Table Of ContentWESLEY
AND
SANCTIFICATION
A STUDY IN THE DOCTRINE
OF SALVATION
BY
HARALD LINDSTROM
FRANCIS ASBURY PRESS
oFZondervan Publishing House
Grand Rapids. Michigan
Wesley and Sanctification
Copyright © 1980 by The Zondervan Corporation,
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Francis Asbury Press is an imprint of Zondervan
Publishing House, 1415 Lake Drive, S.E.,
Grand Rapids, Michigan 49506
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Foreword © by Timothy L. Smith
ISBN 0-310-75011-3
Printed in the United States of America
84 85 86 87 88 89 90 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my Father
and the memory
of my Mother
FOREWORD
By Timothy L. Smith
Harald Lindstrom’s classic study of John Wesley’s doctrine of
sanctification, long out of print, remains the most accurate and
comprehensive description we have of the theology of the founder of
Methodism. Its accuracy stems from the fact that Lindstrom relied
principally upon Wesley’s sermons to define his understanding of
scriptural Christianity. Its comprehensiveness reflects the fact that
John Wesley saw, and spent his lifetime explaining, that the promise of
salvation was the central theme of biblical theology and that the
experience of sanctifying grace was the essence of salvation.
In the year 1738 Wesley discovered what he often thereafter took
care to explain, that in the New Testament the term “salvation” did not
refer simply to eternal blessedness in heaven. It signified, rather, the
experience of new life in Christ that enabled believers to live “soberly,
righteously, and godly in this present world.” In the spring before his
own experience of it at Aldersgate, he also learned from a fresh reading
of the four Gospels and the Book of the Acts that the faith that brings
such a “great salvation” is the gift of God’s grace, not the fruit of our
striving. This faith was far more than mere belief in God, which heathen
persons, he said, often display, or in the truth about Jesus Christ, which
even the devils know and for which they tremble. Rather, as Ephesians
2:8-10 puts it, the faith that is God’s gift makes believers new persons,
“God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works.” He
used this text for both the “Aldersgate” sermon at Oxford in June, 1738,
and for the one he published on Christian perfection twenty-five years
later, called “Scripture Way of Salvation.” This promise of a divine
bestowment of both justifying and regenerating grace was, for Wesley,
the heart of the New Testament’s good news, from Zacharias to Saint
Paul.
Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification, Lindstrom explains
carefully, sprang also from this scriptural promise of hallowing grace.
Justification makes believers just. They receive the power of a new life
from Christ by receiving his Holy Spirit. Their experience of such a
“new birth” makes good works possible. Thereafter, faith working by
love, “the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus,” keeps them free from bondage to
the principle of sin and death and enables them to fulfill the law of
Christ. From the earliest days of the Wesleyan revival, Wesley loved to
preach on regeneration from Saint Paul’s great text, Romans 14:17, “the
kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost.”
The holiness thus begun in the experience of the new birth, Wesley
believed the Scriptures declared, increases as believers walk with God.
Soon they discover the depths of their inward bent to sinning, and in
renewed repentance cry for deliverance from it. God answers that
prayer in a second moment of grace that brings purity of heart and
perfect love. Wesley always carefully distinguished, however, the
inbred sin from which we are to be delivered from the human frailty
displayed in erroneous judgment and psychic or mental weaknesses of
various sorts. The issue was always the motivation of loVe. Christian
perfection consisted, he must have written a hundred times, in loving
God with all one’s heart, mind, soul, and strength, and other human
beings as oneself. And he understood love in Hebrew terms, of course:
loyalty, or faithfulness, grounded in thankful affection for the God who
made and kept his promises.
John Wesley believed that the covenant and promise of such love was
the central theme of all Christian theology. For this reason, if
Lindstrom’s volume had consisted simply of the elaboration of the
doctrine of entire sanctification set forth in chapters three and four, the
result would have been a distortion of biblical and Wesleyan faith. For
the system of theology that bounded and sustained the Methodist
founder’s teaching about Christian perfection comprehended all the
scriptural doctrines of salvation: human sin and God’s prevenient grace;
the atonement of Christ and its power, through faith, to justify and
sanctify fallen persons; the order in which the hallowing process moves
forward through the great moments of faith; the divine source and
ethical consequences of Christian love; and the relationship of that
“righteousness of faith” to final or eternal salvation. Lindstrom
expounds Wesley’s view of these five supporting doctrines in five
chapters of remarkable depth and clarity, showing their organic
connection to the promise of renewal in the image of God. The logical and
spiritual unity of these doctrines constituted for Wesley the sum of the
gospel.
His system of Christian theology has been too much neglected.
Persons inside the Wesleyan movement should have relied upon it to
sustain and clarify their thinking about the Holy Spirit during the
confusing discussions of recent years. If they begin afresh to rely upon it
now, pastors and theologians both within and outside the Wesleyan
tradition, who have long been misled to suppose that Wesley was not a
theologian but simply an evangelist, would find in his exposition of
scriptural faith an antidote to the epidemic of antinomianism that has
gripped twentieth-century evangelical piety.
Harald Lindstrom was educated in theology at the University of
Uppsala, Sweden in the late 1930’s, when that community was a vital
center of spiritual and theological renewal. Uppsala theologians stood
much closer to Martin Luther’s understanding of reformation doctrine
than did the school then forming around Karl Barth at Basle,
Switzerland. They were deeply influenced by Anders Nygren’s great
work, Agape and Eros, a study of the Christian idea of love, and were
preoccupied, as Lutherans properly are, with the doctrine of
justification by faith. Concern for the biblical conceptions of sin and of
salvation through the Atonement prompted Lindstrom’s rigorous study
of the way in which these doctrines became crucial in John Wesley’s
emergence from Anglican moralism.
To be sure, Lindstrom’s work minimized somewhat the contribution
of the formerly Lutheran Moravians to Wesley’s thought, possibly
because Lutheran theologians are rarely comfortable with Moravian
spirituality. He also minimized, I think, Wesley’s deep reliance upon the
Scriptures as well as his grounding in Anglican and Catholic doctrines of
the Atonement. The latter were especially important during the
fourteen years of public ministry that preceded his moment of saving
trust at Aldersgate. But the volume spells out in clear and relevant
detail the revolutionary influence that Wesley himself always ascribed
to his discovery, with Moravian Peter Bohler’s help, of the doctrine of
justification by “living” faith. That discovery, symbolized rather than
explained, I think, by Wesley’s experience at Aldersgate, broke the
leader of Oxford’s “Holy Club” away from the influence of William Law,
his great Anglican contemporary. Lindstrom makes clear the influence
of Law’s two books, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, published
in 1724, and A Practical Treatise Upon Christian Perfection, published
two years later, upon John and Charles Wesley during their years at
Oxford.
Wesley’s doctrine of original sin owed much less to William Law,
however, than to his study of the Bible and the early church fathers.
Lindstrom’s first chapter explains that, as fully developed in his
sermons, Wesley’s teaching was identical with that of Luther and
Calvin. All three drew from St. Paul and St. Augustine the conviction
that humanity’s fall, at Eden, resulted in total depravity. Although
Wesley pointed out that traces of the divine image survived the Fall,
repentance, faith and even an earnest intention to seek salvation, to say
nothing of striving to recover the divine image in holiness, were all
impossible without the prevenient grace of God. That grace “went
before”—as the meaning of the old English word “prevenient”
declares—everything else. It gave human beings, primarily through
their consciences, some knowledge of God and the ability to respond
with repentance to divine conviction for sin, and with faith to the
promise of salvation. I believe Lindstrom’s six pages on Wesley’s
doctrine of prevenient grace are the clearest statement of it ever made.
In the second chapter, the author shows that Wesley’s emphasis upon
the doctrine of the Atonement stemmed from his growing conviction of
the depth of human sinfulness. Here, again, Lindstrom tends to date
Wesley’s doctrine from the Aldersgate experience rather than, as I
think in hindsight is more accurate, from the young scholar’s deep
dependence upon divine grace, especially in the sacrament of
communion, during the Oxford years when he thought the exercise of a
holy discipline was the scriptural way to holiness. But Lindstrom
explains accurately the view of the New Testament conception of the
moral law that Wesley set forth in a series of three great sermons on the
text beginning with Paul’s words, “Do we then make void the law
through faith? God forbid” (Romans 3:31). Wesley’s view was, in fact,
the opposite of the traditional Lutheran (and anti-Hebraic) notion that
the law was an evil power that Christ overcame for us in the Atonement.
On the contrary, as Wesley often put it, the text of the second of those
three sermons affirms that the law is “holy, just, and good.”
His use of these words of St. Paul from Romans 7:12 displayed
Wesley’s understanding of the unity of the law of the Lord. Under both
the Old and the New Covenants, the essential commandment, he said, is
to a whole or perfect love. The Christian gospel promised freedom only
from the power of the law to impose and reinforce the bondage of guilt
and, consequently, freedom to fulfill it in faith and love, rather than, as
some antinomians were saying in Wesley’s day, freedom to ignore or
break it. In the Atonement Christ revealed the steadfastness of the
Father’s love; that revelation brought not only the assurance of pardon
for all of our past sins but moral power to work out the new life of
righteousness that Christ had imparted, rather than simply imputed, to
us. By faith in his Atonement, believers could begin to fulfill the law,
breathing in “the power of the Spirit of life that is in Christ Jesus.” Such
a salvation, Wesley taught, consists in sanctification; and that
sanctification begins in the “real change” that takes place when a
believer is “bom again,” bom of the Spirit of God. Lindstrom explains
and illustrates this by summarizing, first, crucial parts of Wesley’s
sermons, then of such important tracts as his Character of a Methodist
and his classic Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.
By the time the reader comes to the third chapter of this volume,
dealing with the order or sequence of spiritual events through which the
Spirit of God perfects his children in love, it is clear that Lindstrom is
engaged primarily in explaining to a Lutheran audience the differences
between their understanding of reformation theology and Wesley’s.
The latter’s break with William Law’s ethical way to holiness (which
Wesley called practical mysticism) was a significant reaction against the
tendency of English Arminianism toward sanctification by works in
favor of the evangelical and, of course, Lutheran doctrine of justification
by faith. Wesley, however, discovered justification to be an experience
inseparable from sanctification. Indeed, the Greek in the Epistle to the
Romans suggests, as in chapter 5:1, that believers have been “made just
by faith.” By denying any possibility at all of our meriting justification
through works of righteousness, Wesley reversed what he understood
(and, Lindstrom shows, partly misunderstood) to be Law’s belief that
good works could and must precede saving faith.
Salvation, which for Wesley meant essentially sanctification, beganin
the new birth. Thereafter, the process of renewal in the image of God
continued throughout life. But it soon led “true believers” unerringly to
awareness of the depths of their inbred sin, to deep repentance for it,
and, after a longer or shorter time of seeking, to faith for deliverance
from it. The centrality of that second moment of grace in the process of
full redemption is crystal clear in the section on “the stages” of grace.
Sanctification was, for Wesley, both gradual and instantaneous. It
proceeded from the instant when the Holy Spirit enabled an awakened
