The Higher Life, Compassion, and Social Holiness
As taught in the Holiness tradition
How the Holiness tradition joins a cleansed heart to active mercy and social reform
The Holiness tradition grew out of the eighteenth-century evangelical revival led by John Wesley and his brother Charles, and out of the nineteenth-century renewal movements in Britain and North America that carried the Wesleyan emphasis on heart-religion forward into camp meetings, rescue missions, and reform societies. Its defining conviction is that the gospel does not merely pardon sinners; it actually makes them holy, here and now, "all the days of our life." Where the topic of this lesson — the higher life, compassion, and social holiness — is concerned, the tradition insists that inward transformation and outward mercy are a single fabric. A heart filled with the love of God cannot help spilling over into love of neighbour, and a faith that does not work by love is, in the tradition's reading of James, no living faith at all.
By the end of this lesson
- Define the Holiness doctrine of entire sanctification (Christian perfection) as a heart cleansed and ruled by perfect love, distinguishing it from initial justification.
- Explain "social holiness" and show why the tradition treats works of mercy and works of piety as one inseparable fabric.
- Trace the lesson’s four anchors as a movement from consecration (Romans 12) to its content (James 1:27) to its daily power (Galatians 5) to its measure (1 John 2:6).
- Summarise Wesley’s exegesis of "the flesh" and the plural works versus the singular fruit, and how it underwrites the hope of a cleansed heart.
- Identify the tradition’s primary sources — Wesley’s A Plain Account, the Standard Sermons, Fletcher’s Checks to Antinomianism, and Charles Wesley’s hymns — and what each contributes.
- Describe precisely where Holiness teaching differs from the mainstream simul justus et peccator view, including the disputed definition of sin and the danger of self-deception.
Scripture
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