While many issues surrounding our understanding of the doctrine of sanctification and the life of holiness may occupy our minds and hearts, it is worth observing that the postmodern generation, and particularly the Gen Xers and NetGens, are not particularly interested in doctrinal niceties.
“The modern world was grounded,” comments Len Sweet, influential Christian author and commentator on the current scene. “Its favourite definition of God was ‘Ground of Being’. Its basic metaphors were drawn from a landscape consciousness that didn’t trust water. Scholars are trained to keep categories clean and watertight. We were taught to be careful not to water down our insights. The surface on which we lived was solid, fixed and predictable. We could get the lay of the land, mark off directions where we were headed and follow maps, blueprints, and formulas to get to where we are going. A lot of time was spent on boundary maintenance and border issues.
Postmodern culture is ... a seascape ... changing with every gust of wave and wind, always unpredictable ... the sea knows no boundaries. The only way one gets anywhere on the water is not through marked-off routes one follows but through navigational skills and nautical trajectories,” (Leonard Sweet, Soul Tsunami pp. 72-73).
“Postmoderns are hungry for teaching but not for doctrine,” he notes. “Where the modern age was predominantly either/or, the postmodern world is and/also. Or phrased more memorably, the postmodernist always rings twice!”
The Wesleyan evangelical community has not been immune to these influences.
Among our thoughtful young believers are more than a few who pursue a postmodern evangelical eclectic spirituality. Their understanding of holiness is characterised by transparency, connected-ness, positive relationships, and ethical responsibility, including creation care.
Two writers whose love for Jesus and His people is unmistakable, but whose theology is more of the and/also variety, may represent iconic figures for this generation of earnest Christians: Kathleen Norris (Cloister Walk, Amazing Grace and Anne LaMott (Travelling Mercies), who epitomises a transparent, earthed and earthy and often irreverent spirituality that connects with this generation (Whatever! Oh well!).
Questionable theology
George Barna speaks of “a lot of questionable theology weighing down America’s young people”.
“Lacking much exposure to the Bible itself and coming from a generation that relies more heavily on emotionalism than empiricism for guidance, the opportunities for heresy are prolific. We have the makings of a generation that is prone to reflect on the finer matters of Christian theology without understanding the basic foundations,” (Generation Next pp. 82-83). Then he quotes from Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind - a comment still relevant: “Today’s students no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and, hence, do not long to have one. Yet they have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly.” (Some of us could do with pursuing an “embodied holiness” a little more incessantly.)
Where and how will they acquire the images of grace and godliness that will engender a hunger for holiness? For our part, engaging the issues of doctrinal understanding that must underlie our preaching and teaching of holiness in this or any other time, is critical.
Christian Smith in his 2005 survey of the faith of American teens entitled Soul Searching and based on a broadranging five-year study of teen religious understanding and practices, found their faith mostly self-interested, naive and muddled. “Based on our findings,” he writes, “I suggest that the de facto religious faith of the majority of American teens is ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.’ God exists. God created the world. God set up some kind of moral structure. God wants me to be nice. He wants me to be pleasant; wants me to get along with people. That’s teen morality. The purpose of life is to be happy and feel good, and good people go to heaven. And nearly everyone’s good,” (Smith 2005:10-11).
In 2010, he published the results of a follow-up survey which included many of the same informants of the earlier study in order to track the development of faith understanding among “emerging adults” between 18 and 29. The book is titled Souls in Transition. He finds this age group even less interested in the particularities of doctrinal discussion or denominational allegiances. They are largely distanced from any serious consideration of biblical teaching as impinging upon their own sense of what feels appropriate. “More generally, it was clear in many interviews that emerging adults felt entirely comfortable describing various religious beliefs that they affirmed but that appeared to have no connection to the living of their lives.” This is the context into which we are called to articulate the truth claims of Scriptural holiness.
Reducing truth
Given our Western cast of mind, we have a tendency to want to reduce truth to system, experience to rigid categories of explanation, profound mysteries to code words, shibboleths and neat formulae. Scripture presents us with a wealth of metaphors which interpreted too literally can lead to confusion and considerable mischief. So we continue to try and understand the metaphors and search for metaphors of our own in our attempts to make this precious truth accessible to our people and appropriate to our time.
As a young missionary, I was greatly helped by a slim book entitled The Spirit of Holiness by Everett Cattell, veteran missionary to India and president of Circleville Bible College. He describes the life of the believer as bipolar, i.e. he pictures a horseshoe magnet under paper filled with iron filings. They arrange themselves around the two poles. In sanctification, the pole of the self finds its life in Christ, and the two poles become one. Something goes out of existence. It is the old configuration of the filings and the tensions between the poles. ”Not the self, but the pattern of life created by the self when it is not hid with Christ in God is the thing that must be destroyed.” He insists on a distinction between the death of self and a death to self. If the self moves away from Christ, the old pattern of tension and division reappears. The secret is abiding in Christ by the Spirit. Campus Crusade has adopted a similar model and metaphor in its popular booklet, Have You Made the Wonderful Discovery of the Spirit-filled Life? It may seem too formulaic, but deals with the central issue of displacing the self on the throne of the heart, and putting Jesus on the throne with all other areas of life ordered under his sovereign control.
Free Methodist Bishop Les Krober presents a compelling witness to his own pilgrimage coming to an awareness that the critical issue for him was an addiction to self that needed to be broken. He defines sanctification in this way:
“Entire sanctification is the work of God in response to a Christian’s surrender and faith which breaks the addiction to self. This full surrender changes our saving relationship to God as it delivers us from the spirit of rebellion. It opens the door to the possibility of a wholehearted love for God and others. It lays the foundation for a growing improbability of willful disobedience. This deepened relationship with God, activated by His Spirit, releases us from our self-sufficient arrogant attitude, frees us from the need to control others and dictate our own terms, and breaks the habit of manipulating the world and God. As the Holy Spirit frees us from our independent mind and will, we grow in quantum leaps of Christ-likeness, making glad the heart of God and bringing hope and joy to the person being transformed.”
McCasland, in his biography of Oswald Chambers, Abandoned to God, describes his experience of sanctification at age 27 in this way: “The citadel of his heart had fallen, not to a conquering Christ, but to the gentle knocking of a wounded hand!” (McCasland 1993:86)
We look for positive metaphors of freedom and robust health, of possibility, privilege and power. J Sidlow Baxter in A New Call to Holiness (1967:134 ff.) employs the metaphor of living in a fetid, damp, unhealthy slum, without proper nourishment, surrounded by disease. The body becomes debilitated, weakened and subject to infection. But suddenly the poor wretch is transported to a seaside village where the air is clear and the sea winds bracing. The food is nourishing and the environment clean, beautiful and inviting. The body begins to respond. Not all at once, but gradually. The change of circumstance was sudden and critical. But the recovery of vigorous health takes longer - good diet, fresh air, exercise, a pleasant and healthful environment. Before long, the face takes on a glow and life is lived to the full. This, he sees, as the nature of the sanctification experience.
Soul disease
I have come to see sanctification as a cleansing, healing work at the motive centre of the personality; a freeing from the soul’s debilitating inner disease. I have come to feel that what the Spirit is addressing here is much like an HIV positive condition of the soul. We walked a brother in Christ through HIV/AIDS until the Lord took him. He came and told me. Then we watched every virus take him down. Soul disease weakens us like that. It disables our spiritual immune systems subtly and renders us vulnerable to every opportunistic spiritual virus in the moral environment in which we are immersed. I am breathing this in from the atmosphere on a daily basis.
It is not only the things to which I consciously expose myself, but the unseen, unsuspected influences that play upon me constantly. Then when the pressure is great and my defences are weakest, I fall prey to the temptations that present themselves.
It’s the soul’s virus that the sanctifying work of the Spirit addresses. It doesn’t make us fully robust overnight. We’re still subject to temptation and even failure. But the immune system has been put in place and my moral energies are no longer being silently sapped and therefore rendering me vulnerable to the approaches of the evil one however he presents himself.
“O come and dwell in me,” sang Wesley.
“Spirit of power within!
And bring the glorious liberty
From sorrow, fear and sin.
The whole of sin’s disease,
Spirit of health remove,
Spirit of perfect holiness,
Spirit of perfect love.”
If we were to think of sanctification in digital terms, is sanctification something like a reprogramming of the software of the soul, with appropriate downloads and updates - perhaps including the introduction of anti-virus software for systems protection - and a recognition of the dangers of careless surfing (what gets your attention, gets you!)?
And is there a moment when we must muster the faith and courage to press “enter” to begin the adventure?
Life in the Spirit
The journey itself - the process - may be seen as more significant than any sense of definitive arrival at a specified destination. Characteristically, there is more journaling of the journey than clear and confident witness to crisis encounter with the Cross and the Spirit purifying our hearts by faith.
Recall the titles I mentioned, Cloister Walk and Traveling Mercies. What do we gain or lose in focusing on sanctification as the Imitatio Christi - to which Richard Foster, Dallas Willard and others are drawing us anew? The positive value is its focus on sanctification as relational and transformative, in the context of a “Transforming Friendship” (James Houston) with Christ by the Spirit.
This resonates with the current generation. “As we walk in the light ... “ (1 John 1:7).
Eugene Peterson, in Subversive Spirituality, explores the hunger of this age for intimacy and transcendence. Unfortunately these hungers are poorly served as we reach out for pseudo-intimacies that dehumanise and pseudo-transcendence that trivialises.
It is the possibility of a living, vital and intimate relationship with a transcendent God through faith in Jesus that connects so well with this generation. Sanctification is the lived reality of Christ in the believer’s life and our life in Christ (John 15:4-5 and
Colossians 2:6-7).
Coutts quotes Brengle in the frontispiece of The Call to Holiness as declaring: “There is no such thing as holiness apart from ‘Christ in you’.” This focus emphasises the disciplines of faith and love’s obedience. The employment of the means of grace, regular practices and disciplines of worship and devotion was vital to Wesley’s view of sanctifying grace, including the role of the community of faith and ministries of compassionate service.
The International Spiritual Life Commission was convened to explore the inner life of The Salvation Army and the adequacy of our provision of the means of grace through our corps ministries for the spiritual nurture and sanctification of our people. The report of the commission took the form of a series of calls to Salvationists around the world and provides a basis for reviewing whether and how effectively the spiritual ministries of our corps are meeting the needs of our people. It calls all Salvationists to engage in the disciplines of life in the Spirit: the disciples of our life together and the disciplines of our life in the world.
This view of sanctification as our life in Christ as He makes His hallowing presence real in us, is strong on the outcomes - the ethical implications of holy living. “The aim of such instruction,” says Paul to Timothy, “is love that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith” (1 Timothy 1:4-5). This focus is decidedly Wesleyan. “It has always been the most profound conviction of Wesleyanism that the Bible speaks to the moral relationships of men and not about sub-rational, non-personal areas of the self.
Sin is basically self-separation from God ...holiness is moral to the core - love to God and man,” (M Wynkoop, A Theology of Love, p. 167). On the other hand, from a Wesleyan perspective, there is a need to deal decisively with the sovereignty of the self and the soul’s debilitating inner disease that saps our spiritual energies and undercuts our ability to follow the example and teaching of our Lord Jesus.
There is, after all, no Calvary by-pass
