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When John Wesley was 6 years old, he overheard his mother advising his brother Samuel to "moralize all your thoughts, words, and actions, which will bring you to such a steadiness and constancy as becomes a reasonable being and a good Christian."

This disciplined ideal, underscored throughout his childhood, set Wesley on a quest for the answer to one question: "How can I be the kind of person that God created me to be, and that I truly long to be, a person holy in heart and life?"

While Wesley was at college, he investigated these issues through avid reading of spiritual writers—early monastics, Roman Catholic mystics, Pietists, Puritans, and Anglican "holy living" divines.

While united in encouraging the pursuit of holiness, these writers differed on whether true holiness could be expected in this life. Consequently they offered two very different conceptions of perfection: dynamic, ever-increasing maturity; or static, unsurpassable attainment.

Wesley's early writings reflect the tension between these two ideas. He championed pursuit of holiness through spiritual disciplines, typically describing the Christian's goal as "perfect love." Simultaneously, he issued denials of any "perfect" holiness in this life.

Wesley's early writings also reveal that his aspirations toward holiness (sanctification) were driven by a desire for assurance that he was in a state of divine acceptance (justification).

Then his Aldersgate experience convinced him that justification precedes and empowers sanctification, rather than being based upon it. Yet he was initially led to expect (and to proclaim) that justifying faith would bring instantaneous moral perfection!

He soon came to question this expectation, and in 1741 he published a sermon, "Christian Perfection," to answer criticisms of his initial claims. He hoped to sort out the ambiguity by defining both the limits and the possibilities of human perfection on earth.

Wesley had to fight on two fronts when clarifying his understanding of Christian perfection. His opponents included other Anglican clergy and Jonathan Edwards.

Most Anglican clergy equated holiness with proper actions and assumed that rational conviction of the rightness of an action regularly induced that action. In other words, if people know what is right, they will do it.

Wesley's spiritual journey undercut these assumptions and drew him instead to an "affectional" model of the Christian life.

He insisted that our actions are not products of isolated decisions but flow from our inner affections, meaning desires or dispositions. As such, we can only hope for consistent outward holiness in actions if we possess the inward holiness of Christlike affections.

Edwards, too, promoted an affectional model of Christian life, but he disagreed with Wesley on how we obtain Christlike affections.

Edwards believed that these affections were unilaterally infused by God and, apparently, instantaneously complete. Wesley, believing that God's grace works cooperantly in salvation, argued that the affections arise in response to God's empowering impact on our lives. These affections strengthen into enduring "tempers" as we exercise them or fade away as we resist them.

This conviction lies behind Wesley's repeated claims: 1) that we are only able to love God and neighbor when we have first felt God's love for us; and 2) that when we allow love of God and neighbor to flow, it produces "every Christian grace, every holy and happy temper. And from these springs uniform holiness of [action]."

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