Christian perfection and the common good?

Wesleyan resources for Public Theology in times of crisis

Abstract

This article argues that John Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection, understood as love perfected by grace, constitutes both the theological heart of Wesleyan identity and a mandate for public theology in the present moment. This »grand depositum «entrusted to the people called Methodists is not a private spirituality but a distinctively structured account of salvation as healing, in which grace restores the divine image, perfects love, and necessarily presses outward into social holiness and public witness. Drawing on Wesley’s primary sources and relevant Wesleyan scholarship, the article shows that the move from personal sanctification to social engagement
is not a secondary application of doctrine but an intrinsic feature of the Wesleyan grammar of grace. It then brings this theological grammar to bear on four overlapping crises that mark contemporary public life, namely, democratic fracture and the misuse of religion, forced migration and the erosion of hospitality, ecological breakdown, and the normalisation of violence. In each case the Wesleyan framework of perfecting love offers not a partisan programme but an orientation, one that protects the vulnerable, pursues fairness, and builds trust across difference. The result is a public theology that is confessionally rooted, translational in practice, and oriented by the conviction that healing justice is the public form of sanctified love.