Prevenient Grace and the Order of Salvation
As taught in the Holiness tradition
How Holiness theology charts grace from the first dawn of conviction to full salvation.
Within the Holiness tradition, the question of how a sinner moves from spiritual death to full salvation is answered through a carefully ordered sequence of divine grace. This tradition, rooted in the eighteenth-century evangelical revival led by John Wesley and carried forward by the nineteenth-century Holiness movement of figures such as Phoebe Palmer, teaches that grace is at work in a person long before that person consciously turns to God.
By the end of this lesson
- Define prevenient (preventing) grace as Wesley did and explain why the first desires toward God are themselves gifts of grace rather than natural human capacities.
- Reconstruct the Holiness order of salvation in sequence: preventing grace, convincing grace (repentance), justification, and sanctification.
- Explain the synergistic logic Wesley drew from Philippians 2:12-13, in which God's working is the ground of the believer's working.
- Distinguish justification (deliverance from the guilt of sin) from sanctification (deliverance from the power and root of sin) as the two branches of salvation.
- Contrast the Holiness doctrine of universal, resistible grace with the Calvinist doctrines of unconditional election and irresistible grace.
- Identify the key Holiness sources — Wesley's sermons, Fletcher's Checks to Antinomianism, and Palmer's Way of Holiness — and the role each played in shaping the tradition's order of salvation.
Scripture
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