by Dion A. Forster

Perfect love as public vocation

The doctrines contained within John Wesley’s Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament (first published 1755) and Wesley’s Forty-four Sermons (published collectively in 1762) comprise the norms of belief for many Methodists. Sermon 40 concerns Christian Perfection. Wesley did not imagine perfection as a mystical withdrawal from the world, nor primarily as the moral refinement of the Church or the individual believer. Rather, Christian perfection names a public vocation. It is holiness expressed as love perfected by grace and directed outward towards neighbour, community, and society, and, in contemporary terms, towards the flourishing of the whole of creation, human and non-human alike.

Christian perfection is not a utopian dream or a moral ideal suspended beyond reach. Rather, it is a concrete possibility opened by grace. Wesley never imagined that individuals, churches, or societies could perfect themselves by their own resolve or virtue. Perfection, he insisted, is God’s work before it is ours. As Scripture reminds us, ‘The one who calls you is faithful, and he will do it’ (1 Thess. 5.24). Perfect love, which is one way in which Wesley spoke of Christian perfection, is therefore not an achievement to be secured, but a gift to be received and embodied, and its purpose is the flourishing of people, communities, and the whole of creation.

As mentioned, Wesley employed other phrases as near equivalents to Christian perfection, each illuminating a different dimension of its meaning. One is perfect love. In the Wesleyan tradition, love is not an interior sentiment or a private moral disposition. It is a transformative force that presses outward, seeking to shape relationships, institutions, and social practices. Another is scriptural holiness, which signals a form of life ordered by grace, informing both personal character and communal patterns of living. Christian perfection, therefore, names a vision of grace that does not retreat from the world but moves deliberately towards it. Simply stated, if perfection means love perfected by grace, then holiness of heart and life necessarily carries civic obligations and generates a social imagination. The deeper God’s love transforms persons and communities, the more it overflows into concrete practices of neighbour-love and the pursuit of the common good.

My proposal is that Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection offers valuable resources for public theology, providing a way of holding together personal transformation, communal formation, and public responsibility. Perfect love, love brought to fullness by God’s grace, has the capacity to sustain a faithful public witness of hope and healing amid today’s crises.

Rev Dion Angus Forster is Professor of Public Theology and Ethics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Extraordinary Professor in Systematic Theology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and Research Fellow at Wesley House Cambridge. Born in Zimbabwe with Scottish heritage, Dion is an ordained minister in the Methodist Church of Southern Africa. With PhDs in Science and Theology, and New Testament Studies, Prof Forster’s current research focus is decolonizing Methodist and Wesleyan Theology and Ethics.

[This essay is an abridged version of the Brian E Beck Memorial Lecture delivered at Wesley House, Cambridge, 22 January 2026.]

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