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THE PROBLEM OF LOVE
by Ray Shelton
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274 A.D.) followed Augustine’s theology of grace. But in his interpretation of original sin Aquinas believed that Adam lost his original righteousness and the result in all men is a disordered disposition. All Adam’s descendants lack this original righteousness but the nature of man is not changed, and the natural inclination to virtue is diminished. Original sin is a disordered disposition due to the lack of this original righteousness. Actual sins, which are to be distinguished from original sin, vary from person to person in both nature and extent. Both original and actual sins cause weakness and ignorance; all powers of the soul are “left to some extent destitute of their proper order”. Sin also results in physical death. In the view of Aquinas physical death is not natural to man. The corruptible body of man God has adapted to its form, the rational soul of man, and to its end, eternal happiness.
Thomas Aquinas adopted as did Medieval theology the three ladders of Augustine. Medieval theology thought it self-evident that if man is be saved he would have to ascend to God’s level. The salvation of the soul is its ascent from the imperfect world to the perfection of God. And there are, in particular, three ladders to heaven for the soul’s ascent:
(1) the ladder of Merit;
(2) the analogical ladder of Speculation;
(3) the anagogical ladder of Mysticism.
1. The ladder of Merit is not opposed to grace. Medieval theology is a theology of merit; but this does not mean it is not a theology of grace. The New Testament (particularly the writings of Apostle Paul) and the Reformation saw these as opposed to each other. But Medieval theology since the time of Augustine saw these as complementary if not one. The way to God and blessedness is by means of human merit. As Thomas Aquinas writes, “Man attains blessedness by a series of acts which are called merits.” But this does not exclude Divine grace or make salvation by man alone. On the contrary, Aquinas most emphatically rejects the idea that man might acquire blessedness by his own strength. For Aquinas there is not a contradiction between the idea of merits and the idea of grace; each is the condition of the other and they are complementary. Merit is required of man, but he cannot achieve this merit apart from the Divine grace and unless Divine grace comes to his aid: without grace no merit. This is generally true of Medieval theology and it had its origin in the theology of Augustine and faithfully upholds the Augustine principle: “When God crowns our merit, it is nothing but His own gifts that He crowns.”
2. the analogical ladder of Speculation: The analogical ladder of Speculation is the specific form that the ladder of speculation took in the theology of Aquinas. By the ladder of religious speculation, since the time of Augustine, Medieval theology has ascended from the world of sense to the spiritual world of God. The relation between the world and God was primarily conceived upon the principle of causality, that for every effect of a change there is adequate cause. Since God is “the first and the universal Cause of all being”, it is possible to find in everything, in so far as it is a being, likenesses to God. It is the task of theology to find these Divine “traces” in the universe and to rise by their aid to a contemplation of God Himself in His majesty. Of course, within the created world there is no absolute likeness to God. But everywhere in creation, from the lowest to highest, there are analogies to the Divine Being, clearer at higher, fainter at the lower levels. By observing these analogies and working back from the effect to the first cause (via causalitatus), by negating the imperfect (via negationis), and positing the perfect (via eminentiae) which the effect implies, one can reach a true, never exhaustive, but adequate knowledge of the nature of God.
3. the anagogical ladder of Mysticism. The anagogical ladder of Mysticism is the way of inner ascent [anagoge] to union with the Divine. In the soul of man there are those divine and uncreated elements. These are the peaks that the soul must climb if he is come in contact with God. The mystic seeks the point within himself where he can make contact with God. It is the Neoplatonic One [hen] in man, which makes possible unity [henosis] with the One divine Being [to theion hen]. But this height is not reached without thorough preparation. Here the old ordo salutis of mysticism, with its three steps of purification, illumination and union, must be used. Medieval mysticism made reference to Christ’s ascension as a pattern for the ascent of the soul. This is expressed clearly by Bernard of Claivaux, who says:
“When our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ wished to teach us how we might ascend to heaven, He Himself did what He taught: He first descended, and as His simple divine nature, which can neither lessened nor increased nor undergo any other change, did not permit Him either to descend or ascend, He took up into the unity of His person our nature — that is, human nature. In this He descended and ascended and showed us the way by which we, too, might ascend.”
Bernard sees in the upright form given to man at creation an evidence that he is meant by God to direct his desire upward. But the natural man in his attempt to raise himself up, takes a false path of pride and presumption, and sinks even deeper down. He can only be rescued when Christ shows him the right way. We are called to be followers of Christ. In this life we are to follow Him in lowliness and humiliation. But that is not all. Our “Imitatio Christi” [Imitation of Christ] is to include both humiliation and exaltation. We are to follow Christ in everything, not only when He descends in His Incarnation, but also when at His Ascension He ascends into heaven. To both Bernard applies the words of Jesus in Luke 10:37: “Go, and do thou likewise.” On these lines Bernard interprets the Sermon on the Mount. The eight Beatitudes signify eight rungs on the mystical heavenly ladder, whose foot is here below while its top reaches up to heaven. On this ladder we must ascend above ourselves and above everything in the world. Only then can our spirit reach the higher world and come to full and immediate union with God. But during this life, this highest happiness is granted to man in isolated and fleeting moments.
Aquinas believed that final perfection and the beatific vision of God was reserved for the life to come after death, but in this life he believed that by contemplation a perfect vision of God and a perfect knowledge of the truth could be had. For Aquinas perfection involved the disparagement of the world and the desires of the flesh, which he considered the source of evil. Elimination of bodily desires was a prerequisite for obtaining perfection; thus perfection was for Aquinas renunciation. Associated with the obtaining of this perfection was human merit; to obtain perfection one had to do good works by which to acquire merit that would be rewarded in the after life with the beatific vision of God. For those imperfect there was a treasury of merits of the saints from which the imperfect could draw at the discretion of the Church. In order to obtain perfection Aquinas set up a hierarchy of states of perfection to which corresponded the levels of the religious orders. Although he did not deny the possibility of perfection for all persons, he believed that religious vows were certainly a meritorious aid to perfection. He thus perpetuated the spiritual dichotomy between clergy and laity.
The Reformers, both Lutheran and Calvinist, rejected the three ladders, the ladders of Merit, of Speculation, of Union, by which one could obtain perfection. But they retained the Augustinian understanding of man as having a sinful nature and that consequently man cannot obtain perfection in this life. This original sin remains with man until death, even in those who are declared righteous by the imputation of Christ’s merits through faith. These believers are regenerated receiving a new nature, but the old nature is still there in the believer. The experience of chapter 7 of Romans is interpreted as the conflict between these two natures. The Christian life is characterized as struggle with the sinful nature to keep it under control, subject to God’s law. Because of this sinful nature, spiritual perfection is impossible in this life. Lutheran theology saw the believer both simultaneously a saint and sinner. Calvin says that while the goal toward which the pious strive was to appear before God without spot or blemish, the believer will never reach that goal until the sinful physical body is laid aside in death. He saw the physical body as the residence of the depravity of concupiscence. Thus perfection and the physical body are mutually exclusive.
Martin Luther insisted, in opposition to all egocentric form of religion, upon a purely theocentric religion. Whatever the subject he dealt with, the idea of justification, the Lord’s supper, etc., he opposed the egocentric tendency. In his campaign against Catholic Christianity, Luther is governed by this opposition. In catholic piety he finds the egocentric tendency; there everything centers upon man himself, what he does and what happens to him. Salvation which is God’s own work, which God has reserved to Himself alone and accomplished through Christ, is transformed into a work of man; righteousness is transformed from something that God gives into something man achieves. Obedience to God is transformed by the idea of merits into that which yields profit for man. Everything is measured by the standard of human desire and by the importance it has for man. This even applies to God Himself. When God is extolled as the highest good, summum bonum, it is as man’s highest good. Luther’s main objection to Catholic piety is always this, that it puts man’s own self in the place of God. Luther sees himself to be the herald of theocentric religion in his campaign against all egocentricity. This is expressed with clarity in the manifesto which Luther introduces his lectures on Romans (1515-1516). He declares that there is something which is to be broken down and destroyed, and something contrary that is to be built up and planted. And what is to be broken down and destroyed is everything “that is in us,” all our righteousness and wisdom, absolutely everything in which we take a selfish delight. What is to be built up and planted is “everything that is outside us and in Christ.” The righteousness by which God saves us, is not produced by us, but has come to us from outside us; it is not derived from earth, but has come to us from heaven. Luther observed that the whole Catholic doctrine of love displays an egocentric perversion. However much Catholic piety speaks of God’s love, the emphasis is primarily placed on the love we owe to God. The love of God is less God’s love for us than our love for God. Love is regarded essentially as a human achievement. In the Catholic presentation, love never looses the marks of acquisitive love and this can be traced logically back up to self-love. In contrast to Catholic piety, Luther sets a thoroughly theocentric idea of love. When Luther speaks about love in the Christian sense, he draws not from the realm of human love at all, but from God’s love, especially as this has been revealed in Christ. And this love is not acquisitive love, but a love that gives. This is seen especially when Luther speaks about justification. In his famous autobiographical fragment with which he prefaced the Latin edition of his complete works in 1545, Luther speaks of Rom. 1:17 where he made the discovery that changed his understanding of the righteousness of God. Justification is not a question of the “iustitia” [righteousness] in virtue of which God makes demands upon us, but the “iustitia” which God bestows, so Christian love is not concerned with the love with which we love God, but with the love with which God Himself loves. God’s righteousness is the righteousness that God gives [dono], and not the righteousness God requires. Luther uses here the scholastic distinction between active and passive righteousness, rejecting the righteousness of God in the active sense, but accepting it in the passive sense.
Luther was fully aware of the revolutionary nature of his message. He knows that by it he is pronouncing judgment not only upon Catholic “work-righteousness,” but upon “all religions under heaven.” Here there is no difference between Jews, Papists and Turks; in all of them we find the same religious attitude. All false religions are characteristic by the same reasoning: “If I do this and that, God will be gracious to me.” Ultimately, there is only two religions, that which is built on faith in Christ, and that which builds on reason and one’s own works. These are absolutely opposed to each other; if we can deliver ourselves from sin and enter by our righteousness into heaven; then Christ is superfluous. Thus Christianity is bound to regard these false religions as its adversaries. Their religions are man’s attempt to climb up to heaven and is counter to the message that God came down from heaven in Christ and offered eternal life as a gift to be received by faith. This message destroys all false religions that attempt to earn eternal life by the merits of their righteous works. It demolishes all false, egocentric religions.
To understand Luther at this point, we must look at his view of man. Luther rejects the view of man as his nature having a higher and lower part, as having a “spiritual” and a “carnal” nature. For Luther the natural man is “fleshly” in his whole being, in all that he does and is. Not merely the sensible part of man, not merely what his “fleshly” nature makes him do, but also the highest and best in him, and primarily this is “flesh.” Even his righteousness, his religion, and works belong to the “flesh.” Even when he is saved, being justified by faith, the Christian is “simultaneously righteous and a sinner” [simul iustus et peccator]. God justifies the sinner as righteous in such way that the sinner remains a sinner. It is this assertion of Luther’s that the sinfulness of man remains even in the justified man, that has caused offense in Catholic circles.
The medieval interpretation of Christianity is marked by the upward way to God. This is asserted in the legalistic piety of popular Catholicism, but also in the rational theology of Scholasticism and the ecstatic religiosity of Mysticism. These are three ways or ladders by which man climb up to God. Against these three ways of ascent, Luther makes his protest. He will have nothing to do with this “climbing up into the majesty of God.” At the center of Luther’s protest is his rejection of the way of merit. The “good works” that Catholicism promotes are not really good works because they performed for the wrong intention. The general Catholic view is that a work is good and meritorious before God, only when it is done with the intention of obtaining eternal blessedness. It is this intention, this motive, which according to Luther robs it of its value; even makes it condemnable. The one who does the good in order to win “merits” and to promote his blessedness is not wholly devoted to the good itself. He is only using it as a means for climbling up to the Divine Majesty. Only when this intention is rooted out, and the good is done “to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbor,” is it really good at all. Thus Luther rejected the idea of good works as a ladder to heaven. Luther equally rejects all attempts to ascend to God by the way of reason and speculation. He himself tried this way during his time in the monastery. One of the books he took as his guide at that time was Bonaventura’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum. From it he learned of the ascent by the analogical ladder of speculation. Later he rejected any attempt “to climb up to heaven by thinking” because it is doomed to failure. The Way of speculation is impassable as was the Way of merit. If God is to be known, it is only if God chooses to reveal Himself; otherwise, God is unknowable. And God has chosen to reveal Himself in the Incarnation of the Word; in the Incarnation God has descended to us. At the manger of Bethlehem, the Way of reason is exposed as false and vain. Reason in its attempt to ascend to heaven does not get God but only its idea of God. It is not the truth that Way of reason reaches, but just speculation. Luther’s objections to the attempt to ascend up to God by the ladders of merit and of speculation are also applicable to the mystical Way of ascent. Luther rejects the interpretation of the passage of Scripture that has been taken by mysticism for its support, Matt. 5:8: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”
This Scripture seems to point to the mystical experience of seeing God (visio Dei) as the final goal of the Christian life. Does it not speak of purification as the way to that goal, much as Plato speaks of purification which is necessary in order to reach the vision of the self-subsistent Being and Beauty. But Luther will not accept this interpretation. He explains this text not according to an ascent to God, but according to God’s descent.
“Thou mayest not climb up to heaven nor run into a cloister after it…. But that it is a pure heart, which looks and thinks upon what God says.”
And the vision spoken of this text has nothing to do with mystical Vision of God.
“To see His face, as the Scripture says, means rightly to perceive Him as a gracious, good Father, to whom we may look for all good things. But this only comes through faith in Christ.”
Another passage of Scripture that mysticism used in proclaiming the Way of mysticism is the story of the heavenly ladder which Jacob saw in his dream (Gen. 28), Luther rejected their interpretation of this passage as teaching that the heavenly ladder is the ladder of mysticism. God has not commanded us to raise a ladder up to heaven to come to Him; God Himself has provided the ladder and come down to us. In Christ, God has come down to meet us; Christ is the heavenly ladder and the “Way” furnished by God (John 14:6).
The one subject on which Luther and Augustine seem to be in agreement is that self-love is the root of all evil. Augustine stresses this emphatically, especially in the The City of God [De civitate Dei], when he traces the opposition between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the world back to that between love of God [amor Dei] and love of self [amor sui]. But this self-love refers to “inorderd” [inordinata] self-love, which seeks its satisfaction in something other than God, in temporal and transient things. In addition to the perverted self-love, Augustine speaks of a right self-love, which seeks its satisfaction in God Himself. This sort of self-love is so far from being opposed to love for God, that it is equivalent to it. Thus for Augustine, sin is obviously not self-love as such, but only its wrong direction that is sin and the root of sin; Augustine is using another criterion of sin. This other criterion that Augustine finds is the idea that it is linked with sensible and material things. Since man’s nature is at once both spiritual and sensible, man is a citizen of two worlds. By God’s appointment, man has the highest good above him. Man should, therefore, direct his thoughts and desires up towards the super-sensible, spiritual world. But now man’s sensible side of his being offers resistance, and it seeks to drag man down and puts him in bondage to temporal goods. Hence, when Augustine wishes to characterize the sinful man, he says that man is “curvatus.” He is not, as he ought to be, erect and looking upwards, but crooked, bent down to the earth.
Luther’s view is the direct antithesis to these ideas of Augustine. When Luther calls selfishness, self-love, as sin and as the essence of sinfulness of sin, Luther means what he says without any qualification. Luther knows no good self-love. In the commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” Augustine had actually held that a commandment of self-love was implied, even if it is not expressly stated by a separate commandment. Luther, on the contrary, asserts that the Commandment of Love involves the rejection and condemnation of all self-love whatsoever. On the basis of Christ’s words in John 12:25
(“He who loves his life will lose it, and he hates his life in this world shall keep it to eternal life.”),
Luther takes as a fundamental principle: “To love is the same as to hate oneself.” Earlier in the lectures on Romans, Luther says that there are two interpretations of the commandment to love of one’s neighbor possible. It may be taken to mean that both things are commanded, to love one’s neighbor and to love oneself. Or it can be understood so that only love of our neighbor is commanded, while the manner in which we love ourselves is the pattern of our love for our neighbor. Luther adds the comment that this latter interpretation please him better. He later declares that the intrepretation that has prevailed since Augustine is false. In commanding man to love his neighbor as himself, God is in no way commanded that man shall love himself. Self-love is a vicious love, which must be destroyed. Nevertheless, it can serve as a pattern for the right kind of love to our neighbor, just as Adam is a type of Christ. “Just as in Adam we are evil, so in Christ we ought to be good.” Similarly, Jesus uses sinful self-love as an example of how we ought to love our neighbor. Thus Luther finds in the commandment to love one’s neighbor as one’s self, a prohibition of every kind of self-love; even deliverance from self-love.
When stating what man’s corruption is, Luther uses Augustine’s expression: man is crooked or “bent” (curvatus). But Luther uses it in a different sense than Augustine. When Augustine says that man is “bent,” “crooked” (curvus, curvatus), he meant that man’s desires are bent down to the things of earth, that he loves and pursues the lower, temporal things. Luther took it to mean that man has a selfish disposition and he is bent back on himself. In other words, the will is not straight, but “crooked,” turned back to itself. Luther’s concept of sin is governed by self-love. When Paul wrote, “Love seeks not its own” (I Cor. 13:5), Luther sees that sin is the opposite of this; the essence of sin is that man seeks its own self. And since the whole of natural human life is governed by this principle, all humanity is under the dominion of sin. Sin has its seat not merely in man’s sensible nature, but it embraces the whole man. And furthermore sin is not just evil acts of men, but permeates the greatest and most praiseworthy deeds; for they are done for man’s own glory. Even the very highest that man can attain, that is, fellowship with God, is polluted by this egocentricity. It is this that arouse Luther’s hostility to Catholic piety, in which the attainment of this highest good is reduced to a system to obtain it. And it was this Augustinian and Medieval view of self-love as the Way of Salvation that Luther opposed; it must be plucked up by the roots, if true love is to take its place.
The culmination of Luther’s attack on Catholic piety is the removal of love outside the context of justification entirely and elimination of the Catholic idea of “fides caritate formata” [faith formed by love] which asserts that man is justified by faith and love. That is, the decisive thing for man’s justification is not faith but love, Charitas. In the Aristotelian thought, the form of a thing is what gives to matter its reality and value. So love, Charitas, is what gives to faith its reality and value. Faith is the matter, and as such is insubstantial and powerless. Love is the form, the formative principle, that gives to faith its worth and real being. So justification is ultimately not by faith, but by love, Charitas, that man is justified and comes into fellowship with God.
In opposition, Luther asserted that justification takes place by faith alone, “sola fide.” When Luther reads in Paul: “a man is justified by faith, without the works of the law,” he found not merely a rejection of salvation by meritorious works, but the rejection of salvation by love. Justification is not only not by outward works of the law, but also and especially not by love, which is the fulfilling of the law. This teaching has been misunderstood that Luther has set love aside as unimportant and that he was asserting the importance only of faith; and that he had replace the “religion of love” with a “religion of faith.” From the Catholic point of view, Luther has been regarded as the destroyer of the Christian idea of love. Though most Evangelicals do not agree with this judgment, they regard Luther’s treatment of love as the weakest point in his thought, and his polemical position has pushed love too much into the background. Some Evangelicals think that Luther’s preoccupation with his religious task has caused him to forget about the ethical side of Christianity. Although his emphasis on “sola fide” is his religious strength, it is considered to be the source of his ethical weakest, in so far as it caused him to separate, not only the works of love, but love itself, from the basic relationship to God. That “Love has had to stand down in favor of faith” is the almost universal view in this matter.
But Luther is not the destroyer of the Christian idea of love, but the destroyer of the wrong idea of Christian love that dominated Catholic piety. The Catholic idea of love is a distortion of the Christian idea of love. And Luther is not neglecting the ethical side of Christianity by emphasizing “sola fide” but is the restoring of the true basis for the ethical side of Christianity. Luther is rejecting the idea that man’s relationship to God is based on the good that man does and is, that is, on man’s love and his works of love. It is this idea that Luther is rejecting in his emphasis on justification by faith alone. Luther is not setting faith against love, but is asserting the correct relationship of faith to love. It is not our love for God that justifies us, but God’s love for us that justifies us through faith receiving that love. Luther understood love as nothing other than God Himself; thus Luther can say of the man who abides in love, “that he and God become one cake [eine Kuche]”. Luther had no intention to minimize and depreciate love. In rejecting the Scholastic doctrine of “fides caritate formata” Luther is rejecting the idea that it is our love for God that justifies us. By “justification by faith alone” Luther does not mean that it is our faith, our believing, that justifies us, but by our faith we receive the righteousness that God in His love has provided for us in Christ. We are justified not by our righteousness but by God’s righteousness. To preach faith in Christ is nothing other than to preach love, that is, God’s love. Through faith we are the children of God, and we love by the love we have received. This is the true basis for the ethical side of Christianity. Luther also rejects the idea of grace of Catholic piety as the enablement of God through the sacraments to do the good works by which the Christian can merit eternal life. He understood God’s grace as God’s unmerited favor, whereby God provides the righteousness that we need.
Christianity is a religion of love. Luther’s opposition and criticism of Catholic piety and theology was directed against its misunderstanding of love. His problem with Catholic piety was its understanding of love as egocentric, self-centered love. Luther’s understanding of love was the direct antithesis of Augustine’s ideas of love. Augustine understood all love to be acquisitive love, which seeks its satisfaction in something. Augustine distinguishes between perverted self-love and right self-love; perverted self-love is directed to the temporal and transient things, seeking find its satisfaction in something other than God. This sort of self-love is opposed to love for God, which seeks its satisfaction in God, as its summun bonum. Luther rejected this understanding of love, which came to dominate Catholic piety. Luther brands all self-love as sin; he held that self-love is the essence of the sinfulness of sin. Luther argued that all love that is not centered in God, not theocentric, is evil, and it is wrong to call it “love”: “To love is the same as to hate oneself” [Est enim diligere se ipsum odisse].
John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of Methodism, was born in Epworth, England, to Samuel and Susana Wesley; he was the fifteenth of nineteen children. Although John’s grandparents were Puritan Nonconformist, his parents returned to the Established Church of England, where his father for most of his ministry held the livings of Epworth (1697-1735) and Wroot (1725-1735). He was a staunch High Churchman. Wesley in his early years was instructed by his remarkable mother, who sought to instill in him a sense of piety leading to a wholehearted devotion to God.
John was educated at Charterhouse, a school for boys in London, and then at Christ Church, Oxford University, where he received the B.A. degreein 1724 and the M.A. degree in 1727. He was a serious student of logic and religion, but he did not experience his “religious” conversion until 1725, when he was confronted with the decision of what he was to do for life. Through the influence of his mother and a friend, and the reading of Jeremy Taylor and Thomas a Kempis, he decided to make religion “the business of his life”. In 1725 he was ordained a deacon, elected to a fellowship at Lincoln College at the same university (1726), and served as his father’s curate at Wroot (1727-1729). He preached his first sermon in South Leigh. And in 1728 he was ordained a priest by John Potter. He returned to Oxford and became the leader of a small band of undergraduate students, including George Whitefield, that was organized earlier by his younger brother, Charles, for spiritual improvement. This band, called the “Holy Club”, were later called “Methodist” because of their strict method of studying the Bible and their rigid rules of self-denial and works of charity. During this period (1729-1735) both he and his brother came under the influence of the nonjuror and mystic, William Law. It was during this period that he formed his views on Christian perfection, that was to become the hallmark of Methodism, even though he did not understand justification by faith yet, and, as he confessed later, he was seeking to be justified by his own works-righteousness.
In 1735, when Wesley began his Journal and he continued it until his death, Wesley went to Georgia in the New World as a missionary, accepting the invitation from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to undertake a mission to the Indians and colonists there. Although the Indians alluded him, he served as a priest to settlers there under General James Oglethorpe. During a storm on the crossing over to Georgia, Wesley was deeply impressed by a group of twenty-six German Moravian missionaries on board the ship. Their simple faith in the face of death (the fear of dying had been constantly with Wesley since his youth) opened him to the Moravian evangelical faith. The cheerful courage of this company in a storm convinced Wesley that the Moravian had a trust in God that was not yet his. Soon after reaching Savannah he met Spangenberg, who asked him the question: “Do you know Jesus Christ?” Welsey answered, “I know He is the Saviour of the world.” Spangenberg replied, “True, but do you know He has saved you?” When Wesley returned to England in 1738, after his disastrous experience in Georgia, he met the Moravian, Peter Boehler, who exhorted him to trust Christ alone for salvation. As the result of his conversations with Boehler, Wesley was “clearly convinced of unbelief, of the want of that faith whereby alone we are saved.” At a Moravian band meeting, an Anglian “society”, in Aldersgate Street, London, (Wednesday, May 24, 1738), as he listened to the reading of Luther’s preface to the Commentary on Romans, Wesley felt his “heart strangely warmed”. As he recorded later,
“About a quarter before nine, while he [Luther] was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and a assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
This experience determined Welsey’s understanding of the normal mode of entrance into the Chirstian life. And it also made him an evangelist. He declared later, “Then it pleased God to kindle a fire which I trust will never be extinguished.”
Shortly after this conversion experience, Wesley went to Germany and visited the Moravaian settlement at Herrnhut and met Count Zinzendorf. When he returned England, with a former member of the Holy Club, George Whitefield, he began to preach salvation by faith. This “new doctrine” was considered redundant by the sacramentalists in the Established Church, who believed that people were saved by virtue of their infant baptism. The established churches began to close their doors to their preaching. This did not deter the Methodist (the name carried over from their Oxford days). Wesley believed that he was called “to reform the nation, particularly the Church, and spread Scriptural holiness over the land.” So he and Whitefield began preaching in the open air. In April, 1739, Wesley followed Whitefield to Bristol, where a revival broke out among the miners of Kingswood. In order to conserve the gains of their evangelism, Wesley organized the new converts into Methodist “societies” and “bands”, which sustained both them and the revival. The revival continued under his direct leadership for fifty years. He traveled some 250,000 miles throughout England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, preaching some 40,000 sermons. Although Wesley never visited North America again, he sent preachers there and 1784 he ordained Thomas Coke to superintend the work there. Wesley literally considered the “world as his parish” to which he spread “scriptural holiness throughout the land”. He remained loyal to the Established Church all his life. Methodism did not become a separate denomination until after his death.
Wesley’s theology is essentially Arminianism, which is usually contrasted with Calvinism. But his Arminianism is not just a negation of the five points of Calvinism. Wesley affirms the sovereignty of God to overcome the “sinful, devilish nature” of man, by the work of the Holy Spirit. Wesley called this process prevenient grace, justifying grace, and sanctifying grace (grace being nearly synonymous with the work of the Holy Spirit).
Prevenient grace for Wesley is the universal work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and lives of people between their conception and their conversion that prepares them for conversion. Original sin, according to Wesley, makes it necessary for the Holy Spirit to initiate salvation, because people are bound by sin and death. People experience the gentle wooing of the Holy Spirit, which prevents them from moving so far from “the way” that when they finally understand the claims of the gospel upon their lives, they have the freedom to say yes. The justifying grace is the work of the Holy Spirit at the moment of conversion when they say yes to the call of prevenient grace by placing their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Wesley understood conversion to have two phases in a person’s experience. The first phase is justification which includes the Spirit imputing to the believer the righteousness of Christ. The second phase is regeneration or the new birth. This lays the ground work for sanctification or the imparting of righteousness. These two phases mark the distinctiveness of Wesley’s theology. Here he combines the “faith alone” emphasis of the Protestant Reformation with the passion for holiness so prevalent in the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Sanctifying grace describes the work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of the believers between their conversion and their death. Faith in Christ saves them from hell and sin for heaven and good works. Imputed righteousness, according to Wesley, entitles one to heaven, and imparted righteousness qualifies one for heaven. Here Wesley goes to great lengths to describe his view of Christian perfection. The process of sanctification or perfection culminates in the experience of “pure love” where one’s love becomes devoid of self-interest. This second work of grace is the main work of the Holy Spirit in lives of believers. The first work of grace, justification, imputing of Christ’s righteousness, must be followed by the second work of grace, sanctification, the imparting of Christ’s righteousness. According to Wesley this second work of grace was not just a single experience but was also an on-going, continuous and dynamic process moving toward perfection, perfect love. This concept of continuous process was later clarified by the mystics such as Francois Fenelon, whose phrase “moi progressus ad infinitum” [“my progress is without end”] impressed Wesley and became the major teaching for the perpetuation of the Evangelical Revival. The watchword of the Revival was “Go on to perfection; otherwise you cannot keep what you have.” According to Wesley prevenient grace is a process and justifying grace is instantaneous, but sanctifying grace is both a process and instantaneous. Although Wesley spoke of the instantaneous experience that he called “entire sanctification” subsequent to justification, his major emphasis was upon the continuous process of going on to perfection.
But this understanding of sanctification as a process was lost by Wesley’s followers. In the 1840s and 50s there originated in the United States a movement that endeavored to preserve and propagate John Wesley’s teaching on entire sanctification and Christian perfection. Sanctification was seen as instantaneous experience, a second work of grace, in which inbred sin is eradicated. This Holiness movement emphasized that salvation involved two experiences. The first was conversion or justification, in which one is freed from the guilt of sin, and in the second experience called entire sanctification or full salvation, in which one is liberated from the flaw in their moral nature that causes them to sin. This experience makes possible for them to fulfill the entire law of God. This doctrine of entire sanctification became the distinctive of the Holiness Movement. When contemporary writers and teachers within Methodist Church attempted to downplay this instantaneous experience and emphasize the continuous character of sanctification, the Holiness people withdrew from the Methodist Church and formed their own denominations: the Wesleyan Methodist in 1843 and the Free Methodist in 1860. These became the first two denominations with the Holiness teaching of entire sanctification. After the Civil War a full-fledged Holiness revival broke out within the ranks of Methodist, and in 1867 the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness was formed. From 1893 it was known as the National Holiness Association (NHA) and in 1971 it was renamed the Christian Holiness Association. Until the 1890s the Methodist dominated the movement and channeled its work into their churches. By the 1880s as tensions between Methodism and the Holiness association increased, the first independent Holiness denominations began to appear, The gap between the two widened as Methodist practice drifted toward a sedate, middle-class American Protestantism, while the Holiness groups insisted that they were practicing primitive Wesleyanism and were the successors of Wesley in America. The small schismatic bodies gradually coalesced into formal denominations, the largest of which were the Church of God, Anderson, Indiana (1880), Church of the Nazarene (1908), and the Pilgrim Holiness Church (1897), which later merged with the Wesleyan Methodist in 1968. The polity of these churches was a modified Methodism toward somewhat more congregational autonomy, and the “second blessing” of entire sanctification was the heart of their theologies. Most of them operated with a strict perfectionist code of personal morality and demanded that their adherents wear plain dress and abstinence from “worldly” pleasures and amusements. Almost all of them allowed women to be ordained into the ministry and occupy leadership positions.
The Holiness teaching quickly spread beyond Methodism. A Mennonite group, the United Missionary Church (formerly the Mennonite Brethren in Christ and since a merger in 1969 is known as Missionary Church), adopted a doctrine of entire sanctification and Holiness standard of personal conduct. Another group, the Brethren in Christ, founded in 1863, of mixed Pennsylvania pietists and Mennonites, also adopted Wesleyan perfectionism. Four Quaker yearly meetings that had been influenced by the Holiness teachings came together in 1947 to form the Evangelical Friends Alliance. The Salvation Army also adopted the Holiness teachings. The Christian and Missionary Alliance with its teaching on Christ as Savior, sanctifier, healer, and coming King, had affinities with the Holiness movement, but never accepted the doctrine of the second work of grace and the eradication of the sinful nature. Two of its teachers and ministers, A. B. Simpson and A. W. Tozer, were widely read in Holiness circles.
The Pentecostal movement began as an offshoot of the Holiness Movement. It began at a small school, Bethel Bible School, in Topeka, Kansas, which was founded by a Holiness evangelist, Charles Fox Parham. Parham had concluded that speaking in tongues was the sign of the second work of grace, after a student, Agnes Ozman, experienced speaking in tongues, or glossolalia, in January, 1901. The teaching and practice spread rapidly among Holiness groups. They became known as Pentecostals because they identified their experience with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the 120 gathered in the upper room on the day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2. They called their experience the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” on the basis of the promise of the risen Jesus recorded in Acts 1:5, “John baptized with water, but before many days you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” The movement came to Southern California in 1906 when a student of Parham, William J. Seymour, a black Holiness evangelist from Houston, Texas, came to Los Angeles, Calif., and began to hold revival meetings at an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal Church on Azuza Street in downtown Los Angeles. The Azuza Street Revival from 1906 to 1909 became the center from which Pentecostalism became a world movement. Other Holiness groups were pentecostalized rapidly as leaders of Holiness Movement came to Azuza Street to investigate what was happening there. Among the Azuza Street “pilgrims” were G. B. Cashwell (North Carolina), C H. Mason (Tennessee), Glen Cook (California), A. G. Argue (Canada), and W. H. Durham (Chicago). Within a year from the opening of the Azuza Street meetings (April, 1906), these and others spread the Pentecostal message across the nation.
But many of the Holiness groups were not willing to believe that speaking in tongues was sign of the second work of grace. Sharp controversies and divisions developed in several Holiness denominations. The Pentecostals left or were forced to leave their Holiness denominations and they formed the first Pentecostal denominations, among which were the Pentecostal Holiness Church, the Church of God in Christ, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Apostolic Faith (Portland, Oregon), the United Holy Church, and the Pentecostal Free-Will Baptist Church. Most of these churches were located in the southern states and experienced rapid growth after the Pentecostal Revival. Two of these, the Church of God in Christ, and the United Holy Church were predominantly black. A controversy developed among these churches about sanctification. Some like Parham and Seymour taught that speaking with tongues was the sign of the “second work of grace”, but others held that the baptism of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues was a “third work of grace”. Then there were those like William H. Durham who in 1910 began to teach his “finished work” theology, which taught that sanctification is progressive work of the Holy Spirit based on the finished work of Christ on Calvary. The baptism of the Holy Spirit was the first filling of the Holy Spirit by which one is enabled by the Holy Spirit to live and minister. The Assemblies of God was formed in 1914 based on Durham’s teaching and soon became the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. Most of the Pentecostal Churches after 1914 were formed on the model of Assemblies of God. They include the Pentecostal Church of God, the International Church of the Four Square Gospel (founded in 1927 by Aimee Semple McPherson), and Open Bible Standard Church.