The Second Definite Work of Grace

John Wesley taught that a believer could be entirely sanctified, cleansed in heart from the root of sin rather than merely forgiven its acts, but he deliberately left open whether this came gradually, over a lifetime of growth in grace, or in a single identifiable moment, and he resisted pressure from his own followers to fix the timing more precisely. Nineteenth century American revivalists were less willing to leave the question open.

Phoebe Palmer, a Methodist laywoman whose New York parlor meetings became a center of the movement from the 1830s, taught what she called the shorter way, an altar theology in which a believer could claim entire sanctification immediately by faith rather than waiting years for it. The movement crystallized organizationally at a camp meeting in Vineland, New Jersey, in 1867, which founded the National Campmeeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness and gave the newly sharpened doctrine, a definite, nameable, instantaneous second blessing following conversion, a national platform and a name recognizable across denominational lines.

As the parent Methodist Episcopal Church cooled toward the revivalists' insistence on a required, dateable second experience through the 1880s and 1890s, Holiness preachers who would not soften the doctrine began organizing congregations and eventually whole denominations of their own to carry it forward as settled article of faith rather than as one emphasis among several.

The Church of the Nazarene formed in 1908 when Phineas Bresee's Los Angeles congregation merged with several other regional Holiness bodies; its Manual states in its Articles of Faith that entire sanctification is wrought instantaneously by grace through faith, preceded by entire consecration, a formulation that has stood with little change since.

The Wesleyan Church took its present name and shape in 1968, when the Wesleyan Methodist Connection, itself organized in 1843 partly by ministers who left the Methodist Episcopal Church over its accommodation of slavery, merged with the Pilgrim Holiness Church, a body that had emerged from the same 1880s and 1890s Holiness revival wave. Both bodies treat the second definite work as settled denominational doctrine written into a governing Manual or Discipline.

The Church of God, Anderson, Indiana, founded in 1881 by Daniel S. Warner, holds the identical doctrine of instantaneous entire sanctification but pairs it with a distinct and stronger claim, that sanctified believers should reject denominational organization itself as a further mark of the same holiness the second work produces, a distinctive not shared by the more conventionally organized Nazarene and Wesleyan churches even though all three trace their doctrine of sanctification to the same nineteenth century Holiness revival.