Christian perfection (entire sanctification)

Methodists and many Pentecostals affirm Christian perfection, also called entire sanctification, that by grace a believer may be so filled with love for God and neighbour that the reigning power of sin is broken in this life. John Wesley, who made the teaching a hallmark of Methodism, described it as perfect love rather than freedom from all mistake or infirmity, a heart wholly given to God, and taught that it is received by faith as a work of the Holy Spirit subsequent to conversion. It is understood as growth into holiness that God completes as a gift, not a human achievement.

Wesley set out the doctrine most fully in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, a treatise he continued to revise across decades starting in the 1760s, defending it against repeated charges, including from fellow Methodist preachers, that it either promised more than scripture allows or would breed spiritual pride in those who claimed the experience. The teaching was one of the flashpoints in Methodism's own internal Calvinist-Arminian division: George Whitefield, Wesley's early collaborator and a committed Calvinist, grew sharply critical of the doctrine, holding it incompatible with the Reformed view that sin remains in believers throughout life, a disagreement that contributed to the eventual separation of Calvinistic and Wesleyan strands within the broader Methodist revival.

The doctrine gave rise to the Holiness movement and, through it, shaped Pentecostalism, which often framed sanctification as a distinct experience of grace. It is affirmed within the Wesleyan and Pentecostal traditions and distinguishes them from the Reformed view, which holds that sin remains in the believer throughout life and perfection is reached only in glory. The affirmation expresses an optimism about the transforming power of grace in the present life, central to the Methodist emphasis on holiness of heart and life.

Nineteenth-century American revivalists, Phoebe Palmer prominent among them, recast Wesley's teaching into what the Holiness movement called a second definite work of grace, an experience many Holiness preachers taught should be sought and received instantaneously through consecration and faith, a sharper and more crisis-oriented emphasis than Wesley's own more gradual account of growth in perfect love. This Holiness theology fed directly into the Pentecostal movement that emerged from the 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, where early Pentecostal leaders initially taught sanctification as a second work of grace prior to, and distinct from, the subsequent baptism in the Holy Spirit, before many Pentecostal bodies later simplified the sequence.