Entire Sanctification: Wesley's Doctrine of Christian Perfection

No doctrine is more distinctively Wesleyan than entire sanctification, and none has been more frequently misunderstood. When critics hear the word 'perfection,' they assume Wesley was claiming that sanctified Christians never make mistakes, never sin, and are essentially sinless. Wesley himself spent years correcting this misreading. What he actually taught is both more modest and more remarkable than the caricature.

What Entire Sanctification Is Not

Wesley was explicit: entire sanctification is not freedom from mistakes, errors of judgment, weakness, ignorance, or temptation. It is not a state from which a person cannot fall — Article XII of the Methodist Articles of Religion affirms that believers can depart from grace and fall into sin. It is not an achievement of human effort. And it is not the final end of the Christian life — Wesley saw it as a stage that could be followed by further growth in grace.

What Entire Sanctification Is

Wesley defined Christian perfection as perfect love — a heart in which the love of God and neighbor has so thoroughly displaced the root of sin (what he called 'inbred sin' or 'the carnal mind') that no deliberate, knowing violation of God's will remains. The person who has been entirely sanctified does not sin in the sense of willfully transgressing the known law of God. This is not the result of moral effort but of a definite work of the Holy Spirit — a second blessing, distinct from and subsequent to justification and the new birth.

The Scriptural Basis

Wesley grounded entire sanctification in several scriptural themes. Jesus commands love of God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength — Wesley took this as a genuine possibility, not merely an ideal. Paul prays that the Thessalonians would be 'sanctified wholly' (1 Thessalonians 5:23). John writes that 'perfect love casts out fear' (1 John 4:18) and that 'whoever is born of God does not sin' (1 John 3:9). Wesley believed these texts pointed to a real transformation of the heart, not merely a legal declaration or a gradual process with no definite crisis point.

The Holiness Movement and Pentecostalism

Wesley's doctrine of entire sanctification generated the 19th-century Holiness Movement — a revival of Wesleyan perfectionism within and eventually beyond Methodism. The National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness (founded 1867) spread the teaching across the country. Holiness denominations like the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Church, and the Free Methodist Church were organized specifically to preserve this doctrine when mainline Methodism began to soft-pedal it. And the Holiness Movement directly influenced the birth of Pentecostalism at Azusa Street in 1906 — many early Pentecostals understood Spirit baptism with tongues as a new form of the 'second blessing.'

Why the Doctrine Matters Today

Entire sanctification addresses something every serious Christian feels: the gap between what I profess and what I am. Most Christian traditions say that gap will be closed at death or in glorification. Wesley said the Holy Spirit can close much of that gap now, in this life, through a definite work of grace. Whether or not one accepts the full Wesleyan account, the doctrine makes a serious claim about what the Holy Spirit can do in a human heart — and it refuses to give up on the possibility of genuine transformation before eternity.