Sanctification

Michael Allen, Scott R. Swain

• Publisher: Zondervan Academic
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780310491477
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

Sanctification—the act or process of becoming holy—is one of the gifts of the gospel of Jesus Christ, but it's often misunderstood by the modern church. Sanctification offers a Christ-centered and clear account of the doctrine by viewing it within its wider biblical and historical context.

Churches too often allow their definitions of holiness to be prompted by existential goals or the social mores of the Christian community. It's not surprising, then, that many view holiness as accidental or expendable, even as a legalistic posture opposed to the freedom of the gospel and separate from the gift of grace.

Sanctification (part of the New Studies in Dogmatics series), defines holiness in theological terms by:

• Providing a framework by discussing the core Christian doctrines associated with it, such as the character of God, the nature of creation, and the covenantal shape of life with God.
• Considering the ways in which the gospel of Jesus not only prompts us to holy action but provides holiness as one of its blessings.
• Attending to the ways in which the gift of sanctification relates to human means, so that we can appreciate its connection to human nature, responsibility, and the pedagogy of exemplars and of law.

-ABOUT THE SERIES-

New Studies in Dogmatics seeks to retrieve the riches of Christian doctrine for the sake of contemporary theological renewal. Following in the tradition of G. C. Berkouwer's Studies in Dogmatics, this series provides thoughtful, concise, and readable treatments of major theological topics, expressing the biblical, creedal, and confessional shape of Christian doctrine for a contemporary evangelical audience.

The editors and contributors share a common conviction that the way forward in constructive systematic theology lies in building upon the foundations laid in the church's historic understanding of the Word of God as professed in its creeds, councils, and confessions, and by its most trusted teachers.

CHAPTER 1

SANCTIFICATION AND THE GOSPEL

THINKING THE HOLY

As Moses would tell you, you have to approach the holy in the proper way. The burning bush demands a specific posture and mode of spiritual preparation. The present book addresses holiness from a particular angle, not by approaching holiness in general as some sort of phenomenological or cultural ideal or experience, but by reflecting upon holiness in the sphere of the gospel, that is, holiness in the wake of the economy of the triune God’s life-bestowing grace. We will be working through the question of what is “evangelical holiness.” That matchless seventeenth century theologian John Owen regularly spoke of evangelical holiness in his attempt to veer away from the dangers of moralism and antinomianism alike.¹ Doing so means relocating talk of the holy by framing it in light of the gospel; it means addressing the holy not directly but only indirectly, in light of the story of the gospel of Jesus.

Holiness deserves thoughtful consideration. We are called to be holy. The demand means that it cannot be sidestepped or ignored. Yet there are many factors militating against careful reflection on holiness. Any initiative focused on holiness does well to be cognizant of these challenges—as well as the force and allure of them. Historically, much that has gone under the name of holiness has, in fact, been mere cultural preference: the ills of colonialism or bigotry continue to linger as a threat for holiness run amok. Culturally, holiness has sometimes gone hand in hand with arrogance or elitism. Christians press into the nature of and calling to be holy with great peril unless they are cognizant of the dangers of confusing their preferences and practices with those of God Almighty. Thinking the holy can seem narrow-minded, legalistic, and presumptive.

Holiness is also a difficult topic for those who live in the churches marked by the Protestant Reformation. From the earliest days of the first generation of Reformers, the charge of moral laxity, or antinomianism, emerged from the lips of their detractors. Salvation in Christ alone was said to be completely external and, thus, nothing more than a legal fiction that left sinners undisturbed and no better off than before, morally speaking. Some responses to these charges risked compromising the Reformers’ emphases on Christ, grace, and faith—emphases that were so dear to the Reformation itself. Therefore, we must note that reformational Christians remain aware of the dangers of either describing grace in a way that never connects the centrality of Christ with the conformity of the sinner unto Christ’s image, or of doing so only by somehow failing to hold fast to the reformational principles: solus Christus! sola gratia! sola fide! Thinking the holy can seem like a pipe dream, or it can be approached only by endorsing a neonomianism, a higher life, or an addition to the apparently insufficient work of Jesus Christ.

Thinking the holy for Christians, and specifically for reformational Christians, appears a difficult task. It remains needed, however, for the prophetic and apostolic witness to Jesus Christ insists on the importance of holiness from start to finish. God is holy. The world is meant to be made holy. Sin ruins the holy. The holy is promised anew. Christ is holy and makes holy by his Spirit. The economy of the gospel demands that we confess not only that Christ brings life, blessing, and, fundamentally, God to us, but that in so doing he brings holiness along the way. And the triune God not only delivers holiness according to the Scriptures, but God does so with respect for all life—people, persons, natures, practices, habits, and acts.

My approach to evangelical holiness sits rather uneasily alongside typical reflections on holiness and Christian morality. The considerable literature that has emerged in those areas focuses upon matters of communal and political formation, psychological and therapeutic development, and missional and evangelistic callings. Thankfully such intellectual excursions do not always happen apart from any prompting and directing by biblical and specifically christological material. When the literature turns christological, it presses into the shape of the incarnational ministry of the Son: his life, teaching, and passion. When ethical material does listen to christological prompting, however, it is primarily in the past tense and focuses on the finished work of Christ. By contrast, some of the matters that are most central to my account—Christ’s pre- and post-incarnate existence—languish on the margins of ethical reflection. My suggestion is that an evangelical account of the holy requires a steady focus upon the holiness of God, that is, the holiness of the inner triune life, so that its communication to creatures can be registered as truly gracious, that is, miraculous and free. In addition, to appreciate the christological context of the holy and of the ethical life requires attention not only to the past tense of the gospel but also to its present and future tenses, which are the continuing ministry of the risen Christ by his Spirit and its promised completion in glory. In other words, while my focus upon evangelical holiness does center our reflections on the person and work of Jesus Christ, this center exceeds our myopic disciplinary or imaginative reductions.

Perhaps an example can be used to clarify these differences. One particularly powerful recent attempt to set forward a distinctly Christian approach to ethics has been offered by Stanley Hauerwas and a number of his students. Hauerwas has always been perceptive to the ways in which political entanglements can affect the parameters of Christian discipleship and ecclesiastical witness. In particular, Hauerwas registered the impressive influence of liberal political philosophy upon ethics in the mid-twentieth century. Religion was located in the private sphere, and a uniquely Christian witness in various facets of life was thus problematized. He has offered lengthy analyses of the work of political philosophers, such as John Rawls and Richard Rorty, in seeking to untangle the liberal legacy from the inside out.

A number of philosophical resources have been employed by Hauerwas to help register the failures of modern liberalism and then to suggest a path forward. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s epistemology and philosophy of language proved influential to Hauerwas’s early work, serving Hauerwas as an analytic tool to note the communal shape of learning, reasoning, and valuing the true, the good, and the beautiful. Recent essays show that this Wittgensteinian influence has continued to shape Hauerwas’s thought for decades now.² A while later, the contributions of Alasdair MacIntyre were added, in particular his notable work After Virtue. MacIntyre provided a genealogy of why ethics was in such a hard place in late modernity and what sort of tradition would be necessary to render it viable again. In his memoir, Hannah’s Child, Hauerwas identifies the seismic influence of MacIntyre’s book:

I like to think that this book changed the world. At least it changed the world in which I worked . . . Without the kind of philosophical work that MacIntyre represents, theology threatens to be an esoteric discipline available only to those on the inside. Alasdair (and Aristotle) provided me with the conceptual tools necessary to show that knowledge of God and what it means to be human are inseparable.³

In many ways, Hauerwas’s work has always functioned to connect ethical issues with deep philosophical resources. In his memoir he notes that this has been his real contribution.⁴ But philosophy has been a tool for doctrinal development. In particular, the Wittgensteinian grammar of knowing and the MacIntyrian approach to formation have flowered into an ecclesiastical ethics in Hauerwas’s work. His book titles can be instructive in this regard. He has sought to think about Christian witness After Christendom. In the wake of that system, which he regards as so seductive and insidious for a variety of reasons, he proposes a way forward where the holy and the good are pursued In Good Company, that is, in The Peaceable Kingdom that is now present in the church.⁵

What can we make of such a contribution to thinking about the holy? Hauerwas wisely discerns the various ways in which late modernity insidiously shapes moral reflection by seductively calling us to think the holy in terms and categories set by other agendas, whether they are directed by the market, the earthly polis, the therapeutic, or some other motivating force. And Hauerwas has not only written a number of studies himself, but has inspired still further work in his many students regarding the formative influence of seemingly mundane and routine activities in the life of the church, even the elements of the Christian liturgy. One can only read resources like the Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, which is surely a remarkable example of what ethics looks like as Hauerwasian—and thus Wittgensteinian, MacIntyreian, and ecclesiastical—and stand appreciative for the penetrating insights into the formative significance of Christian practices. Here we have a consistent call for the Christian distinction to make the world the world by being the church. From his early works unto today, Hauerwas has brought razor-sharp focus upon the tie between Community and Character.⁶ Thus, the holy is defined not by cultural preference or universal values but specifically by the kingdom principles of the particular people of God; this approach is an ecclesiastical ethics in a distinctive key.

And yet this ecclesiastical ethics is not an evangelical ethics of the sort that will be pursued here. Focusing upon practices and ecclesiastical formation is no doubt necessary but not thereby theologically sufficient as a Christian description of thinking the holy and of the good. Hauerwas has attempted to glean much from Karl Barth and his opposition to natural theology, but it is questionable whether Hauerwas sustains the kind of christocentric focus of Barth or, rather, whether he turns to offer a more pronounced ecclesiocentric turn. Indeed, this seems to be evident in his Gifford Lectures, now published as With the Grain of the Universe. Upon assessing and critiquing the projects of William James and Reinhold Niebuhr, both of which he finds to be thinking the true and good in light of universally accessible realities that are undisciplined by life in the ecclesia, he turns to Karl Barth as the ironic savior of modern theology.⁷ This turn is ironic precisely because Barth refuses to play by the rules of the modern intellectual game, which honors reason as a discrete and autonomous realm of activity.⁸ But Hauerwas’s assessment of Barth focuses much more intently upon the witness of the saints and the sociological influence of the ecclesia (in the form of men and women like Pope John Paul II, John Howard Yoder, and Dorothy Day) than upon the continued ministry of Jesus as found in Barth’s ethical material (especially in volume four of the Church Dogmatics).⁹

In this book, I do not wish to challenge Hauerwas’s insistence on ecclesial formation, for it does much good deconstructively and reconstructively. But it must be contextualized within the economy of the gospel if we are to think the holy and God’s making holy, specifically in the economy of Christ and his Holy Spirit, and not transform the polis of Christendom into something abstract or autonomous.¹⁰ While he does critique William James and Reinhold Niebuhr, in particular, for muting the link between Christology and ethics, there is little material consequence in his link between the actual economy of the Messiah and his theological project.¹¹ My mapping of the terrain will be quite different in its deployment of theological topics and biblical materials. The very shape of Christian practices points backward, behind themselves, to the prevenience and excess of God’s gift of life in Jesus and by his Spirit. Not only that, but the practices of the Christian faith are intricately woven together with a firm insistence upon the ongoing ministry of the Christ. Ecclesiology does affect ethics, but Trinitarian theology must orient both in an operative way. “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom 11:36).

LOCATING HOLINESS THEOLOGICALLY

In the remainder of this chapter, then, we must sketch the course of this book in its effort to locate holiness theologically. With Hauerwas and others, we want to think holiness in a distinctly Christian way. Further, we can affirm that this will involve attention to the church as the space within which the holy is lavished upon sinners. And yet, we cannot approach the topics of the holy or the church directly; they must be located within the wider economy of God’s life-giving grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The need for dogmatic order in thinking holiness theologically becomes obvious when one attends to the apostolic benedictions of the New Testament. For example, the apostle Paul concluded his first writing to the church in Thessalonica with these words: “Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it” (1 Thess 5:23–24). The blessing fixes upon the work of sanctification in its entire span, touching “your whole spirit, soul, and body.” Not only does it span the full range of human experience and being, but it also points toward its full consecration in its allusion to being sanctified “completely.” But these anthropological entailments of the gospel proceed from some basic convictions about the character of God, for it is “the God of peace himself” who is being invoked here as the agent of sanctification. The singularity of this agent is highlighted by that term “himself” (autos), and a doctrine of sanctification will be evangelical only to the extent that it can attest the operative presence of that qualifier “himself.” Indeed, Paul returns to this singularity in his final words: “He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.” No other is needed, because this one—“he who calls you”—is “faithful” and sure. Again, evangelical thought about this sanctifying work must attend to that faithfulness and surety.

Doing so—attending to the character of God who works holiness in his people—means locating the gift of holiness in the wider frame of the gospel. Indeed, it means setting the holy within a canonical and doctr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Sanctification and the Gospel
• 2. God
• 3. Creation
• 4. Covenant
• 5. Incarnation
• 6. In Christ
• 7. Justification and Sanctification
• 8. Grace and Nature
• 9. Grace and Responsibility
• 10. Grace and Discipline
• Subject Index
• Scripture Index
• Author Index