HistoricalChristian.Faith

John Wesley on purgatory and prayer for the dead

Dates: c. 1750 · Wikipedia
Summary: John Wesley (1703–1791), the founder of Methodism and a lifelong Church-of-England priest, held and practiced prayer for the dead while rejecting the Roman doctrine of purgatory. Drawing on the ancient Church, the Book of Common Prayer's burial office, and the early liturgies, he composed and published forms of prayer for the faithful departed for daily use, and defended the practice against the charge (pressed by Bishop George Lavington) that it was a "Popish" innovation. His was a general prayer — that the departed faithful, with the living, "may have their perfect consummation and bliss" — carefully detached from any notion of a satisfactory fire or of buying souls out of purgatory.

Claims & evidence

Prayer for the faithful departed is a Christian duty

I believe it to be a duty to observe to pray for the Faithful Departed.

— John Wesley, from an undated manuscript, reproduced in Harrington W. Holden, John Wesley in Company with High Churchmen (5th ed., 1872), pp. 84–87, Google Books. Holden, gathering Wesley's scattered statements, observes that Wesley "taught the propriety of praying for the dead, practised it himself, and provided forms, that others might" — putting them forward "not tentatively or apologetically, but as considering such prayer a settled matter of Christian practice."

The practice is justified by antiquity, the Church of England, and the Lord's Prayer

In this kind of general prayer, therefore, for the Faithful Departed, I conceive myself to be clearly justified, both by the earliest Antiquity, by the Church of England, and by the Lord's Prayer.

— John Wesley, reply to Bishop George Lavington (1750), in Holden, John Wesley in Company with High Churchmen, pp. 84–87, Google Books. Lavington, in The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared, had charged Wesley with crypto-Romanism for citing "the words of an ancient Liturgy — 'for the Faithful Departed.'" Wesley answers that whenever he uses those words he prays "to the same effect" as the Burial Service of his own Church — a general intercession for the departed faithful, grounded in the most ancient practice, not the Roman doctrine of purgatory.

The model: the Prayer Book's own burial collect for the departed

that we, with all those that are departed in the true faith of thy holy Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss, both in body and soul, in thy eternal and everlasting glory.

— The Book of Common Prayer, the Burial of the Dead (the collect after the committal), churchofengland.org. This is the "kind of general prayer" Wesley defends and imitates: the Church of England's own office asks God, for the living together with "all those that are departed in the true faith," to bring both to their "perfect consummation and bliss." Wesley took this as warrant enough — the established Church already prays for its dead.

Notes

• Wesley is a key Protestant witness for prayer for the dead without purgatory. He keeps the older, near-universal practice the timeline traces (2 Maccabees through the early liturgies) while standing with the Reformation in rejecting the satisfactory cleansing fire — the two strands the purgatory timeline distinguishes throughout. His prayer is general and non-meritorious, deliberately unlike the Masses-for-the-dead Luther and Calvin attacked.
• Source note: Wesley's words here survive chiefly through Harrington Holden's 1872 compilation (which prints Wesley's High-Church statements in parallel with the Tractarians'); the manuscript "duty" sentence is an undated Wesley fragment, and the "earliest Antiquity … Church of England … Lord's Prayer" sentence is from his 1750 reply to Lavington. The BCP collect is quoted directly from the primary liturgy.
• Methodism after Wesley was divided on the practice; later evangelical Methodism in particular often dropped it, while the broader Anglican tradition retained it — the same narrowing seen on the Lutheran side after Luther.