Holiness of Heart and Life: Lessons from North American Methodism

Abstract

Near the end of his life, john Wesley proposed that propagation of the message of entire sanctification was the chief reason why God had raised up his Methodist movement.'Whatever one makes of this claim to providential purpose, the doctrine of Christian Perfection clearly became the focus of Methodism's most vigorous early debates, both with opponents and within the movement.Nowhere were the internal debates more polarized than among North American Methodists.Partisan factions emerged in the early nineteenth century, dividing on a spectrum that ran from denial of any need for or possibility of entire sanctification to insistence that it was a state of Christian victory that could be entered instantaneously by any believer (however young in their Christian life) who simply claimed it in faith.There have been several attempts to account for this divergence among Wesley's American descendants.Some have ascribed it primarily to the impact of incompatible temporal variations in Wesley's views on entire sanctification that are reflected in the materials he bequeathed to his movement.'Others (who often assume more consistency to Wesley's own understanding) highlight tensions between his teachings on Christian Perfection and those of some of his co-workers and early followers.'The question that either of these suggestions leaves is how the character and dynamics of the early Methodist experience in North America may have itself contributed to divergence over the issue of entire sanctification.In one of the first con-