A Lutheran reads Wesley

One of the great things about a long weekend is the chance to catch up on my reading. I’m one who’ll go to library and check out an armfull of books, intending to get to them all…eventually. This weekend I finally got to John Wesley’s A Simple Account of Christian Perfection. It’s basically a collection of reflections, sermons, hymns, and essays on Wesley’s distinctive doctrine.

In a nutshell, Wesley’s claim is that it is possible for Christians to attain perfection in this life, in some cases many years prior to death. By perfection Wesley means, essentially, to be so completely full of love for God and one’s neighbor such that one no longer commits sin (in the sense of an intentional infraction of the moral law). Perfection, he is careful to point out, does not free us from ignorance or other weaknesses that belong to our status as finite embodied beings per se. Perfection also has a strong doxological and eucharistic aspect as we come to accept all things that happen to us with praise and thanksgiving, seeing them as God’s will.

For Wesley, justification means the remission of guilt on account of Christ’s atonement, whereas sanctification is the regeneration of the heart whereby we are “cleansed from all unrighteousness.” He thinks that it is very clear from the Bible that God promises to do this – not merely to save us from the consequences of sin, but to save us from sin itself.

It’s important to note that Wesley doesn’t think that perfection of total sanctification usually comes immediately after justification. There may be, and often is, a long period of growth toward perfection during which we still struggle with sin (though he doesn’t rule out that God may act on someone to bring them to perfection almost immediately). However, the final transition to perfection is an instantaneous movement even when it is preceded by a long period of growth. He also points out that, once attained, this state can be lost, but it needn’t be.

Wesley seems to have a synergistic account of sanctification – while justification is by faith alone, he thinks that the human will cooperates with God’s grace in attaining perfection. Though at times he suggests that it is entirely God working in us. So I’m not sure if he was unclear on this relation, or if he clarifies it elsewhere. He also thinks that we can know both that we have been justified and that we have attained total sanctification. This knowledge seems to come from self-examination, though others can corroborate it to a certain extent. Though he doesn’t claim to have attained this state himself, he does claim to know of people who have.

What to make of Wesley’s account? First of all, I think he’s right that the Bible (and tradition) holds that we are not just forgiven our sins on account of Christ, but God wants to actually deliver us from our sin. I think most Christians would agree that justification & the forgiveness of sins inagurates a new life in which we participate in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. And it has usually been taken that some progress in sanctification is possible in this life, that Christians are empowered to live according to God’s standards of rigteousness.

Does that mean, though, that it’s possible to attain perfection in this life? Here I think Wesley may overreach. First of all, I think his epistemology is a bit questionable. Is it really possible to determine by self-examination that we have been justified and/or attained perfection? This seems like a notoriously unreliable procedure. Once we make our own internal states the test of how we stand with God, we seem to be in danger of building our house on some pretty unstable sand.

This is where I think Luther’s emphasis on the “external word” can have a salutary effect. According to Luther we should not look inward to try and determine if we really have faith, but rather we should look outward – to Christ and to the promises God makes to us, which we receive through the preached word and the sacraments. These external means of grace have a solidity and objectivity that we can trust. Luther well knew the dangers of excessive self-examination.

Even if we could verify it by self-examination, I wonder if asserting that some do in fact attain perfection is to claim to know more than has been revealed to us. Exegetical considerations aside, it seems safer to say that one may attain perfection, and that it is something to be strived for, but we should be agnostic about whether this in fact occurs. We could draw a parallel with the question of universalism. Some want to positively assert that God will or must save everyone. But this seems to be more than we can know, and in fact an attempt to tie God’s hands by appeal to some abstract notion of justice. Better, I think, to say that we should hope and pray that God will save everyone, without asserting that we know this will in fact happen.

Another reason to be agnostic about the attainment of perfection is that making perfection the telos of our life may, ironically, lead us to an excessive self-concern. This is another point where the Lutheran tradition has a contribution to make. Rightly understood, justification by faith alone ought to inculcate in us a certain self-forgetfulness. Since my destiny is secure, because my life is “hidden with Christ in God,” I don’t have to worry about traversing some path of holiness or climing some spiritual ladder. Again, the Christians attention is turned outward toward the neighbor and his needs. Precisely because I don’t have to worry about myself I am free to serve the neighbor in love.

That said, I think Wesley has a word to say to us as well. Lutherans, perhaps becuase they have tended to focus so much on justification, have downplayed sanctification. This can result in a certain complacency about sin, whereas Wesley reminds us that it is always possible to press on further toward the goal, even if we don’t attain it in this life.

Another contribution that Wesley’s emphasis on holiness can make is that it can give shape to Christian love. In emphasizing the neighbor and his needs, a Lutheran ethos may fail to provide us with a way of distinguishing genuine from spurious needs. “Love and do what thou wilt” may be a sufficiently concrete ethic for saints, but I suspect that the rest of us need more guidance than that. Lutherans have often fallen back on the “orders of creation” as specifying in more detail the obligations we have to others. But this can blunt the radicalness of Christianity and sanctify the status quo. By contrast, the Wesleyan emphasis on the imitatio Christi can give a more particularly Christian shape to works of love directed toward the neighbor.