Of Sanctification (appended 1939)

The Text

This is the most revealing unit in the entire corpus, and it achieves that distinction by being, technically, not part of the document at all. ¶104 prints “Of Sanctification” after Article XXV under a flat note: it came from the Methodist Protestant Discipline, was placed there by the 1939 Uniting Conference, “was not one of the Articles of Religion voted upon,” and is a legislative enactment, not protected by the First Restrictive Rule. Read the status before the content: the constitutional Articles of Religion contain no article on sanctification. The doctrine John Wesley called the “grand depositum” for which God raised up the people called Methodists — holiness of heart and life, perfect love — is absent from the Wesleyan church’s constitutional confession. In 1939 the church felt the absence and appended a borrowed paragraph it was careful to mark as not constitutional. The gap, and the late lesser- status patch, are the truest thing the Articles say about Methodism.

Translation Notes

“appended 1939; legislative, not constitutionally protected.” This is not pedantry; it is the unit’s whole meaning. Articles I–XXV cannot be changed (First Restrictive Rule); this paragraph can. The church’s foundational, unalterable doctrine omits sanctification; its alterable appendix supplies it. The hierarchy of authority runs exactly opposite to the hierarchy of Wesleyan distinctiveness.

“renewal of our fallen nature by the Holy Ghost.” The content, when it finally appears, is solid Wesleyan substance: sanctification as the Spirit’s real renewal (not merely imputed standing — distinguishing it from justification, Article IX), grounded in the atoning blood, received “through faith.”

“delivered not only from the guilt of sin, but… from its pollution… from its power.” The three-fold scope is precisely Wesley’s: justification deals with guilt (Article IX); sanctification with pollution and power. “Walk in his holy commandments blameless” is restrained perfection language — blameless love, not the “can no more sin” Article XII condemns.

Historical Context

Wesley’s abridgment of the Thirty-Nine (Articles I–XXV) deliberately left the distinctively Wesleyan doctrines to the Sermons and Notes. The Discipline’s own ¶103 says so without embarrassment: the Articles “did not guarantee adequate Methodist preaching; they lacked several Wesleyan emphases, such as assurance and Christian perfection. Wesley’s Sermons and Notes, therefore, continued to function as the traditional standard exposition of distinctive Methodist teaching.” So the omission of sanctification from the Articles is not an oversight; it is the document’s design — the Articles are the catholic-Reformation floor, the Wesleyan distinctive lives elsewhere (the structural thesis of this whole document essay).

The 1939 appendix has its own history. The Methodist Protestant Church (one of the three uniting bodies) had a sanctification article; the Methodist Episcopal traditions did not. At the 1939 Uniting Conference the merged church inserted the Methodist Protestant article here, while scrupulously noting it had not been voted as an Article and was not constitutionally protected. The result is a paragraph that is, simultaneously, the most Wesleyan content in ¶104 and the least authoritative — a doctrinal patch the church needed but could not, under its own constitution, sew into the protected fabric.

Lines of Interpretation

The disputed question is double: the doctrine (is entire sanctification / Christian perfection attainable in this life?) and the fact (what does it mean that the holiness church omitted holiness from its constitution?).

Patristic

Tradition: theosis; the healing of nature

The Eastern doctrine of deification — the real transformation of human nature by grace into participation in God’s holiness — is sanctification’s deepest patristic kin. “Renewal of our fallen nature… enabled… to love God with all our hearts” is theosis in Western dress.

Strengths

• Recovers sanctification as real ontological renewal, not legal fiction or moralism
• Roots Wesley’s “perfect love” in catholic antiquity, not revivalist novelty

Weaknesses

• Eastern theosis is unhurried and eschatologically open; Wesley’s “in this life” claim is sharper
• The appended status means this rich theme has no constitutional anchor — patristic depth, legislative footing

Reformed

Tradition: progressive sanctification; the not yet

The Reformed hold sanctification real but progressive and incomplete until glory; they resist any attainable perfection. From here the appendix’s “blameless” is acceptable only as direction, not arrival, and the article’s absence from the constitutional core is unsurprising — the Articles’ Reformed-shaped soteriology had no such doctrine.

Strengths

• Honestly names the real doctrinal dispute (attainable perfection) the appendix’s “blameless” raises
• Explains why the Reformation-derived Articles omitted it: it was not their doctrine

Weaknesses

• “Only progressive” underplays the appendix’s (and Wesley’s) “saved from its power… now”
• Can use the constitutional silence to mute a doctrine the church in fact teaches

Roman Catholic

Tradition: infused grace; growth toward holiness

Catholic theology’s infused sanctifying grace and call to holiness parallels the appendix’s “renewal… by the Holy Ghost… through faith.” The dispute is over assurance and completeness in this life, not over real transformation.

Strengths

• Affirms with the appendix that grace truly renews, not only reckons
• Converges with Wesley on the universal call to holiness

Weaknesses

• Differs on assurance and on perfectibility’s timing
• The appendix’s Protestant “through faith… blood of atonement” frame is sharper than the infusion model

Modern / Ecumenical / Wesleyan-Holiness

Tradition: the Holiness movement; the entire-sanctification debates; ecumenical retrieval

The doctrine’s afterlife is enormous: the nineteenth-century Holiness movement, Pentecostalism’s roots, the entire-sanctification disputes, and a modern ecumenical retrieval of sanctification as central. Yet all of it grows from a doctrine the constitutional Articles do not contain.

Strengths

• Accounts for sanctification’s vast tradition-shaping influence
• Reads the appendix as the institutional acknowledgment of an unkillable Wesleyan emphasis

Weaknesses

• Holiness-movement sharpenings (instantaneous “second blessing”) exceed the cautious appendix and risk Article XII’s condemnation
• The constitutional-status problem persists: the most generative Wesleyan doctrine has the least constitutional weight

Wesleyan Voice

For once the Wesleyan voice is not a gloss on the text but the reason the text is a problem. Wesley called Christian perfection the “grand depositum” — the very thing God raised up Methodism to spread. A Plain Account of Christian Perfection is his book-length exposition; Christian Perfection, The Circumcision of the Heart, and The Scripture Way of Salvation are its sermons. His doctrine is exactly the appendix’s: a real renewal by the Spirit, received through faith, grounded in the atoning blood, by which the believer is delivered not only from sin’s guilt (justification) but from its pollution and power, “enabled… to love God with all our hearts” — perfect love, attainable in this life by grace, yet (carefully, against Article XII) not freedom from temptation, mistake, infirmity, or the need of the atonement. The appendix is Wesley’s doctrine, accurately stated, in restrained form.

The Wesleyan datum, then, is not the content but the constitutional status, and it is the sharpest single instance of this document’s whole argument. Wesley designed the Articles as the catholic floor and lodged the Methodist distinctive in the Sermons (¶103 says so). The result is a church whose unalterable doctrinal core — the part the First Restrictive Rule forbids changing — does not contain the doctrine for which, by Wesley’s own testimony, the church exists. When the 1939 church felt that void, it could not, under its own constitution, write sanctification into the protected Articles; it could only append a borrowed paragraph and stamp it non-constitutional. The holiness church’s holiness doctrine sits in its lawbook as a legislative footnote. That is not a scandal to be hidden; it is, read in this corpus’s honest key, a confession — the exact analogue of the Athanasian struck from the Sunday Service and the slave clause the church wrote and would not keep. What a tradition puts in its unalterable core, and what it leaves to sermons and appendices, is its self-portrait. Methodism’s portrait says: we are catholic and Reformed in our constitution, and our heart’s distinctive — perfect love — we carry, vulnerably, in our preaching and a 1939 patch.

Hymnody

Here the hymnody does what the constitution would not. What the Articles omit and 1939 bolted on, Charles Wesley wrote into the church’s mouth in volumes. “Love divine, all loves excelling… take away our bent to sinning… finish then thy new creation, pure and spotless let us be” is Of Sanctification sung — perfect love prayed for as attainable gift. “O for a heart to praise my God, a heart from sin set free” is the appendix’s “washed from its pollution, saved from its power.” “O come, and dwell in me, Spirit of power within” and the whole Promise of Sanctification (1741) are entire sanctification as petition and hope. The decisive fact is the asymmetry: the doctrine has almost no constitutional presence and an overwhelming hymnic one. Methodism legislated sanctification faintly and sang it constantly — which is, again, the document’s self-revelation: the grand depositum lives in the hymnal and the sermons, not the protected law.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

The first pastoral use is to teach the doctrine from where it actually lives. Do not preach sanctification from this appendix as if it were a constitutional Article; preach it from Wesley’s Plain Account and sermons and from the hymnody, and use the appendix’s status as the lesson: the church that exists to spread scriptural holiness keeps that doctrine in its sermons and songs, not its unalterable law — so a Methodism that neglects the Sermons and the hymnal will lose its own heart while keeping its constitution intact. That is a diagnosis worth preaching.

The second use is the doctrine itself, pastorally and carefully. To the discouraged believer: sanctification means you are not left in sin’s power, only forgiven its guilt — real renewal is promised, “through grace.” To the presumptuous: “blameless” is perfect love, not the “can no more sin” Article XII expressly condemns; the perfected still need the atonement and may fall. Hold the appendix with Article IX (justification) and Article XII (sin after justification) and the Wesleyan whole emerges: guilt answered by faith, power broken by grace, perfection as love, not impeccability.

The third use is the honest naming of the gap. When a formed member asks why “the most Methodist doctrine” is a footnote, tell the truth: Wesley built the Articles as a catholic floor and trusted the Sermons to carry the distinctive; 1939 added this and marked it non-constitutional; the gap is real and is itself instructive. A tradition is known by what it dares not change and what it leaves to preaching. Methodism’s answer — catholic creed unalterable, perfect love entrusted to sermon, hymn, and a 1939 patch — is not a failure to explain away but a self-portrait to preach.

Further Reading

• 1 Thessalonians 5:23–24; Hebrews 12:14; Matthew 5:48; 22:37; 1 John 1:7–9 — the scriptural ground
• ¶103 of the Book of Discipline — the church’s own admission that the Articles “lacked… Christian perfection”; Judicial Council Decisions 41, 176 on this paragraph’s status
• John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection; Christian Perfection (Sermon 40); The Circumcision of the Heart (Sermon 17); The Scripture Way of Salvation (Sermon 43) — where the doctrine actually lives
• Charles Wesley, “Love divine, all loves excelling”; the Hymns… for those that seek and those that have Redemption — the doctrine sung
• The standing it presupposes: [[articles-of-religion/article-9-of-the-justification-of-man]]
• The guard against its abuse: [[articles-of-religion/article-12-of-sin-after-justification]]
• The means through which it comes: [[general-rules/third-rule-the-ordinances-of-god]]