Faith & Spirit Quote by Adam Clarke

Perfection, for Adam Clarke, isn’t a personality upgrade or a moral glow-up; it’s a repair job on a wrecked original. The sentence is built to relocate the reader’s ambition. “Perfection” sounds like human striving, but Clarke immediately reframes it as “restoration,” a word that implies prior ownership and present damage. You don’t climb into holiness; you return to it. The drama is that the thing most modern people treat as self-authored virtue is, in his telling, a divine reclamation project.

The subtext is both theological and quietly polemical. Clarke writes in a Protestant world wary of any doctrine that smells like earning salvation. So he loads the mechanism into “creating him anew in Christ Jesus.” The grammar makes God the active agent and the human the object acted upon. That move protects the claim from Pelagian optimism (humans can fix themselves) while still leaving space for the Methodist hunger for real moral transformation, not just forensic forgiveness.

Context matters: Clarke is a Wesleyan-era theologian, and Wesleyan “Christian perfection” was frequently caricatured as smug sinlessness. Clarke’s phrasing counters that by rooting perfection in Genesis and the Fall: holiness is not a badge for spiritual overachievers but the recovery of the “image and likeness of God” that has been “lost.” It’s an anthropology with stakes. If the image is damaged, then ethics without regeneration is cosmetic. If it can be restored, then holiness isn’t a metaphor; it’s a re-made self, with Christ as the only plausible architect.