Holy Trinity: Holy People

The Theology of Christian Perfecting

Thomas A. Noble

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781498216296
• eBook ISBN: 9781621895510
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Teaching on the sanctification of Christians using the difficult word perfection has been part of Christian spirituality through the centuries. The Fathers spoke of it and Augustine particularly contributed his penetrating analysis of human motivation in terms of love. Medieval theologians such as Bernard and Thomas Aquinas developed the tradition and wrote of levels or "degrees" of "perfection" in love. However, the doctrine has not fared so well among Protestants. John Wesley was the one major Protestant leader who tried to blend this ancient tradition of Christian "perfection" with the Reformation proclamation of justification by grace through faith.This book seeks to develop Wesley's synthesis of patristic and Reformation theology in order to consider how Christian "perfection" can be expressed in a more nuanced way in today's culture. Noble examines what basis may be found for Wesley's understanding of sanctification in the central doctrines of the church, particularly the atonement, the doctrine of Christ, and the most comprehensive of all Christian doctrines, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. What he sets out is a fully trinitarian theology of holiness.

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Preliminaries

Holiness is one of the core concepts of the Christian faith. It runs like a thread through the whole of the canonical Scriptures where we are taught to think of the God of Israel, named in the New Testament “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” as essentially and inherently holy. But because that is so, the people of God are to be holy. Christian theology must therefore include the concept of sanctification, an understanding of the way in which God “makes holy” (sanctum facere) not only a people corporately, but each one personally.

But Christians disagree in their teaching on sanctification. Clearly those who follow Christ will and should be changed by becoming his disciples, but in what ways, and how far? How like their Master can Christians become in this life? How well can they reflect the love of their heavenly Father? How far can they be filled with his Spirit? And can we possibly dare to speak of Christian “perfection”?

Several introductory books in recent decades have tried to set out the differing opinions on this, particularly among the heirs of the Reformation, evangelical Protestants. In Justification and Sanctification (1983) Peter Toon dealt with Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, and Wesleyan views.1 Gundry’s Five Views on Sanctification (1987) presented what were called the Wesleyan, Reformed, Pentecostal, Keswick, and Augustinian-Dispensational views. Donald Alexander’s Christian Spirituality: Five Views of Sanctification (1988) included the same views, except that it replaced the last of these with the “Contemplative” view. J. I. Packer in his book A Passion for Holiness (1992)2 carried on the Reformed (or, more specifically, Calvinist) tradition of Bishop J. C. Ryle’s book, Holiness, written to oppose the teaching given at the Keswick convention. Archbishop Rowan Williams was one of the compilers of a book sub-titled The Anglican Quest for Holiness (2001)3 and an ecumenical and scholarly approach was taken in another compilation edited by Stephen Barton, Holiness, Past and Present (2003). The list could be extended.4

a) Wesley’s Catholic and Evangelical Doctrine

The purpose of this book is to look particularly at the historic Christian teaching on Christian holiness as it was formulated by John Wesley. Stanley Hauerwas commented that in spite of the difficulties in Wesley’s doctrine, particularly the troublesome word “perfection,” he continued to think “that Wesley was right to hold that the peculiar contribution of Methodists to the church universal lies in our struggle to recover the centrality of holiness as integral to the Christian life.”5 William J. Abraham has characterized Wesley’s doctrine of perfection as “an exercise in ascetic theology, which was also a form of realized eschatology that posited a distinctive phenomenology of the Christian life.” He argues that the recovery and reformulation of this doctrine requires “much more serious endeavors in historical and systematic theology,” and particularly calls for attention to “Methodist dogmatics.”6 Wesleyan theologians such Hauerwas, Dunning, Long, and Lowery have addressed the doctrine of Christian perfection creatively in the context of Moral Theology (alias Christian Ethics).7 The aim here is to develop our understanding of the doctrine in the context of doctrinal theology, otherwise known as Christian Dogmatics. Samuel M. Powell differentiates “academic theology,” which is close to philosophy of religion (and, we might add, apologetics), from confessional “church theology.”8 The former seems to attract much attention today, but the latter, church dogmatics, requires much more work for the sake of the church. Philosophical theology may help to keep the wolves at bay (except of course when it is the work of a wolf in sheep’s clothing!), but it is church doctrinal theology or dogmatics, working closely with biblical theology, that provides food for the sheep.

In keeping with Wesley’s “catholic spirit,” we will not present his doctrine of Christian sanctification as merely a series of sectarian “distinctives” of interest only to Wesleyans, but as a view that stands within the mainstream tradition of the Christian church. Sadly, the Wesleyan view has too often been presented in a sectarian way. In the disputes among evangelical Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was often attacked as “sinless perfection,” and some of Wesley’s heirs deserved to be rebuked for that distortion of his teaching. But unlike his more unbalanced followers, John Wesley was widely read and deeply immersed in the church Fathers and was an Oxford scholar who read the Fathers and the Scriptures in the original languages. He insisted on using the easily misunderstood word “perfection” because of his commitment to Scripture as “a man of one book” (homo unius libri). The Bible was Wesley’s source of authority for his doctrine, interpreted in the light of the early Fathers and of his own tradition in the Church of England. His doctrine of Christian “perfection” was not, therefore, a new doctrine; it was simply his formulation of the doctrine within the mainstream tradition of the church catholic. The aim here therefore is not just to carry on a conversation within the Wesleyan tradition, but across the church.9

One of the key tasks of this book will be to understand from Wesley’s own writings what he actually taught. It is necessary to distinguish that from the simplified (and indeed simplistic) teaching of some later teachers who regarded themselves as “Wesleyan.”10 But we will approach Wesley through first undertaking a survey of the ancient Christian tradition that shaped his interpretation of Scripture, noting particularly how far he was echoing the teaching of the Fathers of the church. But of course Wesley was not only an enthusiast for the “primitive Christianity” of the early centuries: he was also an evangelical Protestant. While listening to a reading from Martin Luther, he underwent a conversion in which he trusted in “Christ alone” and received assurance of the forgiveness of his sins. He embraced a doctrine of justification by faith, which, he said, did not differ by a “hair’s breadth” from that of John Calvin. It is this embracing of both the Fathers and the Reformers which makes him a figure of great ecumenical significance. His most original contribution to Christian thought was in “practical divinity.”11 He tried to think through how to integrate the teaching of the Fathers and the Reformers in this area of practical Christian living which Protestants have long referred to as “sanctification” and which today is often included in studies of “spirituality.”12 George Croft Cell, one of the pioneers of the twentieth-century rediscovery of Wesley as a theologian, famously wrote: “The Wesleyan reconstruction of the Christian ethic of life is an original and unique synthesis of the Protestant ethic of grace with the Catholic ethic of holiness.”13 That may not be exactly the best wording, but it does indicate that Wesley was what Kenneth Collins calls a “conjunctive” theologian.14

Once we have looked at the biblical roots of Wesley’s doctrine, surveyed the earlier heritage of spiritual writers through the patristic and medieval periods, and tried to straighten out the tangled web of misunderstandings and distortions that abound about Wesley’s own teaching at the popular level, we will then consider the limitations and weaknesses in Wesley’s thought. This is important, for the aim is not to champion Wesley against all comers, but to further a deeper understanding among Christians that will help us all in the practical matter of following Christ. Therefore, we must recognize that, while Wesley was a careful scholar and a clear thinker, he was a man of his time. And while he should be regarded (in David McEwan’s phrase) as truly a “pastoral theologian”15 who took consistent theological positions, yet he was not a dogmatician. He did not engage in the kind of Christian dogmatics that tries to think out afresh Christian theology as an organic whole encapsulated in the creeds. He was clearly trinitarian, he clearly embraced orthodox Chalcedonian Christology, and he clearly stood in the Reformation tradition when it came to the doctrines of the atonement and justification by faith. But as a practical theologian of his time, it never occurred to him (or any of his contemporaries) to think through deeply and rigorously how his particular doctrines of “faith, repentance, and holiness” formed an organic whole with the theology of the creeds.16 In fact much theology since the Reformation has tended to regard the central doctrines of the faith as “ivory tower” matters. We have so often taken the trinitarian heart of the Christian faith for granted in order to get on with what is thought to be more practical and relevant. Specifically in Wesley’s case, he did not engage in thinking through in depth and explaining how his doctrine of Christian perfection flowed out of these central Christian beliefs in the atonement, the incarnation, and the Trinity. As a man of his time, he cannot be blamed for that.

But that is the aim of this book. We begin with the belief of the mainstream of the Christian church—from the Apostolic Fathers through Clement and Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and through the spiritual writers of the Middle Ages up to Wesley and beyond—that Christians may be truly sanctified not only in outward consistency of conduct, but inwardly in such a way as to be truly among the “pure in heart.” That is not a universal view, of course. Three of the church’s greatest theologians, Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, question whether this level of Christian holiness is possible in this life. Our intention here is not to engage...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: Preliminaries
• Chapter 2: Christian Perfecting in Holy Scripture
• Chapter 3: Christian Perfecting in Church Tradition
• Chapter 4: Wesley’s Doctrine of Christian Perfecting
• Chapter 5: Reformulating Wesley’s Doctrine Today
• Chapter 6: Christian Holiness and the Atonement
• Chapter 7: Christian Holiness and the Incarnation
• Chapter 8: Christian Holiness and the Holy Trinity
• Chapter 9: Reflecting the Holy Trinity
• Bibliography