Chapter 3: The Holiness Tradition: Discovering the Virtuous Life
Chapter 3
The Holiness Tradition: Discovering the Virtuous Life
Train yourself in godliness, for, while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.
— 1 Timothy 4:7b-8
Holiness is goodness on fire.
—Walter Rauschenbusch
3 
THE CONTEMPLATIVE TRADITION — the prayer-filled life — forms the foundation for holy living. It is through an ever-deepening intimacy with God that we are enabled to enter into an ever-deepening re-formation of heart and mind. The Holiness Stream of Christian life and faith focuses upon the inward re-formation of the heart and the development of “holy habits.” We can rely upon these deeply ingrained habits of virtue to make our lives function appropriately and to bring forth substantial character formation. This addresses the erosion of moral fiber in contemporary society.
SEEKING A HISTORICAL PARADIGM
A moving example of the Holiness Stream is found in the life of Phoebe, an extraordinary teacher, humanitarian, and theologian. A powerful preacher of “the holiness way,” she has been called “the most influential female theologian the Church has yet produced.”1 Because of her commanding personality and remarkable teaching and speaking abilities, Phoebe’s influence spread far and wide. One story from her extensive ministry illustrates something of the power of her personality.
While in Scotland preparing to hold special meetings at a rather staid Presbyterian church, Phoebe noted that there was no altar for people to come to in surrender of heart and will to God. Phoebe requested that an altar be built immediately and was told in no uncertain terms that, even if the trustees were favorable to such an action (which they were not), it would take a full week just to receive their approval. Undaunted, she insisted, warning that if the church wanted these meetings and desired to experience the blessing of God, an altar had to be built without delay. Her stubborn determination won out, and at 4:00 A.M. a crew of construction workers arrived at the church, finishing their work just in time for the afternoon meeting. The new altar was quickly packed with people earnestly offering their lives in perpetual sacrifice to God.
Phoebe’s teaching and speaking ministry began in the most unassuming manner — a weekly meeting (in her lower Manhattan home) called “the Tuesday Meeting for the Promotion of Holiness.” Initially confined to women, the meeting proved so popular that her home had to go through several renovations to accommodate the ever-increasing numbers — four hundred at its peak. Conducting this Tuesday Meeting for nearly forty years, Phoebe attracted some of the most gifted and significant Christian leaders of the day: the philosopher Thomas Upham; the founder of the Free Methodist Church, B. T. Roberts; the leader of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances Willard; the founder of Boston University, John Dempster; and a host of others.
Transcending the limitations of both gender and denomination, she brought together Methodists and Baptists and Presbyterians and Episcopalians and Catholics and Quakers and United Brethren and Messianic Jews. People far and wide copied her format so that eventually over two hundred Tuesday Meetings were going on in such distant places as England, India, and New Zealand.
Methodist Beginnings
Phoebe’s father was a young convert of John Wesley, and so the history and teachings of prominent Methodist leaders dominated the family’s religious life. At nineteen Phoebe married a physician and fellow Methodist. Phoebe bore six children to the union, though sadly three died in infancy. The third child, Eliza, died under especially tragic circumstances: a maid accidentally dropped a lit oil lamp on the gauze curtain covering the baby’s crib, causing a terrible flash fire. Rushing upstairs, Phoebe “grasped my darling from the flames. She darted one inexpressible look of amazement and pity, on her agonized mother, and then closed her eyes forever on the scenes of earth.”2
The loss was a critical turning point. In what she called her “inexpressible bewilderment of grief,” Phoebe turned to her Bible — and to her God — for consolation. Her own words best describe the agony of that time:
While pacing the room, crying to God, amid the tumult of grief, my mind was arrested by a gentle whisper, saying, “Your Heavenly Father loves you. He would not permit such a great trial, without intending that some great good proportionate in magnitude and weight should result. … In the agony of my soul I had exclaimed, “O, what shall I do!” And the answer now came, — “Be still and know that I am God.” I took up the precious WORD, and cried, “O teach me the lesson of this trial,” and the first lines to catch my eye on opening the Bible, were these, “O, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past finding out!” … The tumult of feeling was hushed. … “What thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter,” was assuringly whispered. Wholly subdued before the Lord, my chastened spirit nestled in quietness under the wing of the Holy Comforter. … And now I have resolved, that … the time I would have devoted to her, shall be spent in work for Jesus. And if diligent and self-sacrificing in carrying out my resolve, the death of this child may result in the spiritual life of many.3
In this single, ecstatic event Phoebe was “weaned from the world” and given an unquenchable zeal to do the work of Christ.
“Christ the Altar”
Her spiritual struggles, however, far from being over, had just begun in earnest. Phoebe longed for “entire sanctification” and was troubled by the teaching John Wesley gave in his Plain Account of Christian Perfection that believers should not consider themselves sanctified “till there is added the testimony of the Spirit, witnessing his entire sanctification, as clearly as his justification.”4 Phoebe’s quandary actually had less to do with Wesley’s teaching itself than it did with testimonials from the pantheon of Methodist leaders — which for her was a kind of “lives of the saints” — which all but universally spoke of an acute awareness of personal sinfulness as part of this “testimony of the Spirit.” But, try as she might, Phoebe could never experience an epiphany of wretchedness. Indeed, her own inward searching succeeded only in drawing her all the more intimately into God’s love, hence deepening her dilemma!
Interestingly, the horns of this “dilemma” were broken as Phoebe listened to the varied testimonies of sanctifying grace from women at the Tuesday Meeting. Moved by the great diversity of their experiences, Phoebe came to see that God’s means of sanctifying grace were far richer than merely personal awareness of sinfulness. “I purpose from this hour,” she declared, “to leave no means unused that I may know the same grace.”5
Long hours of prayerful searching and of biblical study led her to what she would later call her “day of days.” It was almost exactly one year after the terrible death of Eliza that Phoebe had a decisive experience of total consecration and sanctifying grace — one that would energize the remainder of her life. Again her descriptive powers are so great that they cannot be improved upon:
Between the hours of eight and nine (in the evening) — while pleading at the throne of grace for a present fulfillment of the exceeding great and precious promises; pleading also the fulness and freeness of the atonement, its unbounded efficacy, and making an entire surrender of body, soul, and spirit; time, talents, and influence; and also of the dearest ties of nature, my beloved husband and child; in a word, my earthly all — I received the assurance that God the Father, through the atoning Lamb, accepted the sacrifice; my heart was emptied of self, and cleansed of all idols, from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, and I realized that I dwelt in God, and felt that he had become the portion of my soul, my ALL IN ALL.6
This profound “Valley of Decision,” as she called it, led to the development of her “altar theology.” That teaching, in brief, says that Christ himself is the altar upon which we rest our all in sacrifice, and since everything that touches the altar is holy, we are holy when we place everything we are upon the altar. We, therefore, live in a state of holiness and sanctification as we continually give ourselves as a living sacrifice to Christ, our altar. And in a flurry of exegetical license Phoebe often quoted these words of Jesus: “The altar sanctifieth the gift” (Matt. 23:19, KJV).
This imagery of Christ as the altar upon which we offer ourselves gave Phoebe the freedom she needed to have personal certainty of “sanctifying grace.”7 It also became a significant addition to the vocabulary of the Holiness movement; as one historian put it, “The altar motif became a permanent part of evangelical spirituality.”8
Throughout her life Phoebe continued to develop and popularize her “altar theology” until it become her most unique contribution to American theology. And, as things turned out, it was a genuinely important contribution, substantially influencing the Pentecostal understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit at the turn of the twentieth century.9
“The Promise of the Father”
But Phoebe spoke and wrote on many other themes as well, themes that often arose out of the give-and-take of human need and faithful ministry. At a Tuesday Meeting one woman expressed her heartfelt desire for a holy life but said that an obstacle hindered her — an insurmountable obstacle, it seemed to her. One of the conditions Phoebe had established for receiving “entire sanctification” was to give public witness to this “blessing,”* and this woman belonged to a denomination that barred women from speaking in church! So what was she to do?
Everyone turned to Phoebe for an answer to this dilemma — a dilemma that was, in part, of her own making. Her response was surprisingly succinct and pragmatic: at Pentecost the Holy Spirit was poured out upon all those gathered in the Upper Room, both men and women, and they were empowered to testify to Christ. Hence women were not only allowed to speak but were impelled to do so by the very Spirit of God. This concise answer ultimately led to a more detailed response — a four-hundred-page book entitled The Promise of the Father.10 In this book Phoebe anticipated numerous contemporary feminist concerns, addressing them without mincing words: “We believe that hundreds of conscientious, sensitive Christian women have actually suffered more under the slowly crucifying process to which they have been subjected by men who bear the Christian name than many a martyr has endured in passing through the flames.”11
A total of eight other books followed. The most famous, The Way of Holiness, succeeded in catapulting Phoebe onto an international platform. She later edited a magazine, Guide to Holiness, which at its zenith had thirty-seven thousand subscribers, one of the largest circulation lists among religious journals in America at that time.
Perhaps by now you have guessed that I have been telling the story of Phoebe Worrall Palmer (1807-1874). On the other hand, maybe you had no clue who I was discussing, since her story is little known today.
This is most regrettable, for Phoebe Palmer’s impact has been substantial. The Second Evangelical Awakening (1857-1865), which brought over a million genuine converts into American churches, can be traced to her ministry. And in the wake of her work in the British Isles from 1859 to 1863, more than seventeen thousand individuals professed conversion to Christ and thousands more claimed sanctifying grace. Indeed, those meetings proved so popular that special trains were scheduled to accommodate the crowds.12
Phoebe helped launch one of the earliest inner-city ministries to the poor in America — “The Five Points Mission” — and she was the principal founder of the Methodist Church’s mission to China. A direct progenitor of a dozen different Protestant denominations that are still active today, she also influenced the founders, early presidents, or key leaders of some of the major universities in America, including the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Syracuse University, Wesleyan University, Boston University, the University of Georgia, American University, and Drew University. She significantly influenced the embryonic development of major international religious groups such as the Salvation Army, the Wesleyan Church, the National Camp Meeting Association for the Promotion of Holiness, the Free Methodist Church, the Keswick Movement in England, the Church of the Nazarene, the Assemblies of God, and the worldwide Pentecostal movement.13
At a time when women generally were not accorded positions of authority, literally tens of thousands looked to Phoebe Palmer for leadership and instruction. She embodied the personal piety and energetic spirituality that marked the Holiness movement of the nineteenth century. She was impelled by holy fire, sterling convictions, and boundless zeal. Sustained attention to her life and teaching is well worth the investment.
SEEKING A BIBLICAL PARADIGM
How can I pick a single model of the Holiness Stream from the New Testament? The examples are myriad. Not that these women and men which dot the landscape of our New Testament were perfect. Of course not, but, then, perfectionism is not what the Holiness Tradition is about. It is about … well, that comes later.
The Pillar of Jerusalem
The one personage I want to lift up as the biblical example par excellence of the Holiness Stream is James*, the blood-brother (half- brother, if you will) of Jesus and the author of the Epistle that bears his name.14
What a story James has to tell! Throughout Jesus’ earthly ministry James rejected his older brother’s messianic mission.* In fact, his disapproval of Jesus’ activities probably bordered on genuine hostility. At one point, when the people were declaring that Jesus “has gone out of his mind,” James (along with his mother, his brothers, and his sisters) tries “to restrain him” and make him return home. But Jesus rejects the embarrassed solicitations of his family, declaring, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:21, 31-35).
So James decidedly was not numbered among those who left all at the outset to follow Jesus; he was not even among the curious crowds who were amazed at his teachings and still more amazed at his healings. And yet when the disciples are gathered together waiting for the promised Holy Spirit, to our astonishment we discover James among them (Acts 1:14). And we find that in just a few short years he is recognized as a “pillar” of the church, eventually authoring the Epistle that bears his name (Acts 12:17, 15:1-29, Gal. 2:9, James 1:1).
This is a complete turn of events. What could possibly have happened to change James the scoffer into James the believer and ultimately into “James the Just,” the leader of the Jerusalem church? I believe the answer is nothing less than Jesus’ personal appearance to his younger brother following his resurrection from the dead. The documents mention this fact in such an unconscious, almost offhanded manner that, unless we are careful, we easily miss it. Right in the middle of a cataloging of postresurrection appearances we read, “Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles” (1 Cor. 15:7). How gracious of Jesus! How utterly kind! It is the only postresurrection appearance we know of where Jesus made himself known to someone who did not believe in him.
Just imagine that meeting, brother to brother. James’s older brother — the brother he had played with, eaten with, worked with — now stood before him in resurrected form. What a transforming confrontation! This single encounter erased all the embarrassments of the past, all the objections, all the doubts. Jesus, his own brother, was — and is — the hoped-for Messiah!
Quickly the believing fellowship welcomes James, and before we know it he is the acknowledged leader of the church at Jerusalem. Just look at his enormous influence. Paul, following his conversion and a three-year “study leave,” meets with James in Jerusalem, recognizing his status as an apostle (Gal. 1:19). Peter, after his miraculous deliverance from prison, instructs those gathered for prayer at “Mary’s house” (the mother of John Mark) to tell the whole story to James, indicating, in effect, that James is the one person who must be notified of the situation (Acts 12:17). It is James who presides over the great “Jerusalem Council” of Acts 15. He led the believing community through the thorny issue of whether a person had to become a Jew before they could become a Christian. James alone brings the council’s findings to a decisive conclusion: “Therefore I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God.” Then he guides the growing church to declare with one voice, “It has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to impose on you no further burden …” (Acts 15:19, 28). And finally, Paul, on his last trip to Jerusalem, makes a point of meeting with James in what sounds like an all-but-official reception: “The next day Paul went with us to visit James; and all the elders were present” (Acts 21:18). Clearly James was a man of enormous influence in the early Christian community.
And his influence was rooted in the most profound devotion. Eusebius records that James “used to enter alone into the temple and be found kneeling and praying for forgiveness for the people, so that his knees grew hard like a camel’s because of his constant worship of God. … So from his excessive righteousness he was called the Just.”15 Indeed, one of his traditional titles was James the Just (or James the Righteous — the Greek word can be translated either way).
Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, tells us of the earthly end to James: Ananus, the high priest, ordered his death by stoning around A.D. 62. Josephus further notes that many Jewish leaders vigorously protested this unjust act of Ananus, which gives us some inkling of the high regard accorded James even by the non-Christian Jewish community.
Purifying the Source
Perhaps the greatest legacy James gives us is the small Epistle that bears his name. This letter, addressed to Jews dispersed throughout the Mediterranean, says less about Jesus than any other New Testament book, but its speech is more like Jesus’ than any of them. Indeed, its closest parallel is Jesus’ own Sermon on the Mount, from which it quotes (5:12). It also has many affinities to the ancient Hebrew wisdom literature. Of course, both of these writings center on the formation of moral character, and this is the focus of James’s Epistle as well.
Contrary to popular opinion, the Epistle of James is not a book about action. It is a book about the source of action, the heart of virtue. Even the most frequently quoted saying from the book — “Faith without works is dead” — is not about action. We do not respond to this verse by jumping up and doing some works, for, you see, we can do all kinds of works without faith. No, James shows us how we can be hooked into a different kind of reality, a spiritual reality that in turn produces a different kind of person, which in the natural course of things produces a different kind of action. Forming this “different kind of person” is the burden of James’s Epistle and the reason he is such a moving example of the Holiness Tradition.
Different in what way? James shows us a person who can face trials of all kinds with rock-solid joy, a person who is plugged into a divine wisdom that sees “bitter jealousy” and “selfish ambition” for the impostors they truly are, a person who instinctively relates to all peoples on the basis of the “royal law” of love, a person who out of divine resources is able to “tame the tongue,” a person who eschews “fightings and wars” because the inner wellspring of the life is so purified that from it naturally flows blessing and not cursing.
James, you see, understands that what is on the inside of a person will come out. If the central core of who we are is “earthly, unspiritual, devilish,” what flows out will be “disorder and wickedness of every kind.” Conversely, if the central core of who we are is “pure, … peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy,” then what flows out will be “a harvest of righteousness [which] is sown in peace for those who make peace” (James 3:15-18).
This is why James gives so much attention to purifying the source out of which all action flows: “Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh” (James 3:11-12).
A divinely transformed heart, by its very nature, will produce right action. It simply cannot do otherwise. James learned this from his Master and older brother. Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, gave us the world’s most complete teaching on how right action flows from the wellspring of a right heart, and the Epistle of James is a beautiful commentary on this teaching.
This explains why James can sum up “pure and undefiled” religion in a simple two-fold action: “to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). These two actions show what is in the heart. “Look at the action,” says James, “and you will know the heart. Pure action, pure heart. Defiled action, defiled heart.” So he identifies for us the kind of action a pure heart will do — namely, care for the most helpless in the culture — and the kind of action a pure heart will not do — namely, accept the death-giving pollution of a world system in rebellion against divine Love. In the most simple and straightforward manner possible, James gives us the via positiva, what we do do, and the via negativa, what we do not do.
Purity of heart is the fountainhead of all right action — this is the message of James. And this is why he is such a rich source for us of the Holiness Tradition, the virtuous life.
SEEKING A CONTEMPORARY PARADIGM
On the day Dietrich Bonhoeffer heard that the 20 July 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler had failed16 — the day he knew that his own fate and the fate of his friends was sealed — he wrote an account of his life in a poem entitled “Stations on the Road to Freedom.” Brooding in his Tegel prison cell, he set forth the four great dimensions of a spiritual life that lead to freedom in all its facets — freedom from ingrained habits of sin, freedom from cowering inaction and irresponsibility, freedom from fear of a monstrously demonic and immensely powerful nation-state. Listen carefully and prayerfully to his words, for they speak of the holiness of life:
STATIONS ON THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
July 21, 1944
DISCIPLINE
If you set out to seek freedom, then learn above all
discipline of soul and senses, so that your passions
and your limbs might not lead you confusedly hither and yon.
Chaste be your spirit and body, subject to your own will,
and obedient to seek out the goal that they have been given.
No one discovers the secret of freedom but through self-control.
ACTION
Dare to do what is just, not what fancy may call for;
Lose no time with what may be, but boldly grasp what is real.
The world of thought is escape; freedom comes only through
action.
Step out beyond anxious waiting and into the storm of events,
carried only by God’s command and by your own faith; then will freedom exultantly cry out to welcome your spirit.
Wondrous transformation! Your strong and active hands
are tied now. Powerless, alone, you see the end of your action.
Still, you take a deep breath and lay your struggle for justice,
quietly and in faith, into a mightier hand.
Just for one blissful moment, you tasted the sweetness of freedom,
then you handed it over to God, that he might make it whole.
DEATH
Come now, highest moment on the road to freedom eternal,
Death, put down the ponderous chains and demolish the walls
of our mortal bodies, the walls of our blinded souls,
that we might finally see what mortals have kept us from seeing.
Freedom, how long we have sought you through discipline,
action, and suffering.
Dying, now we behold your face in the countenance of God.17
This poem, written under the shadow of almost certain execution, is one of the finest expressions of the Holiness Tradition ever penned. And the Lutheran pastor and theologian who penned them is a sterling contemporary model of that Tradition.
“Costly Grace”
The outline of Bonhoeffer’s story is well known. In 1927 he was a student earning a doctorate in theology from Berlin University at the age of twenty-one. In 1930 he was a debater crossing theological swords with the liberal establishment at Union Theological Seminary, New York. In 1931 he was a teacher exegeting issues of Christian ethics and the nature of the Church at Berlin University. Bonhoeffer, it seemed, was destined for the life of an academic. But the ominous storm clouds of the Third Reich changed everything.
By 1933 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was an activist attacking the idolatrous “Aryan Clause,” which excluded Jews from civil service. By 1934 he was a leader in the newly formed “Confessing Church,” prophetically denouncing the heretical defections of the “German Christians.”* By 1935 he was a professor establishing a clandestine seminary at Finkenwalde — an institution where “pure doctrine, the Sermon on the Mount, and worship can be taken seriously.”18 By 1937 he was an author attacking “cheap grace” — that is, “grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”19 By 1939 he was a double agent seeking the defeat of his own nation and deeply involved in the conspiracy to assassinate the Führer. By 1943 he was a prisoner living out the days of misfortune “equably, smilingly, proudly, ***I like one accustomed to win,” and at the same time feeling “restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage.”20 By 1944 he was a theologian from a prison cell, searching, ever searching, for a “religionless Christianity” in which “man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.”21 And finally, in the gray dawn of Sunday, 8 April 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer became a martyr, whispering to his fellow prisoners as he left his cell to be hanged on the Flossenbürg gallows, “This is the end — for me, the beginning of life.”22
Bonhoeffer’s biographer, Eberhard Bethge, summarizes the self-sacrifice and prophetic vision of this young pastor-theologian when he speaks of him as “that fighter on behalf of the First Commandment against the idolatrous syncretisms of his time and of our time as well; the composer of devout prayers and inspiring sermons; the fascinating author of spiritual literature; the exciting writer of the letters from prison; the sophisticated analyst of the Christian situation in the post-Enlightenment era; the witness to faith in Jesus Christ both now and in the future.”23
“Christ the Center”
Bonhoeffer’s life as a churchman in Germany and in broader ecumenical circles is a model of courage and compassion. His work in the resistance movement is endlessly fascinating. His death is moving beyond words. But why would I consider him an example of the Holiness Tradition? He was far from perfect. He made mistakes, some of them serious. What is it that makes me single him out as a model for the virtuous life? Six things. The first three, which we turn to now, are tied to his conviction that Christ is the absolute center of all things.
First, Bonhoeffer took Jesus seriously. It is hard to overestimate how fully the christological question affected everything for him. If Jesus truly lived, died, rose, and is among his people today, it makes all the difference in the world. We simply cannot consider the earth apart from Christ’s footsteps imprinted upon it. “Christ’s manger stands on the earth, his cross is rammed into the earth, his grave is dug into the earth.”24 This being so, the community of faith must come to recognize Christ’s personal presence in the world today and set out to follow him in all things.
This emphasis emerged most powerfully in his lectures at Berlin University in 1933, a period Eberhard Bethge calls “the high point of Bonhoeffer’s academic career.”25 The message of those lectures is captured for us in Christ the Center. Here we find Bonhoeffer’s unswerving call for “one complete Christ.” “I do not know,” he says, “who this man Jesus is unless I say at the same time ‘Jesus Christ is God’, and I do not know who the God Jesus Christ is unless I say at the same time ‘Jesus Christ is man’. … This one God-Man is the starting point of christology.”26 From this solid vantage point Bonhoeffer could critique both the reigning liberal reduction of dogmatics to a humanistic domestication of God and the Church’s worship of a Christ-replica of its own lust for privilege.
By means of this rigorous christological critique of all political, theological, and ecclesiastical pretensions, Bonhoeffer found a Christ who constantly offends our sensibilities, much like “the idiot” in Dostoyevsky’s writings: “The idiot does not keep himself apart, but clumsily causes offense everywhere. He has nothing to do with the great ones, but with the children. He is mocked and he is loved. He is the fool and he is the wise man. He endures all and he forgives all. He is revolutionary, and yet he conforms. … Christ goes through the ages, questioned anew, missed anew, killed anew.”27 Christ stood at the very center of Bonhoeffer’s vocation and was the interpretive key to his understanding of Scripture and his critique of Church and society.28
Second, Bonhoeffer took Jesus’ call to discipleship seriously. He felt this call most powerfully compressed in Jesus’ robust and prophetic Sermon on the Mount. Throughout his life he stoutly refused to do what is so common today — namely, to see Jesus’ Sermon as an “impossible ideal,” or merely as nice words that are not meant to be obeyed, or perhaps as instructions for some future dispensation. No, he understood the Sermon on the Mount to be Jesus’ universal call to obedience — a call issued to all peoples, at all times, in all places. In a letter to his brother Karl-Friedrich he wrote, “I have begun to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount. That is the only source of power capable of blowing up the whole phantasmagoria* once and for all.”29
The most systematic treatment of this matter is found in The Cost of Discipleship, where Bonhoeffer argues for “costly grace”: “Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.”30 This he contrasts with “cheap grace,” by which he means “grace sold on the market like a cheapjack’s wares. … Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession, absolution without personal confession.”31
The German title for The Cost of Discipleship is the single word Nachfolge — “discipleship.” Discipleship is a theme Bonhoeffer wrestled with throughout his life. That theme can be seen in his seminars, sermons, and study groups from as early as 1932. But it was in the seminary life at Finkenwalde that he was able to give concrete shape to the hold that the Sermon on the Mount had on his life. His lectures on discipleship became the “nerve center” of the curriculum, and the seminarians felt the exhilarating experience of being drawn into a revolutionary movement. They knew that they were “witnessing a theological event.”32 The future of Christianity in Germany was at stake — indeed, the future of the Christian faith itself. In those lectures, which later became The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer gave the world a “catholic” or universal exposition of obedience.
For Bonhoeffer personally, Jesus’ call of discipleship freed him from the lust for position and status, turned him from “phraseology to reality,” and led him in time to relinquish the secure life of academia:33 It also led him to his uneasy pacifism: desiring to be obedient to the peace commandment of Jesus while at the same time standing in firm resistance to the tyranny of Hitler.34
Third, Bonhoeffer took spiritual discipline seriously. It is no accident that his lectures often returned to the disciplina pietatis.35 He was training for a life in which the powers of body and soul are placed entirely in the service of Christ. His life was built on “a new kind of monasticism … a life of uncompromising adherence to the Sermon on the Mount in imitation of Christ.”36
While always rejecting “any escapism disguised as piety,” he unquestionably understood the nature of spiritual formation: “We must be assimilated to the form of Christ in its entirety, the form of Christ incarnate, crucified and glorified.” And again, “To be conformed with the Incarnate — that is to be a real man. … ‘Formation’ … means in the first place Jesus’ taking form in his church.”37 And Bonhoeffer’s personal habits of daily meditation, prayer, and sacrament intensify his teaching on “formation.”
Consequently, God had so built within Bonhoeffer such ingrained habits of virtue that he had the inner spiritual resources for appropriate action. As we learned from our study of James, a divinely transformed heart will, by its very nature, produce good fruit. This is what enabled Bonhoeffer to stand firmly against the idolatrous cult of the Führer when so many around him were caught up in the seductive siren of patriotism. This is what enabled him to make the heart-wrenching decision to leave the security of the United States and “live through this difficult period of our national history with the Christian people of Germany.”38 This is what enabled him to describe (and truly experience) his imprisonment and suffering and loss as a “wondrous transformation.”
Action in the World
The remaining three reasons for holding Bonhoeffer up as a model of the virtuous life are tied to his conviction that Christian faith must, of necessity, result in action in the milieu of contemporary society.
Fourth, Bonhoeffer took free, responsible, obedient action seriously. He rejected all legalistic systems for defining moral norms. He refused to reduce Christ and Scripture to ethical principles and rules. Instead, he stressed the ongoing, relational dialectic of encountering God’s will, often against our will, and, in Christ, receiving the freedom to act responsibly in any given situation. When the center is clear, the boundaries of responsible action can be open to meet the demands of the present moment. “It is therefore impossible,” he wrote from prison, “to define the boundary between resistance and submission on abstract principles: but both of them must exist, and both must be practised. Faith demands this elasticity of behaviour.”39
This matter is most fully developed in his Ethics.40 In that text we are warned of the delusion of grasping for a Pharisee-like knowledge of good and evil in hopes that we can discern when we are “right” and when we are “wrong.” No: ethical action, he insisted, is not found in this way. Rather, every changing situation of need becomes the specific locus of God’s will and command.
In taking this stance, Bonhoeffer framed an ethic that was responsive to the present moment and so could engender responsible resistance to the growing Nazi horror. For example, at the outset of the Jewish deportations, Bonhoeffer wrote, “An expulsion of the Jews from the West must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ.”41
Bonhoeffer’s purpose in centering ethical action in God’s will and directive in the crisis of any given moment was not to validate some “easy way out” — a strategy common today in the various versions of situational ethics. Rather, he attempted to marshal a vigorous social ethic that can “see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled — in short, from the perspective of those who suffer.”42
In one of the most moving passages of Ethics — a passage written when Germany was smack in the middle of ecstatic celebration over its greatest military victory, the fall of France — Bonhoeffer called the Church to a corporate “confession of guilt.” “The church,” he declared, “confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid. She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and the most defenseless.”43
Fifth, Bonhoeffer took the purity of the Church seriously. Consistently he called the Church to be the Church. His was a purifying voice warning the Church against violating the First Commandment to “have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3).
Two days after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Bonhoeffer gave a radio address in which he warned against the possibility of Germany slipping into an idolatrous cult of the Führer (leader), who might very well turn out to be a Verführer (misleader) mocking God himself.44
In response to the passage of the Aryan Clause that excluded Jews from civil service, Bonhoeffer wrote a document titled “The Church and the Jewish Question.” His insistence in this paper that “the church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society, even if they do not belong to the Christian community,” so infuriated some of his colleagues that they walked out on his speech. Here also Bonhoeffer first considered aloud the possibility that, if the state fails in its obligation of justice for all, the Church has a responsibility “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel [of the state] itself.”45
The national church election of 23 July 1933 brought the issue of church and state to a head. The German Christians were victorious, capturing key positions in the church. It was a time begging for a renewed confession of faith, which is precisely what Bonhoeffer called for in his Sunday sermon of 23 July: “Church, remain a church! … [C]onfess, confess, confess.”46
And confess they did, at least in the beginning. In August the Council of Young Reformers deputized Bonhoeffer and Professor Hermann Sasse to retreat to the Christian community of Bethel to produce a confession of faith that would challenge the German Christians. What they produced — the Bethel Confession — solidly and uncompromisingly stated the theological foundation of the struggle and gave a spirited defense of the Jews: “This ‘holy remnant’ bears the indelible stamp of the chosen people,” and they must never be “exterminated by Pharaoh-like measures.” “We oppose,” continued Bethel, “the attempt to deprive the German Evangelical church of its promise by the attempt to change it into a national church of Christians of Aryan descent.”47 This amounted to the sharpest possible repudiation of Nazi Aryanism.
A line had been drawn in the sand! Or had it? The Bethel Confession was sent to some twenty theologians, who proceeded to dilute any criticism of the state and to whittle away at its uncompromising call for obedience to Jesus Christ. The final toothless product had so emasculated the challenge to resist the Third Reich that Bonhoeffer refused to sign it.
The Bethel Confession, so promising in the beginning, failed to provide any genuine challenge to the German Christians.48 Nevertheless, it highlights Bonhoeffer’s role as a purifying force in the Evangelical Church of Germany.
But Bonhoeffer’s concern for the Church was not confined to confessional purity alone. He sought a living fellowship of Word and sacrament, confession and forgiveness, prayer and worship. This brings us to perhaps his most moving piece of devotional writing, Life Together.
At Finkenwalde Bonhoeffer established an “Evangelical House of Brethren” where precisely this kind of life could be lived out. When the Gestapo closed down the Finkenwalde Seminary, Bonhoeffer saw the need to record for posterity the rationale and daily regimen of this community and to call the Church to an authentic community life if it was to know genuine renewal. Thus, with a compelling sense of urgency, he completed Life Together in just four weeks. In it we find some of the finest writing anywhere on mutual submission out of reverence for Christ, reciprocal confession under the cross, and a daily life of Scripture, meditation, prayer, and intercession.
Sixth, Bonhoeffer took the world seriously. What he saw so clearly was the need for righteousness in action in the midst of a secular and secularizing world. The reality that gripped him so totally was that we must live in “existence for others.” “Jesus,” he wrote, “is there only for others. … Our relation to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship … but our relation to God is a new life in ‘existence for others,’ through participation in the being of Jesus. … The church is the church only when it exists for others.”49
This brings us to Bonhoeffer’s powerful notion of “religionless Christianity.” The aspect of this teaching that is especially relevant to our study of holiness is his insistence that we “must live a ‘secular’ life, and thereby share in God’s sufferings.” This is a life that is “freed from false religious obligations and inhibitions” and open to serve all people — whoever and wherever they are. It is a life, not of religious acts, but of “participation in the sufferings of God in the secular life.” It is a life of repentance that is less concerned with our own needs, problems, sins, and fears than with being “caught up into the way of Jesus Christ,” suffering with those who suffer and rejoicing with those who rejoice. And we do all of this right in the middle of the vicissitudes of everyday life.50
Bonhoeffer did not live to flesh out his concept of religionless Christianity. In his Letters and Papers from Prison we have only the barest outline. Even so, the outline is most suggestive and challenging:
To make a start, [the Church] should give away all its property to those in need. The clergy must live solely on the free-will offerings of their congregations, or possibly engage in some secular calling. The church must share in the secular problems of ordinary human life, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live in Christ, to exist for others. In particular, our own church will have to take the field against the vices of hubris, power-worship, envy, and humbug, as the roots of all evil. It will have to speak of moderation, purity, trust, loyalty, constancy, patience, discipline, humility, contentment, and modesty.51
Bonhoeffer here is calling for a world-affirming spirituality of the first order, and its implications for the life of holiness are profound indeed. We long for more. We can only wonder where Bonhoeffer would have taken this creative line of thinking had he lived. Nevertheless, we can be genuinely grateful for one who lived so courageously and taught so profoundly.
DEFINING THE HOLINESS TRADITION
Holiness means the ability to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. It means being “response-able,” able to respond appropriately to the demands of life. The word virtue (arete) comes into our New Testament from a long history in Greek philosophical tradition, and it means simply to function well. Virtue is good habits we can rely upon to make our life work. Conversely, vice is bad habits we can rely upon to make our life not work, to make it dysfunctional, as we say. So a holy life simply is a life that works.
How contrary this is to our popular notions of holiness. Frankly, it is rarely considered a compliment to be seen as “holy” these days. And certainly no one wants to be thought of as “holier-than-thou.” To most minds the concept of holiness carries with it an air of arrogance and judgment. Furthermore, it is often associated with trivialities of behavior that we all know have little or nothing to do with a virtuous life. Because these misconceptions are so pervasive in our culture, it is crucial that we learn what holiness is not as well as what it is.
Holiness is not rules and regulations. Elaborate lists of dos and don’ts miss the point of a life hidden with God in Christ. No single standard of behavior is dictated by the word holy. All external legalisms fail to capture the heart of holy living and holy dying.
Holiness is sustained attention to the heart, the source of all action. It concerns itself with the core of the personality, the well-spring of behavior, the quintessence of the soul. It focuses upon the formation and transformation of this center.
Holiness is not otherworldliness. Its life is not found by developing logic-tight compartments of things sacred and things secular. We do not come into it by studiously avoiding contact with our manifestly evil and broken world.
Holiness is world-affirming. The holy life is found smack in the middle of everyday life. We discover it while being freely and joyfully in the world without ever being of the world. Holiness sees the sacred in all things. It is integrative, synoptic, incarnational.
Holiness is not a consuming asceticism. It is not punishment for the sake of punishment. It neither despises nor depreciates the human body. And it never locates virtue or merit in ascetical exercises themselves.
Holiness is a bodily spirituality. It affirms the goodness of the human body and seeks to bring it into working harmony with the spirit. It utilizes appropriate Spiritual Disciplines for training the body and mind in right living. It is, in this sense, ascetical — but never for the sake of the asceticism, always for the sake of the training.
Holiness is not “works-righteousness.” We cannot muster up our willpower to do good deeds and thereby become righteous. Sanctifying grace, just like justifying grace, is utterly and completely a work of … well, grace. It is unearned and unearnable. It is a God-initiated and God-sustained reality; we cannot do it, conjure it up, or make it happen.
Holiness is a “striving to enter in,” as Jesus tells us. Effort is not the opposite of grace; works is. Works has to do with merit or earning, and the effort we are called to undertake has nothing whatever to do with meriting or earning anything. In fact, the classical Disciplines — fasting and prayer, for example — have no virtue or merit whatsoever in and of themselves. They merely place us before God in such a way that he can begin building the kingdom-righteousness within us. (I say “merely” because I want to underscore that the virtue is all of God, but I certainly do not want to give the impression that our effort is nothing. In the economy of God it is a very important something. We will come to this presently.)
Holiness is not perfectionism. We do not by some act of divine fiat become sinless creatures incapable of any wrong action. As holy persons we can still make mistakes — and we do, with sorrowful regularity. We fail. We fall. Even so …
Holiness is progress in purity and sanctity. We are set apart for divine purposes. Holy habits deepen into fixed patterns of life. We experience a growing preponderance of right actions flowing from a right heart. We are ever in the process of becoming holy.
Holiness is not absorption into God. It does not mean the loss of our identity, our personhood. Through holy living we do not become less real, less whole, less human. Quite the opposite.
Holiness is loving unity with God. It is an ever-expanding openness to the divine Center. It is a growing, maturing, freely given conformity to the will and ways of God. Holiness gives us our truest, fullest humanity. In holiness we become the persons we were created to be.
DISCOVERING THE MAJOR STRENGTHS
The Holiness Tradition feeds us in many ways: focusing on personal transformation, emphasizing purity of heart, assuring progress in character formation, fostering growth in grace, and more.
The Ultimate Goal
First of all the Holiness Tradition constantly holds before us the ultimate goal of the Christian life: an ever deeper formation of the inner personality so as to reflect the glory and goodness of God; an ever more radiant conformity to the life and faith and desires and habits of Jesus; an utter transformation of our creatureliness into whole and perfect sons and daughters of God.
You see, the goal of the Christian life is not simply to get us into heaven, but to get heaven into us! God is intent upon making you and making me into “a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright, stainless mirror that reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness.”52
To be sure, the full reality of this “perfect reflection” awaits glorification. But even now we need to hear the ultimate goal spoken over us again and again so that we may enter into the process that leads to this goal. God does not wait until death to initiate this process of complete and total transformation. Oh, no. It begins now, and God can and will do far more here and now than we can possibly imagine. If we are not perfect yet, we can be a whole lot better.
We, you see, are terribly prone to settle for less than what God desires for us. We are glad enough for God to remove an irritating behavior from our personality (a sour disposition, for example), or a destructive addiction (like alcoholism), but it is a very different thing for him to begin restructuring our inner affections. We may be willing to give up honors and possessions and even friends, but it touches us too closely to disown ourselves. And yet we simply must understand that God is seeking not to improve us but to transform us. C. S. Lewis writes, “The goal towards which [God] is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection; and no power in the whole universe, except you yourself, can prevent Him from taking you to that goal.”53
The Wellspring of Action
A second major strength we find in the Holiness Stream is its intentional focus upon the heart, the wellspring of action. All of the best writers in this Tradition constantly (almost monotonously) call us toward purity of heart. The great Puritan divines, for example, gave sustained attention to this “heart-work,” as they dubbed it. In Keeping the Heart, John Flavel, a seventeenth-century English Puritan, notes that the “greatest difficulty in conversion, is to win the heart to God; and the greatest difficulty after conversion, is to keep the heart with God. … Heart-work is hard work indeed.”54
For the Holiness Tradition, external actions — this set of ethical practices or that set of observances — are never the center of attention. Specific actions are a consequence, a natural result of something far deeper, far more profound. The scholastic maxim Actio sequitur esse reminds us that action is always in accordance with the essence of the person who acts.55 This does not reduce good works and acts of charity to insignificance, of course, but it does make them matters of secondary significance, effects rather than causes. Of primary significance is our vital union with God, our “new creation” in Christ, our immersion in the Holy Spirit. It is this union that purifies the heart. When the branch is truly integrated into the vine — united with the vine and receiving its life from the vine — then good spiritual fruit is a natural consequence (John 17). Action follows essence.
It is so easy for us to center virtue in the action itself. If an individual does this particular thing or refrains from doing that particular thing, we think he must be virtuous. Now, it is true that virtuous persons will do virtuous actions, but it is not the actions that make those persons virtuous. Rather, those persons do the actions because they are virtuous. It is a little like the star tennis player who consistently makes good shots; she makes good shots precisely because she is a good tennis player. By sheer luck I might make a good shot, but that would not make me a good tennis player, as the shots before and after the lucky shot would amply prove.
This is why the moral philosophers can say, “Virtue is easy.” When the heart is purified by the action of the Spirit, the most natural thing in the world is the virtuous thing. To the pure in heart, vice is what is hard.
So the constant appeal to heart-purification by the voices from the Holiness Tradition are welcome words. It is no vain thing to be returning to our first love over and over and over again. It is an act of faith to continually cry out to God to search us and know our heart and root out every wicked way in us (Ps. 139:23).
We are — each and every one of us — a tangled mass of motives: hope and fear, faith and doubt, simplicity and duplicity, honesty and falsity, openness and guile. God knows our heart better than we ever can. He is the only one who can separate the true from the false; he alone can purify the motives of the heart. But he does not come uninvited. If chambers of our heart have never experienced the healing touch, perhaps it is because we have not welcomed the divine scrutiny.
The most important, the most real, the most lasting work is accomplished in the depths of our heart. This work is solitary and interior. It cannot be seen by anyone, even ourselves. It is a work known only to God. It is the work of heart purity, soul conversion, life transfiguration.
Though we cannot see the work itself, we can detect some of its effects. We experience a new firmness of life-orientation. We experience a settled peace that we do not fully understand and cannot fully explain. We begin seeing everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good. And, most amazing of all, we begin to feel abiding, unconditional warm regard for all people.
The Assurance of Progress
Third, the Holiness Tradition gives us hope for genuine progress in character transformation. This hope is a grace-filled gift, for there are many people who have simply given up on any movement forward in the spiritual life. Often such people devise elaborate justifications for their lack of growth — some suggesting that any real change must await another dispensation, others suggesting that since we are covered by the righteousness of Christ, we do not need and should not expect any character formation.56
But the salvation that is in Jesus Christ is not limited to the forgiveness of sins; it is also able to break sin’s power. We are “created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Eph. 2:10). Sin no longer needs to reign in our mortal bodies. We can walk in newness of life. We can yield our arms and legs and eyes and ears and brain to God as “instruments of righteousness.” We can be “conformed to the image of his Son,” Jesus (Rom. 6:12-14, 8:29).
Growth in Grace
And that leads me to the fourth strength of the Holiness Tradition — namely, its tough-minded, down-to-earth, practical understanding of how we “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18). The foundational structure for this growth in grace involves a training of body, mind, and spirit by means of the disciplines of the spiritual life. These Disciplines are well-recognized activities of prayer and meditation and study and fasting and solitude and service and worship and celebration and much more. All these activities are ways by which we quite literally present our bodies as “a living sacrifice” to God (Rom. 12:1).
This is a seeking after the righteousness of the kingdom of God through indirection. By undertaking Disciplines of the spiritual life that we can do, we receive from God the ability to do things that under our own steam we simply cannot do, such as loving our enemies. The Disciplines, you see, place us into the divine stream of things in such a way that God is able to build within us deeply ingrained habits of “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Gal. 5:22b-23a).
While the classical Disciplines of the spiritual life are the foundational means for our formation, they are far from the only means. Often God uses the various difficulties and trials we face in life to produce in us a kind of patience endurance (James 1:2-3). At other times God uses the interactive exchange that goes on between ourselves and the Holy Spirit to develop a dependent spirit within us. Or to grow our faith. Then again, God will often use human beings and other physical means to mediate his life to us. All of these things shape us, form us, and make us substantively different persons, to the extent that we are willing participants in this work of grace. We can stop our growing conformity to Christ at any point. God in his wisdom and sovereign freedom has given us veto power over our own formation. This is the dignity he bestows upon us as free moral agents.
And the Spirit is most patient, waiting for us to come to our senses and see the goodness of rightness. But believe me, God is determined to pursue this good work in us to the very end. C. S. Lewis observes, “The command Be ye perfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. [God] is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. … He meant what He said. Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect — perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and immortality.”57
The transformation of ourselves into the likeness of Christ will not be fully completed in this life, for, as Lewis notes, “death is an important part of the treatment.”58 How far each one of us moves forward into godliness here in this life depends upon a whole host of complex factors, not the least of which is the emotional, mental, and psychic package we were given at birth. Such factors can either give us a good running start or handicap us enormously. Yet even with all the complex interplay between heredity, environment, and other factors too numerous to mention, we can and should expect substantial movement forward into a life of “righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 14:17b).
I want to make two comments about this growth in grace — comments that will sound strangely contradictory but that in fact fit together quite nicely. First, in our thinking and our living we need to make generous allowance for divine infusions of grace that produce in us quantum leaps forward.59 These (as best I can understand) are utterly sovereign acts of God. We in no way cause them to happen, and they appear unconnected to our strivings in any discernible way. Perhaps you have been grappling with a particular addiction — say, pornography — and at some point all distorted sexual desires simply and totally disappear. Or maybe in some simple worship context you experience wave after wave of supernatural Love washing over you in a paroxysm of hope and wonder and joy and peace. These are glorious acts of God for which the only sane response is to fall to our knees in worship, adoration, and praise.
My second comment stresses the other side of the coin. We have a part to play in this “growing in godliness” (as the Puritans were fond of calling it). We have work to do. And it is exceedingly important work, for God has ordained it to be the normal and most common means of our formation. Graciously God invites us to work in cooperation with the Spirit through spiritual Disciplines appropriate to our need and through the various other means of grace. Paul so beautifully brings together these two sides of the same coin when he states, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:12b-13).
Now, this ordinary, everyday means of character transformation lacks the fireworks of the special infusions of overwhelming grace. Furthermore, it seems painfully slow, though it always proceeds at a rate consistent with the nature of the virtue being sought. Francis de Sales writes, “The ordinary purification and healing, whether of the body or of the mind, takes place only little by little, by passing from one degree to another with labor and patience. … The soul that rises from sin to devotion may be compared to the dawning of the day, which at its approach does not expel the darkness instantaneously but only little by little.”60
It is easy for us to undervalue this most fundamental means of grace. It appears so commonplace, so quiet, so modest, so unimpressive. But it is the primary way we grow. God has ordained that it be so. Through it God invites us to be participants in the work of grace, “labourers together with God,” as Paul puts it (1 Cor. 3:9, KJV).
In any event, these two realities actually work hand in glove. Our bodies, our minds, our souls need shaping and preparing for any special infusion of grace. On our own we are not sufficient receptacles to contain the divine Blessing. We would simply blow apart, or something worse. Therefore, we should always value this ordinary way (this intolerably slow way) of growth, for through it God prepares us for things we can hardly imagine.
UNDERSTANDING THE POTENTIAL PERILS
Every Tradition has its zealots — those who, not fully understanding the Tradition, push some aspect of its teaching into a distortion. I want to mention three such distortions in the Holiness Stream that can easily become serious pitfalls in our lives.
The first is legalism. This comes any time we turn our center of attention away from the heart and onto externals of one sort or another. Usually these externals are tied to particular standards of culture or modes of behavior. When this shift of focus happens, we reduce virtue to custom and thereby trivialize it.
Once we define holiness solely by external matters, we are, of necessity, plunged into legalisms of one sort or another. Why? Because now we have hoops for people to jump through. We have a way to manage and control ourselves and others. (And usually we are the hardest on ourselves.)
Now, external actions are not unimportant, which is why this matter is often confusing to people. We solve our confusion by seeing how Jesus gave central attention to the heart out of which flow the issues of life. When the heart is set right, then the actions that are good and true will flow naturally. So external action is of importance, but it is of secondary importance. External action is derivative, not primary.
Please understand. It is not wrong for us to study the issue of appropriate action as we do in ethics courses. Nor is it wrong to have lists of right actions as we do in the Decalogue and many other biblical passages. These show us how love acts in given situations. But they are never the center of our attention, only the byproduct, and, by their very nature, they can never fully encompass a virtuous life.
Righteousness, holiness, the life of virtue is centrally and primarily a matter of “heart work.” This is why Jesus gave such sustained attention to the rightness of the heart out of which flow the issues of life.
But (and here is the rub), if holiness is primarily a matter of the heart, how can we know who is holy and who is not, who has it and who doesn’t? Legalism, with its external standards, majors in answering this question. I suggest to you that it is a virtue to ignore the question.
The second great peril for the Holiness Tradition is Pelagianism (a teaching named after Pelagius, a fourth-century monk).61 It is a big word with a long history, but it refers primarily to any form of earning or meriting our standing with God. Sometimes it is called “works righteousness,” that is, attempting to attain righteousness by means of our own works.
The reason Pelagianism is such a great danger to the Holiness Tradition is that inherent in any serious call to holy living is the temptation to believe that any progress forward is somehow our doing. It is the arrogance of feeling that we are in charge after all, that we really can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. You see, the ancient Adamic temptation to “be as gods” is ever with us.
Because this temptation is so great, some groups have rejected the possibility of any moral progress in this life. They tell us that the only righteousness we should look forward to is the “imputed righteousness”* of Christ on our behalf. Now, the doctrine of imputed righteousness is a precious truth. Our standing with God is an act of grace alone. We can do nothing to improve that standing. Because of the work of Christ on our behalf we are loved and accepted just the way we are. This is a reality we simply receive and embrace without any attempts to add to or improve upon it.
Having said this, I must go on to say that all the writers of the New Testament would find it completely ludicrous to think that the imputed righteousness of Christ leaves us locked into the same patterns of viciousness and destruction. “God forbid,” as Paul puts it (Rom. 6:2, KJV). No, the righteousness of Christ that is imputed to us so generously and freely also places us on the path of discipleship, where we learn to “grow in grace” (2 Pet. 3:18). We become apprentices to Jesus so that slowly but surely (no doubt with many slips and falls along the way) we begin to “follow in his steps.”
So there are things for us to do, but what we do does not make us righteous. We could imitate the life of Christ down to the minutest detail and still not be righteous. Our actions, in and of themselves, contain not a single iota of righteousness. All that the actions of discipleship do is place us before God so that he can begin to build the righteousness of the kingdom within us. Purity of heart, indiscriminate love, a peace that transcends understanding — these, and so much more, are the things built into the heart of the disciple.
Now, once again we must underscore in the most complete way possible that this heart-work is God’s work alone. We simply cannot program our heart; only God can, and God only. It is sola gratia, grace alone. Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, says, “Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matt. 5:16). Now, some inquisitive mind might wonder, If it is “your light” and “your good works,” then why don’t you get the glory? The reason is simple: we know that we have done nothing more than receive a gift. Our transformation of heart is utterly and completely a work of grace.
It is time now to look at the third peril, perfectionism. This danger is largely derivative from a failure to deal successfully with the first two. If my focus remains upon external standards of behavior, and if I feel that I am the one who has attained those standards, I am going to be sorely tempted to see myself as perfect.
This pitfall is especially dangerous because it cuts us off from our essential humanity. Often it forces us to deny who we really are and what is actually in us. When this happens, we begin to pretend that we are what we are not. And the resulting inner contradiction is destructive indeed.
Perfectionism is almost routinely understood in legalistic terms. The reason for this is easy to see. In order to know who is perfect and who is not, we need an external criterion by which we can judge others. And most deadly of all is the way this approach to life necessitates a rigid, condemning, judgmental spirit. If you doubt what I have just said, simple observation will give ample and regrettable testimony that this is the case.
Now, the impulse to be perfect is not wrong. We are to be perfected in love even as our Father in heaven is perfect (Matt. 5:48). We should intend to be perfect. And we should make plans to be perfect. But no matter how far we go into perfection, there will always remain room for growth.
Paul captures this paradox so beautifully in his Epistle to the Philippians. First, he makes it quite clear that he has room for growth: “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect.” Then he gives the lifestyle posture of the disciple of Jesus: “Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.” And finally he shows us that this very process is itself perfection: “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded” (Phil. 3:12-15a, KJV). So, as we constantly recognize how far we have yet to go, and as we constantly press forward toward all that God has for us, we are in fact entering into a kind of perfection.
You see, God meets us at the point of our effort. We do not sit back and expect God to pour righteousness on our heads. There are things for us to do. But the effort is always in a spirit that is nonlegalistic, nonworks, nonjudgmental, noncondemning. And always we realize that we do not have anything that we have not been given.
How, then, do we deal with the perils in the Holiness Tradition? By replacing legalism with love. By replacing Pelagianism with grace. By replacing perfectionism with growth. If we do this with true and honest hearts, we will be kept on the right path.
PRACTICING THE HOLINESS TRADITION
Holiness never involves works, as we have seen, but it most assuredly involves effort. Hence we cannot ignore the question of practice. How do we go about moving forward in holiness?
First, we train. And in our training we remember the principle of indirection. Rather than tackle the issues of virtue and vice head-on, we undertake activities of body, mind, and spirit that in time will build spiritual resources within us to act appropriately when the situation demands it. As athletes of God we plan a regimen of spiritual Disciplines that will stimulate our growth in grace. If we are struggling with pride, we learn service, which leads us into the many little deaths of going beyond ourselves. If we are needing hope, we learn prayer and meditation, which usher us ever deeper into the heart of the Holy. If compulsions of one kind or another obsess us, we learn fasting, which teaches us to control all the senses by the grace of God. If we want faith, we learn worship, which shows us the Lord high and lifted up. And on it goes. Throughout we are training for holiness, planning for perfection.
Second, we invite others to travel the journey with us. Such persons become both companions and mentors. They provide us with discernment, counsel, and encouragement. Often we are too close to our own training plan to see that we are overachieving and setting ourselves up for failure. Or to see that sloth is setting in and we need encouragement to venture out into the depths. Furthermore, others often can detect our growth and development better than we, and their reassuring words help us see the footprints of God in our lives.
Such spiritual companionship also provides a loving accountability. A trust relationship is built in which it is the most natural thing in the world to answer honestly and fully the query, “How is it with your soul?” In the best of worlds we can identify persons who are giving us spiritual direction and persons to whom we give spiritual direction. But even where the best is not possible — and often it is not — we can still find loving relationships that nurture our spiritual growth.
Third, when we stumble and fall, we get up and start again. Appropriate confession and restitution are always in order, but we never spend too much time lamenting our failures and shortcomings. Where we are not yet perfect, we know that we have a perfect Friend who will never leave us, never forsake us. Besides, we are in this for the long term. We are looking ahead to the perfection that is coming and is to come. We keep pressing on.
I wish that this simple counsel did not sound so trivial, for it is a profound truth for our growth: stumbling is part of our growing. Our mistakes and failures teach us the right way to live — and that the right way is the good way. And after stumbling it is no small thing for us to start at the beginning once again. We are learning that by starting again and again and again something firm and lasting is being built in us. The old writers called this something “fortitude,” and fortitude builds habits, and habits build character, and character builds destiny.
THE CALL TO VIRTUOUS LIVING
QUESTION:
What is the Holiness Tradition?
ANSWER:
A life that functions as it should.
QUESTION:
Why should we explore it?
ANSWER:
Because through it we are enabled to live whole, functional lives in a dysfunctional world.
Every one of us is called to holiness of heart and life. Anthony Bloom reminds us that “All holiness is God’s holiness in us: it is a holiness that is participation and, in a certain way, more than participation, because as we participate in what we can receive from God, we become a revelation of that which transcends us. Being a limited light, we reveal the Light.”62 How wonderful to think that as we become partners with God, participating in this ongoing work of Christian perfection, our little light (which is not the source of light but only a reflection of the Light — and often a distorted and faint reflection at that) might lead others all the more fully to see Jesus, the Light of the world.
* The practical outworking of Phoebe’s “altar theology” involved three clearly defined steps: entire consecration, faith, and testimony. This woman, you understand, felt hindered from fulfilling the third step.
* Not to be confused with the Apostle James, the son of Zebedee and brother of John.
* It is interesting to note that James’s younger brothers — Joses, Judas, and Simon — and his sisters — whose names are unknown to us — followed James’s lead in refusing to believe in Jesus (Mart. 13:55; Mark 6:3; John 7:5).
* “German Christians” was the term used for Protestants who supported Hitler. The “Confessing Church,” of which Bonhoeffer was a key figure, arose as a witness to Christian faithfulness and became the chief opposition to the German Christians.
* Translator’s note: “i.e., Hitler and his rule.”
* Sometimes this is also called “alien righteousness,” for it is a righteousness that comes from the outside and is alien to our sinful nature, which is in rebellion against God. At other times the term “objective righteousness” is used to underscore the objective nature of God’s declaring us righteous through the shed blood of Jesus Christ.