Sanctification

Explorations in Theology and Practice

Kelly M. Kapic

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780830840625
• eBook ISBN:
  9780830896936
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Often treated like the younger sibling in theology, the doctrine of sanctification has spent the last few decades waiting not-so-patiently behind those doctrines viewed as more senior. With so much recent interest in ideas like election and justification, the question of holiness can often seem to be of secondary importance, and widespread misunderstanding of sanctification as moralism or undue human effort further impedes thoughtful engagement. But what if we have missed the boat on what sanctification really means for today's believer?The essays in this volume, which come out of a recent Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference, address this dilemma through biblical, historical, dogmatic and pastoral explorations. The contributors sink their teeth into positions like the "works" mentality or "justification by faith alone" and posit stronger biblical views of grace and holiness, considering key topics such as the image of God, perfection, union with Christ, Christian ethics and suffering. Eschewing any attempt to produce a unified proposal, the essays included here instead offer resources to stimulate an informed discussion within both church and academy.Contributors include:

• Henri Blocher
• Julie Canlis
• Ivor Davidson
• James Eglinton
• Brannon Ellis
• Michael Horton
• Kelly M. Kapic
• Richard Lints
• Bruce McCormack
• Peter Moore
• Oliver O?Donovan
• Derek Tidball

Part One

Sanctified by Grace Through Faith in Union with Christ

- 2 -

Living by Faith—Alone?

Reformed Responses to Antinomianism

Richard Lints

The just shall live by faith.

HABAKKUK 2:4 (NKJV), CITED IN ROMANS 1:17, GALATIANS 3:11 AND HEBREWS 10:38

When the prophet says, “The just shall live by faith,” the statement does not apply to impious and profane persons, whom the Lord by turning them to faith may justify, but the utterance is directed to believers and to them life is promised by faith. We must have this blessedness not just once (in justification) but must hold to it throughout life. To the very end of life believers have no other righteousness than that which is described as the free reconciliation with God by faith.

John Calvin1

The gospel is the story of God creating, redeeming, sustaining and consummating a people for his own possession. In that narrative is embedded the entire Christian life. There is no other story that narrates our reconciliation with God past, present or future. As a gift from God, the gospel is received by faith alone. The gospel is also continually embraced by faith throughout the entirety of the Christian life. Protestant traditions have generally affirmed that faith in the triune God of this gospel is the sole instrumental ground of justification. They have spoken with less than a ringing consensus about faith as the instrumental ground of sanctification. If the gospel is God’s redeeming actions past, present and future, and faith is the instrument by which believers embrace it, consistency would suggest that there is essential continuity to the role of faith in justification and sanctification. That is not the case for many Protestants, and many Protestants in the Reformed tradition specifically. This essay attempts to get at the underlying reasons why this is so.

The argument unfolds in several stages. It begins by tracing the erroneous assumption that good works (in contrast to faith) are necessary to sanctification in order to avoid the problem of antinomianism. It is erroneous because sanctified believers remain always sinners and there is no partial righteousness sufficient to satisfy the critics of antinomianism. In effect, there are two types of antinomianism; only one is to be avoided, and sola fide is not susceptible to the dangerous type. Faith is the orientation of persons outside of themselves. As such it is the instrument by which believers embrace divine holiness, and it restrains them from notions of achieving holiness themselves. Divine holiness is nothing less than the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit to believers. Because of that presence, the law ceases to function forensically (i.e., acting as judge) and instead operates sapientially in the life of believers. The final section of the argument suggests that the conceptual resources of imaging and idolatry underwrite a reorientation of the doctrine of sanctification that does not depend on notions of good works or moral progress.

If the gospel is the narrative of God’s creating, redeeming and consummating work in Christ, there is no progress beyond the gospel in the Christian life. There is no story beyond the story. The Christian life is about growing deeper into the gospel, which therefore implies living by faith, not beyond faith. The significance of sola fide in this context is, quite simply, immense.2 Faith alone constitutes the means by which sinners are reconciled to the living God, and by virtue of which they continue to cling to reconciliation to God as their only hope. It is vital not to refer to this faith as the good work of the sinner, which would wrongly connote that sinners engage God by being good enough. Their relationship with God is and always is based on grace. It is God who graciously reconciles sinners with himself as an act of his divine compassion.

Being reconciled is not only initiated by God but continues by virtue of his grace. We may refer to Christian holiness as that ongoing work of divine grace by which reconciliation with God is sustained in the life of the believer. Holiness attaches to the divine declaration that his people are set apart in Christ. The creaturely counterpart to this divine declaration is faith. Yet in many Protestant traditions, the believer’s actions (i.e., their good works) in sanctification come perilously close to being precisely another instrumental ground of one’s ongoing reconciliation before God.3 The logic of this tendency is simply that the alternative appears to be some form of antinomianism, wherein the actions of believers are inconsequential to the covenant relationship to God. If one downplays the necessity of “good works” in sanctification, then one appears dangerously close to answering Paul’s rhetorical question of Romans 6:1, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” in the affirmative. Yet, as I shall argue, by emphasizing the necessity of good works in sanctification, the risk is that one’s continued reconciliation with their covenant Lord will be based on a “boast” before God, which Paul expressly denies in Romans 4. The danger of boasting is mitigated only by keeping faith as central to sanctification as it is to justification. As Calvin reminds, “Let us not consider works to be so commended after free justification that they afterward take over the function of justifying man or share this office with faith.”4

Two Courtrooms?

Protestants have often interpreted Paul’s rhetorical question in Romans 6:1 as implying the necessity of good works in sanctification.5 There can be no antinomian license to sin in the face of divine grace, so the argument goes. Charles Hodge offers a representative exposition of the Protestant framework of sanctification in the light of this fear of antinomianism. “Justification,” he writes, “is a forensic act, God acting as judge, declaring justice satisfied so far as the believing sinner is concerned, whereas sanctification is an effect due to the divine efficiency.”6 On this rendering justification is the declaration of God toward sinners based solely on the finished work of Christ. Sanctification, by contrast, is the inward renewal of character that results from the infusion of the Holy Spirit as the gracious gift of God to those who are justified. Faith is the means by which believers embrace the full penal satisfaction of Christ’s death on the cross on their behalf. After that and by means of the impartation of divine grace, “sinful acts become more in­frequent and holy acts more and more habitual and controlling.”7 The Holy Spirit provides the “occasion for the exercise of . . . submission, confidence, self-denial, patience and meekness as well as faith, hope and love.”8 Real moral progress appears to be the hallmark of sanctification. Hodge goes so far as to say, “The best Christians are in general those who not merely from restless activity of natural disposition, but from love to Christ and zeal for his glory, labor most and suffer most in his service.”9

But what does “best” amount to in this instance? It appears from Hodge’s exposition that “best” is a qualitative term applied to believers who are more cooperative with the Holy Spirit’s inward renewal of their character. The language of “best” implies a scale defined by the amount of “holy acts” performed by the believer and the infrequency of “sinful acts” performed. That scale determines the “happiness or blessedness of believers in a future life in proportion to the devotion to the service of Christ in this life.”10

The scales of divine justice operate according to two different and conflicting principles for Hodge. From one angle, the justice of God is satisfied by Christ’s death as the federal representative of his people and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to them. In this divine courtroom, the innocent one (Jesus) has been declared guilty in the place of the guilty ones (believers), and in turn the guilty ones have been declared innocent in place of the innocent one. But evidently in another divine courtroom nearby with those very same believers, as Hodge says, “a man shall reap what he sows, and God will reward everyone according to his works.”11

The reason Hodge backs himself into this corner is straightforward. To avoid any hint of Roman Catholic moralism on the one hand, Hodge affirms double imputation with respect to justification. To avoid any hint of antinomianism on the other hand, he affirms the necessity of good works in sanctification. He cites Luther’s denunciation of Agricola as the confirming historical evidence that Protestants are committed to the necessity of good works.12 Good works are not meritorious in justification, but they are “rewarded” and appear to have a judicial function in sanctification according to Hodge.

Hodge attempted to suppress the overtly meritorious consequences in his doctrine of sanctification by arguing that the Holy Spirit is the efficient cause of these good works, and therefore they accrue no merit on behalf of the believer: they are rewarded but not because of any merit. This curious reality is made more perplexing by the odd asymmetry of justice in this second courtroom of sanctification. Good works are rewarded, while bad works receive no condemnation. Justice, or some form of it, appears to work in only one direction. Hodge appears to think that good works function as instrumental, nonmeritorious grounds in sanctification analogous to the manner in which faith functions as the instrumental, nonmeritorious ground in justification.

The problem is twofold. First, in Hodge’s portrayal justification is grounded in faith precisely because good works are in sufficiently short supply as to warrant condemnation rather than reward. But in sanctification, there appear to be a sufficient supply of good works to warrant blessing. Second and more importantly, Christ’s redeeming work is entirely sufficient for the reconciliation of sinners, but in the courtroom of sanctification the verdict is based on the good works of believers as well.13 There appear to be works worthy of a reward without being meritorious. At the very least this is confusing.

The tacit assumption in Hodge is that good works as well as faith are actions of the human will, whose meritorious standing is avoided by the causal precedents of the Holy Spirit. However, faith must be distinguished from good works at the very point where Hodge wants to make them analogous. Faith has no “boast” (i.e., merit) before God not only because of its causal ancestry in the Holy Spirit but also primarily because its reference point lies outside of itself. The causal conditions of faith appear irrelevant to its meritorious standing (or lack thereof) in Romans 3 and 4. There is no reference to the work of the Holy Spirit’s producing faith at the critical juncture in Paul’s argument against moralism (“having a boast”) nor against antinomianism (“a license to sin”). Rather, Paul depicts faith in contrast to works, as hoping and trusting in something (Christ) outside of one’s self (Rom 4:3-5, 21-25). It has a fundamental exteriority about it in this respect. By contrast, works have no such fundamental exteriority about them. They belong to the one who does them. When works are conceptually contrasted to faith, it is the contrast between an action without an external reference and an action with an external reference. In this regard, Hodge responded to the antinomian criticism only by implicitly affirming self-referencing action, or self-righteousness in theological terms.

What is required is a reframing of the issues. There is a danger of anti­nomianism but not of the sort portrayed by Hodge. Let me suggest that there are two different (and contrasting) forms of antinomianism, only one of which is theologically dangerous. Antinomianism type 1 affirms that obedience to law cannot serve as the basis of a relationship to God. Anti­nomianism type 2 affirms that there is no normative moral center within the triune community. Both forms of antinomianism work against the intuition that moral norms are intrinsically connected to God by means of obedience to the law. Type 2 repudiates the connection between the divine being and fixed moral norms. “Freedom in Christ” according to antinomianism type 2 entails a freedom from all fixed moral norms.14 One upshot of type 2 antinomianism is the embrace of the self as the determiner of all moral standards. By contrast, antinomianism type 1 affirms that there are fixed moral norms in the divine being but that obedience to them does not serve as the basis of the relationship to God. That relationship, after the fall, is grounded in divine grace.15

Type 1 antinomianism should actually be embraced if faith is the sole instrument by which believers lay hold of Christ. Type 2 antinomianism should be rejected because divine holiness requires a normative moral center. Arguing for the former notion of antinomianism and against the latter requires that the difference between faith and works in sanctification is accentuated and any hint of intrinsic righteousness in sinners is avoided.16 Calvin pungently reminds: “God does not as many stupidly believe once for all reckon to us as righteousness that forgiveness of sins concerning which we have spoken in order that having obtained pardon for our past life, we may afterward seek righteousness in the law. This would be only to lead us into false hope, to laugh at us and mock us.”17

Simul Sanctus et Peccator

“There is no greater sinner than the Christian Church,” said Luther in his Easter Day sermon in 1531.18 Calvin’s rhetorical flourish ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Prelude: An Opening Homily
• Part One: Sanctified by Grace Through Faith in Union with Christ
• Part Two: Human Agency and Sanctification’s Relationship to Ethics
• Part Three: Theological and Pastoral Meditations on Sanctification
• Subject and Name Index
• Scripture Index
• Notes
• Praise for Sanctification
• About the Author
• More Titles from InterVarsity Press