in the Church of England preached that “the blood of Christ cleanseth” them “from all sin,” and urged them not to cease praying that God would “remove that which is displeasing in His sight” and “give us the whole mind ‘that was in Christ.’” This evidence clarifies the use Wesley made in his sermon “Salvation by Faith” at Oxford of the scriptural promises that the Lord would save His people from “all their sins: from original and actual . . . sin,” seal them with “the Holy Spirit of promise,” deliver them from “any sinful desire,” and give them “the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.” This described the experience he had expected but only part of which he had found.[8]

During the months which followed that trip, and particularly after Wesley joined Whitefield in leading the awakening in Bristol and London in the spring and summer of 1739, Wesley carefully studied the Scriptures concerning “babes in Christ” and the degrees of faith. They confirmed his belief that those who, under his and his brother’s ministry as well as that of Whitefield and the Welsh evangelist Howell Harris, had professed to have been instantaneously transformed by the Holy Spirit from “the faith of a servant,” as he put it, to the faith of a child of God were undoubtedly born again. By the late summer of 1739 he had dealt at length with a multitude of such converts. They had been “set at liberty” from the power of sin. Yet they were unsteady and unestablished. Caring for them taught Wesley that he had been discouraged about his own experience because he had expected too much. Though he had not during that first year after Aldersgate supposed that he could be delivered from inbred sin, he had believed that he would experience fullness of joy and peace. Now, in the fall of 1739, he became convinced Scripture taught this fullness would accompany a second and deeper moment of hallowing grace, which would bring also purity of heart and perfect love. He turned then from bemoaning the incompleteness of his peace and joy in regeneration to marveling at the measure of grace that he and his converts had received and at the fullness which was to come. Now, hungering and thirsting after righteousness became a joyful experience. He was confident that entire sanctification, or purity from the remains of inward corruption, would also guarantee his final perseverance and so make his satisfaction complete.[9]

Eventually, Wesley’s followers who sought and found this blessing taught him that he still expected too much; and his study of the experience of Jesus and the apostles confirmed that he had. Hence, in 1765, when he republished the preface to the hymnbook of 1740 in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection, Wesley inserted several footnotes to show where he had overstated the subjective fruits of full salvation. And he explained how the fall from grace of several notable Methodists who he could not doubt had once enjoyed perfect love had convinced him in the late 1750’s that this experience assured only present, not final salvation.[10] But from 1740 onward, he never questioned the idea of an instant of heart cleansing in a second moment of sanctifying grace. I think he would be amazed to find some of his modern followers seeking, at this late date, to fasten upon him a belief in progressive sanctification so extensive that it minimizes almost to the point of extinction the doctrine of an instantaneous experience. A central argument of the Plain Account was, in fact, that he had been teaching that doctrine ever since the publication of the hymnbook of 1740.[11]

Wesley’s personal struggles were also intertwined with his emerging controversy with the Moravians, and hence his dawning belief in a second moment of grace was closely connected to that controversy. The journals of both Wesley and Whitefield indicate the increasing concern of the evangelists about the insistence of the London Moravians that none had any faith at all who did not have perfect faith—one that banished all doubt and fear and secured complete deliverance from inward sin. They attacked directly the testimonies of the followers of both men to the experience of regeneration and, therefore, the preaching of both evangelists on the doctrine of the new birth. They bade these falsely assured “converts” to desist from doing anything at all, whether self-denial or good works or observing what Anglicans thought were the “means of grace,” until they had such perfect faith. The result was to discourage very many of Wesley’s converts, to put a damper on the revival itself, and to prompt some of Wesley’s closest followers to renounce their professions, stop taking communion, and “wait in stillness for salvation.”[12]

Inattention to chronology has allowed scholars to minimize or ignore the connection between the Moravian controversy and Wesley’s new view of entire sanctification. He later described in his Journal for November 1–9, 1739, the spiritual crisis in the affairs of the Fetter Lane Society in London stemming from the Moravian insistence that justifying faith must be perfect, that is, sanctifying, and that those who had once professed justification must wait in “stillness” until they had such faith. The longest of his several conversations that week with their bishop, August S. Spangenberg, took place on November 7—the very day that his “Diary” tells us he “writ Christian Perfection.”[13] Moreover, that portion of Wesley’s Journal which recounts his conversion and his trip to Germany was not published until September, 1740. By that time all the world knew that he had broken with the Moravians and begun proclaiming a second work of grace.[14] The Journal, as distinct from the “Diary” on which it was based, was written for publication and always had a hortatory purpose. And in this case, Wesley’s purpose was to refute the London Moravians by describing the testimonies to degrees of faith and to a second moment of hallowing grace that he had heard in Germany two years before. He published them not simply to confirm his Aldersgate experience but to show that the experience of the “greatest professors” at Herrnhut had presaged his conviction that freedom from inbred sin as well as from all doubts and fears was the fruit of that second moment.

Hence his recounting in the Journal for July and August, 1738, Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf’s carefully circumscribed definition of justification, which matched Wesley’s view at the time in 1740 when he wrote the Journal; and hence his report of the inquiries he made of “the most experienced of the brethren, concerning the work which God had wrought in their souls, purifying them by faith.”[15] Among these was Christian David, founder and pastor of the church at Herrnhut. Three of the four sermons Wesley heard David preach at Herrnhut dealt with the state of those who were “weak in faith,” who were “justified” but did not yet have “a new, clean heart.” David said they had “received forgiveness through the blood of Christ” but had “not received the constant indwelling of the Holy Ghost.” That the preacher had described their state, and progress from it, by close reference to the opening sentences of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount just as Wesley had taken to doing in the fall of 1739, had both dialectical and spiritual significance to the visitor from England . David showed how they must come to mourning and to hungering and thirsting after righteousness before they were made “pure in heart,” set free “from all self-will and sin,” and made merciful as “their Father which is in heaven is merciful.”[16]

David also explained the nature of that intermediate state, which “most experience between that bondage which is described in the seventh chapter of the epistle to the Romans and the full glorious liberty of the children of God described in the eighth, and in many other parts of Scripture.” And he explained in one sermon “the state the apostles were in, from our Lord’s death (and indeed for some time before) till the descent of the Holy Ghost at the day of Pentecost.” They were then “clean,” Wesley recalled David as saying; they then had “faith, otherwise He could not have prayed for them, that their ‘faith’ might not ‘fail.’ Yet they had not, in the full sense, ‘new hearts’; neither had they received the gift of the Holy Ghost.” And he remembered the pastor urging such persons to “labor then to believe with your whole heart. So shall you have redemption through the blood of Christ. So shall you be cleansed from all sin.” This long summary pointed as fully to Wesley’s new understanding of sanctification as did Christian David’s testimony to his finding “the full assurance of faith” and those of Michael Limmer and Arvid Gradin to the same effect. Wesley cited Gradin’s words twenty-five years later, in his Plain Account.[17]

Wesley composed his famous “Letter to the Church of God at Herrnhut” at the same time that he was editing this Journal of 1738 for the press, namely, August, 1740. That letter begins with his complaint that some of the London Moravians were affirming that “present salvation . . . does not imply the proper taking away our sins, the cleansing our souls from all sin, from all unholiness, whether of flesh or spirit”—words which clearly refer to Wesley’s new understanding of Christian perfection—“but only the tearing the system of sin in pieces, so that sin still remains in the members, if not in the heart.” Wesley said he had also heard Moravians in London insist that saving faith did not secure “liberty from evil thoughts, neither from wanderings in prayer,” that it did not grant “an assurance of future salvation,” and that “the seal of the Spirit” related only “to the present moment.” (Wesley believed at this point, and for a number of years thereafter, that the experience of entire sanctification was indeed a sealing of the Spirit which made it impossible for one to fall from grace.)[18]

In short, the letter to the Moravians had to do mostly with the doctrine of entire sanctification, a fact hitherto overlooked. He went on in the letter to complain that London Moravians thought salvation implied “liberty from the commandments of God, so that one who is saved through faith is not obliged or bound to obey them”—a direct contradiction of Wesley’s preaching about Christian holiness from the Sermon on the Mount. Moreover, he wrote, “some in England,” particularly Philip Henry Molthier, then the Moravian leader in London, insisted that “there are no degrees in faith” and that “there is no justifying faith without the plerephory [fullness] of faith, the clear, abiding witness of the Spirit,” nor none “where there is not, in the full, proper sense, a new heart.”[19]

Modern Moravian scholars have been no more eager than modern Methodists to emphasize the doctrine of heart purity. But in fact that is what their forbears taught true faith would bring.[20] And they insisted that none has any faith at all until he or she could give testimony to the faith which hallows the heart. But they did so in such a manner as to “damp the zeal of babes in Christ,” Wesley concluded, “talking much of false zeal,” and forbidding them to testify to salvation or to share the sacrament of holy communion.[21]

Encountering this Moravian doctrine, Wesley did not consider abandoning his confidence that regenerating faith, even such as was displayed by “babes in Christ,” was indeed the true and saving Christian faith. Nor did Whitefield.[22] But Wesley was intent on declaring “that holiness without which no man shall see the Lord.” And he was not satisfied with less than the fullness of joy which Jesus had promised to His disciples.

Attention to Wesley’s friends and to the chronology of events helps us, finally to realize how much Wesley was moved by his rethinking of the opening sentences of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He had first preached a series on them in Bristol in April, 1739, and again the following July. The manuscripts of those sermons, if he wrote them out, were likely edited and then destroyed (as almost all Wesley’s published manuscripts were) after he printed in 1746 and 1748 thirteen discourses on Christ’s sermon. But whether or not he prepared the discourses in manuscript form in 1739 or 1740, it is certain that the ideas they display in the later printed version permeated the consciousness of Wesleyans in the years 1739 and 1740.[23]

We may safely conclude, then, that the doctrine of perfect love emerged both from scriptural study and from the certainty Wesley felt about the genuineness of the faith of his converts.[24] Holiness of heart seemed to him, as it has ever since to his followers, what every person who is truly saved by faith will long for. He was convinced that this “great salvation from sin” would be sent down, as “at the day of Pentecost” unto “all generations, into the hearts of all true believers” and that the promise was “to all them that are afar off, even as many as the Lord shall call.”[25] Wesley also believed that real Christians would grow in holiness both before they received the blessing of sanctifying faith and afterwards, not by works of righteousness but by the grace of God. This the Holy Spirit brought to them both by the inspiration of His presence and by the “means of grace”—prayer, thanksgiving, obedience, self-denial, studying the Scriptures, and faithful attendance on preaching and upon the sacrament of holy communion.[26]

Putting events into chronological perspective and paying attention to his evangelical friends also helps us understand better Wesley’s public and private testimony on behalf of Christian holiness. For nearly six years from the time he felt satisfied that doctrine was scriptural he proclaimed it broadly, in public as well as in society meetings. He published a clear summary of it in the spring of 1740 in the preface mentioned above. Whitefield’s private and public correspondence indicated the attention evangelicals in America as well as Great Britain paid to his new teaching.[27] Though he delayed the printing of his sermon on Christian perfection until September, 1741 (recalling later that he had waited for the Bishop of London to encourage him to do so), he and his brother Charles issued a third volume of hymns in 1742 which, like that of 1740, spelled out fully the Biblical promises of a second and purifying blessing.[28] All this was confirmed in the tract Character of a Methodist (published, apparently, in 1742, not, as Wesley remembered in the Plain Account, three years earlier), in Charles Wesley’s great Oxford sermon of April 4, 1742, the most popular publication ever issued by the Wesleys[29], and in John’s summary defense of Methodist teaching in An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, first printed in 1744.

But the effect of Whitefield’s widening attack cut severely into Wesley’s community. The young evangelist followed up the famous Christmas letter of 1740 by preaching and publishing nine sermons opposed to Arminianism and perfectionism after he arrived in England in March, 1741. A few months earlier he had endorsed a weekly newspaper, The Christian’s Amusement, renamed The Weekly History in 1741, that combined world-wide revival news with letters and sermons from Whitefield and other persons that promoted Calvinistic and anti-perfectionist ideas. Meanwhile, his Journals continued to be published in short segments that appeared only a few months after the date of their closing entries.[30] Wesley realized that Whitefield was far more in control of public evangelical opinion than he, and that such controversy weakened the revival everywhere. He feared it would alienate him from Howell Harris, the leader of what became the Calvinistic Methodist movement in Wales . In the early part of 1740, however, Harris was preoccupied with the public controversy his own itinerant revivalism stirred up, and with a tender courtship.[31]

Those who had long opposed Wesley and Whitefield as “enthusiasts” for teaching the actual presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Christian believers rushed to publicize the disagreements between the two evangelists and seized upon Wesley’s new doctrine of heart purity as proof of their charge.[32] The extent of the pressure is evident from the fact that some of Wesley’s closest follower’s drew back. James Hutton (once Wesley’s right-hand man), Charles Kinchin, and John Gambold chose the Moravian version of perfectionism, which avoided the public scandal of a second blessing. For the rest of John Wesley’s life, therefore, he periodically felt compelled to refute the claim that true saving faith brought with it entire sanctification, and that there was only one great moment of grace.[33]

Apparently in 1745 Wesley decided that preaching Christian perfection to persons not yet converted was neither scriptural nor practical. He began to rely instead upon bands and “select societies,” to which he assigned persons who were clearly in the experience of regeneration and clearly seekers or finders of full salvation. If the minutes of the first conference of 1745 actually reflect his practice, for the next dozen years he confined his own preaching of the details of the second experience to those who had found the first[34]

The printed versions of John Wesley’s sermons preached between 1740 and 1745 and published in 1746 and 1748 were, therefore, primarily concerned with the new birth. The exceptions are three that he published immediately after their delivery, in 1741, 1742, and 1744: Christian Perfection, Charles Wesley’s Oxford sermon, Awake Thou That Sleepest, and John’s last Oxford sermon, entitled Scriptural Christianity. The last one appeared in fifteen editions during Wesley’s lifetime; but it was not explicit enough on the meaning of its text (Acts 4:31, “They were all filled with the Holy Ghost”) to satisfy later British and American advocates of that experience.[35] Even the poems on the work of the Holy Spirit, based on John 7:37–38 and chapters 14 through 17, published in 1745 in the two brothers’ Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father, were sufficiently devoted to the entire scheme of salvation as to raise few hackles; theologians, then as now, did not take hymns very seriously. The Wesleys did.[36] But in those early sermons on regeneration, Wesley repeatedly signaled his followers that he was entirely committed to the doctrine of entire sanctification. And he plainly told those seeking salvation by faith that much more grace lay ahead for them.[37] This strategy, however, accounts for what seems to modern holiness people the nagging lack of specifics about the second blessing in John Wesley’s first two volumes of sermons, published in 1746 and 1748, as well as in such early tracts as A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion and his famous letter to Dr. Littleton, the last part of which he issued in 1751 and several times later under the title A Plain Account of Genuine Christianity.[38]

In pursuing this strategy, however, the Wesleys and their preachers developed great skill in inserting the doctrine of Christian holiness into every treatise, without defining it in great detail. When we understand and believe what the evidence tells us about the maturing of his convictions on the subject in 1739 and 1740, Wesley’s seemingly innocuous phrases that couple justification with heart purity in many different ways appear in their true light.[39] Wesley became increasingly confident that to declare that the God of love had given His children the two “great commandments” was to assure them that they might also receive by faith, through the Holy Spirit, that holiness of heart which was required to obey them. Moreover, he believed that if regenerate Christians everywhere were convinced that the Sermon on the Mount was the New Testament’s version of the law, they would hunger and thirst after that righteousness and purity of heart which enabled them to see God. He preached early and late that by faith we establish the law; and the members of his societies, who understood “the whole Wesley,” knew that faith to be the condition of both the hallowing experiences that Wesley taught.[40]

Wesley was equally concerned to uphold the theological tradition of the Anglican divines of the previous century as well as that of the early church fathers. He had staked the public understanding of his doctrine that the Holy Spirit accomplishes our regeneration upon the homilies Archbishop Cranmer had long before composed for The Book of Common Prayer, and on Bishop John Pearson’s seventeenth century volume on The Creed. These had expounded the Church of England’s idea that salvation came by faith and that faith was the work of the Holy Spirit. The doctrine of cleansing from the remains of inbred sin, however, added decisively to the Anglican creed and brought to the forefront an obscure theological tradition.[41] Here Whitefield had an advantage; for a gradual sanctification, never quite fully achieved in this life, could be harmonized with both Anglican and Puritan doctrine.

In his published writings, therefore, Wesley for many years emphasized progressive sanctification more than the moment of the Holy Spirit’s cleansing, though he never failed to use language which enabled his followers to understand that he was contending for both the gradual and the instantaneous work of God’s Spirit. In more private documents, however, as for example in the unpublished conference minutes of 1744 and 1747, in his correspondence not intended for publication, and in essays and correspondence circulated privately, he carefully explained the second moment of grace.[42] Scholars have been inattentive to this distinction. Some have concluded, with the great majority of Methodist theologians writing in the twentieth century, that Wesley taught only progressive, not instantaneous, sanctification.[43] They have been able to do that, however, only by neglecting Wesley’s Oxford Sermons and many of those he published after 1760, and by ignoring the central teaching of his Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion and his later Thoughts on Christian Perfection, abstracted in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

Which brings us to another recently vexed question, that of whether Wesley believed that the first Christians were sanctified wholly at Pentecost, and whether he thought the use of the terms “baptized” or “filled” with the Holy Spirit, as distinct from “gift of the Holy Spirit,” were a proper scriptural description of that experience. I must warn you at the outset that in my judgment the historical facts do not shed much light on recent arguments about this subject. The latter deal with whether the Methodist founder thought the apostles were born of the Spirit before Pentecost, which a few of Wesley’s conflicting statements have allowed some of his modern followers to doubt.[44] And they raise questions about his views of both the secondness and the instantaneous aspect of perfection in love, matters on which Wesley appears not to have expressed any uncertainty after the fall of 1739.

Wesley’s concerns, rather, stemmed from: (1) the necessity of his rethinking the relation of Pentecost to heart purity in the light of his realization that the blessings flowing from salvation by faith involved two moments of hallowing grace; (2) his determination after 1739 not to diminish in any way the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit begun in regeneration, which in the early months of the great revival of that year he had sometimes described as the baptism or filling with the Spirit; (3) his desire (especially strong after George Whitefield’s return from America in February, 1741 to challenge Wesley’s opposition to predestination and his teaching that believers may be cleansed from all sin) not to widen the public perception of a rift between him and other evangelical leaders; (4) his pastoral concern to make sure that his converts distinguished sharply the “extraordinary” gifts of the Spirit from the sanctifying fullness imparted to the 120 converts at Pentecost and promised to all believers there; and (5) his concern to keep righteousness pre-eminent, and so lift up to all believers the ethical meaning of full salvation.

Obviously, Wesley’s perception in the fall of 1739 that Scripture taught a second moment of sanctifying grace required him to rethink the promises of Pentecost. The result was clear in his and his brother’s Hymns . . . for the Promise of the Father and in his Oxford sermon of 1744, Scriptural Christianity. The latter made being filled with the Holy Spirit both a promise to all believers and a second experience. To underline these two points, he chose the text from Acts 4:31 , rather than Acts 2:4 .[45] This rethinking took place very early, however, as is evident from his brief explanation of the text about Pentecost in John 7:37–38 in his sermon Christian Perfection, in his use at the end of that sermon of the long poem (on “Ezekiel 36:25, etc.”) entitled “The Promise of Sanctification,” and in the questions he asked in his famous interview with Count Nicholas von Zinzendorf. He published the sermon the same month that the interview occurred, in September, 1741.[46] The latter, near its close, ran as follows:

W[esley]: The apostles were justified before Christ’s death, weren’t they?

Z[inzendorf]: They were.

W. They were also more holy after the day of Pentecost than before Christ’s death, weren’t they?

Z. Not at all.

W. But, on that day, they were “filled with the Holy Spirit,” weren’t they?

Z. They were. But that particular gift of the Spirit had nothing to do with their holiness. It was merely the gift of miracles.

W. Perhaps I don’t grasp your thought. Through self-denial, we die to the world more and more and so live to God more and more, don’t we?

Z. We reject all “denials”; we despise them. As believers we do as we please and nothing else. We heap scorn on all “mortifications.” No “purification” is prerequisite to love’s perfection.[47]

It is also evident in his use after 1739 of two pre-pentecostal testimonies to what Wesley said was the witness of the Spirit to saving faith—those of the Virgin Mary and of the Apostle Thomas.[48]

Wesley’s use of Pentecostal language came to a climax in his Farther Appeal, published in 1745. There he set forth at length the teaching of the Scriptures, the Church of England, and the post-apostolic fathers on the work of the Holy Spirit in bringing to believers both the assurance of salvation and the experience of sanctification.[49] In response to published criticism of his earlier statements about the baptism or fullness of the Spirit, he emphasized that

Christians now “receive,” yea, are “filled with the Holy Ghost,” in order to be filled with the fruits of that blessed Spirit. And he inspires into all true believers now, a degree of the same peace and joy and love which the apostles felt in themselves on that day when they were first “filled with the Holy Ghost.”

Moreover, Wesley said, that experience was the fulfillment of the promise of John the Baptist, “He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost.”[50]

In the second part of the Farther Appeal, published a few months later, Wesley declared that all Quakers should “not repent alone (for then you know only the baptism of John) but believe, and be ‘baptized with the Holy Ghost and with fire.’” He urged them to cry out for that baptism “till the love of God inflame your heart, and consume all your vile affections! Be not content with anything less than this.” He also urged Roman Catholics to heed Thomas a Kempis’s rules for holy living and their own Marquis de Renty’s admonitions that they be “zealous of every good word and work,” be “filled with the Holy Ghost and delivered from all unholy tempers,” and so be “unblameable and unrebukable, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing.”[51]

Wesley stressed during the same period, however, the work and gift of the hallowing Spirit, as distinct from His fullness, in the experience of regeneration. His most persuasive passages on this subject appeared in the same Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion. But of equal doctrinal significance are the sermons on regeneration that he preached between 1739 and 1745 and edited for publication in the early summer of the latter year. These sermons as well as his letters and the volumes of his Journal composed in those years constantly allude to the love of God being “shed abroad” in the hearts of persons born again, and to the process of sanctification that accompanied their quest for the experience of perfect love.[52]

By this means, of course, Wesley participated fully in the sometimes fierce debate that all evangelicals carried on with those who accused them of “enthusiasm” because they taught that the Holy Spirit was still visiting humanity in modern times, bringing sinners to repentance and salvation through faith in Christ’s atonement. Their opponents challenged the integrity of the entire awakening, whether Calvinist, Pietist, Wesleyan, or Quaker, and whether in Scotland or England , America or Britain. Wesley’s leadership in this debate convinced most evangelicals that he was still ready to defend powerfully the truth they held in common.

His activity was a part of a larger effort to keep out of public view as much as he could the grievous rift between him and other evangelicals, especially that between him and Whitefield. The latter had not only become wedded to Calvinism but continued to use Pentecostal imagery to describe the new birth. In a reprinting of 1745, Whitefield changed the title of his oft published sermon, The Marks of the New Birth, to “Marks of Having Received the Baptism of the Holy Ghost.”[53] Wesley labored to keep their disagreement as private as possible, and to keep its grounds as narrow as he could. He managed, in fact, to retain the friendship and admiration of Howell Harris throughout the critical years 1740–1743, even though Harris had always been a Calvinist and believed no more than Whitefield that God had promised to cleanse believers’ hearts from all sin. But, like Wesley, Harris took seriously the biblical promises of growth in holiness; and he stressed as Wesley did, entire freedom from the dominion of inward sin, while Whitefield wavered on the point.[54] To speak of entire sanctification in Pentecostal terms, as Wesley had done in the early years but managed largely to avoid during the decade before he began using them again in his Notes Upon the New Testament, was to raise evangelical opposition that he wished to avoid.

Linked to all three of these concerns was a fourth: Wesley’s desire to help his converts distinguish clearly between the “extraordinary” gifts of the Spirit associated with Pentecost—languages, miracles, healing, discernment—and His “ordinary” fruit, that is, the universally promised one of His sanctifying graces.[55] This was no small task, for a popular tradition in both Catholic and Protestant theology had confused the ordinary with the extraordinary gifts and insisted that those extraordinary gifts (and hence all His gifts) had passed away with the apostolic generation. In the Age of Reason the opponents of “enthusiasm,” as they called it, felt compelled to cling to this tradition.[56] By the 1730’s only real enthusiasts testified to Pentecostal experiences. They included the French prophets scattered among England ’s Huguenot exiles, who caused Whitefield and Wesley great difficulties between 1739 and 1742, partly because Wesley refused offhand to judge their claims invalid.[57] He did not rule out God’s occasional gifts of healing, miracles, and previously unknown human languages (the evidence is very skimpy on glossalalia, or “heavenly” languages). But he believed that preoccupation with these “extraordinary” gifts drew believers’ attention away from the quest of holiness.[58]

So Wesley almost eliminated his use of the dramatic phrase “baptism with the Holy Ghost,” preferring instead the one the Apostles are recorded as having used after Pentecost, that is, “filled” with the Spirit.[59] And even for this one he preferred such synonymous phrases as “filled with love,” or “filled with all the fullness of God.”[60] These focused the hearer’s attention upon what Wesley thought most important, and most endangered: the ethical meaning of the righteousness which must exceed that of scribes and Pharisees, of the perfection in love that flows from the faith that God’s love, or faithfulness, inspires.

Of course, for trinitarian Christians to suggest that the Holy Spirit is not the One who first communicates divine love to believers and who thereafter presides over its progress and perfection in hallowing their hearts was and is, to say the least, a theological oddity.[61] Hence Wesley always taught both regeneration and entire sanctification in a Pentecostal frame of reference. But in doing so he had to cope with popular misconceptions of it and with the spread of antinomianism among his evangelical associates. The latter raised to white heat the ethical issue by arguing, variously, that God had not promised actually to make us pure in heart, fully to restore corrupt nature in the divine image, completely to destroy the works of the devil, or to grant us a perfect faith that works in perfected love.

Using these and other similar terms, moreover, contributed directly to his overall objective—to preach righteousness, to help believers, and himself and his brother Charles, keep foremost that “holiness without which no man shall see God.” He understood such holiness to reflect the character he ascribed to the Lord of both the Old and the New Testaments—a God of ethical love, expressed in faithfulness to lost humanity and especially to the poor and oppressed. When that love triumphed over all its enemies in our fallen natures, the result he usually called purity of heart, salvation from sin, Christian perfection, or full restoration to the image of God. His teaching of such a second blessing, his preaching of what was in fact Pentecostal holiness, was indeed the apogee of John Wesley’s theology of love.[62]

In the year 1757, several circumstances swept away most of Wesley’s reticence about public preaching and testimony. Professor Albert Outler once suggested that opposition to sanctification in the conference of 1758, and more widely in the societies, was one of these circumstances. But the manuscript minutes of the conference of 1758, which are preserved in the Methodist Archives and Research Center at the University of Manchester, give no evidence at all of any strain over the subject. The doctrinal questions and answers on sanctification were routine summaries of what had been the emphasis of Wesley’s teaching to the societies during the previous eighteen years. The passages upon how much the “perfect” need the merits of Christ and upon their proneness to mistakes and errors (which were not morally acts of sin but were nevertheless transgressions of the perfect law of Christ) were precisely what Wesley had customarily said.[63]

Rather, Wesley was swept along by the much larger number of his followers who now professed full salvation, thanks in part to his own energetic preaching during the preceding year. Among them was the self trained scholar and powerful Irish preacher, Thomas Walsh. Walsh died in 1757; much of his diary, chronicling his successful pursuit of the second blessing, was published in 1763.[64] Another factor was the spiritual lapse of other trusted followers, which persuaded Wesley that though living in the experience of perfect love was the way to final perseverance it was no guarantee of it. The sanctified believer’s willingness to be faithful to God must be continually renewed. Wesley’s sermons and counsels to band meetings produced hundreds of new testimonies to entire sanctification whose authenticity he could not doubt. Moreover, they came from both old and young believers. Those who professed holiness of heart became so numerous that near the end of the year 1762 he wrote in his Journal,

Many years ago my brother frequently said, “Your day of Pentecost is not fully come; but I doubt not it will: and you will then hear of persons sanctified, as frequently as you do now of persons justified.” Any unprejudiced reader may observe that it was now fully come.[65]

Reticence abandoned, Wesley included in his fourth volume of Sermons on Several Subjects, published in 1760, several which refined his earlier views on the stages of salvation, such as “The Wilderness Experience” and “Wandering Thoughts.” And he included also his wonderful “Thoughts on Christian Perfection,” digested later near the end of his Plain Account, containing a summary of questions raised and answers given at the two or three preceding Methodist conferences. In the “Thoughts” were many warm and scriptural statements about God’s promise to perfect believers’ hearts by filling them with pure love or, as Wesley occasionally said, by filling them with the Holy Ghost.[66]

In the following decade, Wesley published individually several fine holiness sermons on texts which he had often expounded during the years 1758–1761. Among them were Scripture Way of Salvation (a second blessing update of the famous Aldersgate sermon which he had preached from the same text twenty-seven years before), Sin in Believers, and The Repentance of Believers. And he extended an olive branch to George Whitefield in a sermon published in 1765 on The Lord Our Righteousness, using both the subject and the text that Whitefield had long before employed to affirm his devotion to both imputed and imparted holiness.

Finally, Wesley issued his Plain Account of Christian Perfection in 1765, gathering together materials both recent and well-nigh forgotten that he had published during the preceding twenty-five years. He wrote it to counter the charge that the emphasis upon an instantaneous experience of perfect love was a new departure for him. He declared instead what I have concluded was factually correct: that he and his brother had taught this doctrine consistently since the publication of the preface to the hymnbook of 1740. For modern scholars to lift out a passage or two from that Plain Account which speak of progressive sanctification, and to combine them with Wesley’s example comparing the gradual sanctification which precedes the experience of full salvation to a patient who is dying for a long time before he or she experiences the moment of actual death, is a strange use of the document.[67] And it is to hand over to George Whitefield and his Calvinistic allies the very argument by which Wesley established his difference from them. This is indeed a libel on the dead. And the historian’s task, I think, whether he or she is dealing with religious ideas or political events, is to protect the dead from libel.

But the task of all true Wesleyans, I think, is more important—to promote that purity of heart and perfect love which flows from “the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.” In the face of the present questions I think Wesley would ask ones like this: If we truly love God, ought we not to love Him with all our hearts, and other persons as ourselves? Is not such love what Moses, Jesus, and Paul said were the two commandments that underlay all the rest? And are not God’s commands implied promises that we will be enabled to keep them? God’s promise to cleanse you “from all your filthiness and all your idols,” to put His Spirit within you and cause you to keep His commandments, is, Wesley would say, one of a chain of Biblical promises that call us to perfect love.