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cooperation in a sense—exploring how divine grace works.[8]
John Wesley embraced justification by faith alone; indeed his “conversion” involved the strange warming of his heart when hearing Luther’s treatment of Romans.[9] But Wesley did not want this objective aspect of Christian assurance to prevent believers from vigorously pursuing perfect holiness or subjectively receiving assurance in light of their growth in grace. He insisted that biblical commands regarding holiness, even perfection, implied the possibility of graced obedience, enjoying this end of salvation here and now. Wesley’s focus was the heart, so perfection would not involve loss of finite weakness or error, or legally blameless lack of inadvertent sin, but complete love of God and neighbor. If Calvinists and Lutherans championed Romans, with the latter marginalizing James, then Wesleyans renewed interest in 1 John.
Realizing Christian perfection would involve ongoing growth in grace, putting sin to death and putting on Christ. But sanctification would involve more than slow, sometimes steady, progress. Christian perfection would involve seeking a special work of grace after conversion, generally labeled a “second blessing.” Such holiness meant a primarily personal focus concerning salvation, yet Holiness groups were frequent pioneers in nineteenth-century evangelical social reform: they were more typically involved in abolitionist, temperance, and women’s suffrage causes than others. Meanwhile, populist commitments enabled Wesleyans to transform the Anglo-American landscape of church life. Such alternative movements as the Keswick Convention reflect broad Holiness outlines despite altered details: pursuit of a higher plane of sanctification through repeated crises of post-conversion filling with the Holy Spirit that punctuate ordinary life. Such approaches have had widespread evangelical influence.
Pentecostal: The Baptism and Gifts of the Holy Spirit
Emerging from the Holiness tradition is the family of Pentecostal movements originating near the turn of the twentieth century. Just as an Arminian stance cuts across church traditions—with Baptists, for example, being either Arminian, Calvinist, or an amalgam—so Pentecostal beliefs and practices, or openness to them anyway, cuts across other ecclesiastical and soteriological traditions.
Classic Pentecostalism emphasized not merely holiness but empowerment for bold ministry and joyful living. The second, or post-conversion, blessing was baptism with the Holy Spirit, with its initial evidence being glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. Most classic Pentecostals did not say that a person is unsaved without such an experience, but such an experience was to be normatively sought. Various Pentecostal denominations promoted this experience and the distinctively supernatural gifts of the Spirit.
The charismatic movement arose in the middle of the twentieth century across a range of churches, celebrating charismata and promoting Spirit baptism, albeit with less emphasis on the “initial evidence” of tongues. The Vineyard movement arose in the late twentieth century to continue celebrating charismatic and missional empowerment, often adopting a more Reformed account of progressive (less episodic or crisis-oriented) sanctification. Today “Pentecostal” is a broad adjective globally, having lost theological specificity concerning the classic Spirit baptism evidenced by tongues-speaking. Pentecostal soteriologies generally see themselves remedying more classical—not just Protestant but also Catholic and even Orthodox—deficiencies, bringing the Holy Spirit’s work out from under the shadow of excessive Christ-centeredness.
Trends
Accordingly, one of the significant soteriological trends across various traditions is greater emphasis on the Holy Spirit’s work. Western Christians and churches are increasingly aware of God’s empowering presence within Global South Christianity. Simultaneously, traditional atonement-oriented accounts of salvation, tending toward anthropological pessimism and soteriological exclusivism, are increasingly unpopular in the West. Yet these do not exhaust recent soteriological trends, the rest of which loosely correspond to a traditional dogmatic outline.
Christ’s Accomplishment: Atonement and Justification
Christ’s work of atonement has frequently been reinterpreted in nonviolent or victorious terms, while justification by faith has been subject to both ecumenical dialogue and extensive debate in Pauline scholarship.
Justification is not a significant feature of Orthodox soteriologies. Catholic soteriology adopted a broadly Augustinian account involving transformative righteousness, in which justification itself is not primary except in debate with Protestants. Catholic soteriology does not teach justification by meritorious works, but justification by faith as fulfilled in love. This love relates transformative righteousness to ontological renewal through infusion of sacramental grace. Believers do not merit salvation as an achievement but as a fitting divine response to human appropriation of grace. By contrast, Protestants typically define justification not as a process of infusion but as the initial imputation of Christ’s righteousness—at minimum a declaration of forgiveness based on Christ bearing believers’ sins.
Until recently atonement theology operated with a distinction between the person and the work of Christ. The former comprised the focus of Christology; the latter fell into an ambiguous space, partly Christological and partly soteriological. Magisterial Protestants developed complex accounts of the ordo salutis in which justification became a primary benefit, the initial application of Christ’s atoning work.
Ever since the Socinians of the early Protestant era, penal substitutionary atonement—according to which Christ suffered the punishment deserved by human sinners—has had opponents. Early in the twentieth century Gustaf Aulén, a Swedish Lutheran, proposed a threefold typology of atonement theologies.[10] Aulén’s widely used typology suggested that (1) objective views, orienting atonement around change on God’s side, arose in the Middle Ages when Anselm treated atonement in terms of God’s offended honor. Such objective views bear hallmarks of feudal or legal or other realities in their originating contexts. (2) Subjective views, orienting atonement around change on the sinner’s side, also arose in the Middle Ages, thanks to Peter Abelard. Yet subjective views focus on Christ’s moral example or influence to the exclusion of other scriptural concepts, so they became widespread only in the modern era and are viewed as liberal, captivated by contemporary concerns. Aulén suggested that this binary opposition between objective and subjective views was not original to the Christian tradition, which had previously been characterized by (3) classical views orienting atonement around Christus Victor—Christ triumphing over all hostile powers, including sin, death, and the devil.
Aulén’s work appealed to many who recognized that no single atonement theory had been canonized in the early creeds, who reveled in patristic or subsequent diversity, and who rejected the penal substitution model. Modern thought finds blood sacrifice and pessimistic anthropologies distasteful. Aulén’s work opened a door through which feminist and other critiques of penal substitution walked all the more forcefully. To some, penal atonement theories entail “divine child abuse,” fostering male violence along with female victimization—glorifying Jesus’s suffering at the hands of an angry divine Father. Catholic René Girard is representative of other recent antiviolence theories, reinterpreting Christ’s sacrifice sociologically as an exposure of societies’ scapegoating mechanisms.[11]
Alternatives to penal substitution have arisen periodically among more conservative Protestants. For instance, some Wesleyans find penal substitution to be extrinsic to their tradition and appeal to governmental models, in which Christ’s sacrifice reflects God’s justice in overcoming sin without addressing divine wrath for specific sinners. Alternatives have also arisen among biblical scholars: some argue that Scripture does not contain the penal substitution model, while others argue more modestly that Scripture does not require it.[12] In such accounts, Scripture provides multiple metaphors from which theologians are free to choose as contextually appropriate. Unifying these objections to penal substitution is the general charge that it is Lutheran and Reformed, not broadly evangelical, reflecting an outdated and excessively Pauline theology to the exclusion of other biblical priorities.
Traditional Protestants have responded by defending the presence of penal substitution