Reading different theological perspectives. Historical readings express their authors' perspectives, including Arminian and Reformed or Calvinist traditions. Inclusion does not make an author's position settled CTS doctrine. Read with Scripture and the assigned material. A supported answer from another evangelical perspective should be assessed on its reasoning, not penalized simply for differing from the author. If an automated score rejects such an answer, ask CTS for review.

Master’s Assigned Readings (all five)

M.Div. and Th.M. students read all five assigned selections and take their separate exam after activation. The test page states the current rule; valid earlier completions remain valid.

Optional Honors (choose three)

Honors is optional on every track. Certificate and Associate students may read three honors selections without a required-reading exam. Honors does not replace either master’s exam.

The Master's textbook test: read A Plain Account of Christian Perfection — John Wesley, then take its test: twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once. Correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. It is separate from the reading test on the five digests below: passing one does not pass the other. On the M.Div. and Th.M. tracks both tests are being introduced; each test's page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take them, and a pass is kept in your record.

The Master's reading test: separate from the honors invitation below. Honors asks you to read any three of these digests; the Master's test covers all five. It has twenty fill-in-the-blank questions, four from each reading, drawn from forty; eighteen right passes. Each answer is marked right or wrong at once; correct answers and explanations are available after the attempt passes. You may try again after a short wait. The test is being introduced: its page says whether it is in force yet. Until then any student may take it, and a pass is kept in your record.

Honors option: Complete any three of the five readings below. These readings supplement the course and do not replace its units or examinations.

On this site: Each of the five readings is a Chapala Theological Seminary digest, written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French here on the site — every one opens directly from this page, with nothing to download. Each card names the work its digest is made from.

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Reading 1 · How the Doctrine Took Shape

One Design, One Desire

A CTS digest of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), §§1–6; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11

Wesley traces the road that led him to Christian perfection: Jeremy Taylor’s “purity of intention” in 1725, à Kempis and the religion of the heart, William Law’s refusal to allow “half a Christian,” the Bible as his one standard, and his 1733 sermon on the circumcision of the heart, where perfection already meant love filling the whole heart.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

One Design, One Desire: How Wesley Came to the Doctrine of Perfection

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the opening sections of the Plain Account, where Wesley traces his path from 1725 to 1733 through three devotional writers, the Bible, and his first published sermon

A CTS digest of sections 1–6 of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), as printed in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Plain Account §§1–6
Primary source
1725–1733
John Wesley

A word before you read. John Wesley (1703–1791) wrote the Plain Account to answer one question: what had he really taught about Christian perfection, and why? In these first sections he tells the story of how the idea took hold of him as a young Oxford scholar. One warning before you begin. In Wesley, “perfection” never means being free of every mistake or weakness. It means a heart wholly given to God in love. Keep in mind, too, that this is Wesley’s own account of his past, written decades later. It is his testimony and his interpretation of his journey.

1.An Old Man Explains Himself

The Plain Account first appeared in 1766, and Wesley revised it for the last time in 1777, when he was seventy-four. By then the Methodist movement had spread across Britain and Ireland and into the American colonies. It was organized in “societies,” which met in small weekly “classes” for prayer, confession and mutual care, and it was served by travelling lay preachers who met with Wesley each year in Conference. For more than twenty years the doctrine of Christian perfection had been the most attacked part of Methodist teaching. Some critics said it was proud; some said it was impossible; some within Methodism had pushed it into wild extremes. So Wesley set out to give “a plain and distinct account” of what he had believed, step by step, showing “both what I thought, and why I thought so.” He writes, he says, for “the serious part of mankind,” those who want to know the truth as it is in Jesus. The tone is that of a pastor explaining himself to friends, not of a scholar writing for the learned. The method is historical: Wesley wants to show that the doctrine was not a late invention but the steady aim of his whole life.

2.1725: Jeremy Taylor and Purity of Intention

The story begins in 1725, when Wesley was a young fellow of Oxford preparing for ordination in the Church of England. He read Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Dying, a much-loved seventeenth-century Anglican guide to the devout life. What struck him most was Taylor’s teaching on “purity of intention”: doing everything for the single aim of pleasing God. Wesley was “exceedingly affected,” and he resolved on the spot to dedicate all his life to God, “all my thoughts, and words, and actions.” He saw that there was “no medium.” In older English a medium is a middle ground. Every part of life, he concluded, must be a sacrifice either to God or to oneself, and to live for self is in the end to serve the devil. Then he turns to the reader with a question: can any serious person find a middle way between serving God and serving the devil? Notice where Wesley’s doctrine begins. Not with a dramatic experience, and not with a theory about sin, but with a simple, searching demand: God wants the whole of life, not a religious corner of it.

3.1726: Thomas à Kempis and the Religion of the Heart

A year later Wesley read Thomas à Kempis, the fifteenth-century author of The Imitation of Christ, which English readers then knew as The Christian’s Pattern. Wesley later published his own edition of it. From à Kempis he learned that giving all his outward life to God was still not enough unless he gave his heart, “yea, all my heart,” to Him. This is what Wesley calls “inward religion, the religion of the heart.” He borrows a lovely phrase: “simplicity of intention, and purity of affection” are “the wings of the soul,” without which it can never rise to the mount of God. Here he adds a word he will use throughout the book. When Wesley speaks of “tempers,” he does not mean bad moods. A temper is a settled disposition of the heart, such as love, humility, pride or envy. He hopes for one desire “ruling all our tempers.” This step matters because it moves holiness from behaviour to motive. A person can do many good things for mixed reasons. Wesley was learning that God looks for a heart that wants one thing above all.

4.William Law: No Such Thing as Half a Christian

“A year or two after,” Wesley read two books by William Law (1686–1761): Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1729). Law was a High Church writer of great moral seriousness, and his Serious Call shaped generations of English Christians. These books convinced Wesley of “the absolute impossibility of being half a Christian.” He determined to be “all-devoted to God,” giving Him “all my soul, my body, and my substance.” Substance here means possessions and money. Holiness touches the wallet as well as the soul, and the later Methodist rules about earning, saving and giving all one can grow from this root. Notice also a small but important phrase. Wesley made his resolution “through his grace,” of which, he says, he felt the “absolute necessity.” Even at this early stage he did not imagine he could make himself holy. Some years later Wesley would part ways with Law, criticizing his mystical leanings and what Wesley saw as a lack of clear teaching on faith in Christ. Yet he never stopped honouring the challenge Law put to him.

5.1729: A Man of One Book

In 1729 Wesley began “not only to read, but to study, the Bible,” as “the one, the only standard of truth.” That same year he joined his brother Charles in a small Oxford group that met for prayer, Bible study, frequent Communion and visits to prisoners. Fellow students mocked them as the “Holy Club” and the “Methodists,” because they lived by method. From Scripture Wesley saw the need of having “the mind which was in Christ” (Philippians 2:5) and of “walking as Christ also walked” (1 John 2:6), not in some respects but in all. Religion, he concluded, is a “uniform following of Christ.” He adds a wise caution: he feared nothing more than “bending this rule” to fit his own experience or other people’s. That is a principle every Wesleyan pastor should keep. We do not lower Scripture to match what we have seen; we let Scripture set the standard. One more piece of context is needed here. All of this came before Aldersgate. On 24 May 1738, after a failed mission to Georgia and long talks with Moravian believers, Wesley felt his heart “strangely warmed” while hearing Luther’s preface to Romans read in a London meeting. Only then did he gain a settled trust in Christ alone for salvation. Wesley insists that his goal did not change, but after 1738 he understood far better that holiness, like pardon, is received by faith.

6.1733: “The Circumcision of the Heart”

On 1 January 1733 Wesley preached before the University in St Mary’s Church, Oxford. In the church calendar that day is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, and Wesley took up Paul’s image of a circumcision “of the heart” (Romans 2:29; compare Deuteronomy 30:6). He defined it as “that habitual disposition of soul” which Scripture calls holiness: being cleansed from sin and renewed in the image of Christ. At the centre of the sermon stands love. Love is “the fulfilling of the law,” and all the commandments are summed up in it. “In this is perfection,” Wesley says. God Himself is to be our “one ultimate end.” We may enjoy other things, but we should “love the creature, as it leads to the Creator.” The sermon closes with a call to offer God “the living sacrifice of the heart” and to let Him reign “without a rival.” This was Wesley’s first published sermon, and he states that it is still his view in 1777, “without any material addition or diminution.” Then he challenges his critics: what in this can any believer in the Bible deny without contradicting Scripture? From the very start, then, Wesley defined perfection not as flawlessness but as love: love for God that fills the whole heart and orders every other love.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

These pages lay the foundation for everything that follows. Later heirs of Wesley, from the American camp meetings to the Church of the Nazarene (formed in 1908) and the Wesleyan and Free Methodist churches, would argue about how and when entire sanctification is received. But all of them claim this starting point: holiness is wholehearted love for God and neighbour. To this day many Methodist bodies ask candidates for ordination whether they are “going on to perfection.” A pastor in Jalisco or anywhere else can take several lessons from these sections. First, holiness begins with intention: the question is not only what we do, but for whom we do it. Second, the heart matters more than appearances. Third, Scripture is the measure, not our experience. Fourth, good books can change a life; Wesley’s journey ran through the devotional classics of the wider church, Anglican and Catholic alike. It is fair to note where others disagree. Reformed and Lutheran Christians usually teach that sin remains in every believer until death, and they fear that talk of perfection can lead to pride or despair. Wesley’s reply begins already here: he is not claiming flawless performance, but a heart ruled by love.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Wesley found “no medium” between living for God and living for self. Where in your own life are you tempted to keep a “middle ground”? Which books or teachers have shaped your desire for God, and whom could you guide toward such reading? And when you think of holiness, do you think first of rules kept, or of a heart filled with love for God and neighbour?

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Reading 2 · The First Tract and Its Critics

The Character of a Methodist

A CTS digest of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), §§10–12; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11

Wesley’s first portrait of a mature Christian, happy in God, praying without ceasing and loving even enemies; the surprising cry from devout believers that “there is no perfection on earth”; Bishop Gibson’s advice to “publish it to all the world”; and the 1741 sermon explaining in what sense Christians are, and are not, perfect.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

The Character of a Methodist: Wesley’s First Portrait of Perfect Love

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Wesley’s first tract on the subject, the surprising opposition it met, and the sermon that set out in what sense Christians are, and are not, perfect

A CTS digest of sections 10–12 of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), as printed in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Plain Account §§10–12
Primary source
1739–1741
“Christian Perfection” sermon

A word before you read. In these sections Wesley quotes two of his own early writings: a tract called The Character of a Methodist and his sermon “Christian Perfection.” The first is a portrait of a mature Christian; the second is an argument from Scripture. Between them comes an episode that surprised Wesley: some of the sharpest opposition came from devout believers. Read slowly, and watch for the careful distinctions Wesley draws. He is not describing someone who never errs, but someone whose heart is ruled by love.

1.A Tract with a Neutral Title

By the time of this tract the Wesley brothers had been through their Aldersgate experiences of 1738, and the Methodist revival had begun in earnest. John had started open-air preaching near Bristol in 1739, and the first Methodist societies were forming. Wesley tells us that his first writing “expressly on this subject” was given an “indifferent title,” The Character of a Methodist, so that no one would be prejudiced before reading it. In older English “indifferent” means neutral. He wanted readers to meet the description before they met the controversial word “perfection.” And at the very front he placed Paul’s words, “Not as though I had already attained” (Philippians 3:12). That choice is worth noticing. Wesley was not holding himself up as the example. He was describing the goal toward which every believer presses. Wesley’s own reckoning in 1777 places the tract about thirty-eight years earlier; the printed editions that survive are usually dated a little later, from 1742. Either way, it belongs to the first years of the revival.

2.Happy in God, Praying Without Ceasing

The portrait opens with the Great Commandment. A Methodist, Wesley writes, is one who loves the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. God is “the joy of his heart.” Because of this he is “happy in God,” and since perfect love has cast out fear (1 John 4:18), he rejoices evermore. This joy is not dependent on circumstances. In ease or pain, in sickness or health, in life or death, he gives thanks, trusting God as “a faithful Creator.” He is “careful for nothing”: in the King James English that Wesley quotes, careful means anxious. Next, he prays without ceasing. This does not mean he is always on his knees. Wesley says his heart is lifted up to God “at all times, and in all places,” in company or alone, at work or at leisure. He walks with God continually. Notice the three marks here, joy, prayer and thanksgiving, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:16–18. Wesley will return to this same text again and again in later years as the sign of perfect love. Holiness, in this picture, is not gloomy strictness. It is a life made glad by the constant presence of God.

3.A Pure Heart and a Single Eye

Love for God overflows into love for neighbour. The Methodist “loves every man as his own soul,” including his enemies and the enemies of God; if he cannot do them good, he prays for them. He is “pure in heart”: love “has purified his heart from envy, malice, wrath, and every unkind temper.” He has put on what the King James Bible calls “bowels of mercies” (Colossians 3:12), an old phrase for deep, heartfelt compassion. He has “a single eye,” one intention in all he does, which is to please God. And “the tree is known by its fruits.” He keeps all of God’s commandments, “from the least to the greatest,” and his obedience is “in proportion to his love.” This holiness reaches into ordinary life. Whether he eats or drinks, dresses or works, or even rests from “too wasting labour,” he does it all to the glory of God. He cannot lay up treasures on earth, speak evil of a neighbour, or utter an unkind word, for “love keeps the door of his lips.” After quoting this portrait, Wesley adds that from about 1730 he had been homo unius libri, “a man of one book,” the Bible, and that he still taught exactly the same doctrine, adding nothing to it.

4.Opposition from an Unexpected Quarter

At first, Wesley says, no writer objected to the tract. Then “a cry arose,” and to his surprise it came from “religious men.” They did not say that he had described perfection wrongly. They said “there is no perfection on earth,” and they attacked the brothers for saying otherwise. Wesley was hurt, he admits, because he and Charles were “clear on justification by faith” and careful to ascribe the whole of salvation “to the mere grace of God.” Most surprising of all, they were accused of dishonouring Christ by teaching that He “saveth to the uttermost” (Hebrews 7:25). Who were these critics? Wesley does not name them, but the years around 1740 and 1741 saw two painful divisions in the revival. One was with some of the Moravians, who taught that believers should be “still” and wait, and whose leader, Count Zinzendorf, held that all our holiness is in Christ and none is in us. The other was with Calvinist evangelicals, including Wesley’s friend George Whitefield, who disagreed with him about predestination and about perfection. To them, claiming present holiness in the believer seemed to take glory away from the finished work of Christ. To Wesley, denying it seemed to limit what that finished work could do.

5.A Bishop Says, “Publish It to All the World”

Late in 1740, Wesley recalls, he spoke with Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, at Whitehall. The Bishop asked him plainly what he meant by perfection, and Wesley told him “without any disguise or reserve.” Gibson replied: “If this be all you mean, publish it to all the world.” So Wesley wrote the sermon “Christian Perfection” on Philippians 3:12, published in 1741. It has two parts: in what sense Christians are not perfect, and in what sense they are. The first part is essential for understanding the whole doctrine. Christians are not perfect in knowledge. They are not free from ignorance or from mistake, for no one is “infallible” any more than “omniscient.” They are not free from infirmities: slowness of understanding, an overactive or dull imagination, “impropriety of language, ungracefulness of pronunciation,” and “a thousand nameless defects.” They are not free from temptation, for “the servant is not above his master.” And there is no “perfection of degrees,” no state that does not allow continual growth. A Wesleyan who forgets this list will make the doctrine sound proud or absurd. A Wesleyan who remembers it can explain that Christian perfection is fully compatible with a weak, human, still-growing life.

6.In What Sense Christians Are Perfect

The second part makes two claims. First, even “babes in Christ” are “so far perfect as not to commit sin,” as 1 John 3:9 says. Here “sin” means outward, wilful sin; later Wesley will define it carefully as a voluntary transgression of a known law. He then answers the texts people raised against him. Proverbs 24:16 does not say a just man sins “seven times a day”; the words “a day” are not there, and the falling is into “temporal affliction,” not sin. Solomon’s “there is no man that sinneth not” describes life under the old covenant, but now “the Holy Ghost is now given.” If Peter and Paul once sinned, that proves no “necessity of sin” for all Christians. In James 3:2, “we offend all,” Wesley argues, refers by a figure of speech to the false teachers James is warning. And in 1 John 1:8–10, verse 9 promises both to “forgive” and to “cleanse”; to make the cleansing mean only pardon would make holiness a condition of justification. Second, “grown Christians” are freed from “evil thoughts and evil tempers.” With Paul they can say, “Christ liveth in me” (Galatians 2:20). They are purified from pride, self-will, and anger “in the common sense of the word.” They still feel a “displacency,” an old word for displeasure, at sin, but only compassion for the sinner. For, as John says, “as he is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17).

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

Notice the two stages in Wesley’s thinking. Every born-again believer has power over wilful sin; mature believers are also cleansed within. This pattern of new birth followed by a deeper cleansing became the backbone of the later holiness movement. Nineteenth-century preachers such as Phoebe Palmer, and churches like the Church of the Nazarene, would speak of entire sanctification as a “second work of grace.” For a pastor today, these sections offer a beautiful picture to preach, a life of joy, prayer, thanksgiving and practical love, and a careful list of what perfection does not mean. They also model courage joined with humility: Wesley put “Not as though I had already attained” at the front. Other Christians read these texts differently, and fairness requires saying so. Most Reformed, Lutheran and many Baptist interpreters take 1 John 1:8 to describe the ongoing presence of sin in every believer, and read “we offend all” in James 3:2 as including the apostle himself. Many see Romans 7 as the ordinary Christian struggle. Wesleyans need not dismiss these readings. But they can answer, with Wesley, that the New Testament promises a cleansing as real as forgiveness, and that grace is stronger than sin.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Read again the marks of the “character of a Methodist”: joy, unceasing prayer, thanksgiving, love for enemies, a single eye. Which of these is most alive in you, and which most needs God’s work? Why do you think Wesley placed “Not as though I had already attained” at the front of his tract? And how would you explain to a doubting friend the difference between infirmity and sin?

Select

Reading 3 · Hymns and Conferences

Sung and Settled

A CTS digest of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), §§16–18; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11

Charles Wesley’s hymns pray to enter “the Canaan of thy perfect love,” while the first Methodist Conferences of 1744–1747 define sanctification, insist it begins at justification, preach it by “drawing, rather than driving,” state their opponents’ views fairly, and gather the Scriptures. John then draws four conclusions: perfect love, by faith, in a moment, expected now.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Sung and Settled: Hymns and the Early Conferences on Perfection

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — how Charles Wesley’s hymns taught the doctrine to ordinary Methodists, and how the first Conferences of preachers defined it, tested it against Scripture, and sought common ground with those who disagreed

A CTS digest of sections 16–18 of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), as printed in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Plain Account §§16–18
Primary source
1742–1752
Charles Wesley

A word before you read. This reading moves between two kinds of text: verses from hymns, and the question-and-answer minutes of the first Methodist Conferences. Both were ways of teaching. The hymns put the doctrine on people’s lips; the Conferences put it in careful words for preachers. As you read, notice how often the hymns say “now,” and how carefully the Conferences say what they do and do not claim.

1.A Doctrine Set to Music

Methodists learned their theology by singing it. Charles Wesley (1707–1788), John’s younger brother, wrote thousands of hymns, and the brothers published them in a series of volumes called Hymns and Sacred Poems. The “volume” Wesley mentions here is the one of 1742, published when the dispute over perfection was at its height. The hymns on the subject were “too numerous to transcribe,” so he quotes parts of three. The first is a prayer to be “perfected in love,” resting on the promise, “The servant shall be as his Lord.” It asks Christ to redeem “from all iniquity” and warns that unless He purges “my every stain,” His suffering and my faith are vain. It closes with a plea for the present: “Me for thine own this moment take.” The second uses the image of Israel entering the promised land. The believer who is already justified asks the Spirit to “wash me clean” and to bring him into “the Canaan of thy perfect love.” The third rejoices that “Love is the bond of perfectness,” quoting Colossians 3:14, and cries, “I shall be holy here!” Notice what the hymns teach without any lecture: holiness is a gift we ask for, it is centred on love, and it is hoped for in this life, not only in heaven.

2.1744: The First Conference

On Monday 25 June 1744, the first Methodist Conference began in London, with “six Clergymen and all our Preachers” present. The Conference became the governing heart of Methodism. To this day Methodist churches around the world meet in annual conferences, and the word “connexion,” an old spelling of connection, still names the network of societies and preachers linked to one another. On the second morning the Conference considered “the doctrine of sanctification, or perfection.” Its answers were short. To be sanctified is to be “renewed in the image of God, in righteousness and true holiness” (compare Ephesians 4:24). A perfect Christian is one who loves God with all the heart, mind and soul (Deuteronomy 6:5). Does this mean that all inward sin is taken away? “Undoubtedly,” for God promised to save His people “from all our uncleannesses” (Ezekiel 36:29). The method itself is instructive. The preachers did not issue a creed from above. They asked questions, searched the Scriptures, and recorded the substance of their answers in what came to be called the Minutes.

3.1745: When Does Sanctification Begin?

The second Conference met on 1 August 1745 and added important precision. When does inward sanctification begin? “In the moment a man is justified.” This is a key Wesleyan teaching that is often forgotten. Holiness does not begin at some later crisis; it begins at conversion. Yet, the minutes add, sin remains in the believer, even “the seed of all sin,” until he is “sanctified throughout.” From conversion onward a believer “gradually dies to sin, and grows in grace.” Is entire sanctification ordinarily given only a little before death? “It is not, to those who expect it no sooner.” May we expect it sooner? “Why not?” The preachers admitted that most believers they had known were not so sanctified until near death, and that even Paul’s first readers were not. But that does not prove it cannot happen today. Then comes one of the wisest pastoral lines in all of Methodism. How should sanctification be preached? “Scarce at all to those who are not pressing forward.” To those who are, “always by way of promise; always drawing, rather than driving.” In 1746 the third Conference read over these minutes again and found nothing to change.

4.1747: Seeking Common Ground

At the fourth Conference, in June 1747, some people were present who did not believe the doctrine, so the preachers examined it “from the foundation.” They began, generously, by listing what their opponents granted. Those who differed agreed that every believer must be entirely sanctified “in the article of death,” an old phrase meaning at the very moment of death. They agreed that a believer grows in grace daily and should press after perfection. Then the Methodists listed what they in turn granted. Most believers they had known were not perfected in love until shortly before death. Paul uses the word “sanctified” for all who are justified, so when speaking of full salvation from sin one should add “wholly” or “entirely.” And the New Testament writers speak mostly to justified believers, rarely to those wholly sanctified. Look closely at the brackets in this passage. They are Wesley’s own later comments, added when he reprinted the minutes, quietly insisting that Scripture speaks of entire sanctification “very frequently, strongly, and explicitly” in some places. After all this, the real disagreement shrank to one question: should we expect to be saved from all sin “before the article of death”? This is a model of honest disagreement: state the other side fairly, admit what is true in it, and find the precise point of difference.

5.The Scriptural Case

The Conference then gave its reasons from Scripture in four groups. First, promises: God “shall redeem Israel from all his sins” (Psalm 130:8); He will cleanse His people “from all your filthiness” (Ezekiel 36:25); He will circumcise the heart to love Him wholly (Deuteronomy 30:6). Second, assertions: the Son of God came to “destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8), and Christ gave Himself to present a Church “without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25–27). Third, prayers: “Deliver us from evil,” Jesus’ prayer that His people be “made perfect in one” (John 17), Paul’s prayer that they be filled “with all the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3), and his prayer that God “sanctify you wholly” (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Such prayers, they argued, would be “mere mockery of God” if there were no such thing. Fourth, commands: “Be ye perfect” (Matthew 5:48) and the command to love God with all the heart. (The printed text gives Matthew 12:37; the Great Commandment is at Matthew 22:37.) Why before death? Because a command “is not given to the dead, but to the living.” Asked to name a perfect person, they answered that if they knew one they might not say, since he would be set “as a mark for all to shoot at.” They also admitted that believers may feel “a secret distaste” toward anyone claiming this grace, partly from concern, partly from “implicit envy,” and partly from slowness to believe the works of God.

6.1749: Charles’s Hymns and Four Conclusions

In 1749 Charles published two more volumes of Hymns and Sacred Poems. John admits that he had not seen them beforehand and that “some things in them” he did not approve. Historians usually connect this with Charles’s tendency to set the standard of perfection extremely high, so high that it seemed almost unreachable before death. But John “quite approved of the main” of these hymns, and he quotes many lines. They pray, “Now, without sin, in me appear”; “shut me up in God”; and “That moment be now!” They speak of “inbred sin,” the corruption of nature with which we are born, and ask God to root out “the seeds of sin.” They long for “that second rest” and “the second gift.” Similar language appears in Charles’s famous hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling” (1747). From all these extracts John draws four conclusions that he and his brother maintained. Christian perfection is (1) the love of God and neighbour, implying deliverance from all sin; (2) received “merely by faith”; (3) given “instantaneously, in one moment”; and (4) to be expected “not at death, but every moment.” These four points are the core of classic Wesleyan teaching. The phrase “second rest” helps explain why later holiness preachers spoke of a “second blessing.”

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

Three lessons stand out. First, worship shapes belief. Wesley’s 1780 hymnbook, the great Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists, included a whole section of hymns for believers longing for full redemption, and the nineteenth-century holiness movement poured out its own songs of cleansing and “Beulah land.” What a congregation sings, it comes to believe. Second, “drawing, rather than driving.” The doctrine is a promise to those who hunger, not a whip for the weary. Third, the Conferences model careful, humble, shared discernment, along with a fair statement of the other side. Wesleyans today still debate the balance between the gradual and the instantaneous. Many Nazarene and Methodist scholars stress the lifelong process of growth that the 1745 minutes describe, while others, especially in holiness camp-meeting traditions, stress the decisive moment. Other Christians disagree more deeply. Reformed and Lutheran theology teaches that sanctification is real but always incomplete in this life, and the Keswick movement spoke of sin being continually counteracted by the Spirit rather than removed. Fairness requires noting these views. Yet the Conferences’ question still stands before every believer: why not expect God to do now what He has promised to do?

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Which hymns have shaped your own understanding of holiness, and what do they teach? How might your preaching be more “drawing, rather than driving”? The 1747 Conference began by stating what its opponents believed. How could you follow that example the next time you disagree with another Christian about doctrine?

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Reading 4 · The 1759 Examination

Pure Love Reigning Alone

A CTS digest of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), §19; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11

Wesley’s fullest questions and answers on perfection: what it includes and excludes, the vital line between sin “properly” and “improperly” so called, why the most sanctified need Christ most, how testimonies should be tested with reason and tenderness, and how believers should wait for the change in obedience, prayer and simple faith.

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Pure Love Reigning Alone: The 1759 Examination of Perfection

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — Wesley’s longest set of questions and answers on Christian perfection: what it includes and excludes, how he defined sin, how testimonies should be tested, and how believers should wait for the blessing

A CTS digest of section 19 of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), as printed in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Plain Account §19
Primary source
1758–1760
Thoughts on Christian Perfection

A word before you read. This is the longest and most carefully reasoned part of the Plain Account. It reproduces Wesley’s tract Thoughts on Christian Perfection, written after the Conference of 1759. If you read only one section of the book, many Wesleyan teachers would point you here. Pay special attention to how Wesley defines sin, because almost every disagreement about this doctrine turns on that definition. Reported experiences in this section are Wesley’s evidence and his interpretation of it.

1.Guarding Against Drift

By the late 1750s many Methodists were testifying that God had perfected them in love. With growth came risk. At the 1759 Conference Wesley saw “some danger that a diversity of sentiments should insensibly steal in,” that is, that different opinions might creep in unnoticed. So the preachers examined the doctrine again, and Wesley soon published Thoughts on Christian Perfection (1760). His preface is modest. The tract is not meant “to gratify the curiosity” of anyone, nor to prove the doctrine at length against its critics. He wants simply to declare what Christian perfection includes and what it does not, and to add practical directions. He keeps the question-and-answer form in which his thoughts were first gathered, the same form the Conferences used. His opening answer gives the definition that every later Wesleyan statement echoes. Christian perfection is loving God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength. This means that “no wrong temper, none contrary to love, remains in the soul,” and that all thoughts, words and actions are governed “by pure love.”

2.What Perfection Does Not Exclude

Does this perfection exclude all infirmities, ignorance and mistake? Wesley answers, “I continually affirm quite the contrary.” A person may be “filled with pure love, and still be liable to mistake.” He gives a reason rooted in the body. While the soul dwells in “flesh and blood,” it thinks through bodily organs that share in our fallen frailty, so we cannot avoid sometimes thinking wrongly until “this corruptible shall have put on incorruption.” A mistake in judgment may even lead to a mistake in practice. His example is Gaston de Renty, a devout seventeenth-century French Catholic layman whom Wesley greatly admired. De Renty wore an “iron girdle,” a painful belt, because he had wrongly been taught that hurting the body was a path to holiness. Such a mistake, done from love, is “not properly a sin.” Yet Wesley adds at once that it still “needs the atoning blood.” The preachers at Bristol in 1758 had put it in five steps: everyone may mistake as long as he lives; a mistake in opinion may cause a mistake in practice; every such mistake breaks the perfect law; it would deserve condemnation but for the atonement; and so even the most perfect may pray, “Forgive us our trespasses.” Wesley even notes that love itself can lead us into error. Because love “believeth and hopeth all things,” it may lead us to think some people better than they really are.

3.Sin, Properly and Improperly So Called

Here is the heart of the section. Wesley distinguishes two things. “Sin, properly so called,” is “a voluntary transgression of a known law.” “Sin, improperly so called,” is “an involuntary transgression of a divine law, known or unknown.” Both need the atoning blood. No perfection in this life excludes involuntary transgressions, which flow naturally from ignorance and mistake. Therefore, Wesley says, “sinless perfection is a phrase I never use.” You may call such transgressions sins if you please; he does not. Then he gives advice to both sides. Those who do not call them sins must never imagine that anyone can stand before infinite justice “without a Mediator”; that would show “the deepest ignorance, or the highest arrogance.” Those who do call them sins must beware of confusing these defects with real sin. How high, then, should perfection be set? “Just as high as the Scripture does”: nothing more and nothing less than “the pure love of God and man.” This is where other traditions most clearly differ. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, for example, defines sin as any lack of conformity to God’s law, not only a wilful breaking of it. On that definition no believer is free from sin in this life. Wesley would not deny the defects; he simply declines to call them sin in the full sense, while insisting that they still need Christ’s blood.

4.None Need Christ More

If perfected believers live without sin, do they still need a Mediator? “Far from it. None feel their need of Christ like these.” Christ does not give life to the soul apart from Himself but “in and with, himself.” Wesley quotes Jesus’ words about the vine and the branches: “Without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). He then lists five ways every believer needs Christ: every grace is His free gift; it is given because of the price He paid; we have it not only from Him but “in him”; every blessing depends on His intercession; and even the best need His priestly work to atone for omissions, shortcomings and mistakes. Our perfection, he says, is not like that of a tree that flourishes from “its own root,” but like that of a branch that bears fruit only while joined to the vine. Severed from it, the branch withers. This answers a common fear about the doctrine: that it makes believers self-sufficient. In Wesley’s teaching, the more fully a person is sanctified, the more completely that person depends on Christ.

5.Speaking of It and Testing It

Should someone who has received this grace speak of it? At first, Wesley says, he could hardly keep quiet, “the fire would be so hot within him.” Afterwards he should speak with care: not to those who do not know God, not without good reason, and always with deep humility, “giving all the glory to God.” But he should not stay entirely silent, for God does not light a candle to hide it under a bushel. Testimony quickens the hunger of other believers. How can a testimony be tested? We cannot know with infallible certainty, but Wesley offers three reasonable proofs: clear evidence of exemplary behaviour beforehand, a distinct account of “the time and manner” of the change, and holy words and actions afterward. Then he clears away false tests. A person is not disproved by occasional mistakes, by being startled by a sudden noise, or even by deep sorrow, for Christ Himself knew agony without sin. Such a person may enjoy pleasant food, “smell to a flower, or eat a bunch of grapes,” and may marry and work in business. If perfect parents have children, the children still inherit sin from Adam, just as seeds from fruit grafted onto a “crab-stock,” the root of a wild sour apple tree, still grow into crab apples. A perfected believer may do no more outward work than others, and his prayers may not move us. “Pure love reigning alone in the heart and life,” Wesley concludes, “this is the whole of scriptural perfection.”

6.How the Change Comes, and How to Wait

When may a person judge that he has received this grace? Only after a conviction of “inbred sin” deeper than he felt before justification, then a gradual dying to it, then a total death to sin and an entire renewal in love. Even the feeling of “all love and no sin” is not enough by itself; there must be “the testimony of the Spirit,” witnessing to entire sanctification as clearly as to justification. Is the change gradual or instantaneous? Wesley answers with an image. A man may be dying for some time, yet there is an instant when he dies. So a believer may be dying to sin for some time, but there is an instant when sin is gone and he “lives the full life of love.” Even then he grows in grace, “not only till death, but to all eternity.” How should we wait? Not in “careless indifference,” but in “vigorous, universal obedience,” self-denial, prayer, fasting, and “a close attendance on all the ordinances of God,” the means of grace such as Scripture, prayer and the Lord’s Supper. It is received “by simple faith,” yet God gives that faith to those who seek it diligently. Why have so few received it? Ask how many are seeking it this way. Ask that it be done now: “Do not call this setting God a time.”

7.Tenderness, Living Witnesses, and the Pastor Today

How should we treat those who think they have attained? “Examine them candidly,” and encourage them to pray, but “with the utmost tenderness,” without “harshness, sternness or sourness.” Harshness can destroy a mistaken soul or grieve a genuine one. Wesley mocks those who set themselves up as “inquisitors-general” over the deep things of God. If someone is deceived while feeling only love, it is “a harmless mistake”; warn him gently of the danger if his love grows cold. Finally, Wesley rests the doctrine on Scripture, yet admits that living witnesses matter: “Convince me of this, and I will preach it no more.” Later holiness churches, including the Nazarenes, built their testimony meetings and altar calls on this confidence. For pastors today, this section is a manual. Define sin carefully. Never let holiness weaken dependence on Christ. Test testimonies with both reason and gentleness. And keep the standard where Scripture puts it, pure love, rather than at our own imagined ideal. Critics, then and now, have worried that this approach relies too heavily on inner feeling. Wesley’s three proofs and his demand for the Spirit’s witness were his attempt to answer that concern.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. How does Wesley’s distinction between sin “properly” and “improperly” so called change the way you think about your own failures? Why does he insist that the most sanctified need Christ the most? Think of someone in your congregation who has spoken of a deep work of God. How could you respond to that person with both careful discernment and “the utmost tenderness”?

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Reading 5 · The Mature Summary

Let It Appear in Its Native Form

A CTS digest of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), §§26–28; Works, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11

After the London controversy of 1762–1763, Wesley sums up the doctrine in short propositions: perfection is perfect love, not absolute, not infallible, improvable and amissible, surrounded by gradual growth. He then asks what is “so frightful” in it, calls it the doctrine of Christ Himself, and pleads with his critics as “your brethren.”

CTS DIGESTRead the full digest — opens right here

The Chapala Theological Seminary digest — an original summary written by CTS, available in English, Spanish and French, readable offline. This is the CTS digest, not the full original source text.

Let It Appear in Its Native Form: Wesley’s Mature Summary of Perfection

A Chapala Theological Seminary reading — the short propositions of 1764, Wesley’s defence of the doctrine as the teaching of Christ Himself, and his closing appeal to fellow believers who opposed it

A CTS digest of sections 26–28 of John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1777 revision), as printed in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson (1872), vol. 11. The original is in the public domain; the short quotations below are from it.

Plain Account §§26–28
Primary source
1764–1765
Perfect love

A word before you read. These closing sections are Wesley at his most concise and his most passionate. First comes a numbered list of propositions, a summary written after years of experience and some painful controversy. Then come two pages of appeal, in which Wesley asks his critics why anyone should fear a doctrine whose heart is simply love. If you want to remember one summary of the Wesleyan teaching on perfection, this is a good one to learn.

1.After the Storm

The sections just before this reading tell of a time of both blessing and trouble. In 1762 there was “a great increase” of the work of God in London, and many testified to being perfected in love. But some went to extremes. A former soldier named George Bell claimed special gifts and predicted that the world would end on 28 February 1763. Thomas Maxfield, one of Wesley’s earliest lay preachers, encouraged some of these claims, and a painful split followed. Critics pointed to the excesses as proof that the whole doctrine was dangerous. So in 1764, “upon a review of the whole subject,” Wesley wrote down what he had learned in short propositions. Read them as the fruit of experience. They are calmer, more careful and more pastoral than some earlier statements. Yet they do not retreat from the central claim. Wesley remained convinced that God can fill a believer’s heart with love in this life, and that the misuse of a truth is no reason to abandon it.

2.The Propositions, One to Five

The first five propositions mark out the boundaries. (1) There is such a thing as perfection, “for it is again and again mentioned in Scripture.” (2) It is not as early as justification, for justified people are told to “go on unto perfection” (Hebrews 6:1). This guards against confusing the new birth with full sanctification. (3) It is not as late as death, for Paul speaks of living people who were perfect (Philippians 3:15). This guards against postponing holiness to the deathbed or to purgatory. (4) It is not absolute. Absolute perfection “belongs not to man, nor to angels, but to God alone.” (5) It does not make anyone infallible: no one is free from error while in the body. Notice the balance of these points. Wesley is answering two kinds of people at once. To those who denied perfection altogether, he says that Scripture teaches it and that it is for this life. To enthusiasts like Bell, who claimed too much, he says that no Christian becomes like God in His perfection, and no Christian is beyond mistake.

3.The Propositions, Six to Ten

(6) Is it sinless? “It is not worth while to contend for a term.” It is “salvation from sin.” Wesley refuses to fight over a word that might mislead. (7) It is “perfect love” (1 John 4:18). This is its essence. Its “inseparable fruits” are rejoicing evermore, praying without ceasing, and giving thanks in everything (1 Thessalonians 5:16–18), the same marks that appeared in The Character of a Methodist years before. (8) It is “improvable.” It is not a fixed point beyond which there is no progress; one perfected in love “may grow in grace far swifter than he did before.” (9) It is “amissible,” an old word meaning capable of being lost, “of which we have numerous instances.” Wesley honestly admits that he was not thoroughly convinced of this until “five or six years ago.” A pastor must therefore never treat the blessing as a guarantee against falling. (10) It is “constantly both preceded and followed by a gradual work.” This last point is vital for understanding Wesley. The moment of entire sanctification is never isolated. It is the crown of a long process of growth and the beginning of a further process that never ends.

4.Is It Instantaneous? Answering the Objections

Proposition (11) asks whether the change itself is instantaneous, and Wesley goes “step by step.” In some believers an instantaneous change has clearly been wrought, and since then they rejoice, pray and give thanks without ceasing. They are witnesses of what he preaches. In others the change “was not instantaneous”: they did not perceive the moment. But, Wesley reasons, it is often hard to perceive the moment when a person dies, yet there is such a moment. If sin ever ceases, there must be “a last moment of its existence, and a first moment of our deliverance from it.” He then answers objections. “They will lose it.” “They may; but they need not.” “Sin is only suspended.” “Call it which you please.” They are all love today. “The doctrine has been much abused.” So has justification by faith, but that is no reason to give it up. Wesley quotes a proverb: when you wash your child, throw away the water, “but do not throw away the child.” Do perfected believers say they no longer need Christ’s merits? Quite the opposite. They sing, “Every moment, Lord, I want / The merit of thy death!” So, Wesley concludes, preachers should preach perfection to believers “constantly, strongly, and explicitly,” and believers should “agonize for it.” To agonize here means to strive with all one’s strength, as in Jesus’ call to “strive to enter in at the strait gate” (Luke 13:24).

5.“What Is There So Frightful Herein?”

In section 27 Wesley looks back over the whole account and asks his readers a direct question: “What is there so frightful herein?” For twenty years and more there had been an outcry, as though all religion were being “torn up by the roots.” The preachers of perfection had been “hooted at, like mad dogs,” even by people who feared God, and even by some of their own spiritual children. Why? Wesley’s answer is that the doctrine is not really his at all. It is the doctrine of Jesus Christ. He quotes Matthew 5:48 in Greek, Esesthe oun teleioi, “Ye shall therefore be perfect,” and notes that it can be read as a promise as well as a command. It is the doctrine of Paul, James, Peter and John. He found it “in the oracles of God” when he read them with no desire but to save his own soul. Then he summarizes the doctrine in three views. It is purity of intention, giving God all the heart. It is having all the mind that was in Christ and walking as He walked. It is loving God with all the heart and our neighbour as ourselves. These, he says, show “no material difference.” They are one perfection, which he has believed and taught for forty years, “from the year 1725 to the year 1765.” The reader will recognize Taylor, à Kempis, Law and the Bible from Reading 1.

6.“Let This Perfection Appear in Its Native Form”

Section 28 is a moving appeal. Let this perfection “appear in its native form,” Wesley says, and who will speak against it? Who will object to loving God with all the heart, to renewal in the whole image of God, to being cleansed from all pollution of flesh and spirit? “It must be disguised before it can be opposed.” Wesley adds a vivid image: it must first be “covered with a bear-skin.” In ancient Rome persecutors sometimes sewed Christians into the skins of animals so that dogs or wild beasts would tear them apart. Wesley means that critics first dress the doctrine up as something monstrous and then attack the costume. He pleads especially with fellow believers, “the children of God,” not to fight against the image of God. Does not everything within a loving heart cry out, he asks, “O who that loves can love enough?” Methodists agree with them that we are justified freely through Christ’s blood; why be angry because we also expect “to be sanctified wholly through his Spirit”? “Nay, we are your brethren,” he insists, fellow labourers in the Lord’s vineyard. His final sentence borrows the Collect for Purity from the Book of Common Prayer, prayed at every Anglican Communion service: that God would so cleanse the thoughts of our hearts “that we shall perfectly love him.” In effect Wesley says: you already pray for this every Sunday; we simply believe God will answer.

7.What a Wesleyan Pastor Takes from It Today

Near the end of his life Wesley called this doctrine “the grand depositum,” the great treasure God had entrusted to the people called Methodists. His heirs carried it across the world. In nineteenth-century America the holiness movement spread it through camp meetings and through teachers like Phoebe Palmer. Churches were born to preserve it, among them the Wesleyan Methodists, the Free Methodists, the Salvation Army and the Church of the Nazarene, whose founders united in 1908 at Pilot Point, Texas. Today Methodist, Nazarene and Wesleyan congregations across Mexico and Latin America still teach entire sanctification. A pastor can take three things from these sections. First, a clear, memorable summary to teach: perfection is perfect love, received by faith, for this life, improvable, amissible, and surrounded by gradual growth. Second, honesty: Wesley admitted abuses and changed his mind where experience taught him. Third, charity: he called his opponents “brethren.” Other Christians still disagree. Reformed and Lutheran believers hold that sin remains until glory, many Baptists and Keswick teachers speak of victory rather than eradication, and some Pentecostals added a further experience of Spirit baptism. Wesleyans can hold their conviction firmly while honouring these brothers and sisters in Christ, as Wesley did.

8.Taking It to Heart

For reflection. Which of Wesley’s 1764 propositions surprised you most, and why? Why might it matter pastorally that perfect love is both “improvable” and “amissible”? Wesley believed that the doctrine had been “disguised” before it was opposed. How can you present holiness in your church in its “native form,” as love for God and neighbour, so that people are drawn to it rather than frightened by it?

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Further Study: Six Public-Domain Works

These six works are for further study, for the student who wants to go on reading. They are not part of the honors reading above: that stays as it is — the five CTS digests, any three read in full and recorded on your honor. All six are in the public domain; each link opens the work online, and most can also be found in the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. Most are in English: the Chrome browser can translate a page (right-click, “Translate to…”; on a phone, the browser menu).

Wesley's Sermons · The Way of Salvation

1. Sermons on Several Occasions

John Wesley · first four volumes published by 1771

Read Sermons 1, 5, 13, 14, 40, 43 and 85. These sermons supply Wesley’s broader account of salvation, justification, sanctification, new birth, and working out salvation.

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Wesley's Journal · Doctrine in Practice

2. Journal

John Wesley · entries spanning 1735–1790

Read the 1738 Aldersgate entries, the beginnings of field preaching in 1739, and selected later reflections on Methodist discipline. The journal places Wesley’s doctrinal language within his evangelistic and pastoral practice.

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An Early Defender · Fletcher

3. Checks to Antinomianism, vol. 1

John Fletcher · 1829 edition; original controversy 1771 onward

Read the first and second checks, noting Fletcher’s use of grace, works, and assurance. Fletcher is a key early interpreter and defender of Wesleyan soteriology, while also revealing its polemical setting.

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The First Methodist System · Watson

4. Theological Institutes, vol. 1

Richard Watson · 1825 edition

Read the sections on revelation, the authority of Scripture, and the attributes of God before consulting later volumes on salvation. Watson offers an early systematic Methodist framework against which Wesley’s occasional writings can be read.

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The Holiness Movement · Palmer

5. The Way of Holiness

Phoebe Palmer · 1845 edition

Read the narrative portions explaining consecration, faith, testimony, and the “shorter way.” Palmer documents the nineteenth-century holiness movement’s development of Wesleyan sanctification in devotional practice.

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A Methodist Bridge · Clarke

6. Christian Theology: Selected from His Writings

Adam Clarke · 1856 edition

Read the chapters on redemption, regeneration, sanctification, and Christian obedience. Clarke provides an early Methodist exegetical-theological bridge between Wesley and later holiness teaching.

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Honor attestation: By selecting three readings above, you affirm that you have read those three digests in full. The digests are CTS-authored summaries that may include brief excerpts or adaptations of public-domain works.