Wesleyan / Methodist

Grace sits at the synergist pole, synergism being the view that a person freely cooperates with the grace God gives. Wesley’s word for the first move is prevenient grace, which runs ahead of any decision and reaches everyone, so nobody can say they were never offered the chance. Then the person answers, and may say no, which is what Wesleyans mean when they insist on free will.

The Table reading will surprise anyone who has only met Methodism at its most informal. Wesley preached a sermon arguing that a Christian should receive communion as often as he possibly can, and over his life he communicated on average about once every four or five days. Methodists baptize infants and teach the Supper as a means of grace.

Authority reads as Scripture over tradition rather than Scripture alone: Scripture is the rule, and the creeds, the Articles of Religion and the church’s experience are consulted without being made equal to it. Methodists shorten this to Scripture, tradition, reason and experience, a phrase whose inventor later said he regretted coining, because people read it as four equal legs.

This is one of the few older Protestant traditions that never turned cessationist: Wesley argued the miraculous gifts faded not because the church had outgrown them but because Christians’ love had grown cold. Worship leans liturgical, with service books and a church year from the Church of England alongside extempore prayer and loud hymn singing.

The confidence about holiness has a name: entire sanctification, or Christian perfection. Wesley did not mean that a Christian stops making mistakes. He meant that love for God and neighbor can come to fill a person so completely that nothing is left competing for the heart, and that it is worth expecting in this life rather than at death. He gathered the case in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, which traces his thinking back to 1725.