No. Methodism is Arminian, not Calvinist. The Methodist Articles of Religion contain no article on predestination or election, and they say plainly that a believer can fall from grace and be restored. The split happened inside early Methodism itself, and one Calvinist branch of it is still going today, which is where most of the confusion comes from.
Where the disagreement started
John Wesley and George Whitefield were both Methodist preachers in the same revival. In 1740 Wesley preached a sermon at Bristol titled Free Grace. His text was Romans 8:32.
He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also, along with Him, freely give us all things?
The sermon was an attack on predestination, and it broke the movement in two. Wesley states his whole case in the second paragraph: “The grace or love of God, whence cometh our salvation, is FREE IN ALL, and FREE FOR ALL.”
He does not soften it as he goes. Further down the same sermon he says the doctrine “represents the most holy God as worse than the devil, as both more false, more cruel, and more unjust.”
Whitefield answered in a letter written from Bethesda in Georgia, dated December 24, 1740. He kept the affection and gave no ground: “I think in this you greatly err.”
That exchange is why the answer here is no. The two men who led the revival settled it against each other, in print, within a year.
The four points the two sides actually disagree on
Both traditions wrote their positions down. The table sets Methodism’s own doctrinal standard beside the two confessions that define Calvinism. Every cell comes from the document named at the head of its column.
| The question | Articles of Religion (Methodist) | Westminster Confession (Reformed) | Canons of Dort (Reformed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who is chosen, and on what basis | No article on it. Wesley’s revision leaves out the Church of England’s Article XVII, Of Predestination and Election, and the twenty-five articles never take the subject up. | “some men and angels are predestinated unto everlasting life; and others foreordained to everlasting death” (3.3) | God “chose in Christ to salvation a definite number of particular people,” who “were neither better nor more deserving than the others” (First Main Point, Article 7) |
| Who Christ died for | The offering of Christ is “that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction for all the sins of the whole world” (Article XX) | “Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectually called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but the elect only” (3.6) | Christ was to “effectively redeem from every people, tribe, nation, and language all those and only those who were chosen from eternity to salvation” (Second Main Point, Article 8) |
| Whether grace can be resisted | We can do no good “without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will” (Article VIII). Preventing is the old word for going before. | God calls effectually by “renewing their wills, and, by his almighty power, determining them to that which is good” (10.1) | Regeneration is a work “which God works in us without our help,” and not one that leaves it “in human power whether or not to be reborn or converted” (Third and Fourth Main Points, Article 12) |
| Whether a believer can fall away | “after we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and, by the grace of God, rise again and amend our lives” (Article XII) | Those effectually called “can neither totally nor finally fall away from the state of grace, but shall certainly persevere therein to the end, and be eternally saved” (17.1) | By God’s mercy the elect “neither forfeit faith and grace totally nor remain in their downfalls to the end and are lost” (Fifth Main Point, Article 8) |
The blank in the first row is the sharpest thing on this page. The Methodist Articles of Religion are Wesley’s revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, which do carry one on the subject: Article XVII, Of Predestination and Election. Wesley’s twenty-five carry nothing in its place.
The one branch of Methodism that was Calvinist
Whitefield’s side of the split did not vanish. A Methodist Church report on Anglican and Methodist relations records what became of it: the Calvinist part of Methodism “went out from the Church of England, forming the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion and the Calvinistic Methodist Church of Wales (later the Presbyterian Church of Wales).”
That Welsh church is still here. Its own history page calls it “The Presbyterian Church of Wales or the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Church” and traces it to the Methodist revival of the eighteenth century. Its leaders set apart their own ministers in 1811, and it later replaced its reliance on the Thirty-Nine Articles, “interpreted Calvinistically,” with a Confession of Faith agreed at Aberystwyth in 1823. The church reports about 13,000 members in just under 500 congregations.
So the full answer has two halves. Methodism as a body is Arminian. One Methodist branch went the Calvinist way, carried the word Methodist in its name for most of two centuries, and is a Presbyterian church today.
What Methodists say about themselves now
A Methodist Church report puts the present position in one sentence: “The collective self-understanding of the Methodist Church today is unequivocally Arminian.” (source, PDF)
In the United States the standard is the same twenty-five Articles of Religion, still printed in the Book of Discipline of The United Methodist Church. Nothing in them commits a Methodist to unconditional election, limited atonement or irresistible grace, and Article XII rules out the perseverance of the saints as Westminster states it.
How the two men ended
Whitefield died in 1770. Wesley preached his funeral sermon in London on November 18 that year. In it he separated the doctrines he held to be essential from the ones he did not, and of the second group he said: “we may think and let think; we may ‘agree to disagree.'” (Sermon 53)
They never resolved it. Methodism kept Wesley’s answer.