Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six Part Seven Part Eight An Aside (Between Parts Eight and Nine) Part Nine Part Ten Part Eleven Part Twelve Part Thirteen Part Fourteen An Aside (Between Parts Fourteen and Fifteen) Part Fifteen Part Sixteen Part Seventeen
Jonathan Edwards died in 1758, before Wesley’s final teaching on entire sanctification had run its full course and before the development of the descending later movements. Edwards did, however, address an error directly related to Wesley’s teaching: the assumption that a recognizable religious experience proves saving grace. In The Religious Affections, he argued that intense feelings, apparent conversion experiences, and even seemingly convincing accounts of spiritual change do not authenticate themselves.
Edwards’s work is a valuable theological precursor to the argument here, and to others, about decisionism, despite his never directly analyzing Wesley’s later two-tier system or its descendants. Whitefield and Charles Wesley challenged Wesleyan perfectionism. Edwards examined counterfeit religious affections, and Ryle criticized perfectionism. Benjamin Warfield traced its later theological forms. Reformed, Baptist, and other conservative Protestant writers offer serious critiques of the two-tier structure, perfectionism, Higher Life/Keswick theology, and their effects on evangelicalism.
Jonathan Edwards
In his landmark work A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), Jonathan Edwards provided the foundational biblical argument that dismantles any “two-tier” framework of the Christian life. Edwards directly exposed the falsity of a two-tiered system through several key principles. He argued that when the Holy Spirit regenerates a person, He does not merely offer a temporary influence or an optional secondary “upgrade”. Instead, the Spirit indwells the believer as “a new, abiding principle of life and action.” True conversion immediately alters a person’s inner nature, giving them a “divine sense” that fundamentally loves and delights in God’s holiness.
Edwards famously stated that the ultimate, definitive sign of true grace is not mere emotional peaks or verbal professions, but Christian practice. Genuine conversion and sanctification are organically linked: the same new birth that justifies a sinner necessarily impels them toward a lifelong pursuit of holiness.
Dividing Christians into a lower tier (those who have “accepted Christ” but remain dominated by ungodliness/worldliness) and a higher tier (those who have attained a subsequent “consecration” or “higher life”) is a theological impossibility. A person whose heart has no affection for God’s holiness and yields no practical fruit of godliness is not a “lower-tier Christian” — they are unregenerate.
George Whitefield and Charles Wesley
Both George Whitefield and Charles Wesley shared intimate personal and ministry bonds with John Wesley. Because and not despite of it, Whitefield warned Wesley that his view of entire sanctification undermined the biblical reality of indwelling sin and would produce dangerous spiritual pride in those who claimed the “second blessing.” Whitefield recounted meeting professed “perfect” believers whose claims of complete sinlessness, when pressed, revealed profound self-delusion and arrogance rather than true humility.
Charles Wesley challenged his brother’s position from within the Methodist movement itself. He viewed sanctification not as an instantaneous crisis experience that people claimed and boasted about. Instead, it was a lifelong, progressive work culminating only at death. Charles was sharply critical of those who claimed to have achieved entire sanctification, famously describing them as self-deceived and arguing that any believer who openly professed to be perfect had, by that very act of spiritual pride, disproved their own claim.
Together, Whitefield and Charles Wesley, in their personal correspondence to John, argue that dividing believers into a two-tiered system — those who remain “ordinary” versus those who have achieved “perfection” — inevitably breeds hypocrisy, obscures the necessity of daily mortification of sin, and devalues the continuous, lifetime nature of biblical sanctification.
B. B. Warfield
Later, after J. C. Ryle, Warfield’s Studies in Perfectionism remains the most thorough historical and doctrinal dismantling of the entire perfectionist family of teachings. He showed how Wesleyan roots fed into Oberlin (Finney), Higher Life, and Keswick systems that weakened the biblical doctrine of remaining sin and treated sanctification as a separable, crisis-driven second gift. Warfield insisted that justification and sanctification cannot be divided without dividing Christ Himself. He also wrote that any scheme promising virtual freedom from sin in this life underestimates both the depth of indwelling sin and the Spirit’s ordinary, progressive work through the means of grace.
Later Analysts
Evangelicals
Varied men critique the chronological separation of justification and sanctification, the carnal/spiritual Christian dichotomy, quietism, and the aorist-tense/experiential hermeneutic that turns biblical commands into crisis formulas. My mentioning these men doesn’t mean I would fellowship with them. J. I. Packer, writing especially in Keep in Step with the Spirit, exposed Keswick and Higher Life teaching as a form of quietistic perfectionism that separates the Christian into carnal and spiritual classes and turns biblical commands into formulas for instantaneous victory.
Andrew Naselli and others document how Keswick-influenced teaching entered evangelical schools, literature, and pulpits. Naselli shows in careful detail how this same structure entered evangelical schools, literature, and pulpits, producing a practical two-tier Christianity that confuses crisis experiences with progressive sanctification.
Independent Baptist
Thomas Ross (faithsaves.net) has written an over one-thousand-page dissertation on this subject, The Doctrine of Sanctification: An Exegetical Examination, with Application, in Historic Baptist Perspective, to which is Appended a Historical, Exegetical, and Elenctic Evaluation of Influential Errors, Particularly the Keswick Theology. It has extensive material refuting Keswick/Higher Life errors, their Wesleyan and Holiness roots, influence on Pentecostalism, and effects on sanctification doctrine.
The central solution is to recover biblical conversion and sanctification and then examine the methods that have grown around the two-tier system. When someone first assumes that a profession establishes salvation and treats a subsequent experience as evidence of spiritual success, it can begin manufacturing the very experiences that its theology requires. Music, emotional appeals, public commitments, testimonies, conferences, and ministry metrics can all become part of that process, even when the people using them sincerely believe they are serving God.
People are still examining parts of this problem today, including revivalism’s influence on Independent Baptist worship and the theological assumptions behind Higher Life teaching. This criticism is not the same as widespread correction. The critics don’t agree either on the diagnosis or the remedy. A 2024 doctoral dissertation specifically studied revivalism’s influence on worship in fundamental, Independent Baptist, and Bible churches, while current discussions of Keswick theology show that the dispute over the two-tier interpretation remains active.
What Is the Solution to the Two-Tier System in Contemporary Christianity?
Recovering Biblical Conversion, Sanctification, and Worship from Experience-Driven Religion
The two-tier system has left a complicated legacy in evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and Independent Baptist churches. It does not always appear under the name of Wesleyanism, and many people who practice its methods would reject Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification. The original terminology has often changed while the underlying assumptions remain. A person supposedly receives salvation in an initial experience, but the Christian life God intends requires another experience, another decision, another surrender, another spiritual breakthrough, or another level of commitment.
In some settings, a profession of faith establishes the first tier, while an identifiable experience of victory, service, evangelistic success, or emotional devotion identifies the second. The solution requires more than changing terminology. Churches must reconsider the soteriology that makes the system possible, the methods that reinforce it, and the worship practices that help people experience what the system says they need. Will a church allow Scripture to define conversion, sanctification, evangelism, and worship? Or will it continue to evaluate those things through experiences and visible results?
Recover the Biblical Meaning of Conversion
The first task is to correct the understanding of the first tier. Salvation is not a human decision that becomes valid because someone remembers making it. It is God’s gracious work in saving sinners through Jesus Christ. The sinner must repent and believe the gospel. A profession of faith matters, but it is not regeneration itself, and a religious act cannot substitute for genuine faith.
This requires churches to distinguish between preaching the gospel and securing a response. An evangelist can explain the gospel accurately, call sinners to repentance and faith, and invite them to respond without assuming that a raised hand, repeated prayer, or walk down an aisle establishes their regeneration. They must evaluate a hearer’s response according to Scripture and not simply record it as a completed conversion. Churches should teach the gospel, hear people’s testimonies, explain the meaning of repentance and faith, baptize believers according to Scripture, and continue to teach and disciple them.
Assurance should rest upon Christ and God’s promises, while also taking seriously the biblical evidence of new life. 1 John is particularly important here. John explains why he wrote concerning those who believe on the name of the Son of God: that they may know they have eternal life (1 John 5:13). Throughout the epistle, he also describes obedience, love, and righteousness as evidence relevant to knowing God. Assurance is neither a reward for achieving a higher tier nor an automatic consequence of remembering a religious decision. It belongs to those who truly believe Christ, and Scripture requires examination of the evidence of God’s work in their lives.
More to Come