The first reaction almost everyone has to the fact that John Wesley taught a doctrine called "Christian Perfection” is to be upset about it. We wonder what he could possibly be thinking. After all, doesn’t Paul say, in Philippians 3:12, “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus?” If not even Paul can say that he is perfect, what hope do the rest of us have to be perfect?
This is a fascinating case of needing to make sure we understand the words being used because, if we aren’t very careful, we will misunderstand. The first thing to notice is that, just three verses later in that same letter, Paul continues by saying, “Let us therefore, as many as are perfect, have this attitude…” (Philippians 4:15). If Paul can say that he is both not-perfect and perfect in the same paragraph, there must be some sense in which we can be perfect and also a sense in which we are not able to be perfect that we must hold together. Wesley structures his whole sermon “On Christian Perfection” on that double reality.
We also need to realize that Wesley uses the term “perfect” somewhat differently than we may be used to. Again, in his sermon “On Christian Perfection,” Wesley lays out a way in which no one is perfect. First, everyone is finite and so there will always be things that people do not know. Because of that, there will also always be things that people make mistakes about. A Wesleyan understanding of Christian Perfection does not mean a person doesn’t make mistakes.
That being said, Wesley does, however, describe Christians as being able to become perfect in the sense that they no longer commit sins. That may feel like it is a contradiction. How can we still make mistakes and yet not commit sins? Wesley does not try to avoid this tension but addresses it head-on.
In his treatise, “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection,” Wesley sketches out his position in five short points:
“1.) Not only sin, properly so called, (that is, a voluntary transgression of a known law,) but sin, improperly so called, (that is, an involuntary transgression of a divine law, known or unknown,) needs the atoning blood. (2.) I believe there is no such perfection in this life as excludes these involuntary transgressions which I apprehend to be naturally consequent on the ignorance and mistakes inseparable from mortality. (3.) Therefore sinless perfection is a phrase I never use, lest I should seem to contradict myself. (4.) I believe, a person filled with the love of God is still liable to these involuntary transgressions. (5.) Such transgressions you may call sins, if you please: I do not, for the reasons above-mentioned.” (§19)
To recap for clarity, Wesley distinguishes between two things we might mean by the word, “sin:” One is a deliberate violation of a known law of God, and the other is any unintentional violation of a law of God, whether the person knew it or not. Wesley is arguing that, while we need atonement for every way in which we fall short of God’s perfect will, only the first of these two categories is “sin” in the sense the Bible usually talks about sin.
This distinction is going to rub some people the wrong way. After all, what Wesley describes as sin “improperly so called” is precisely what many Protestant theologians have made more or less the definition of sin. It is no wonder that Wesley has been misunderstood. The point for our purposes is that, if someone were to say, “Well, we can’t be made perfect because, after all, we will always make mistakes,” Wesley would agree that we make mistakes, but that those mistakes aren’t what a Biblical notion of perfection is talking about.
Something the Bible does that is often under-appreciated, is talk about righteousness in two distinct ways. One way is the way that people usually use it, where a person is more or less righteous and it makes sense to compare the relative righteousness of two people. The other way the Bible talks about it is when it compares all human beings with God. This is why we get declarations that some individuals, such as Job, are “righteous” (Job 1:8), and also that there are “none righteous, not even one” (Romans 3:10). When Wesley teaches that we can be made perfect in love, he is talking about attaining righteousness in the first sense, not the second.
Once we clarify that Wesley does not mean what we might think that he means, people sometimes still object to it, but it is worth noting what people might object to, and whether it is an appropriate response.
Setting the bar as high as Wesley does can seem to some people as if he is making Christianity too hard. Of course, we need to be clear about what we mean by that. Do we mean that being perfected in love is too hard for us to do, because we are weak and broken sinners? Of course it is, but then again, by the same logic, all of Christian faith is too hard for us. Don’t forget that Wesley doesn’t pull this doctrine out of thin air. It is based on everything that comes before it in our relationship with God. If we say that it is too hard, it means that we are saying that, even with the almighty power of the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us, the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead (Romans 8:11), we cannot avoid doing things on purpose that we know are sins. Is that the kind of position that we want to take? Can we reconcile that with the gospel?
When we are confronted with a Wesleyan understanding of Christian Perfection, with all of the clarifications that we often need to make in order to understand it correctly, we can find that it functions in a prophetic way. It becomes the undoing of all of our excuses. Sometimes, we say “It is too hard,” when what we mean by that is, “I don’t want to give up the sin in my life,” or “I do not want to open myself up so completely to the will and the power of God that I stop committing sins,” or even “I kind of like some of the sin in my life and I do not want to give it up.” In that case, we have a different kind of problem; or perhaps, it is the same problem, only harder to ignore.
In the end, the conviction that Christians not only can be made perfect in love, but that they should be made perfect in love, and made perfect in this way in this life, is the necessary conclusion of every other aspect of a Wesleyan understanding of salvation. We cannot get rid of it without undoing every other aspect.
At its core, this key Wesleyan doctrine states that there is only one Christian answer to the question, “Which of my sins do I believe is more powerful than the grace of God,” and that is the answer “none of them.” Any other answer implies that some of our sin is too powerful, even for God. If God is more powerful than sin, we must affirm something like Wesley’s doctrine of Christian Perfection. We might use other terms, but the core of the conviction must remain, or else we confess that we are determined to be servants of sin all our lives.
