Christian perfection

Be perfect

Jesus said, "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matthew 5:48). The word, teleios (τέλειος), speaks less of flawlessness than of something complete, grown to maturity, reaching its goal. John Wesley read the command as also a promise: "how wise and gracious is this, to sum up, and, as it were, seal all his commandments with a promise!" Wesley

The content of this perfection is love: the two great commandments, to love God with all one's heart, soul and mind and one's neighbour as oneself (Matthew 22:37-39), filling the heart. John writes:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. The one who fears has not been perfected in love.

1 John 4:18

Paul prays, "may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely" (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Yet he says of himself that he has not "already been made perfect" (Philippians 3:12), and a few verses later speaks of "All of us who are mature" (Philippians 3:15), using a word of the same root. How to hold these together is the question the doctrine raises.

Wesley and his heirs

Wesley recalled that as a young man the devotional writings of Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor and William Law first showed him a life given wholly to God. He described Christian perfection not as freedom from ignorance, mistakes, infirmities or temptation, but as love so ruling the heart that it is free from wilful sin, the deliberate breaking of a known law of God. It may be received by faith in a moment, with gradual growth before and after; it can grow further, and it can be lost. Even those made perfect in love, he insisted, need Christ's atonement every day Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection.

The Holiness movement of nineteenth-century America carried the teaching on, stressing entire sanctification as a second work of grace received by faith after conversion. Holiness churches such as the Church of the Nazarene grew from it, and in Korea the Holiness Church (Sungkyul) proclaims a fourfold gospel of regeneration, sanctification, divine healing and the second coming.

Where the traditions differ

Reformed and Presbyterian churches confess that sanctification reaches the whole person but remains imperfect in this life. Matthew Henry, on 1 Thessalonians 5:23, wrote that "the best are sanctified but in part while in this world" Matthew Henry. Reformed critics have worried that Wesley's narrow definition of sin as wilful transgression could make light of the corruption that remains in the heart, and they point to John: "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves" (1 John 1:8). Lutherans stress that the Christian is at once righteous and a sinner. Wesleyans answer that those made perfect in love still lean humbly on Christ, and that to expect less than the love God commands is to think too little of his grace.

The Catholic Church teaches that all the faithful, in every state of life, are called to the perfection of charity, which is holiness Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 40. The Orthodox churches see growth into God's likeness as a path without end, in this life and in the age to come. All agree that the goal of holiness is love. See also the lesson Wesley and the Methodist movement and What is sanctification?