John Wesley

As Olson describes his view: grace can be resisted, and faith is simply a free decision (enabled by prevenient grace) not to resist grace but to trust and hope in it entirely, and to let the Holy Spirit renew one's being as a child of God — the opposite of every form of monergism. ⚠ Yet he insisted strongly that he had not shaken the Protestant principle. To those who accused him of changing justification by faith through grace alone, he wrote that he believed in justification by faith alone as much as he believed there is a God; that he had declared this twenty-eight years before in a sermon at the University of Oxford; and that from 1738 until then he had not changed this position, not in the slightest. Olson's judgment agrees with his: his doctrine of salvation is wholly Protestant, even though it is not monergist, because it rejects any place for human merit in salvation.

⚠ His most disputed teaching is Christian perfection — the view that sanctification is not a process that can never be completed in this life. We record what he himself said in 1767, after toning it down, because it is more accurate than later retellings: by perfection, he said, he meant humble, gentle and patient love of God and our neighbor, ruling our tempers, words and actions; he did not deny that a person might fall, whether partly or wholly; and so he retracted several lines in their hymns which partly expressed and partly implied that such a fall was impossible. He also explained that early on he had taught that Christian life could reach a stage after which the struggle with temptation was a thing of the past, but later, noticing that even Jesus was not without temptation, he gave up the idea.

⭐Justification — his place on this thread. ⚠ The measure applied to him is the same one applied to Menno (16th century) and to Pietism (17th century): entire sanctification conflicts with Luther's teaching that the Christian is always at once righteous and a sinner. Olson judges that, however we interpret it, this conflict cannot be avoided, and records that Protestant Christians who hold to justification by faith alone will surely join forces on this principle to oppose Wesley's doctrine of sanctification, as closer to Catholicism than to Protestantism.

⭐ And his answer never changed: he believed in justification by faith alone as much as he believed there is a God, and from 1738 on he had not changed this position in the slightest. Olson himself agrees — Wesley's doctrine of salvation is wholly Protestant, because it rejects any place for human merit in salvation. ⚠ He seems to drift only because, as Olson puts it, he followed the German Lutheran Pietists in taking justification for granted, and put his energy into conversion and sanctification: what had been neglected, Wesley believed, was the Christian's experience of entering through the door of salvation.

⚠Ecclesiology and authority — he kept bishops. We include this because it breaks a very popular oversimplification: Protestant does not mean congregational. Olson records that Wesley, like Luther and the whole Anglican tradition, kept bishops in Methodism, and rejected Congregational and Presbyterian polity. Methodist churches are not autonomous and cannot choose their own pastors; Methodist pastors are usually appointed by Methodist bishops, and are often moved; Methodist congregations have no freedom to decide their own form of worship, nor do they control the affairs of their own churches.

⭐ And the result, Olson notes: some low-church evangelical Protestants, including the Holiness descendants of Wesley's own 19th-century Methodist heirs, reject his ecclesiology, and especially Episcopal church order, as inconsistent with the priesthood of believers.

⚠ Olson also says a fair word for him: Methodist bishops have no special spiritual authority (as they do in Roman Catholicism and in part of Anglicanism) and do not stand on apostolic succession; and later the office of bishop was greatly watered down, so that today they are little more than administrators.