4. Holiness: The Panoramic View
Holiness:
The Panoramic View
You are my portion, O LORD; I have promised to obey your words. I have sought your face with all my heart; be gracious to me according to your promise. I have considered my ways and have turned my steps to your statutes. I will hasten and not delay to obey your commands.
PSALM 119:57-60
Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden light.
MATTHEW 11:29-30
May God himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.
1 THESSALONIANS 5:23-24
The Panorama Unfolds
One of life’s best experiences is climbing to the head of a mountain pass. As you plod upward, you feel the mountain sides closing in on you, as if defying you to squeeze through. At last, however, you reach the top, and suddenly (it is usually sudden, happening as you take a mere two or three steps), a great new landscape unfolds in front of you. You stop. You gaze. Maybe you gasp. Certainly you are thrilled.
I think of two places in North Wales where the head-of-the-pass experience never fails to delight me. Since there are passes all over the world, I expect nearly all my readers have known a similar delight at some time. Panting from your climb, you stand drinking in the view, swiveling your eyes from one feature to another to make sure that you really see all that you are looking at. The joy of the great sight puts energy into you for the next stage of your hike.
To readers who have struggled with me through what has been said so far, I want to announce the good news that we have reached the head of the pass. The landscape of holiness now lies open to our view.
My job for the rest of this book is simply to sharpen the focus on particular bits of the panorama that you can, I believe, already see, at least in outline. Some of them, to be sure, lie a fair distance from where we are standing at the moment—that means that we need the equivalent of field glasses to inspect them. But there is no problem in that. My wife, who is a zealous birdwatcher, uses field glasses constantly to bring far-off birds closer to her line of vision. She loves to pass the glasses to me so that I can inspect the birds too. From now on I seek to play a similar role with regard to holiness. I invite you to look through my glasses, as it were, at a number of particular matters that I want to bring close to your mind and heart.
Basic Truths
It will help us, however, if we first glance back at some of the basic, stage-setting truths that have emerged by way of hints and pointers at least (and mostly by explicit statement) in the course of our ascent to the vantage point that we have now reached.
We have seen, to start with, that holiness is every Christian’s calling. It is not an option, but a requirement. God wants His children to live up to His standards and to do Him credit in the eyes of the watching world, so He says explicitly to us all: “Be holy, because I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:16). Personal holiness is thus an issue for every believer without exception. “I am really expected to be so much like Jesus Christ that others will know at once and unmistakably that I am a Christian.”1 Each of us must reckon on going to school with Jesus our Lord to learn how to practice holiness.
We have seen that holiness is basically a relationship to God, which God Himself graciously imparts to us. It is a relationship established by our justification (God’s once-for-all act of pardoning and accepting us): hereby He claims us, or rather reclaims us, as His own, through the saving mediation of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so sets us apart for Himself. Holiness or sanctification in this sense is always, only, and entirely the free gift of God. It is one aspect of the newness of life that union with Christ effects.
Believers are positionally holy (separated by God for Himself) from the word “go.” Their obligation to practice moral and spiritual holiness on a day-to-day basis is derived from that fact. Our setting ourselves apart for God, in purposed separation from the world, the flesh, and the devil, is our proper response—our only proper response—to the knowledge that God has already claimed us by right of redemption. He gives us His Spirit as a pledge and foretaste of glory. “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:19-20). “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Eph. 4:30).
We have seen also that holiness of life is not precisely a human achievement, however much it demands of human effort. It is a work of the Holy Spirit, who prompts and energizes the human effort as part of it. It is a supernaturalizing of our natural lives, a matter of becoming and so of being what we are as new creatures in Christ—a living out behaviorally of what God is working in us transformationally. We do not sanctify ourselves. On the contrary, conscious recognition that apart from Christ we can do nothing (John 15:6), and prayerful dependence on Him to enable us to do each thing that we know we should do, is a sine qua non of the holy life. Self-reliance is not the way of holiness, but the negation of it. Self-confidence in face of temptation and conflicting pressures is a sure guarantee that some sort of moral failure will follow.
We have seen, in all this, that holiness involves the two related but distinct aspects of Christian existence that are nowadays labeled spirituality and ethics. Spirituality includes everything that has to do with implementing a Christian’s fellowship with God—meditation; prayer; worship; self-discipline; use of the means of grace; exercising faith, hope, and love; maintaining purity, peace, and patience of heart; seeking and serving God in all one’s relationships; and giving God glory and thanks. Ethics covers the delineating of God’s standards, the determining of His revealed will, and the development and display of those character qualities that constitute God’s image in us who were made to be His image-bearers.
Spirituality without ethics corrupts itself by becoming morally insensitive and antinomian, more concerned to realize God’s presence than to keep His law. Ethics without spirituality corrupts itself by becoming mechanical, formalistic, proud, and unspiritual. It follows the Pharisees in settling for self-righteous role-play and forgetting that holiness requires a humble heart. Holiness is an arch that rests on spirituality and ethics as its two pillars, and crashes down the moment either pillar crumbles.
Further, we have seen that holiness is the imitation of Christ in His virtues of love to God and humanity, trust in the Father’s goodness, acceptance of His will, submission to His providence, and zeal for His honor and glory. “Basically,” wrote Stephen Neill, “we are faced with just the same situation as Jesus—the temptation to choose the easier rather than the harder way; the demands of daily existence in a very material world; the intrusive claims of family that sometimes set themselves up against the claims of God; the bitterness of misunderstanding and hostility; the simple joys of friendship and companionship. How should a man act in all these situations? There are no rules to cover all situations. But there is a life that was actually lived, and . . . one of the essential ingredients in Christian holiness is steady patient contemplation of Jesus as he was in the fullness and simplicity of his human life.”2
Carefully and prayerfully modeling our attitudes and responses to pressure after those of Jesus is part of what holiness means. “I want to be like Jesus in my heart,” say the words of a classic spiritual, and true holiness always wants that.
Personal Wholeness
We have seen, finally, that personal holiness is personal wholeness—the ongoing reintegration of our disintegrated and disordered personhood as we pursue our goal of single-minded Jesus-likeness; the increasing mastery of our life that comes as we learn to give it back to God and away to others; the deepening joy of finding worthwhileness in even the most tedious and mundane tasks when tackled for the glory of God and the good of other people; and the peace that pours from the discovery that, galling as failure in itself is, we can handle our failures—we can afford to fail, as some daringly put it—because all along we live precisely by being forgiven, and we are not required at any stage to live any other way.
There is hope too, in the sense of knowing that one is destined, both here and hereafter, to see more of the glory of God in Christ than one has seen as yet. This is part of the holy wholeness of the believer. Robert Louis Stevenson said that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive, as if arrival is always an anticlimax because the destination disappoints. But the Christian travels hopefully in the confidence of arriving at a destination that will be climactically and unceasingly wonderful in every respect, so that however good the hopeful traveling is, arrival will be better still. Cherishing of this hope when the traveling proves rough has an integrating and exhilarating effect that is simply glorious (no other word fits). In all these ways holiness appears as the true health and fulfillment of the individual human being.
In an earlier book, I laid down seven principles about holiness:
1. The nature of holiness is transformation through consecration.
2. The context of holiness is justification through Jesus Christ.
3. The root of holiness is co-crucifixion and co-resurrection with Jesus Christ.
4. The agent of holiness is the Holy Spirit.
5. The experience of holiness is one of conflict.
6. The rule of holiness is God’s revealed law.
7. The heart of holiness is the spirit of love.3
All these truths have danced before our minds in what has been said so far. It is within this frame of reference that we now proceed.
Living a Holy Life
As the landscape of holiness unfolds before us, the practical question becomes sharper and more pressing: just what, then, are we to do? We know ourselves to be justified through faith in Christ, adopted into God’s royal family, united to Christ, regenerated, sealed, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We know that God is at work in us sanctifying us, changing us into Christ’s likeness from one degree of glory (divine self-display in us) to another, and energizing us for works of love and obedience. We know that we are called to cooperate with what our God is doing in our lives. What from one standpoint is our cooperation with the process is from another standpoint a part of the process itself.
What form, then, should our cooperation be taking? How are we to “work out” our salvation (express, exhibit, and advance it) with appropriate “fear and trembling” (awe and reverence in God’s presence—not panic and alarm in our hearts!)? What is the relevance of the reminder that “it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose” (Phil. 2:13)? “Be holy,” says God, and that, as we have seen, is a summons to obedience—consecration to God’s service, with conformity to His standards. But what does this mean, in practical terms? Just what are we to do?
Two Extremes
Scripture and experience warn us that here we have to steer our course between two opposite extremes of disaster. On the one hand, there is the legalistic hypocrisy of Pharisaism (God-serving outward actions proceeding from self-serving inward motives), and on the other hand there is the antinomian idiocy that rattles on about love and liberty, forgetting that the God-given law remains the standard of the God-honoring life. Both Pharisaism and antinomianism are ruinous. Scripture and experience warn us that all Christians are at all times more weak, frail, foolish, undiscerning, and more vulnerable to temptations than they realize. None of us escape the attentions of the devil—that malicious marauder who constantly manipulates the seductions of the world and the flesh in order to lay us as low as he can. How, then, in face of all this, should holy living be conceived, described, and practiced? Our high and privileged calling is to do the will of God in the power of God for the glory of God. When life is so full of traps and pitfalls and false trails, how can this ever be achieved?
To get a handle on this question, think for a moment of diet charts—those intimidating products of modern knowledge about proteins, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, calories, cholesterol, metabolism, and what not. The noteworthy fact about diet charts is that there are so many of them. The Western world is full of diet charts, all designed to regulate one’s food intake in such a way as to produce a desired physical effect, such as weight loss or weight gain or increased energy. Not only are there different diet charts for different bodily needs, there are different charts for dealing with the same condition, like so many alternative routes to a single destination. For weight loss in particular, there exist many different diets to try, and I dare say they all have some merit. But I am much more sure of this: human nature being what it is, each diet has a body of supporters who see it as the only word of wisdom for would-be reducers. They take for granted that the diet they follow will work for everybody, and that no other diet will work as well, so they dismiss out of hand all other diet charts in order to promote their own.
For it is human nature to be exclusive, to dislike alternatives, to claim finality for whatever has benefited us personally, and to be suspicious and standoffish toward other recommended ways of producing the same result. I do not ask you to decide whether this mindset is virtuous or vicious, sensible or silly (it might be a bit of both, but never mind that now). I ask you simply to note that it is a fact. The jealous advocates of the various dieting routines are there to prove it. So also are the advocates of various routines for holy living, which is the matter that concerns us now.
Two Journeys
For the better part of two thousand years Christians who know their business (always some, sometimes many) have been seeking to live holy lives in the strength and to the glory of their triune Savior-God. They have seen that the Christian life is two journeys, not just one. They have perceived that alongside the outward journey from the cradle to the grave through what philosophers call the external world, there is an inward journey into God-knowledge and Christ-knowledge that they need to take as well. They have identified this second journey as the first stage of an eternity of love and adoration, service and joy. They have also grasped that the outward life of loving one’s neighbor and the inner life of loving one’s God belong together, in such a sense that failure in either inescapably weakens the other.
Over the centuries these born-again believers (for such they have been, even when they did not use those words and when the details of their belief were flawed) have taken the inward journey in ways that, though related at root level, were different to a degree. Because human individuals differ from each other, no two marriages are ever identical, and in the same way no two lives of fellowship with God are ever quite the same. Every Christian must ultimately find his or her own way in the relationship, with such help as can be gained from friends, pastors, and those who since the seventeenth century have been called “spiritual directors” (nowadays more often described as “soul-friends”).4 Part of the story, however, is that the different ways exist as traditions that developed in relative isolation from each other—Protestant from Catholic, West from East, Lutheran from Calvinist, Wesleyan from Reformed, mystically oriented from ethically focused, socially alert from individualistic, charismatic from mainstream, and so on. This explains the existence of a number of prescribed paths of holiness that are in themselves complementary and mutually enriching (call them all spiritual diet-and-exercise charts if you wish), but which get presented to us as complete and self-sufficient, with the added innuendo that none of the formulae really work save the one that the speaker is currently peddling. This results in instructors in the spiritual life regularly omitting things that their audiences would be helped by hearing, just because those things are anchored in another tradition. It is an unhappy state of affairs, narrowing those who settle for it and harrowing those who do not.
As one of those who do not, I now proceed to list six differently focused characterizations of the holy life—this Christlike, humble, loving, patient life, in which thought and desire, heart and hand, motive and action, are linked and integrated as they should be. They come from different sources in different eras. Each has been treated from time to time as self-sufficient. It will be evident from the way I present them that I believe they belong together, since the thrust of each is part of the total truth. Let the reader judge.
Holiness as the Redirecting of Desire
Desire is the “I-want” state of consciousness. In this line of teaching (which goes back at least to Origen in the third century, Augustine in the fifth, and Gregory the Great in the sixth), holiness is viewed first and foremost as the detaching of desire from created things in order to attach it through Christ to the Creator, for expression and satisfaction in and through God-centered prayer. Important as the outward life of justice, integrity, and neighbor-love is, the inner life of pure-hearted prayer is held (surely rightly) to be far more important. God calls on His children to give Him their hearts. Finding their fullness of life here and now in the relationship of knowing, loving, and enjoying Him will be a foretaste of their life in heaven. Prayer is thus the top priority in the life of holiness. Indeed, only insofar as prayer is the breath, heartbeat, and energy source of one’s inner being can one be said to be living a life of holiness at all.
Achieving and maintaining steady, God-centered prayerfulness is a struggle. Christians find themselves in constant conflict with the devil and his hosts, who by God’s permission tempt us to sin and distract us from obedience in order to obstruct and destroy holiness in our inner life. Honest prayer comes only from honest hearts, hearts that are set against sin and that practice regular self-search lest they be self-deceived. So the essence of Satan’s strategy is to prevent us from being honest in heart. (He does not mind our behavior being blameless in human eyes as long as our hearts are crooked before God; proud self-absorption and self-indulgence in our fantasies and motivations are all he needs to get his effect.) God allows us to be thus infiltrated and assaulted partly, at least, so that we may be toughened, matured, and anchored in Him more deeply, through the experience of fighting back in His strength. This is spiritual warfare, in the true meaning of that phrase (see Eph. 6:10-20).
Desiring God
The teaching under review assumes that desiring and contemplating our Savior-God in the reciprocity of love is life’s highest and noblest activity. In developing that thought, it makes two further affirmations: first, Christians often forfeit enjoyment of this relationship through their own negligence and preoccupation with other things; second, God sometimes withholds the sense of His presence and love which He gives at other times, in order to teach us lessons about patience and pure-heartedness that we would not otherwise learn. A variety of presentations have been developed to articulate these truths. We glance now at some of these.
The importance of distancing oneself from what has held one’s heart has often been expressed in terms of withdrawing into the “desert” of solitude, where desire is purified. The same point has been made in the West by directing Christians to strip off (renounce, leave behind) all the distracting things that overlay the “cone” or “apex” of their souls, and in the East by requiring apatheia (not inner impassivity, but the self-mastery that redirects passion into the pursuit of God). Paths of thought and prayer for detaching desire from the magnetic pulls of this world in order to attach it more firmly to God in Christ have been mapped by Augustine, Bernard, and Thomas à Kempis; Roman Catholics like Ignatius Loyola and Francis de Sales; and Puritans such as Richard Sibbes, Richard Baxter, Thomas Goodwin, and John Owen, with many others before and since.
The relationship between, on the one hand, verbal meditation and petition and on the other, post-verbal and non-verbal contemplation and self-offering to the Lord whom one knows, trusts, and loves, has been explored by teachers of the “spiritual marriage.” They have developed the analogy of love-language and love-communion between the sexes and applied it to one’s relationship with God. In the same connection, Cistercians, Franciscans, and others have highlighted the links between loving contemplation of God and compassionate action among men and women, while Jonathan Edwards’ Treatise on Religious Affections sets up tests that show whether strong driving feelings in a devotional context are authentically spiritual (stemming from the Holy Spirit’s work in the heart) or not. All of this instruction seeks, one way or another, to mark out the path to that enjoyment of God, which is life’s supreme value and glory.
Unfulfilled Desire
On God’s use of the discipline of dryness and temporarily unfulfilled desire for Himself as a means of strengthening the inner life of His servants, other classic presentations have been made. Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross described different stages or phases in the life of prayer, including the “dark night of the soul” that may precede the joy of realized union with God. Puritan teaching on “spiritual desertion” was substantially the same as that of the two Spanish mystics just cited. John Wesley formulated a two-level account of the inner life whereby, through seeking and agonizing for the post-conversion blessing of “perfect love,” the Christian’s heart is totally purged of sin and imbued with an all-consuming passion of love for God and fellow human beings.
The variations on this “second blessing” theme (concepts of entire sanctification, the clean heart, Spirit-baptism, Spirit-filling, and eradication of sin) have been vastly influential in popular Protestantism, and more recently in the global charismatic movement. One does not have to give full endorsement to any of these formulations5 to recognize the recurring pattern: God brings on dryness, with resultant restlessness of heart, in order to induce a new depth of humble, hopeful openness to Himself, which He then crowns with a liberating and animating reassurance of His love—one that goes beyond anything that was sensed before. As Christ’s humiliation and grief on the cross preceded His exaltation to the joy of His throne, so over and over again humbling experiences of impotence and frustration precede inward renewing, with a sense of triumph and glory, in the believer’s heart. Thus, with wisdom adapted to each Christian’s temperament, circumstances, and needs, our heavenly Father draws and binds His children closer to Himself. Consider the words of Paul and the psalmist on this theme:
Whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. . . . I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ and be found in him. . . . I want to know Christ (Phil. 3:7-10).
Earth has nothing I desire besides you. . . . God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever (Ps. 73:25-26).
These statements are classic transcripts of genuinely holy hearts. The redirecting of desire so that it focuses on fellowship with the Father and the Son, and the strengthening of desire so redirected, is the real essence of holiness. All mature forms of Christian holiness teaching down the centuries have started here, seeing this as the true foundation to everything else in the Christian life, and insisting that the only truly holy people are those with a passion for God. We today have to start here too.
Holiness as the Cultivating of Virtues
Holiness means not only desiring God, but also loving and practicing righteousness, out of a constant exercise of conscience to discern right from wrong and an ardent purpose of doing all that one can to please God. One line of holiness teaching (not usually given under that name) that stems from medieval scholastics and post-Reformation Anglicans in particular, sees holiness in primarily ethical terms. The focus is on the practice of praiseworthy behavior patterns called virtues, which are understood as good habits expressing good character.
Thomas Aquinas delineated holiness as the manifesting of three “theological” virtues (virtues imparted supernaturally by the Holy Spirit to Christians alone) within a frame established by the four “cardinal” virtues (cardinal meaning pivotal, from the Latin for hinge) that Aristotle described, and that the non-Christian world knows at least to some degree. The theological virtues are faith, hope, and love, of which love is the greatest (1 Cor. 13:13). The cardinal virtues are prudence (wisdom and common sense), temperance (self-control), justice (fairness, honesty, truthfulness, trustworthiness), and fortitude (courage and resilience, as in the John Wayne film title True Grit, or as C.S. Lewis renders it, “guts”). The four cardinal virtues define the manner and spirit of the holy person’s exercise of faith, hope, and love. Thus stated, the scheme assumes that nature and grace dovetail, the latter augmenting and perfecting the former. Sin is thought of as a lack of strength rather than a perverted energy. Exponents of a more radical doctrine of sin would feel compelled to make adjustments at this point. But the rightness of insisting that there is no holiness without morally upright and conscientious behavior, grounded in stable character, is surely beyond dispute. The view of the healthy inner life that accompanies this outlook regularly makes more of ordered steadiness in seeking to please God, than it does either of experiences involving communion and union, or of spiritual warfare against satanic attacks. Teachers in this tradition usually concentrate on sensitizing and educating consciences to judge what is right and wrong, engendering the practical compassion that perceives others’ needs and moves in to do something about them, and soft-pedaling any suggestion that emotional intensity is a measure of holiness.
Tension easily arises between those who maximize and who minimize the place of feelings in holiness, and between those who make much or little of particular experiences of God that come the Christian’s way. But in terms of the big picture, which is our present concern, all that needs to be said is that the desire for God, with love of Christ, and the doing of good, with love of righteousness, are equally essential ingredients in a holy life.
Holiness as the Following of
the Holy Spirit’s Urgings
Here we move into the world of impressions, impulses, inner pressures, and personal promptings—a world where it is not easy to keep one’s footing and where many fearful mistakes have been made. But there is truth here too, truth that it is important to bring out: namely, the truth of life supernaturalized at its motivational level.
During the Reformation and the century that followed, justice was done to this truth in a sober and profound way, because the link, basic to Reformation theology, between the Spirit and the Word (biblical teaching), was conscientiously kept in mind. The danger of following supposed promptings by the Spirit that did not square with the Word was fully appreciated. Calvin was not the only one to underline the impossibility of the Spirit in the heart going against His own instruction in the Word, and to draw the conclusion that the impulses driving some ardent individuals and groups outside the mainstream of Christianity came from the spirit of wickedness rather than the Spirit of God.6
But the magisterial Reformers, and even more the Puritans of the next century, recognized that when God through the Holy Spirit calls sinners to faith in Christ, their hearts are changed. Henceforth the heart-changing Spirit indwells them (sustains a constant energizing, empowering, prayer-generating, Christ-imparting relationship to them at the core of their being). This indwelling has the effect not only of making Christ’s presence a reality to them, but also causing the mind and motivation of Christ to grow within them. This means, as the Reformers and Puritans saw the matter, that only a whole-souled response to the biblical revelation of God’s redeeming love and moral will, a response that is grateful, reverent, imaginative, and creative, is adequate. Such a response aims explicitly at pleasing and glorifying God in one’s own life-situation, which is something that every Christian deep down wants to do. This supernatural prompting to love, serve, and please is one facet of the reality of a holy life.
Luther’s Teaching
The above emphasis first broke surface in the teaching of Martin Luther. Luther’s mature thought radiated from a single center like many spokes from the hub of a wheel. He usually referred to this center as the knowledge of Christ, or at one stage, the theology of the cross. On one occasion at least he called it the wonderful exchange. Today we usually call it justification by faith, but it is the same thing, whichever label it bears. It can be stated thus: in virtue of the substitutionary bearing of our sins by Jesus Christ on the cross, and through the divine gift of faith in Him and in His achievement, God imparts the further gift of present pardon and acceptance, so that believing sinners now find themselves set right with God the holy judge, even though they actually fall short of perfect righteousness every moment. Luther’s famous phrase to describe the Christian’s position, one on which he rang many changes, is simul justus et peccator (just—accepted and treated as righteous by God—while still a sinner). Luther’s teaching here is biblically correct and brilliant. I have already incorporated it into earlier chapters of the present book.
On this basis, Luther went on to affirm that the indwelling Holy Spirit, who first caused our faith to blossom (Luther conceived faith as crystalizing in the convicted sinner’s assurance of present acceptance through Christ’s cross), now spontaneously moves Christians to a life of self-giving service to God and their fellow human beings, out of grateful love to the Father and the Son. For Luther the performance of evangelically motivated “good works” in home, church, and society was the essence of a holy life. Faith, he affirmed, engages tirelessly and endlessly in such works. That was his way of saying that the Spirit’s witness in the Christian’s heart to the reality of gracious acceptance through Christ, and the Spirit-sustained urge to answer God’s love by loving others for His sake, was for him (Luther) the Christian’s motivating dynamic. It has not always been appreciated how strongly Luther affirmed this ministry, and indeed other ministries, of the Holy Spirit in the Christian’s life.7
Luther was clear that God’s law states God’s standards and that lawless living cannot please Him, yet he was so anxious to avoid legalism and to present Christian motivation as evangelical that he left his flanks relatively unguarded against the idea that nudges from the Holy Spirit make it needless to look to the law to learn what God wants of us. However, he rejected that idea out of hand when it was actually put forward. Luther was no antinomian, but held always to biblical standards of morality as he understood them. He was as forthright as Calvin in insisting that the motivation by the Spirit that is basic to holiness is motivation only to do according to the Word. For Luther, to follow supposed nudges of the Spirit that do not relate to, or even fly in the face of, biblical standards and requirements is not holiness but unholiness, the devil’s distorting and lampooning of God’s ideal.
We need to be clear that, in stressing thankfulness to God for salvation as the holy person’s controlling motivation, Luther was saying something of enormous importance. To put it in terms of a later controversy, he was affirming that the sense in which Christians work for life (to get to heaven) is determined by the sense in which they work from life (to show gratitude for the grace that is theirs already). Holy people practice good works, not to earn God’s present or future favor, but as a way of laying hold of that for which Christ has laid hold of them. Self-justifying legalism, the false rationale of righteousness that had spread like wildfire through popular Christianity in the centuries before the Reformation, was thus eliminated and banished as a motivating principle forever.
All ventures in holiness go rotten at the core when gain in any form, rather than gratitude, motivates them. The true taproot of holiness is always the Spirit-prompted urge to show love to God and others by doing what is right out of gratitude to God for Jesus Christ, just as Luther saw. As this was truth for his time, so it is for ours.
Holiness as the Overcoming
of Sin’s Downdrag
This perspective has never been more thoroughly explored than it was by the English Puritans (some of whom, of course, relocated in New England in the course of their ministry). The Puritans as a body constitute a Reformed school of thought, but one marked by their own distinctive interests (theological and pastoral), their own distinctive style (plain and analytical), and their own distinctive flavor.8
With Calvin, they analyzed God’s work of sanctifying sinners as, on the negative side, mortification, the progressive killing of sin as it manifests itself in each rebellious and self-indulging habit, plus, on the positive side, vivification, the inculcating and strengthening in us of all Christlike habits (“graces”), in particular the ninefold pattern of habitual reaction to life’s pressures—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control—that Paul in Galatians 5:22 calls the “fruit” of the Spirit (cf. Matt. 12:33).
With Calvin also, the Puritans stressed that God justifies in order to sanctify. Every part of the Christian’s life—his relationship to God and God’s creation; all his relationships with others, in the family, the church, and the world; and also his relationship to himself, in self-discipline and self-management across the board—must become “holiness to the Lord.” With Calvin too, they classed as hypocrites any professing Christians in whom the twofold transformation of mortification and vivification was not taking place. Finally, with Calvin they insisted that God’s moral law as set forth by Moses, the prophets, Christ, and the New Testament letters was the family code for all God’s children at all times. There was, however, a different nuance. Whereas Calvin regularly referred to Christian holiness as progress in faith and fortitude, the Puritans characteristically depicted it as an increasing measure of deliverance from sin.
The Puritan View of Sin
The Puritans as a body manifested an acute awareness of the holiness, righteousness, hatred of sin, and judicial severity against sin that marks the great, gracious, omniscient, and omnipresent God of the Bible. Their sharp-eyed discernment of the pervasiveness, repulsiveness, and deadliness of sin sprang directly from this deep sense of God as holy. Their sensitivity to sin as an inner force, devious and wily, tyrannizing the unconverted and tormenting the saints, was extraordinary. They remain Christianity’s past masters in this particular field of understanding. They saw sin as a perverted energy within people that enslaves them to God-defying, self-gratifying behavior, and by distraction, deceit, and direct opposition weakens and overthrows their purposes of righteousness. They perceived sin as the moral equivalent of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, presenting itself to us again and again as good, desirable, and a necessity of life, thereby corrupting our conscience so that we lose the sense of its guiltiness, and cherish it as if it were a friend rather than an enemy.
In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis pictures a man with a lizard on his shoulder, representing lawless lust. The lizard whispers in his ear about how essential it is to his continued well-being. When the angel asks, “Shall I kill it?” the man’s first response is to say no. (One thinks of Augustine’s prayer: “Give me chastity, but not yet.”)
The Puritans would have applauded Lewis’s lizard as a perfect projection of the way sin entrenches its various forms of expression in Christians’ lives. Puritan theology affirmed that in Christians sin has been dethroned but not yet destroyed. Now sin takes on, as it were, a life of its own, seeking to reestablish the dominion it has lost. Its power appears both in bad habits, which are often deep-rooted and linked with temperamental weaknesses, and in sudden forays and frontal assaults at points where one thought oneself invulnerable. Of itself sin never loses its strength. The most that happens is that with advancing age, ups and downs of health, and shifting personal circumstances, indwelling sin finds different modes of expression. But wherever it appears, and in whatever form, Christians are charged, not just to resist it, but to attack it and seek to do it to death—in other words, to mortify it, in the biblical sense of that word (see Rom. 8:13; Col. 3:5).
Puritan teaching on mortifying the lusts that tempt us is businesslike and thorough. It includes the disciplines of self-humbling, self-examination, setting oneself against all sins in one’s spiritual system as a preliminary to muscling in on any one of them, avoiding situations that stoke sin’s boiler, watching lest you become sin’s victim before you are aware of its approach, and praying to the Lord Jesus Christ specifically to apply the killing power of His cross to the particular vicious craving on which one is making one’s counterattack. “Set faith at work on Christ for the killing of thy sin,” wrote the greatest Puritan teacher, John Owen. “His blood is the great sovereign remedy for sin-sick souls. Live in this, and thou wilt die a conqueror, yea, thou wilt, through the good providence of God, live to see thy lust dead at thy feet.”9
The Puritans have always had a bad press. Their emphasis on each Christian’s lifelong war to the death with “besetting” (habitual) sins has sometimes been dismissed as Manichean (denying the goodness of created human nature), morbid (denying the joy of natural behavior), and morally unreal (obsessed with self-flagellation, in disregard of everything else). But all of this is factually incorrect, and the idea that fighting sin was all the Puritan saints ever thought about is quite wrong. Love for God, joyful assurance, spiritual-mindedness, honesty and public spirit, quiet acceptance of God’s will, the pathway of persistent prayer, and the power of the hope of glory, are among the many themes that are greatly developed in Puritan teaching about holiness. It was not all harping on a single note. Yet it is true that a drumbeat stress on detecting, resisting, and overcoming sin’s downdrag appears everywhere. This obtrusive emphasis has kept many in the past from seeing that Puritan holiness is fundamentally a cheerful affair of peace, joy, worship, fellowship, and growth. The solemn business of self-scrutiny and suffering, inward and outward, as one strives and struggles against sin is only one side of it. But in an age in which self-ignorance, secular-mindedness, moral slackness and downright sin are as common among Christians as they are today, it is doubtless from the stern side of Puritanism—the side that forces on us realism about our sinfulness and our sins—that we have most to learn.
Holiness as the Exercising of Faith
for a “Second Blessing”
Holiness always involves the exercising of faith by praying for specific benefits. In a broad sense, all accounts of Christian holiness except the Pelagian (which reduces holiness to unaided self-discipline, and is heretical, and will not be considered here) involve this exercise of faith. They all see sanctification as God’s work. They all hold that holy living is only ever achieved by divine grace, power, and help, through the Holy Spirit, and they all agree that only believers who pray enjoy this assistance. Concepts of faith in action, however, are often inadequate, varying as they do from the ill-conceived Catholic formalism of “trust the church implicitly” to the ill-conceived Protestant subjectivism of “face the future fearlessly.” Only when the living Christ and the truths of Scripture are the focus of belief, trust, and reliance is it Christian faith at all. The witness of Reformation theology over almost half a millennium is that only when faith specifically trusts God’s promises is it in proper shape.
Looking for, and trusting to, God’s fulfillment of his “very great and precious promises” (2 Pet. 1:4) is a basic exercise of faith as Scripture portrays it. (See what is said about Abraham, the model man of faith, in Romans 4:18-21 and Galatians 3:6-9,16-18; cf. 22,29; Hebrews 6:13-15; 11:1,11,13,17-19, cf. 33.) Promise-focused faith both glorifies God by honoring His faithfulness and forms the soul in that Godward attitude of realized dependence and eager expectancy that is seen in many of the psalms. That in itself is one dimension of holiness, whereby trust and hope rest in God alone. In truth there is no real holiness without this constant exertion of heart in God-centered, faith-filled prayer.
Second Blessing
The correlation between faith and promise has been characteristic of all mainstream evangelical Protestantism. But it has been given a particularly striking development in the historic Wesleyan account of “scriptural holiness” and in its many latter-day modifications. The distinctive thesis of this whole school of thought is that through a second “experience” (experiential event, triggered by God), those who became Christians through a first “experience,” namely new birth, may enter upon an upgraded quality of Christian living. Through this second experience, the sense of God’s love is more vivid, one’s own love to God and humanity is stronger, and sin ceases to control any of one’s behavior because by the power of the Holy Spirit temptation, discouragement, apathy, and gloom are regularly overcome. Full and genuine holiness of life (so it is claimed) only becomes reality after the second experience has occurred.
The original form of this teaching was Wesley’s doctrine of entire sanctification (“Christian perfection,” or “perfect love”), mentioned earlier in this chapter, according to which the second experience roots sin out of the born-again person’s heart, so that perverse desires and mixed motives become a thing of the past. No passion, purpose, or power operates in one’s life henceforth save that of love only. This, said Wesley, is part of the blessing of heaven, which those who seek will find here on earth. During the so-called “holiness revival” between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, “Keswick” and “higher life” teachers modified Wesley’s idea of eradication of sin into mere counteraction of it, thus redefining the second blessing (“Spirit-filling” as they usually called it) as finding one’s way into a God-empowered perfection of act in spite of a continuing imperfection of motive.
But both versions of this two-stage view of the Christian life insisted that the way to enter and maintain the sanctified state is through a focused, expectant, importunate, promise-pleading exercise of faith in prayer, whereby one waits on God to do what He has undertaken to do in specific statements of His written Word. Honoring God by “believing for the blessing,” and holding on to Him in one’s petitions until He bestows it, rather than ceasing to pray through unbelief of His willingness to do what He promised, is the action called for. Spokesmen for both views allow that God may keep us waiting once He has stirred us, out of hatred for our own unholiness, to start praying in this way, but they insist that no one ever enters into the true holiness of stage two without such prayer. It is only seekers, they say, who find.
Both versions of this two-stage understanding of “scriptural holiness” seem misconceived. To start with, nowhere does Scripture teach the universal need of a “second blessing,” or imply that there is no real holiness without it. Then, eradication ascribes to God too much (no continuance of depravity in the heart), while counteraction ascribes to Him too little (no lessening of depravity in the heart). The biblical teaching is rather that the Christian’s total self is progressively renewed and restored throughout the sanctifying process—refocused on God, reintegrated with God at the center, reconstructed in character, habits, and reaction patterns, sensitized to God’s values, redirected into God-glorifying purposes, and made more alert to others’ needs and miseries. At no point is the process complete in any Christian, but it starts and goes forward in them all (see 2 Cor. 3:18).
That, in God’s mercy, momentous post-conversion experiences come to some Christians, bringing assurance, liberty of heart, new spiritual joy and energy, with new power for life and witness, is beyond doubt. These, however, seem to be the particular discretionary dealings of a gracious heavenly Father with His individual children. They are not universal requirements, not prescribed patterns of experience for all, not hoops through which every Christian must try to jump. Those who have had no momentous “second experience,” therefore, should not see themselves as necessarily inferior to those who have been thus blessed. History confirms that some of God’s finest servants have been enriched in this way, while others, equally fine, have not.
So when Wesleyan and Keswick spokesmen define holiness as the second blessing, or as a quality of life that will only appear after the second blessing, and when people from the Pentecostal-charismatic world speak of holiness as a life that cannot be lived without a post-conversion Spirit-baptism (not all say this, but some do), I demur.10 When, however, these same persons maintain that just as one gets into the life of holiness by specific, focused, persistent, reason-giving, promise-oriented verbal prayer, so in the life of holiness each needed benefit and enablement must be sought in the same way, I am right with them. That kind of prayer is indeed modeled and displayed throughout Scripture as an integral element in holy life. I think their account of holiness itself is flawed and incorrect, but I could not agree more with what many of them say about prayer itself. There is, I believe, no genuine holiness that does not have at its heart constant, focused prayer, in which faith is being exercised for the bestowing of particular benefits and the meeting of particular needs.
Holiness as the Practicing
of Spiritual Disciplines
Verbally, this is a very contemporary perspective, though the point being made goes right back to the earliest years of Christianity. But the recovery of this historic emphasis at the present time is badly needed. The latter years of the twentieth century have seen a tidal wave of hedonism and a random approach to living swamp the West, both outside and inside the church. The bad effect of affluence, about which the Bible constantly warns us, is thoughtless self-indulgence of all sorts in private life. This bad effect is currently visible everywhere. Thoughtlessness has become a mark of our society, and the younger generation of Christians, who culturally speaking have never known anything but affluence, prove again and again to be the morally crippled victims of the materialism, consumerism, and hedonism of the world in which they were brought up.
No wonder then that Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline (1978), the first forthright challenge offered to this modern mindset, struck a nerve for so many. Foster’s basic point—that Christians must learn deliberately and regularly to do what makes for their spiritual well-being (use the means of grace and learn self-control, as earlier generations would put it)—was not new, but it hit home as a word in season. Others have since taken it up.
It is interesting to see how the theme is handled by its various exponents. Foster himself explored twelve disciplines in three groups: the inward disciplines of meditation, prayer, fasting, and study; the outward disciplines of simplicity, solitude, submission, and service; and the corporate disciplines of confession (meaning accountability), worship, guidance, and celebration. His Money, Sex and Power (1985) then modeled discipline for these three particular headache areas.
More recent exponents of the theme of discipline seem to be standing on Foster’s shoulders. Donald Whitney’s Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life (1991) works over more than half Foster’s topics, and adds stewardship and journaling to the list. R. Kent Hughes, once Foster’s colleague, in Disciplines of a Godly Man (1991) [Man meaning Male!] reviews sixteen disciplines for men under the headings: purity, marriage, fatherhood, friendship, mind, devotion, prayer, worship, integrity, tongue, work, church, leadership, giving, witness, and ministry. Elisabeth Elliot, in Discipline: The Glad Surrender (1982), deals with the discipline of the body, the mind, place (meaning status), time, possessions, work, and feelings. Dallas Willard, in The Spirit of the Disciplines (1988), pursues the thought that we will become like Christ if we live as He did, maintaining a rhythm of solitude and silence, prayer, simple and sacrificial living, meditation on Scripture, and service to others.
Kent Hughes, having noted that his survey of disciplines lays on the male conscience “over 100 do’s!” speaks wisely about the effect that such a review of the Christian calling should have:
How then are we to respond? Certainly not with “do nothing” passivity which has become increasingly characteristic of the American male. . . .
On the other hand, an equally deadly response is self-sufficient legalism. Admittedly, it is less a statistical danger than passivity. . . . [You can say that again, Dr. Hughes!] God save us from the reductionism of such legalism which enshrines spirituality as a series of wooden laws and then says, “If you can do these six, sixteen, or sixty-six things, you will be godly.” Christianity, godliness, is far more than a checklist. Being “in Christ” is a relationship, and like all relationships it deserves disciplined maintenance, but never legalistic reductionism.
God save us also from self-righteous judgmentalism. . . . There is a universe of difference between the motivations behind legalism and discipline. Legalism says, “I will do this thing to gain merit with God,” while discipline says, “I will do this because I love God and want to please him.” Legalism is man-centered; discipline is God-centered.11
True, Godly Discipline
These discussions of discipline confront us with the truth that the call of God to develop fellowship with Him, in face of pressures and restraints imposed on us by our condition, our company, and our circumstances, along with our weaknesses and blind spots and the multitude of traps set for us by the devil, make imperative a planned, orderly, thoughtful approach to the business of daily living. Only then can we ever ensure that there is room in our lives for all the things we ought to be doing. Only then shall we ever learn to think ahead, and prepare ourselves for what may come, and work out before God what our reactions to this and that should be.
The Christians who realize that it is Christlike wisdom to think ahead in this way are few and far between, but it is so all the same. Experience confirms that those who have already adjusted their minds to the fact that troubles may come, are able to keep their footing and handle their feelings better when troubles do come. As the children of this world, fired by personal ambition, set themselves career goals and then work very hard to achieve them, so God’s children, fired by the greatness of divine love, should have before their minds the goal of discipline in daily living, and work equally hard, planning, praying, and trying things out, to make it a reality. The alternative is to live like a pilot flying blind—always being taken by surprise and tyrannized by the immediate, the urgent, and the unexpected—experiencing life as a succession of emergencies that one is never ready to meet.
Thoughtless, undisciplined living is either frantic or happy-go-lucky, according to whether one feels threatened by the flow of events or not. But it is not Christlike, nor gratifying to ourselves, nor glorifying to God. Sanctified thoughtfulness is a prime element of holy life, for it is here that true discipline begins.
Completing the Panoramic Survey
At this point, we close our survey of the view from the head of the pass. We have not yet seen everything, but we have seen the main things. We have trained our spiritual binoculars on the leading features of the landscape of holiness. Thus we begin to get the entire overwhelming panorama into some sort of focus, so that our notion of what we are looking at is now clearer.
What has emerged is a sort of identikit profile of a person:
• who can never love God enough;
• whose adoration of Him is unceasing;
• who is always seeking to live nobly, lovingly, and honorably for God;
• who reveres the indwelling Holy Spirit;
• who battles constantly against indwelling sin;
• who pleads God’s promises and waits expectantly for their fulfillment; and
• who practices self-discipline maturely and thoughtfully.
Passion and compassion, prayer and prudence, gentleness and generosity, all enter into the portrait. The reflections of Jesus Christ, the apostle Paul, and David and his fellows in the Psalms (to look no further) are surely too plain to miss. Such is the outline of the holiness that is learned in the school of Christ.
Let us give it a further human face. Universal holiness, as they called it, was the chief concern of the Puritans of history. Three and a half centuries ago, when character-drawing on paper was a much-admired literary art, The Character of an Old English Puritane or Nonconformist was set down as follows (I retain the quaint old spellings):
The Old English Puritane was such a one that honored God above all, and under God gave everyone his due. His first care was to serve God, and therein he did not what was good in his own, but in God’s sight, making the word of God the rule of his worship. . . . He made conscience of all God’s ordinances. . . . He was much in praier; with it he began and closed the day. In it he was exercised in his closet, family and publike assembly. . . . He esteemed reading of the word an ordinance of God both in private and publike. . . .
The Lord’s day he esteemed a divine ordinance, and rest on it necessary so far as it induced to holinesse. He was very consciencious in the observance of that day as the Mart [market] day of the Soul [i.e., the day when one secures supplies for the coming week]. . . . The Lord’s Supper he accounted part of his soul’s food: to which he laboured to keep an appetite. He esteemed it an ordinance of nearest communion with Christ, so requiring most exact preparation. . . .
He accounted religion an engagement to duty, that the best Christians should be the best husbands, best wives, best parents, best children, best Masters, best servants, best Magistrates, best subjects, that the doctrine of God might be adorned not blasphemed. His family he endeavoured to make a Church . . . admitting none into it [i.e., as servants or lodgers] but such as feared God; and labouring that those that were born in it, might be born again to God. . . . He was a man of a tender heart, not only in regard of his own sin, but others’ misery, not counting mercy arbitrary, but a necessary duty; wherein as he prayed for wisdom to direct him, so he studied [resolutely aimed] for cheerfulnesse and a bounty [liberal generosity] to act. . . .
In his habit [dress] he avoided costlinesse and vanity . . . desiring in all things to express gravity [a serious approach to living, as opposed to irresponsible frivolity]. His whole life he accounted a warfare, wherein Christ was his captain, his arms, praiers and tears. The Crosse his Banner and his word [motto] Vincit qui patitur [he who suffers conquers].12
This is how holiness was conceived by England’s most robust Christians in Puritan times. It is surely plain that only a little adjustment is needed to bring the model right up to date.
Now we move on from our vantage point in order to come closer to some of the realities that we have viewed from afar. That is the agenda for the next chapters.