THE CRISIS-PROCESS ISSUE IN WESLEYAN THOUGHT

LESLIE R. MARSTON, Ph.D.
(Bishop-Emeritus, Free Methodist Church)

In the definition of Christian holiness the crisis-process problem has become a subject of keen discussion in Wesleyan ranks today, even as a century ago it had become an issue in historic Methodism.

The scope of this paper is threefold. First, to sketch the background of the problem set by John Wesley's persisting devotion to the term Christian perfection" as essentially synonymous with the term "entire sanctification" to designate a second crisis in Christian experience. Second, to present a point of view which differentiates the two terms by identifying "Christian perfection" with the continuing process of spiritual growth from the new birth to life's end, and conceives of "entire sanctification" as a normal event of heart-cleansing and love-infilling occurring within the life-time process. Finally, to develop this approach by reviewing the writings of a leader in the holiness movement of a century ago whose position, strangely enough, has been obscured if not lost to the present century.

In John Wesley's prolonged quest for holiness as the ground upon which, in his thinking, he must claim justification in God's sight, he became enamored with the Christian mystics and their pursuit of perfection. Some of these mystics were what Albert C. Outler (1) has called voluntaristic and others quietistic. By the former we understand Outler to mean activists who take Jesus Christ as their pattern, and strive by a sirenuous legalism to achieve a perfection in accord therewith. Such was William Law, an older contemporary of Wesley and his mentor for a critical period of his quest.

The quietists, on the other hand, were subjectivists who sought inward union with Jesus Christ by way of prayer, passive contemplation, and detachment from the world because of its inherent corruption. By demeaning the human body as inherently evil and removed from the spirit by an impassable gulf, some quietists drifted into crass antinomianism on the assumption that vile deeds of the body could not possibly come into contact with, and thereby contaminate, one's spiritual being.

In his questing years, the spiritual emphasis of the quietists appealed to Wesley, but he drew back from their influence when he observed the antinomian trend of their teachings. But this was not until the choking grip of subjectivism had brought him very near the brink of tragedy. While on his Georgia mission he analyzed the hazards of the quietistic mystics in a letter to his brother, Samuel, Jr., in which he made this confession: "I think the rock on which I had nearest made shipwreck of faith was the writings of the mystics: under which I comprehend, and only those, who slight any of the means of grace." (2)

He had followed also the path of activism by most dutifully performing good works. Upon his return from America, however, he came under the influence of the learned and pious Peter Bohler and by him was convinced of the futility of works-righteousness. About a fort-night prior to his Aldersgate deliverance, Wesley wrote a sharp rebuke to his former counselor, William Law, charging him with teaching obedience to the law and Jesus Christ as the pattern of the law's fulfillment, but failing to point him to simple faith in Jesus Christ as Saviour. (3) By this time Wesley had accepted intellectually Peter Bohler's tutelage in salvation by faith, but he had not yet grasped its full meaning in the assurance of personal salvation.

A few days later this assurance did come to him, and although for several months thereafter he was beset by severe inner struggles, he did not again sink into the morass of his former miseries of mysticism. When, because of these struggles, for a time he so completely lost his assurance of salvation that he asserted that no longer was he a Christian, nevertheless he stoutly affirmed the validity of the experience of divine forgiveness he had received at Aldersgate.

Some call the later Wesley a mystic on the basis of his Aldersgate conversion and his emphasis thereafter on a heart religion. The scope of this paper does not permit extended discussion of this claim, but we venture to offer a few observations. The later course of Wesley's active and fruitful life reflects an inner organization by which he far transcended his earlier mysticism. Outler writes of his mature view of perfection as calling for "holiness in the world... active holiness in this life." (4) He who had sought the reality of God earnestly, but in vain by mystical routes, both voluntaristic and quietistic, entered at Aldersgate into a personal relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ as his Saviour.

His early failures and this later discovery of the way of faith point up the difference between "mystical religion" and "personal salvation"--a distinction his spiritual descendants should hold clearly in focus while facing the dazzling blur of the world's present religious confusion. Mysticism is the quest for reality by way of man's own capacities, whether subjectively or objectively exercised. Evident to all is the legalism of the voluntaristic mystic, and Wesley came to discern also that even his quietism had been a form of self-salvation. But true faith is the response, not of a special mystical faculty or of any power of one's being, but of one's essential self--his entire being--to the call of God.

Now we return to pre-Aldersgate Wesley and the writers who so largely influenced him in his early adult years. In A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (5) Wesley has outlined the steps of his approach to the doctrine of Christian perfection over a period of more than forty years, beginning with the year of his graduation from Oxford University and his ordination as deacon in 1725.

According to his retrospect, in 1725 Wesley read Bishop Taylor's Rules of Holy Living and Holy Dying. This led him to dedicate his entire life to God--his thoughts, words, actions--so deeply did the book impress him with the importance of purity of intention. In 1726 he read The Christian Pattern by a Kempis, from which he understood that "simplicity of intention, and purity of affection" are "'wings of the soul' without which she can never ascend to the mount of God" -- here indeed is language of the mystic!

A year or two later he read William Law's two classics of devotion, Christian Perfection and Serious Call. These led him "to be all devoted to God--to give Him," he said, "all my soul, my body, my substance." And then in 1729, Wesley reports, he became a "a man of one book." He resorted to the Bible "as the one, the only standard of truth, and the only model of true religion." Thereby he was brought to see religion "as a uniform following of Christ, an entire inward and outward conformity to our Master." On January 1, 1833 he reports a sermon which he preached in St. Mary's, Oxford, on the subject "The Circumcision of the Heart." In that sermon he defined a "circumcised heart" in terms of cleansing, holiness, and becoming "perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect." This was more than five years before his Aldersgate conversion!

And Wesley extends the record, adducing still other instances to attest his having advocated Christian perfection long before the publication of A Plain Account in 1765. But these instances, and those recounted above more specifically, point alike to the conclusion that to John Wesley, and to his favorite authors with a leaning toward mysticism, Christian perfection signified, not so much a state of grace initiated by a spiritual crisis subsequent to the new birth, as a life-time striving to reach the Christian ideal by following Jesus as pattern. These earlier teachings and searchings did indeed hold to the scriptural standard of holiness of heart and life, but Wesley seems not so specific on a second crisis during the period covered by his retrospect as he had become at the time he wrote A Plain Account.

Can it be that there is a valid concept of Christian perfection applicable to any and every stage and phase of the Christian life, both before and following the crisis of entire cleansing? In the course of Wesley's evangelistic endeavors following Aldersgate, he observed that a second crisis occurred in the experience of many believers some time after their conversion crisis. We ask, did Wesley incorrectly identify this second crisis with the initiation of the Christian perfection he long had advocated? Should he not have related this second crisis to that perfection by defining it as the consummation of the process of sanctification which, he had consistently taught, begins in regeneration? Has the confused thinking concerning crisis and process developed in measure from Wesley's equating Christian perfection with entire sanctification, whereas the former may be a lifelong perfecting process and the latter an event of the moment, experientially realized and belonging within the context of that perfecting process?

A century after Wesley an affirmative answer to such questions was offered by one now little remembered within American Methodism.

As a young man Benjamin T. Roberts had chosen the law as his profession, but when nearing his bar examination he was converted; and then began his preparation for the Methodist ministry. Thus it happened that in Wesleyan University Roberts became a classmate of Daniel Steele with whom he shared academic honors and, from Wesleyan, he received the degrees Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His career following his university training combined the Christian ministry, church administration, and religious journalism.

From 1860 to his death in 1893 Roberts edited and published The Earnest Christian, an independent family magazine similar in character but, some would say, journalistically superior to the more widely known Guide to Holiness. In his Story of Methodism, A.B. Hyde said of Roberts, "He was a brilliant and effective speaker, and a concise, clear, energetic writer." (6) A contributor to such a standard work as McClintock and Strong's Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature characterized Roberts as "a writer of considerable power" whose "editorials, tracts, and essays display argumentative ability, and the faculty of uttering truth concisely." (7)

This brief of Roberts' career and accomplishments has been presented to establish his competence in the religious and literary fields. We forego discussion of his far-seeing concern with social, economic and ecclesiastical reforms as not relevant to the purpose of this paper.

Following the death of B. T. Roberts in 1893, his son, Benson H. Roberts, compiled from his father's editorial writings, which had extended across the third of a century, a book of 256 pages under the title, Holiness Teachings. (8) Timothy L. Smith, well-known scholar within Wesleyan ranks today, has characterized this book as emphasizing "the ideal of perfect character toward which he (Roberts) believed perfect love and all other authentic religious experiences tend." (9) We list herein six emphases of Holiness Teachings, five of which are stated without amplification. The sixth, because of its direct bearing on the crisis-process issue, is considered here more in detail.

(1) Initial sanctification. Sanctification begins with the new birth by which the sinner becomes "in an important sense, a holy man," with power over his impulses to sin.

(2) Entire sanctification. In entire sanctification, full cleansing comes with a man's complete surrender of every power and possession to the Holy Spirit's control, such that all his motives become promptings of perfect love to God and to all men.

(3) The human element. Entire sanctification renders a man not one whit less human, depriving him of no trait or power with which he is constitutionally endowed by creation.

(4) Backsliding. If the vital connection of faith for cleansing is broken, the holiness of the sanctified yields to the invasion of corrupting tendencies to sin, and these propensities may lead again to the outward transgressions of a backslidden state.

(5) Perfect love. The vital core of entire sanctification is perfect love expressed to God and man through all one's powers of soul, strength and mind, however widely these powers may vary in degree and in rate of progress with different persons.

As thus briefly stated, these emphases may seem commonplace. But supported in the book itself by Roberts' pungent phrasing of his clear insights and by his lucid applications and scriptural citations, they offer a clear guide to holiness. Moreover, they provide a framework in which Roberts' distinctive contribution to the crisis-process issue may be viewed.

In the term "Christian perfection' we reach the point at which Roberts diverged from the traditional Wesleyan usage to give a broader meaning thereto than that included in either "entire sanctification" or "perfect love." Roberts applied the term to the entire span of a sincere Christian's development toward full maturity. It was his claim that the biblical command to be perfect refers, not to any specific step or crisis in the Christian life, but to its every phase and stage. He wrote:

The command "be perfect" does not express any well known, definite act like the command "repent"; nor any particular experience like being "born again." It is taken in a wider sense; with a greater latitude of meaning. It applies to a child of God in various stages of his experience. A blade of corn may be said to be perfect in a dozen different stages of its growth. But if, before it is ripe, it stopped growing, it would not be perfect. So, at a certain period of his experience, a person may be said to be a perfect Christian, and yet his attainments in piety be small in comparison with what they are after fifty years of toil and sorrow. (10)

Roberts illustrated this point further by drawing upon the increasing perfection of the intellectual powers, which at one stage may be perfect but later reach higher perfections with further growth and discipline.

A young man leaves the district school for the academy. He has studied hard and begins to reap some of its fruits. The teacher, proud of his pupil, says: "He is perfect in his mathematics. He can solve every problem in the hardest arithmetic."

After three years in the academy with a mathematics lesson every day, he is sent to college, recommended as "perfect in mathematics." He is well versed in algebra, geometry and trigonometry. After studying mathematics in college four years, having completed his course, he graduates with the highest honors of the mathematical department. He then goes to some special school and spends perhaps three more years in studying mathematics as applied to astronomy or to civil engineering. Then again he is pronounced perfect in his well-mastered study. At the end of a life of unremitting study, we hear him say with the immortal Sir Isaac Newton, "I seem like a child standing upon the shore of the ocean gathering pebbles. I have picked up here and there a pearl, while the great ocean of truth lies unexplored before me."

So when one becomes a Christian his conversion may be perfect; when his heart is purified by faith he may be perfectly sanctified; and still after years of growth in grace we hear him saying with Job when he got sight of God, "Wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes." Yet God had twice pronounced him perfect. (11)

Thus Roberts maintained that Christian perfection is not a definite step to be taken by faith, as regeneration or entire sanctification, but is a continuous process and inclusive category involving day by day obedience and discipline, and warns that "we must not confound the perfection which the Gospel requires with perfect love or entire sanctification. The Scriptures do not use these terms as synonymous." And he cites passages:

We never read in the Bible of any being made perfect by faith. We read of persons being "justified by faith" (Rom. 5:1; 9:30; Gal. 3:24), of being "sanctified by faith" (Acts 15:9; 26:18), but never once of a person being made perfect by faith. Quite another element enters into the making of the saints perfect.

"For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings" (Heb. 2:10). The perfection which the Gospel enjoins upon the saints can only be attained by fidelity in doing and patience in suffering all the will of God. A symmetrical, well-balanced, unswerving Christian character is not obtainable at once. (13)

If Roberts here rightly divides the Word of truth, the final perfection of the Christian is not an instantaneous gift of God's grace to be received alone by the prayer of faith, but comes in the lifelong processes of a ripening Christian character. "We are to seek it," says Roberts, "as a well disposed boy seeks a vigorous manhood by shunning the vices and overcoming the temptations to which he is exposed, and by doing faithfully the duties to which he is called." (14)

Conceived thus, Christian perfection is not static, given once for all as a state of grace in which the Christian may rest. It is a conquest leading to further conquests by faithful service and patient endurance.

Nowhere in his Holiness Teachings did Roberts refer to Wesley's "second-crisis" concept of Christian perfection as differing from his own life-process" concept. Perhaps he discerned in Wesley's writings a hint of the insights that had come so clearly to him. Certainly his intent was not critical opposition to Wesley's concept, for then he must have made a direct attack. His purpose could have been to clarify a cloudy spot in Wesley's analysis of Christian experience.

In his later maturity Wesley wrote what strongly inclines towards Roberts' position. In one of his letters he states that there are two ways "wherein it pleases God to lead his children to perfection: doing and suffering." Also worthy of note as pointing to Wesley's vague anticipation of Roberts' life-process concept are these words concerning Christian perfection in A Plain Account: "It is improvable. It is so far from lying in an indivisible point, from being incapable of increase, that one perfected in love may grow in grace far swifter than he did before." (15)

John L. Peters has observed that in such a statement, "Wesley implies a distinction which he generally fails to maintain . . . between entire sanctification as an event and Christian perfection as a continuing process of which that event is a part." It would be difficult indeed to formulate a more adequate statement of Roberts' distinction between entire sanctification and Christian perfection than this phrasing by Peters. Peters further asserts of Wesley's statement that here, "Wesley displays one of the most significant, and neglected, facets of his teaching." (16)

Regarding entire sanctification Wesley and Roberts were in agreement. Neither held to a doctrine of "gradualism" which repudiates a crisis in the entire cleansing of the heart and its infilling with love, and each maintained that the sanctification initiated in regeneration is consummated in cleanness-- a completed act, as signified by the j" aorist tense of the verb "cleanse" (katharisomen) in II Corinthians 7:1, ". . . let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God " (KJV).

Furthermore, both Wesley and Roberts held that beyond the event of heart-cleansing and its correlated infilling of love, there is in the normal course of Christian experience a continuous progress in holiness as signified by "perfecting" (epitelountes) in the passage above cited. This love, although perfect in quality, is capable of increase in degree and in scope of application to ever-widening areas of life's relationships, even as Peter admonished Christians to "grow in grace and in a knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ" (II Peter 3:18, KJV).

But as already noted, Roberts explicitly set forth in Holiness Teachings what seems contrary to the general tenor of Wesley's position, in holding that spiritual progress of the sincere Christian prior to the second crisis of entire sanctification may properly be ascribed to progress in Christian perfection. Wesley applied the term Christian perfection only to such progress as follows the post-conversion crisis of entire cleansing.

Near the close of A Plain Account of Christian Perfection Wesley wrote: I say again, let this perfection appear in its own shape, and who will fight against it? It must be disguised before it can be opposed. It must be covered with a bearskin first, or even the wild beasts of the people will scarce be induced to worry it. (17)

Hopeful as Wesley may have been that A Plain Account would tear off the bearskin and correctly disclose the distinctive teachings of Methodism, it seems that a corner of the bearskin still covered at least one area. Further unveiling was left to one of Wesley's devoted followers of the succeeding century. In the light of this unveiling as described in the preceding pages, and at the risk of incurring the charge of presumption, we conclude with two observations:

(1) Much of the centuries-long confusion and controversy following upon Wesley's choice of the term "Christian perfection" might have been avoided had he not identified this favorite concept of his questing years with the second-crisis experience of early Methodists, and if instead he had applied the term to the normal progress of the obedient and fully trusting Christian, from the new birth through every stage to the ultimate perfection of eternity.

(2) The somewhat stultifying figure of "states of grace" (should we say "plateaus"?), lamented by Wesley himself, might then have yielded place to the figure of an ascent--a continuous upward progress in the spiritual life of the Christian, in which occurs the crisis-event of entire sanctification, and following which, in consequence of the Christian's deliverance from the drag of inbred sin, the angle of ascent more nearly approaches the vertical--that ultimate perfection of eternity (see Heb. 6:1; 12:22-24). A Diagram Representing "Plateau" Versus "Dynamic" Concepts of Christian Experience

(1) Albert C. Outler, Ed. John Wesley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 252.

(2) John Telford, Ed. The Letters of John Wesley (London: Epworth Press, 1931), I, p.207.

(3) Nehemiah Curnock, Ed. The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M. (London: Epworth Press, 1938), VIII, 319, et. seq.

(4) Outler, op. cit.

(5) John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (London: Epworth Press, 1952), p.5, et seq.

(6) A.B. Hyde, The Story of Methodism (New York: M.W. Hazen Co., 1888), p. 319.

(7) N.S. Gould "Free Methodists" in Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876), pp. 187~189.

(8) Benson H. Roberts, Compiler-Editor, Holiness Teachings Compiled from the Editorial Writings of the late Rev. Benjamin T. Roberts, A. M. (N. Chili, N.Y.; Earnest Christian Publishing House, 1893), 256 pp.

(9) Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform (New York-Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1957), p.131.

(10) Benson H. Roberts, op. cit. p. 209. et seq.

(11) Ibid., 210, et seq.

(12) Ibid., p.212, et seq.

(13) Ibid., p. 211.

(14) Ibid., p.212.

(15) John Wesley, op. cit. p.8.

(16) John L. Peters, Christian Perfection and American Methodism (New York Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1956), p.52.

(17) John Wesley. op. cit., p.110.

Edited by Nick Nettles