The Problem of Holiness

by Grant Sandercock-Brown

S

ince General Coutts wisely and gently steered us away from our “second blessing” theology, Salvationists have not spoken with one voice on holiness. Some think Coutts was wrong; some said “OK, but what now?”; many had lost interest in the whole issue. Unfortunately, we didn’t (or couldn’t) replace our simple second blessing theology with a new, personal, one-sentence definition. Maybe what we miss most is not our second blessing theology but its simplicity and clarity. What we can say is that we threw the baby out with the bath water and have been bemusedly holding an empty tub for rather a long time.

That doesn’t mean that republishing Brengle is the answer to our holiness confusion. Surely we should be able to articulate a fresh understanding on this, to speak to our times in a biblically authentic way about holiness.

And not as a sect with some sort of triumphalist world view. What we have to say about holiness applies the whole church. Surely the body of Christ should all understand holiness the same way. That is, we believe that “the privilege of all believers” means all believers everywhere - not just those in the Army.

A Caveat

 

“When the people called Salvationists cease to be a holiness people they will not be a people at all - certainly not a people of any consequence.” (John Gowans)

I suspect that the General’s observation is correct. We need a re-connection between a practical understanding of holiness and our mission and its trappings. We somehow need to weave these unravelling (or unravelled) strands together again. But here’s the rub: we cannot come up with a new version of holiness merely to help us survive as an Army. Holiness cannot just be a strategy for church renewal. It is far more profound than that. That is why people have not responded to “if we don’t have holiness, the Army will die.” It is not enough. It is my clear conviction that we will convince people of the desirability of holiness only when we live it, teach it and breathe it.

Yes, holiness may well be the answer to our decline in the west. But our first longing must be for the holiness of God and the power of the Spirit, not merely a longing to see the Army renewed and holiness as a strategy to do so.

When all is said and done regarding holiness (and there has often been a lot said and very little done), at the core of our holiness problem there are two crucial holiness questions to be answered: how do you get holy, and how do you live holy? And at the moment, that is something that we are unable to do. Or, perhaps more accurately, something that we are unable to do with any sort of consensus.

Social Justice as the New Morality?

In our search for a new understanding of holiness, some have taken on board social justice. Wesley’s “There is no holiness but social holiness” is taken to mean that we are called to work for a just society. Morality is sidelined, and welfare, i.e. helping needy people, is not enough.

Holiness, apparently, has always meant social justice via activism. We are told to rethink our history, to look at the Maiden Tribute campaign, that’s what we should be about. And so we read Brueggemann and we delve into the Old Testament prophets and do word studies on “righteousness”. And perhaps this is a place to start, and it is certainly better than doing nothing.

However, regarding holiness, if all we do is replace our parent’s quest for moral purity (work hard at not sinning) with a quest for social justice (work hard at changing the lives of the less fortunate), while it is an improvement, we have still missed the point.

For one thing, it’s not clear to me that this is a balanced New Testament theology. It somehow ignores the parable of the Good Samaritan as well as ignoring Paul’s ambivalence to slavery, for example. We need to be careful about saying, “sure you can stop to help the wounded traveller on the Jericho road, but the better thing to do is to work for bandit-free travel on the Jericho-Jerusalem highway.” Some of our rhetoric regarding justice owes more to the liberal social gospel than we perhaps admit.

But the main problem is that it is not personal enough. While holiness is more than a personal opinion, it is still a personal thing. Remember that we could once say “after you are saved, if you seek a second blessing from God you will be filled with the Spirit and be able to live free from sin.” What do we replace that with? A generalised “after conversion you should be working for social justice”?

Yes, working for bandit-free roads and making poverty history are good and righteous things to do, yet there is something missing here. There is a personal, relational dimension absent in this view of holiness.

Towards an Answer

In the first instance, holiness does not begin with us and what we do. Holiness and righteousness begin with a holy and powerful God, a God who does something in us. God is the righteous, covenanting God. Like Abraham, if we trust in him (not believe things about him), as his child we will feel compelled and be enabled to (as Paul put it in Thessalonians) act righteously, holily and blamelessly - to express His righteousness in our living. And that means in resisting temptation as well as doing what God requires.

Holiness is God’s idea and God’s doing. It is not a strategy to renew the Army (although I believe it could); it is not working for a just society (although that is a necessary outcome); it is not morality (although that too is an outcome).

A Lesson from Pentecostalism

Alister McGrath discusses the Pentecostal revival in The Twilight of Atheism. Here is an experiential world view that ignores “I want to believe what they believe” in favour of “I want to experience what they experience.” God is not the God of ideas; rather, “God is experienced and known as a personal, transformative living reality.”

500 million people who are now Pentecostals have just sidestepped nearly all the debates that consume the time of Protestant academics. What Pentecostalism offers is an immediate and intimate connection with God. “You will feel him in your heart, you will see him at work in your life and in your friends’ lives. He will change the way you live. People will be healed, your life will be better. Now!” And so it is no surprise that Pentecostalism has ousted Marxism and is rapidly replacing liberation theology in South America; that it is sweeping through Asia and Africa.

We have nothing to match this practical, transformative Christianity unless we too can live out a biblical, practical, experiential, exciting, one-sentence definition of what holiness means for us.

It’s not that all of us suddenly becoming Pentecostal is the answer (there is, after all, some problematic theology to deal with). But what the Pentecostal revival reminds us is that holiness is vitally connected to the work of the Holy Spirit - how he works in our hearts and what that means for our living.

Paul, in Galatians 3, gets stuck into the “foolish Galatians” for forgetting this very thing. For Paul, the Spirit was the single and sufficient sign that they were God’s people. And he poses the question: “Are you so foolish? Having started with the Spirit, are you ending with the flesh?” Well, are we? A definition of holiness that has no reference to the Spirit of God at work among us and in me is doing just that!

All power to the push for social justice as an (not the) authentic outcome of holy living. But remember, when Jesus quotes Isaiah on social justice in Luke 4, the quote starts: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to…” (Luke 4:18).

Further Towards an Answer

We must affirm that holiness is God’s idea and God’s doing. So in that sense, what I think holiness is doesn’t matter. But of course, since holiness is expressed in my own individual relationship with God, how I understand holiness has practical implications for my praying and my living.

Too often in the Army, the debate about what holiness means has centred on questions of sinlessness. And honestly, we still haven’t agreed on that (remember that Wesley himself said, “it is not worth contending for the term,” not that that stopped us doing so). But it seems to me that we are missing the point here by time and again focusing our discussion on the “negative pole” of holiness. Rather than argue what we don’t have or won’t do when we are holy, we should focus on what we can have and what we should do. And what we can have is the love of God in our hearts, and what we can do is express that love. The “positive pole” of holiness is the love of God filling our hearts and transforming our living, so that we can love him and love others as we ought.

For if holiness means anything at all, it is God’s presence in our lives, helping us to do his will; to fulfil the law as summarised by Jesus in Matthew 22:34-40. And that is to love God with our whole hearts and to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. (And by the way, social justice people, the Parable of the Good Samaritan is Jesus’ answer to “Who is my neighbour?” [Luke 10:25].)

Every child of God is daily called to holy action, not just holy thinking or even holy abstinence. It’s what Paul was on about to the church in Thessalonica when he kept describing his actions as holy, and blameless and righteous. And he prayed that this would be true for them as well.

I’m not sure if I can live the rest of my life without sinning, but I’m sure that God has called me to and will help me live a loving, holy life. A life filled with loving thoughts and actions towards God and others.

And it is for that reason that as Christians we are called to engage the world around us; to live out that love in a society that needs our kindness, generosity and compassion. Holiness is for everyone. It is practical, simple and personal.

“Do not let anyone lead you astray. He who does what is right is righteous, just as he (Jesus) is righteous.” (1 John 3:7)

What an extraordinary verse! And yet, Paul would have agreed whole-heartedly with John. Holiness in practice was simple. Paul was in Christ and Christ was in him, and for that reason he was compelled and enabled to live righteously. The Holy Spirit transformed his motives and guided his actions. When Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit to the church in Galatia, you can be pretty sure that he believed he lived that fruit. All the way through Thessalonians he says “you know how holy, righteous and blameless I was among you.”

Perhaps this side of Freud and psychoanalysis, we cannot recover the simple, practical New Testament concept of holiness expressed in right action. Perhaps we will always be worried about mixed or sullied motives. All I know is that Jesus never debated “sinlessness” with his followers, but time and time again, through story and example, he called them to be doers of the word - to speak gently, to bring healing, to be compassionate.

Holiness is practical and personal. In this world, this society, our communities, we are called to be the living embodiment of God’s love. Holiness is not just about us and our own spirituality. It’s not just about our not sinning or what we have given up for God. It’s not just a strategy for church renewal. It is about what we are willing to do for him. “Take up your cross and follow me” is a personal call to action, not contemplation.

But not on our own. I wish our holiness doctrine was longer, took in the next phrase. “The one who calls you is faithful and he will do it.” It is the power of God at work in every aspect of our lives. You see, those of us who read too many theology books may smile indulgently and disbelievingly at the prayer “I’m running late Lord, please help me find a car park.” Here is a worldview that is diametrically opposed to the liberal or conservative evangelical view of an absent God about whom we theorise and who we use as a basis for our propositions. Childish prayers for parking spaces are unworthy of the “wholly other” and the “ground of our being.” And so we dismiss the prayers whispered at a thousand mercy seats. “Help me give up swearing, gambling, pornography.” “Help me love Mrs. Grumpy.” But at the end of the day, I suspect that I would much prefer to hang out with the prayer for a car park people!

We must, somehow, start living out holiness. A new orthopraxy precedes any new orthodoxy, just as it did for the 19th century second blessing proponents. All knowledge is abstract unless you have experienced it, lived it. We can talk about and theorise on holiness all we want but I have no doubt whatsoever that unless significant numbers of influential Salvationists speak with one spiritual voice on holiness while living holy, Spirit-filled lives, our steady decline will continue, and probably rightly so.

Conclusion

“When the people called Salvationists cease to be a holiness people they will not be a people at all - certainly not a people of any consequence.” (John Gowans)

Which brings us back to Gowans’ confronting thesis, where the real problem for me is that I cannot imagine our much-needed spiritual revival. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen; I just don’t know how it would. Where will it start? Is it actually possible that we could speak with one voice on any issue - ranks, clergy/laity, mission, worship - let alone holiness? The discouraging part of thinking through this whole process is that I can’t see it happening. I cannot imagine what a dramatic holiness renewal would look like in our fragmented Army. My sincere hope is that that is just the failure of my imagination.

Ultimately, the problem of holiness we face, particularly in the West, is that while all of us desperately need holiness, not enough of us desperately want it.

And so the two crucial holiness questions remain, how do you get holy, and how do you live holy? If we are, in any meaningful sense, a movement in which holiness is important, we need to be able to answer those questions clearly and simply. And above all, we need to live our answers.

Writer: A corps officer at Chatswood Corps on Sydney’s North Shore in Australia, Grant Sandercock-Brown is in his mid-40s, married and has three children. An associate lecturer (in New Testament) at the College of Pastor Education (CoFE) and President of the CoFE Association, he is also the editor of the Practical Theologian a twice yearly journal published by the CoFE. Having started writing after a fight with Hodgkin’s disease, he’s since been published in theRubicon, Pipeline, The Salvationist (UK), New Frontier (USA West) and Horizons (Canada) and has been asked to be a regular columnist for The Officer.

3 Comments to The Problem of Holiness

1. The Church of the Nazarene is rethinking their holiness theology - or at least how it is presented. Brengle’s principles are sound but his books are linked to his culture. There is definitely the theological side of holiness but Jesus was concerned with the practice of holiness and the social implications of living out that holiness.

   http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesley_conferences/2007/Oord%20Revisioning%20Article%20X%20Paper.pdf
Jay Davis on September 25th, 2007

2. I didn’t believe much in the “second work of grace” until I was in college. But at a chapel service, a speaker asked the question, “Do you believe the Holy Spirit can meet your needs?” My answer was yes and the Holy Spirit did an amazing work that day. But as life went along I found myself in need of a “third work of grace” and a fourth ect. I realized the Holy Spirit was constantly renewing me. I think that is one way this article spoke to me. I felt that we do need to find a huge part of our answer to the holiness dilemma in experiencing the presence of God.

   I agree with the thought process that focusing on “the negative pole” of sinlessness is a trap that can lead to a works righteousness. I don’t think sinless perfection is possible or Biblical. But in some ways after reading your article I came away feeling like any focus on resisting sin was lumped in to whether or not we were able to be victorious in that every time. Maybe I misunderstood? Here are a couple of examples where I felt this way:

   1) We should focus not on what we don’t have or won’t do but on what we can have and can do.
   2) Seemed to infer that since we can’t live the rest of our lives without sinning we should focus on being “loving”

   But it seems to me that if we are going to define holiness and search out its depths we cannot and should not avoid a focus on resisting sin. It is both an old testament and New Testament concept. It was practiced in the early church. As you have pointed out since loving your neighbor is defined as fulfilling the laws, conversely fulfilling the laws will also be actions which show love to our neighbors. And it has a divine relational component. We can experience a love relationship with God both when we are doing things that please Him and when we are resisting things that don’t.

   Lastly, when it comes to revival I believe we are experiencing it already. When I go to events like Roots and worship alongside other passionate Christians I believe something is brewing. I agree with you that it is hard to picture what that might look like on a large scale but it seems to me that most of the massive revivals of the past would have been hard to imagine beforehand. They were such a revolution in society that people knew it was God himself who had initiated and orchestrated them. That was why so many people got involved. His presence was undeniable.
Jason on September 25th, 2007

3. Hallelujah!

   It’s never been a question of whether works without faith can bring salvation, but whether faith without works is really faith at all.

   I see the need for this discussion and am so encouraged by your words. God has been really defining a lot of things in my heart, especially the issue of where my focus needs to lie. If I believe that God is holy, and that he has called me to be like him, then focusing on not sinning is missing the point! Holiness is so much more than “sinlessness”. It’s Christ-likeness! How beautiful. And how wonderful for us that this is God’s prerogative and also his work to do in us through his Spirit. We melt into him and he accomplishes his work. Sin? Not a thought of it. But it’s not a question of willpower or abstinence, it becomes a matter of each morning rolling out of bed onto our knees and communing with our maker who is in us and through us and over us. It becomes, “for me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” Revolution and revival become the natural progression of Christ’s body living the truth in our cultures that are, unfortunately, far from it. So maybe we look a little counter-cultural, amen!

   Hmmm, what a delightful thing it is for me to hear others who share my convictions. Let’s hear more from one another!
Jonathan Taube on September 25th, 2007

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