I would like to take several of these articles to unpack the Wesleyan understanding of salvation. I am hardly the first person to do this, so this may sound somewhat familiar. I am hoping to put the most important issues right up front and then spend a bit of time highlighting implications that don’t always get raised for those who want to go just a bit deeper.
The first stage on the way to salvation from a Wesleyan perspective is Prevenient or Preventing grace. I am including both of those terms because, while you are much more likely to hear the term “prevenient grace,” Wesley just as often, or even more often, talked about “preventing grace.” At their core, they are both saying the same thing: this is the grace that God gives to us before we even give a thought to him.
From Wesley’s perspective, there was not a single person in the world who has not received some measure of this prevenient grace. This is what he writes in one place. “No man living is entirely destitute of what is vulgarly called natural conscience. But it is not natural: It is more properly termed preventing grace. Every man has a greater or less measure of this, which waits not for the call of man” (Sermon 85, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation, III.4). That is to say, when we talk about people having a conscience or knowing good from evil, Wesley taught that this is not a sign of what it means to be human, but what it means to be someone already embraced by the grace of God.
To be clear, there is a huge difference between someone being “embraced by the grace of God,” and being “saved.” Just because God has reached out to everyone doesn’t mean that everyone responds to that call. This is no form of universalism. What it is, is a powerful theological basis for why we always reach out to those who have not yet given their lives to Christ. We are never making the first move. We proclaim the Good News of Jesus because we believe two things: first, that God genuinely wants all people to be saved and so we need to direct the call to all people. Second, that God has already been working in the hearts and lives of everyone we meet. When we talk about people being able to choose or reject God, it is not because we believe that we can do that by nature, but because God has given us that power through grace, through Christ, and by the Holy Spirit.
Probably every person who has become a Christian can bear witness to the work of preventing or prevenient grace in their lives. They can look back to their life before they ever sought God, or even when they were actively running away from him, and see God at work. By the way, this is the kind of thing that Wesley meant about taking “experience” seriously in our theological work. It isn’t that our experience can tell us what is theologically true, but that if Scripture teaches something to be true, we should expect to experience it in our lives. Wesley taught about this kind of grace not just because he was convinced that it was a Biblical doctrine, but because he saw it confirmed over and over again in people’s lives.
When people talk about reclaiming a distinctively Wesleyan witness, part of what we mean is to reclaim this doctrine of prevenient grace. Wesley did not invent the doctrine (the term shows up at least in Augustine in the fourth century). However, it has been denied, usually quietly, by groups of Christians over the centuries. There are some who have interpreted the Bible as teaching that God does not, in fact, want all people to be saved and so only died for some, only calls some, and only saves some. Those traditions will still have some way of saying that God blesses even those who are not chosen, usually using a term like God giving “common grace” to them.
Sometimes you may even hear that “common grace” is the same thing as “prevenient grace.” Some people might interpret them the same way, but the doctrine of “common grace” is at home and has its origin in a tradition that considers it completely apart from “saving grace.” That is to say, “common grace” has historically been understood as “the grace God gives to people he is not going to save.” In the Wesleyan tradition, prevenient or preventing grace is understood as the first step on the journey toward salvation and always has salvation as its goal, even if specific people resist it.
The other major way that the Wesleyan understanding of prevenient grace is quietly denied is when people argue that “free will” is something that we have just because we are human. The argument is usually that God just had to give us free will because it just wouldn’t be fair if he didn’t. If there had never been a Fall, maybe we could come to that conclusion. The problem is that the Fall broke our ability to choose God on our own strength. If God didn’t act to restore our ability to choose by grace, not one of us could be saved. The fact that we have a choice in the first place is because God has shown grace and mercy to us before we were even capable of choosing him.
A Wesleyan understanding of this first step toward salvation can be summarized this way: God wants all people to be saved, so God restores our ability to choose him by grace and through the Holy Spirit. Because of that, we are empowered to respond by faith and we share the Good News with the whole world because we know that every person we meet has also received the grace of God, even if they don’t know it yet.
It is no coincidence that the Wesleyan revival of the eighteenth century led to the first massive modern movement of international missionary activity. We must reclaim and emphasize this crucial part of our heritage as we live into God’s call for our lives in faithfulness!
