Notes:
Sermon 5: Justification by Faith
There was no mistaking the minatory tone and spirit of the ‘prefixed’ university sermons; they measure Wesley’s move from pious don to itinerant evangelist. In ‘Justification by Faith’, however, we come to his first fully positive exposition of his ‘new’ soteriology—‘faith alone’, ‘the article by which the Church stands or falls’ (see No. 20, The Lord Our Righteousness, §4 and n.). Wesley’s claim (in his letters to William Law, May 14 and 20, 1738; see Letters I [Vol. 25 of this edn.], pp. 540-50, for Wesley’s letters and Law’s replies) that he had never heard of the doctrine of sola fide is scarcely credible, since a wide-ranging controversy on this very point had been raging in the Church of England between Puritans and Anglicans since the latter half of the sixteenth century (cf. proem, §2). In 1739 Wesley had extracted and published Robert Barnes’s Treatise on Justification by Faith Only, According to the Doctrine of the Eleventh Article of the Church of England, from Barnes’s Works, 1573 (cf. above, p. 37); he had long known the Articles (specifically IX-XIV) and the Homilies (specifically the first five of the Edwardian set, 1547). What is credible is that his preoccupations with ‘holy living’ and ‘the means of grace’ before 1738 had obscured the priority of justifying faith as antecedent to, and the ground of, ‘the faith that works by love’. In Holy Communion he had prayed, countless times, for ‘grace so to follow [the] good example…[of God’s] servants departed this life in [true] faith and fear…for Jesus Christ’s sake, our only Mediator and Advocate’; now he is prepared to explain how Christ’s mediation and advocacy effect the pardon of a repentant sinner. The explanation is ‘plain’ enough for ‘plain people’, but III.3 and IV.6 give evidence that this essay was also addressed to the theological community at large.
The first record in the Journal of an oral sermon on justification from this text is for May 28, 1738 (at the chapel in Long Acre, London). Later entries suggest that Wesley preached from Rom. 4:5 at least eight more times before June 8, 1742, when he preached at Epworth (probably from his father’s tombstone): ‘At eight I largely enforced at Epworth the great truth (so little understood in what is called a 182Christian country), “Unto him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted to him for righteousness.”’ This written sermon was first published in 1746, and it stands as the earliest full summary of Wesley’s soteriology in the basic form in which it will continue. In this sense, it is a landmark sermon to which all subsequent ones may be compared. It was not reprinted separately during Wesley’s lifetime, in common with many others first published in Wesley’s SOSO, for whose publishing history and variant readings see the Appendix, ‘Wesley’s Text’, in Vol. 4 of this edn. It has been noted earlier that items which were printed separately before being collected into one of the volumes of SOSO are italicized in the notes and in Appendix C, and for these only are separate stemmata given in the Appendix, along with a few which were reprinted separately after originally appearing in SOSO.
Justification by FaithRomans 4:5
To him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted to him for righteousness.
11. How a sinner may be justified before God, the Lord and Judge of all, is a question of no common importance to every child of man. It contains the foundation of all our hope, inasmuch as while we are at enmity with God there can be no true peace, no solid joy, either in time or in eternity. What peace can there be while our own heart condemns us? And much more he that ‘is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things’?
1 John 3:20.
Cf. John 3:36.
22. And yet how little hath this important question been understood! What confused notions have many had concerning it! Indeed not only confused, but often utterly false, contrary to the truth as light to darkness; notions absolutely inconsistent with 183the oracles of God,
I.e., the Holy Scriptures taken as a whole; cf. Rom. 3:2, Heb. 5:12, 1 Pet. 4:11, and Acts 7:38. See also the agreement here between Matthew Poole and Matthew Henry, but notice that Poole (on Heb. 5:11) adds the ‘ancient creeds’ in which he sees ‘God’s oracles in the Scriptures’ as being ‘summed up’. This metaphor of the Scriptures as ‘oracles’ is a favourite with Wesley, a basic presupposition in his hermeneutics (it is also one of the premises of his early practice of bibliomancy); it appears in at least fifteen other sermons and more times than that in his other writings.
The general and true sense of Scripture (both the truths revealed in Scripture and solid inferences drawn from them, as in the creeds and biblically-grounded theology); cf. John Gerhard, who had summed up their consensus in his Loci Theologici (1621), I.55, and II.424: ‘All the interpretation of Scripture should be according to the analogy of faith…’ (i.e., the general and essential truth of Scripture taken as a whole). See also Francis Turrentin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae (1686), Eng. tr. J. Beardslee (1981), I.xii.6-7; II.xix.2-6; and add the summary analyses of Lutheran views in Schmid, Doctrinal Theology of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Philadelphia, Lutheran Publication Society, 1889, 3rd edn. rev.; Minneapolis, Minn., Augsburg Publishing House, 1961), pp. 70, 76; and Heinrich Heppe, Reformed Dogmatics (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1950), pp. 30-31.
In his comment on Rom. 12:6 (in Notes) Wesley connects ‘the analogy of faith’ with ‘the oracles of God’ and cites 1 Pet. 4:11 as his authority. He then sums up its particulars: ‘that grand scheme of doctrine which is delivered [in the Scriptures], touching original sin, justification by faith, and present inward salvation’. He then stipulates that ‘any question should be determined by this rule; every doubtful Scripture interpreted according to the grand truths which run through the whole.’
For other usages of this phrase, see Nos. 21, ‘Sermon on the Mount, I’, §6 and n.; 62, ‘The End of Christ’s Coming’, III.5 and n.; 64, ‘The New Creation’, §2; 115, ‘Dives and Lazarus’, III.7; 122, ‘Causes of the Inefficacy of Christianity’, §6; 135, ‘On Guardian Angels’, III.1. See also Susanna’s letter to John, Aug. 18, 1725, where she concludes a long paragraph on the Calvinist doctrine of predestination: ‘This is the sum of what I believe concerning predestination, which I think is agreeable to the analogy of faith’ (see Letters, I, Vol. 25 of this edn., p. 180).
Cf. 1 Cor. 3:12, 13.
33. In order to do justice, as far as in me lies, to the vast importance of the subject, to save those that seek the truth in sincerity from ‘vain jangling’
1 Tim. 1:6.
Cf. 1 Tim. 6:4.
See 1 Tim. 3:16.
First, what is the general ground of this whole doctrine of justification;
184Secondly, what justification is;
Thirdly, who they are that are justified; and,
Fourthly, on what terms they are justified.
1I. I am first to show what is the general ground of this whole doctrine of justification.
11. In the image of God was man made;
Gen. 1:27; 9:6. See Nos. 1, Salvation by Faith, §1 and n.; and141, ‘The Image of God’, on Gen. 1:27.
See Matt. 5:48.
See 1 John 4:16.
Wisd. 2:23.
Cf. Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27.
22. To man thus upright and perfect God gave a perfect law, to which he required full and perfect obedience. He required full obedience in every point, and this to be performed without any intermission from the moment man became a living soul till the time of his trial should be ended. No allowance was made for any falling short. As, indeed, there was no need of any, man being altogether equal to the task assigned, and thoroughly furnished for every good word and work.
See 2 Tim. 3:17; 2 Thess. 2:17.
33. To the entire law of love which was written in his heart (against which, perhaps, he could not sin directly) it seemed good to the sovereign wisdom of God to superadd one positive law: ‘Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the tree that groweth in the midst of the garden;’
Cf. Gen. 3:3.
Gen. 2:17.
44. Such then was the state of man in paradise.
A similar (and even more detailed) account of human perfection in man’s first creation had already been expounded in No.141, ‘The Image of God’ (Gen.1:27). In both sermons Wesley takes the perfection of the paradisaical state as normal and normative for human existence. Its restoration is the goal of ‘the order of salvation’; indeed, salvation is defined as the restoration of the image of God; see No. 1, Salvation by Faith, §1 and n.; also No. 44, Original Sin, III.5 and n.
Holiness and happiness had long been linked in the Anglican (catholic) tradition as reciprocals (as in John Norris, Richard Lucas, John Tillotson, and William Tilly). Here, in a staunchly Protestant exposition of ‘faith alone’, Wesley finds it easy and natural to presuppose the integrity of God’s design for humanity (happiness) and his demand upon it (holiness). This linkage—‘holy and happy’—is one of Wesley’s most consistent themes, early, middle, and late, with nuances very much worth noting, for if holiness is active love toward God and neighbour, then happiness is one’s enjoyment and security in such love. Cf. above, p. 35.
55. Man did disobey God; he ‘ate of the tree of which God commanded him, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it.’
Cf. Gen. 3:17.
See Mark 9:43. For Wesley’s interesting explanation as to how Adam’s body became corruptible and mortal, see No. 141, ‘The Image of God’, II.1; it represents his concern to apply his understanding of current advances in medical knowledge to exegetical and soteriological problems.
66. Thus ‘by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin. And so
death passed upon all men,’ as being contained in him who was the common father
and representative of us all. Thus ‘through the offence of one’ all are dead,
dead to God, dead in sin, dwelling in a corruptible, mortal body, shortly to be
dissolved, and under the sentence of death eternal. For as ‘by one man’s
disobedience all were made sinners’, so by that offence of one ‘judgment came
upon all men to condemnation.’
Rom. 5:12, etc.
77. In this state we were, even all mankind, when ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, to the end we might not perish but have everlasting life.’
Cf. John 3:16.
An echo here of the Christological views of Hugo Grotius of Christ as the ‘Federal Head’ of the whole body of humanity; cf. his De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1642; though Wesley probably knew it in Le Clerc’s revision of 1709), Bks. II and III. In Charles Wesley’s hymn (see No. 125 in A Collection of Hymns, Vol. 7 in this edn.), it appears applied to the Pauline analogy between the First and Second Adams:
Adam, descended from above,
Federal head of all mankind.
The metaphor is developed at greater length in Wesley’s Doctrine of Original Sin (1757), Sect. VI, pp. 366-68, against John Taylor’s denial of the orthodox interpretations. In his conclusion Wesley quotes James Hervey approvingly: ‘That as Adam was the first general representative of mankind, so Christ was the second and last….’Cf. Isa. 53:4-6.
Cf. Isa. 53:4-6.
Isa. 53:10.
Cf. 1 Pet. 2:24; Isa. 53:5.
BCP, Communion, Prayer of Consecration; note Wesley’s ‘that one oblation…’ in place of ‘his one oblation of himself’.
Ibid., Catechism.
Ibid., Communion, Prayer of Consecration; note Wesley’s omission of the term ‘oblation’.
88. In consideration of this, that the Son of God hath ‘tasted death for every man’,
Cf. Heb. 2:9.
Cf. 2 Cor. 5:19.
Rom. 5:18.
Cf. No. 20, The Lord Our Righteousness, II.8, for a cross-reference to this passage.
9 1879. This therefore is the general ground of the whole doctrine of justification. By the sin of the first Adam, who was not only the father but likewise the representative of us all, we all ‘fell short of the favour of God’,
Cf. Rom. 3:23.
Eph. 2:3.
Rom. 5:18.
Cf. Rom. 8:1.
Cf. Rom. 3:24.
1II. 1. But what is it to be ‘justified’? What is ‘justification’? This was the second thing which I proposed to show. And it is evident from what has been already observed that it is not the being made actually just and righteous. This is sanctification; which is indeed in some degree the immediate fruit of justification, but nevertheless is a distinct gift of God, and of a totally different nature.
The relation between justification and sanctification—and the problem of their order of precedence—was an old bone of contention between Puritans and Anglicans. Lutherans and Calvinists, as a rule, understood justification (in the forensic sense of pardon and acquittal) as antecedent to sanctification (in the sense of ‘renovation’); cf. Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, Pt. III, ch. iii, §48 (pp. 486 ff.). Anglicans, like Jeremy Taylor, insisted that some evidence of sanctification (e.g., repentance and ‘works meet for repentance’) should precede justification. Wesley stressed the difference between the two (justification as ‘what God does for us’; sanctification as ‘what he works in us’; cf. No.45, ‘The New Birth’, §1) and, after 1738, insists on the priority of justification in the order of salvation (cf. No. 19, ‘The Great Privilege of those that are Born of God’, I.1 and n.). But see the Minute of 1770 for an interesting recurrence of the holy living theme (secundum merita operum), and also the comment on the contrast between Lutherans, Catholics, and Methodists on this issue in No. 107, ‘On God’s Vineyard’, I.5.
22. Neither is that far-fetched conceit that justification is the clearing us from accusation, particularly that of Satan, easily 188provable from any clear text of Holy Writ.
It has been supposed (e.g., by Sugden) that this is the Origenistic soteriology (and that of other Eastern Fathers; e.g., Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa). It is, of course, a misreading of Origen; cf. Gustaf Aulén, Christus Victor (London, SPCK, 1945), pp. 54, 63-71.
Cf. Rev. 12:10.
33. It is also far easier to take for granted than to prove from any clear Scripture testimony that justification is the clearing us from the accusation brought against us by the law. At least, if this forced, unnatural way of speaking mean either more or less than this, that whereas we have transgressed the law of God and thereby deserved the damnation of hell, God does not inflict on those who are justified the punishment which they had deserved.
This was typical Reformation teaching, as in John Gerhard, op. cit., VII.4-5: ‘The Law accuses the sinner before the judgment-seat of God…’; cf. Martin Chemnitz, Loci Theologici, II.250, where it is argued that ‘the conscience of the sinner [is] accused by the divine Law before the tribunal of God….’ Note the mild tone of Wesley’s rejection of this tradition.
44. Least of all does justification imply that God is deceived in those whom he justifies; that he thinks them to be what in fact they are not, that he accounts them to be otherwise than they are. It does by no means imply that God judges concerning us contrary to the real nature of things, that he esteems us better than we really are, or believes us righteous when we are unrighteous.
A mild distortion of the typical Puritan doctrine of forensic justification in which Christ’s imputed righteousness allows the Father justly to pardon the elect and therefore regard them as if they were righteous. The ruling metaphor, in that view, is a forensic one: ‘the heavenly tribunal’. Cf. Calvin, Institutes, III.12; see also John Davenant, A Treatise on Justification (1631), I.227-36, and George Downham [Downame], A Treatise of Justification (1639), pp. 15-45. For a larger survey of the Puritan thesis that imputation is the formal cause of justification (in Davenant, Downham, Joseph Hall, James Ussher, John Donne, Lancelot Andrewes, et al.), cf. Allison, The Rise of Moralism, passim.
55. The plain scriptural notion of justification is pardon,
The fulcrum of Wesley’s evangelical soteriology. No such definition of justification appears anywhere in the early Wesley. The idea is normative after 1738—but see No. 86, A Call to Backsliders, II.2(3), where Wesley speaks of those who ‘had been sanctified in the first degree…’, i.e., before ‘remission of sins’. For the early Wesley, see, e.g., his letter to his mother, Feb. 28, 1730, where he accepts Jeremy Taylor’s correlation of ‘pardon of sins in the gospel [with] sanctification’. Contrast this with Nos. 19, ‘The Great Privilege of those that are Born of God’ (1748), §2; and 43, The Scripture Way of Salvation (1765), I.3. It was in this sense that Wesley could maintain, in a letter to John Newton, May 14, 1765: ‘I think on justification just as I have done any time these seven and twenty years—and just as Mr. Calvin does. In this respect I do not differ from him an hair’s breadth.’ Earlier (Apr. 24, 1765), he wrote to Dr. Erskine, ‘In…justification by faith I have not wavered a moment for these seven and twenty years.’ Later (May 23, 1768), he would reassure the Revd. Mr. Plenderlieth: ‘Since I believed justification by faith, which I have done upwards of thirty years, I have constantly maintained that we are pardoned and accepted wholly and solely for the sake of what Christ hath both done and suffered for us.’ Cf. also Notes on Rom. 3:24; 5:18, and Minutes, 1746.
If the difference between Wesley and Calvin were only a hair’s breadth, that hair’s breadth was crucial—and the Calvinists always recognized it as such. In the Institutes, III. xx. 5, Calvin asserts expressly that ‘in justification, faith is merely passive…’; whereas Wesley understood justifying faith as ‘active’ in some sense (prompted, as it is, by the Spirit’s prevenient activity). In this, he was nearer to Richard Lucas (Enquiry, III.33), John Goodwin (Imputatio Fidei; Or a Treatise of Justification [1642], p.77), or even to Thomas Cockman (Salvation by Jesus Christ Alone…in two sermons preached before the University of Oxford, January 2 and 6, 1732) than to Calvin, Davenant, or Bunyan. There is also his letter to Charles (July 31, 1747), which outlines ‘a genesis problematica on justifying faith’, with its first formal question, ‘Is justifying faith a sense of pardon?’—and the formal answer, ‘Negatur’! The ensuing explanation would seem to contradict the central thesis of ‘Justification by Faith’ and the claim to consensus with Calvin. A closer look, however, suggests a somewhat imprecise elision of justification as pardon with the ‘sense of pardon’ here defined as ‘a distinct, explicit assurance that my sins are forgiven’. Thus, for all of these variants, justification as pardon continues as Wesley’s baseline definition.
Cf. Rom. 3:25.
Rom. 4:7, 8; cf. Ps. 32:1, 2.
Cf. Eph. 1:6, 7; Rom. 5:9, 10.
6Indeed the Apostle in one place seems to extend the meaning of the word much farther, where he says: ‘Not the hearers of the law, but the doers of the law shall be justified.’
Rom. 2:13.
I.e., to our ‘final justification’ (iustitia duplex); this, then, is an echo of Wesley’s doctrine of a ‘double justification’, already rejected by the Lutherans (cf. Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, Pt. III, ch. iii, §42, and, more specifically, pp. 430 ff.).
Matt. 12:36, 37.
2 Tim. 4:7.
Cf. Heb. 12:1. Another echo of the idea of ‘double justification’, which Wesley will argue for in the next sermon, ‘The Righteousness of Faith’ (see I.7 and n.).
1III. 1. But this is the third thing which was to be considered, namely, who are they that are justified? And the Apostle tells us expressly, the ungodly: he, that is, God, ‘justifieth the ungodly’;
Rom. 4:5.
Cf. Luke 5:32; 15:7; etc.
Cf. Heb. 8:12.
2 1912. This seems not to be at all considered by those who so vehemently contend that man must be sanctified, that is, holy, before he can be justified; especially by such of them as affirm that universal holiness or obedience must precede justification
An unsympathetic reference to the typical assumption by those in the ‘holy living’ tradition that ‘repentance and works meet for repentance’ (Acts 26:20) were normal antecedents to justification—and certainly to anything like ‘final justification’ (since the doctrine of ‘double justification’ had come to them from Erasmus, Bucer, and others). Jeremy Taylor had spoken for many in espousing this view in a letter to Bishop John Warner of Rochester (Taylor, Works, II. 678-80; see also Unum Necessarium, ch. ix, ‘The Effect of Repentance’, ibid., pp. 598 ff.); he had expounded it at greater length in The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650), Works, I.399-515. Bishop Thomas Barlow of Lincoln had accused George Bull of such a teaching in the Harmonia Apostolica (1669), despite Robert Nelson’s denials of any such intention on Bull’s part; cf. his Life of Bull (1713), pp. 90, 181, 211. Despite Nelson’s protestations, Wesley had joined Barlow in denouncing both Bull and Tillotson as having taught such a doctrine of works-righteousness (cf. Nos. 150, 151, ‘Hypocrisy in Oxford’). Thomas Tully thought he had found such a heresy in Richard Baxter’s Aphorisms on Justification, and had roundly condemned it in Justificatio Paulina (1674). The point is that here Wesley has reversed his earlier stand and now is stressing the primacy of justification in the ordo salutis even as Baxter had sought to do in his Aphorisms and Confession. Even John Turner in his Boyle Lecture of 1708, ‘The Wisdom of God in the Redemption of Man’, Sermons at the Boyle Lectures (1739), II.359, had asserted that universal or perfect obedience to the Law is impossible to fallen man. What everybody was trying to avoid was the Council of Trent’s bald identification of justification as ‘inherent and infused righteousness’ (cf. Sessions VI, ch. vii). Thus, Wesley here is concerned to set down his new doctrine as clearly and firmly as possible.
An echo of the Agnus Dei and 1 John 2:2.
33. Does then the good Shepherd seek and save only those that are found already? No. He seeks and saves that which is lost.
See Luke 19:10.
Cf. Rom. 8:7.
44. These ‘who are sick’, the ‘burden of whose sins is intolerable’,
BCP, Communion, General Confession.
Cf. Matt. 9:12.
John 3:18.
Rom. 4:5.
Rom. 3:24.
Rom. 5:5.
Cf. Matt. 7:18; Luke 6:43.
55. If it be objected, ‘Nay, but a man, before he is justified, may feed the hungry, or clothe the naked;
Cf. Matt. 25:37-38.
Titus 3:8.
The Thirty-nine Articles, Art. XII, ‘Of Good Works’; also ‘Of the True and Lively Faith’, Pts. I-III, in Homilies, pp. 29-40, and ‘Of Good Works Annexed Unto Faith’, Pt. I, ibid., pp. 41-44.
Cf. The Thirty-nine Articles, Art. XIII, ‘Of Works Before Justification’, and see The Doctrine of Salvation, Faith, and Good Works, II.6 (p. 4 above). In the homily, ‘Of Good Works’, Homilies, p.43, Cranmer cites St. Chrysostom’s De Fide, Lege et Spiritu…: ‘they which glister and shine in good works without faith in God be like dead men which had goodly and precious tombs and yet it availeth them nothing.’ Cf. Migne, PG, 48:1081-83, where De Lege comes under the rubric ‘Spuria’; even so, the passage faithfully reflects St. Chrysostom’s views on the point. Also, see No. 99, The Reward of Righteousness, I.4 and n.
66. Perhaps those who doubt of this have not duly considered the weighty reason which is here assigned why no works done before justification can be truly and properly good. The argument runs thus:
No works are good which are not done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done:
But no works done before justification are done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done:
Therefore no works done before justification are good.
The first proposition is self-evident. And the second, that no works done before justification are done as God hath willed and commanded them to be done, will appear equally plain and undeniable if we only consider God hath willed and commanded that ‘all our works should be done in charity’ (ἐν ἀγάπῃ),
Cf. 1 Cor. 16:14. For Wesley’s preference for ‘love’ rather than ‘charity’ as a translation of ἀγάπῃ, cf. No. 17, ‘The Circumcision of the Heart’, I.2 and n.
Cf. Rom. 8:15.
1IV. 1. But on what terms then is he justified who is altogether ‘ungodly’, and till that time ‘worketh not’? On one alone, which is faith. He ‘believeth in him that justifieth the ungodly’, and ‘he that believeth is not condemned’;
John 3:18.
John 5:24; cf. 1 John 3:14.
Rom. 3:22, 25-26, 28.
Rom.3:31; see Nos. 34, ‘The Original, Nature, Properties, and Use of the Law’, and 35, 36, ‘The Law Established through Faith’, Discourses I and II, for a full exposition of Wesley’s views on ‘Law and Gospel’.
22. Faith in general is a divine, supernatural ἔλεγχος, ‘evidence’ or conviction ‘of things not seen’,
Heb. 11:1. Cf. No. 3, ‘Awake, Thou That Sleepest’, I.11 and n.
Is there an echo here of St. Augustine’s famous distinction between three orders of time (Confessions, XI. xi-xxxi—memoria, expectatio, and contuitus)? Wesley’s ‘spiritual’ is a rough equivalent to St. Augustine’s ‘contuitive’. See No. 29, ‘Sermon on the Mount, IX’, §28 and n.
2 Cor. 5:19.
See 1 Cor. 15:3 and Gal. 2:20. This is Wesley’s definition of the ‘testimony’ or ‘witness of the Spirit’. See Nos. 10, ‘The Witness of the Spirit, I’, I.7; 11, The Witness of the Spirit, II, II.2; 17, ‘The Circumcision of the Heart’, II.5; 58, On Predestination, §12; 106, ‘On Faith, Heb. 11:6’, I.12. There is also here an echo of ‘Aldersgate’, JWJ, May 24, 1738. See also Wesley’s Notes on 1 John 3:14.
3
1953. I cannot describe the nature of this faith better than in
the words of our own Church: ‘The only instrument of salvation’ (whereof
justification is one branch) ‘is faith: that is […] a sure trust and confidence
[…] that God both hath and will forgive our sins, that he hath accepted us again
into his favour, […] for the merits of Christ’s death and Passion…. But here we
must take heed that we do not halt with God through an inconstant, wavering
faith. […] Peter coming to Christ upon the water, because he fainted in faith,
was in danger of drowning. So we, if we begin to waver or doubt, it is to be
feared that we should sink as Peter did, not into the water but into the
bottomless pit of hell-fire.’
[Cf.] Second Sermon on the Passion [Homilies, pp. 382-83].
3.2Therefore have ‘a sure and constant faith, not only that the death of Christ is available for […] all the world, […] but […] that he hath made […] a full and sufficient sacrifice for thee, a perfect cleansing of thy sins, so that […] thou mayst say with the Apostle, […] he loved thee, and gave himself for thee.
Cf. Gal. 2:20.
[Cf.] Sermon on the Sacrament, First Part [ibid., p. 399].
44. By affirming that this faith is the term or condition of justification I mean, first, that there is no justification without it. ‘He that believeth not is condemned already;’
John 3:18.
John 3:36.
See Acts 4:10, 12.
Cf. Acts 3:16.
Eph. 2:12.
1 Cor. 5:12.
Cf. Eph. 2:3.
5 1965. Faith therefore is the necessary condition of justification. Yea, and the only necessary condition thereof. This is the second point carefully to be observed: that the very moment God giveth faith (for ‘it is the gift of God’)
Eph. 2:8; thus faith is not a meritorious ‘work’.
Cf. Rom. 4:5.
I.e., Adam’s state before temptation and its bearing on the problem of ‘original righteousness’; cf. St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III. xxii.v., and St. Athanasius, Contra Gentes, 3. The Lutheran theologians had discussed iustitia originalis and had rejected any correlation of that with any status purorum naturalium (cf. Schmid, Doctrinal Theology, pp. 230-31, and see his citations of Gerhard, Calixtus, and Quenstedt). For the phrase, ‘negative righteousness’, cf. William Allen, The Glass of Justification (1658), p. 20.
Cf. 2 Cor. 5:21.
66. Surely the difficulty of assenting to this proposition, that faith is the only condition of justification, must arise from not understanding it. We mean thereby thus much: that it is the only thing without which none is justified, the only thing that is immediately, indispensably, absolutely requisite in order to pardon. As on the one hand, though a man should have everything else, without faith, yet he cannot be justified; so on the other, though he be supposed to want everything else, yet if he hath faith he cannot but be justified. For suppose a sinner of any kind or degree, in a full sense of his total ungodliness, of his utter inability to think, speak, or do good, and his absolute meetness for hell-fire—suppose, I say, this sinner, helpless and hopeless, casts himself wholly on the mercy of God in Christ (which indeed he cannot do but by the grace of God)—who can doubt but he is forgiven in that moment? Who will affirm that any more is indispensably required before that sinner can be justified?
6.2Now if there ever was one such instance from the beginning of the world (and have there not been, and are there not ten 197thousand times ten thousand?)
Dan. 7:10.
Wesley’s starkest assertion, in any of his writings, of the sola fide, for here he excludes even repentance, which elsewhere he conjoins with faith as the human components of justification. See, e.g., No. 14, The Repentance of Believers, II.6; Minutes, 1745; Principles of a Methodist Farther Explained, VI.4; and his Letter to a Gentleman at Bristol, Jan. 6, 1758. See also Wesley’s extracts of the lives of Henry and James Fraser in the Christian Lib., L.98-99, and XLIX.299. For a doctrine of sola fide nuanced rather differently and yet still in the same tradition, cf. Joseph Mede, Discourse XXVI, Works (1677), pp. 113-15, and also Cockman, Salvation by Jesus Christ Alone….
77. It does not become poor, guilty, sinful worms, who receive whatsoever blessings they enjoy (from the least drop of water that cools our tongue
See Luke 16:24.
Cf. Job 33:13.
Mark 16:16.
Rom. 9:11, 14-16, 18.
88. One reason, however, we may humbly conceive, of God’s fixing this condition of justification—‘If thou believest in the Lord Jesus Christ thou shalt be saved’
Cf. Acts 16:31.
Job 33:17. This is one of Calvin’s main points, in the Institutes, III, xii. 3-7, where (after quoting Augustine) he identifies pride as the chief obstacle to faith. See also ibid., xiii. 2, 4.
Rev. 8:12; 12:4.
Gen. 3:5; see also Nos. 141, ‘The Image of God’; and 45, ‘The New Birth’, I.4 and n., for further interpretations of the Fall.
Rom. 3:19.
Cf. Heb. 12:2.
Cf. 1 John 2:2; 4:10.
Phil. 3:9.
Cf. Rom. 3:22.
99. Thou ungodly one who hearest or readest these words, thou vile, helpless, miserable sinner, I charge thee before God, the judge of all, go straight unto him with all thy ungodliness.
Note the abrupt change here from exposition to direct and sustained exhortation. Cf. Wesley’s letter to Joseph Taylor, Feb. 14, 1787: ‘A sermon should be all application.’ Also, No. 20, The Lord Our Righteousness, II.20. This, then, is the carryover into a written sermon of a dominant feature of Wesley’s oral preaching.
This, of course, was not original with Wesley; English preaching was strong on ‘application’. Cf., e.g., John Selden, Table Talk (1689), p. 92: ‘Nothing is text but what was spoken in the Bible, and meant there for person, and place; the rest is application, which a discreet man may do well; but ’tis his Scripture, not the Holy Ghost.’ See also Tillotson, Works, I.560; Samuel Annesley’s sermon ‘On Conscience’ in The Morning Exercise at Cripplegate (1661), p. 7; and Robert South’s sermon on 1 Sam. 25:32, 33, preached at Christ Church, Oxford, Nov. 10, 1673, which Wesley extracted for the Christian Lib., XLIII.141-49.
Cf. Heb. 12:24.
Cf. Heb. 12:2.
Cf. John 1:29.
Cf. Exod. 24:8; Heb. 10:29.
2 Sam. 12:7.
Cf. Matt. 21:3, etc.
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Entry Title: Sermon 5: Justification by Faith