Part One

John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield began their search for the truth within the infrastructure of the Church of England in the early 18th century.  John started the formal Christian religious denomination, the Methodists, with a break from the Moravians after having been an ordained Anglican cleric.  No one sent him.  He operated as a free agent without authority to start what he wanted, maybe listening to a mystical voice-in-his-head.  Perhaps he gave up because he thought nothing represented the truth as he saw it.  Others have done the same in starting new religions with unique belief and practice.

Holiness

A chief concern for the Wesleys, as seen in their writings and those of others who heard them, was the lack of holiness among those professing Christianity.  They expected a more strict lifestyle in accordance with moral law.  I understand that assessment.  However, what causes this absence of holiness among those who call themselves Christian?  Their conclusion was an observable deficiency of discipline, a need of a different method, hence Methodism.

Scripture, however, shows that holiness comes as fruit of the Holy Spirit through true conversion.  You can’t whip it up or pull it up by the bootstraps.  The Church of England still advocated a false gospel like unto Roman Catholicism from which it proceeded.  Unbelief will not produce holy living.  The ritual of sacrament and ceremony doesn’t cause holiness.

Nonetheless, the Wesleys wanted more holiness among professing Christians.  Under the patch work of disparate theological influences, the Wesleys styled a view of the atonement to generate the greatest personal holiness.  They rejected straight judicial, penal substitution with its imputed righteousness for what men now call, “participatory atonement.”

Grace Alone?

Roman Catholicism says grace saves us.  Mormonism says grace saves us.  Almost every Christian denomination or religion says grace saves us.  If you asked the Judaizers in Galatia whether grace saved us, surely they would also answer, “yes.”  A unique sect of Christianity could easily say that grace alone saves us.  The Wesleys taught that at the moment of the new birth God imparts to someone the power or ability to live holy.  This impartation comes through a mystical experience one has in participating with the death of Christ.

John Wesley had a problem with the teaching that imputed righteousness justifies a sinner.  He received imputed righteousness, but it pardoned only his past sin.  At that point, God imparted righteousness that enabled him to strive for holiness and live a holy life.  These good works are required for salvation.

With Methodist or Wesleyan doctrine, someone may receive righteousness by faith, but faith that comes through the experience.  The experience includes repentance.  In the works of John Wesley, you can read of conversations in 1744 between the Wesleys and a few others to form a catechism of questions and answers.  It read:

But must not repentance and works meet for repentance, go before this faith? Without doubt; if by repentance you mean conviction of sin, and by works meet for repentance, obeying God as we can, forgiving our brother, leaving off from evil, doing good, and using his ordinances according to the power we have received.

Baptism and Eternal Security

According to this, a faith that might justify would only do so through works meet for repentance.  In addition, concerning baptism John Wesley said:

What are the benefits we receive by baptism, is the next point to be considered. And the first of these is, the washing away the guilt of original sin, by the application of the merits of Christ’s death. . . . . By baptism, we who were “by nature children of wrath” are made the children of God.

The perfectionism of the Wesleys meant that with their view of sin, someone could live a technically sinless life.  This theory of participatory atonement required participation.  Without it, someone could lose his salvation.  In the same catechism referred above, the Wesleys said:

Are works necessary to the continuance of faith? Without doubt, for many forfeit the free gift of God, either by sins of omission or commission. Can faith be lost for want of works? It cannot but through disobedience.

You can find statements where it seems that John Wesley did believe in salvation by grace alone through faith in Jesus Christ alone.  Yet, if you can lose salvation, who is doing the saving?  Some of what he wrote seems to agree with judicial, penal substitution.  All of that you must also see in the context of everything else he wrote and said that contradicts penal substitution.  Then today you look at the fruit in Methodist and Wesleyan belief and practice.

The Unholy Fruit

Holiness doesn’t just happen.  It comes the way scripture explains that it comes.  Holiness won’t occur through a different means than what God says.  That proves itself out too.  Methodists and Wesleyans might call themselves holiness, but their deficient and skewed beliefs won’t produce true holiness.  This manifests itself over a period, where the trajectory of personal living moves away from holiness.

Holiness is an attribute of God.  People don’t live holy without God.  The holiness people receive comes through true conversion and the atonement of true conversion is penal substitution.  Other views of atonement are not true or scriptural and they do not provide for holiness.  The failure to live holy comes from not receiving holiness by grace through faith.

The Wesleys taught faith as the threshold of holiness.  It opened for someone the opportunity for a process.  If that process did not end in perfection, that person was not saved.

Confusion or Clarity?

If you are reading this post and confused about what Wesley believed, join the club.  It’s difficult to sort through what he said, perhaps nothing as so plainly muddled as reading a sermon he preached, “The Scripture Way of Salvation.”  I found it almost impossible to understand.  His teaching made it very difficult to have assurance of salvation.  On many different occasions in his lifetime, through letters he expressed extreme doubt, surely because of his convoluted understanding of salvation.

Salvation is clear in the Bible in contrast to salvation of Wesleyan and Methodist teaching.  Paul taught grace and works as mutually exclusive.  Romans 11:6 says:

And if by grace, then is it no more of works: otherwise grace is no more grace. But if it be of works, then it is no more grace: otherwise work is no more work.

One who adds works to grace, like the Wesleys did, “Christ profits [them] nothing” and they become “debtor[s] to do the whole law.”  Jesus is clear.  Paul is clear.  The Wesleys were not and Wesleyan and Methodist belief, teaching, and practice are the fruit of that.