Its Claims
The nature and extent of the atonement
Christ died for all, and God wills all to be saved: the atonement is as wide as the ruin, and no one perishes for want of a ransom paid on his behalf. Work on this claim in the Workshop
Justification by faith
Justification is God's pardon of the believing sinner for Christ's sake, and the new birth is its inseparable companion: in the same moment God forgives and makes the sinner a child of God, witnessed to by the Spirit. Work on this claim in the Workshop
Sanctification and holiness
God can and does, in this life, so fill believers with love that sin's dominion is not merely counteracted but cleansed: entire sanctification, or Christian perfection, received by faith, ordinarily in a moment, as a second work of grace after justification. Work on this claim in the Workshop
Grace and free will
No one is left in mere nature: prevenient grace, given to all through Christ, restores a measure of free response, awakens conscience, and draws every person toward God before any conscious turning. Work on this claim in the Workshop
Perseverance and assurance
A true believer may fall from grace and perish: scripture's warnings are real, the justified have lost faith and love in fact, and perseverance is the believer's continued abiding in Christ, not an unconditional decree. Work on this claim in the Workshop
Historical Development
The position was carried by the Methodist societies and their American expansion, where the camp meeting joined its doctrine to revival practice. The nineteenth-century Holiness movement (Phoebe Palmer's altar theology, the National Camp Meeting Association from 1867) radicalized its second-blessing teaching, and from Holiness soil grew both the Church of the Nazarene (1908) and, by a further step on the Spirit's baptism, Pentecostalism. Twentieth-century Wesleyan scholarship (Harald Lindstrom, Mildred Bangs Wynkoop, H. Ray Dunning) restated perfection as love's relational reign, and the tradition's theologians have been central to the modern retrieval of Arminianism as such.
Interpretive Foundations
Wesleyan theology reads Scripture with tradition, reason, and experience as its confirming court (a pattern later named the quadrilateral by Albert Outler), and reads each doctrine by its fruit in holy lives. Its interpretive key is love: God's nature as love orders the doctrines of grace, so that a grace which finally overrode the beloved's response would contradict the God it came from. Assurance is grounded in the Spirit's direct witness with the believer's spirit, confirmed by the fruit of a holy life.
Biblical Evidence
The readings this position gives the foundational passages. The full evidence stands on the Scripture evidence index.
John 3:16
The verse is read at face value as the gospel's own summary of its scope: God's love embraces the world, the Son is given for it, and the only boundary of salvation is the believing the text itself names. No prior decree narrows what 'whoever believes' opens.
John 10:27-29
The promise is read as spoken to the sheep as sheep: those who hear the Shepherd's voice and follow him are the ones no one snatches away. The security is real and it is the security of abiding; the passage promises keeping to followers, and its readers are warned elsewhere that branches that do not abide are cut off.
2 Peter 3:9
'Not wishing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance' is read as the stated heart of God's patience: the delay of the end is mercy at work, and the will it names is genuinely for the any and the all of its own sentence.
Principal Objections
Entire sanctification is objected to on 1 John 1:8 and on experience; Wesley's own qualification, perfection in love rather than in knowledge, performance, or freedom from temptation, is the position's standing answer, and its critics answer that the qualification empties the claim. Prevenient grace is objected to by the Reformed as nature restored halfway by a grace scripture does not name as such. The fallibility of the justified is objected to on the keeping promises of John 10 and Romans 8, which the position reads as promises to those who abide.
Limitations of This Record
The position describes the Wesleyan-Arminian mainstream from Wesley through the confessional Holiness tradition. It does not describe the Keswick variant, which Wesleyans themselves distinguish from entire sanctification, nor every contemporary United Methodist theological tendency, which range wider than the classical doctrine, nor the Pentecostal completion of the pattern, which stands on its own record.
Sources
Primary: John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766); John Wesley, Sermon 43, 'Scripture Way of Salvation' (1765); Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784).
Secondary: Kenneth J. Collins, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace (Abingdon, 2007); Randy L. Maddox, Responsible Grace: John Wesley's Practical Theology (Kingswood, 1994).