Already Sanctified

A Theology of the Christian Life in Light of God's Completed Work

Don J. Payne

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781540961303
• eBook ISBN:
  9781493423750
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

How does the doctrine of sanctification shape the Christian life? Offering a fully developed treatment of "accomplished" sanctification, Don Payne explains that the primary biblical focus in sanctification is not progressive growth but that which has already occurred for Christians to make growth possible, necessary, and grace-driven. As Payne explores the significance Scripture attributes to the accomplished aspect of sanctification, he helps us understand that we are already sanctified. Sanctification is not synonymous with transformation but undergirds strategies and resources related to Christian discipleship and formation.

Part One: How We Got Where We Are

1
The Sanctification Mutiny

What happened with the doctrine of sanctification to get us where we are today? Without rehearsing the full and complex history of the doctrine, we need to understand some key, trajectory-setting moves that shaped the contemporary conversation—and the struggles. Part of that work will be to understand how the “sanctification situation,” as we currently experience it, came to be. “Context is everything,” as the saying goes.

Proper understanding and assessment of a complex phenomenon demand some knowledge of the backstory, specifically, the factors that contributed to the phenomenon. This holds true for our attempts to make sense of theologies that govern the life of faith. In this case, those key moves were made by the two most recognizable Magisterial Reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, whose reactions against the Roman Catholic Church’s handling of the doctrine of sanctification set the stage for four hundred years of Protestant engagement of the doctrine.

The Reformation and Sanctification

The Reformers’ insistence on sola scriptura (Scripture alone) significantly altered the doctrinal history of sanctification by returning to the biblical text as the authoritative source for the doctrine. Admittedly, the formulations of sanctification that influence the lives of Protestant Christians1 are also shaped by other factors such as tradition, reason, and experience, functioning underneath Scripture as the controlling source.2

The Reformers protested how tradition had upstaged biblical authority in the Roman Catholicism of their day. Yet, even in subservience to Scripture, tradition and other factors still have been at work in the way different understandings of sanctification unfolded in the Reformation legacy. Each of the varied understandings of sanctification within Protestantism reflects the legacy of reaction against late-medieval Roman Catholic theology.3 Leaders of the Magisterial Reformation were concerned about official church teaching and how that teaching affected people’s lives as they understood it and attempted to follow it.4 From those reactions—those protestations—has come the dizzying panoply of teachings about sanctification that warrant ongoing examination.

A primary theological concern of the Reformers was the doctrine of justification, which Roman Catholic teaching had formulated so as to make justification essentially dependent on the exercise of free will and on some type of moral engagement as preparation to receive God’s grace of justification. Thus, the exercise of free will was considered cooperative with God’s grace, even though it resulted from God’s infused and prevenient grace.5 Sharing the key assumption that sanctification involves moral change, the Reformers saw an inappropriate connection between sanctification and justification—a connection that imposed impossible moral demands on people and compromised radical dependence on God’s grace for salvation. The practical result “in the pew” was a debilitating moralism, relentless insecurity about one’s status before God, and a dangerous presumption both about the extent of one’s need for God’s grace and about one’s capacity to put oneself in a place to receive God’s grace.

Martin Luther

Martin Luther took the lead in this protest. As an Augustinian monk he had been immersed in Augustinian theology as it had been shaped by the Aristotelian constructs of the Scholastics. Luther’s biographer James Mackinnon notes Peter Lombard, William of Ockham, and John Duns Scotus as Luther’s “early mentors in the scholastic theology.”6 These figures, more Pelagian in their theological tendencies,7 contributed to what Luther later described as his “torture of conscience,”8 at the root of which was the question of the basis on which God is gracious to sinners.

Reflecting Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian modes of thought, the Roman Catholic Church taught justification in a highly nuanced manner, which included the notion of infused grace along with intricate distinctions about the relation of infused grace to the activation of human free will.9 Luther rejected the notion of infusion in his famous contention that justification is a single act of God to impute Christ’s righteousness.

In the Counter-Reformation, the Council of Trent (1545–63) later solidified the church’s stance in response to the Reformers’ protests.

Chapter VII In What the Justification of the Sinner Consists, and What Are Its Causes

This disposition or preparation is followed by justification itself, which is not only a remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts whereby an unjust man becomes just and from being an enemy becomes a friend, that he may be an heir according to hope of life everlasting.10

Canon 11 If anyone says that men are justified either by the sole imputation of the justice of Christ or by the sole remission of sins, to the exclusion of the grace and the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Ghost, and remains in them, or also that the grace by which we are justified is only the good will of God, let him be anathema.11

Trent’s inclusion of the internal affections of grace and charity in the doctrine of justification represented what Luther and other Reformers considered the inappropriate and dangerous incorporation of sanctification into justification.

William Placher offers the following summary observations and comparison of Luther and Trent. For Luther, he says, “We are justified, though we remain sinners because God imputes Christ’s righteousness to us. To be sure, in our lives as Christians we may turn gradually away from sin (this involves ‘sanctification’ and ‘regeneration’), but that comes later and does not contribute to our justification, which derives not at all from our efforts.”12 For Trent, however,

Grace comes first, an awakening and assisting grace that begins the process of justification, but people must consent to and cooperate with that grace. Justification, in turn, “is not only a remission of sins but also the sanctification and renewal of the inward man through the voluntary reception of the grace and gifts whereby an unjust man becomes just and from being an enemy becomes a friend.” Luther had focused on an instant of justification, in which God saved sinners by pure grace but left them sinners—they were justified only because Christ’s righteousness was imputed to them. Trent pictured justification as a process in which divine grace and human efforts cooperate at every step and not only lead God to count us as justified but also begin to transform us so that we more nearly deserve that status.13

For Luther, to subsume sanctification under justification in this particular manner and to attach justifying significance in any manner to personal transformation was seen as undermining the radical nature of God’s grace for salvation.

Still, for Luther, “justification and ‘sanctification’ are extremely closely united,”14 reflected perhaps in his insistence on simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously righteous and sinner), yet not in the same sense as he observed in Roman Catholic teaching. The key difference for Luther was that in justification Christ’s righteousness is imputed to the believer and sanctification does not factor into that new standing before God. With that boundary in place, Luther went on to make sanctification part of what God does in the believer through faith. Commenting on Romans 6:19, he stated, “For through the terms ‘sanctification’ and ‘cleanness’ he [Paul] is trying to convey the same concept, namely, that the body should be pure, but not with just any kind of purity, but with that which comes from within, from the spirit of sanctifying faith. . . . Because through faith first the soul must be cleansed, so that in this way a holy soul can make the body clean for the sake of God; otherwise it would be a worthless chastity.”15 It is worth noting in his remark that he connected sanctification to cleansing but not necessarily to moral transformation. He offered a forthright description of sanctification in the third article of his Small Catechism:

“I believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Christian Church, the communion of saints; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. Amen.”

What does this mean? I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Je...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One: How We Got Where We Are
• Part Two: The Biblical Story Line Revisited
• Part Three: The Doctrinal Profile Reanimated
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover