Perfect Love: Entire Sanctification in the Holiness Tradition
As taught in the Holiness tradition
Wesley's perfect love and the second work of grace in the Holiness movement
The Holiness movement carries forward a doctrine that John Wesley spent more than fifty years clarifying, defending, and refusing to abandon: that grace can do more in a believer than pardon past sin and begin a slow improvement. Wesley's A Plain Account of Christian Perfection traces how, beginning around 1725, he became convinced that God intends to fill the heart with love so completely that "no wrong temper, none contrary to love, remains in the soul." Out of this conviction the tradition built its central claim — that there is a definite work of grace, generally understood as following justification, in which the believer is cleansed from inbred sin and brought into perfect love for God and neighbour. This lesson sets out what that doctrine asserts, what its sources carefully deny, and how it differs from the readings of sanctification found in the Reformed and Lutheran streams.
By the end of this lesson
- Define entire sanctification as the Holiness tradition does: a definite, faith-received work of grace, generally subsequent to justification, that cleanses inbred sin and fills the heart with perfect love.
- Distinguish Wesley's claim of perfect love from sinless perfection, noting what he denied about ignorance, mistake, infirmity, and temptation.
- Trace the doctrine through John Wesley, John Fletcher, and Phoebe Palmer, including Palmer's altar theology and its press toward a definite moment of consecration.
- State descriptively how the Holiness view of sanctification differs from the Reformed progressive-sanctification view and the Lutheran simul justus et peccator.
- Connect the doctrine to its principal scripture anchors and explain the gradual-and-instantaneous structure Wesley taught.
Scripture
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