Just Holy (Part 3)

Why are we divided about holiness? asks Danielle Strickland

Why is the church, indeed even The Salvation Army divided about holiness? On one hand there are those who suggest that holiness must be personal, individual - that it is, above all other things, a blessing of the heart that leads to purity within. It is an experience of divine cleansing and freedom from sin. Others suggest, almost on the contrary that holiness is only made complete within the fight for social justice. Reforming society is about holiness expressed through solidarity with the poor, outspoken prophetic, anti-religious behaviour that hopes to ignite and offend in anticipation of God’s kingdom come. These campaigners use John the Baptist and Jesus as examples of non-conformists (even to religious standards) to say that personal-based holiness movements are pharisaical. And they may be right.

Critics of personal holiness without social impact are quick to point out the preachers and advocates of personal holiness movements who live in expensive homes and run state of the art programs but neglect the poor.

Holiness movements in the Western world during the last half of the century have largely catered to a prosperity theme and a theology that like the Pharisees in Jesus’ day equate personal moral behaviour with acceptance and prosperity by God. Not only that, but they’ve also compiled a list of moral sins that are damnable and exclusionary - homosexuality and abortion are at the top of the list while systemic systems of injustice like apartied, inequality and extreme poverty go un-adressed.

Those outside of the prosperity bubble of God’s favour have been accused of not living up to a moral code of holiness. Holiness, as one advocate puts it - is the solution to every problem. But is it? Is holiness the solution to a child born to parents so poor that they cannot sustain themselves with enough nuritment to make it through their early years? Is holiness the solution to the farmer who is exploited on a regular basis, kept from providing a decent wage for his children to go to school? Is holiness the solution for women trapped in illegal brothels, drugged and exploited, and sexually abused?

Social justice advocates say these are not holiness issues - they are justice issues. Those women don’t need more personal piety - that child doesn’t need to pray more often or with more faith - that worker doesn’t need anymore hymns singing him into submission - they need rights, advocacy, reform, rescue and avenues of fighting a systemic evil and bringing God’s justice to bear.

On the other hand, those holiness representatives are quick to point out the shortcomings of social reform without inward change. Not only of the reform campaign ideals, but of the reformers themselves. How can love be championed by a man who commits adultery they say about Martin Luther King Jr.? How can God’s kingdom be advancing through Bono’s proclaimation of the gospel to the poor when he uses swear words on T.V.? Billions of dollars and a generation of people committed to helping the world’s poor dismissed by the external impurity of language and moral purity codes broken.

Harsh assessments of one another and ‘camps’ of holiness that celebrate specific facits of holiness but may miss the bigger picture are not helpful to our mission of winning the world. Holiness, much like Salvation is much bigger than we can perhaps ever know, but if the foundation of God’s throne is righteousness and justice like the Bible suggests then perhaps we ought to discover the way to make ready for Christ’s sovereign presence in the world. Perhaps righteousness and justice are not sequential or competing ideas but expressions of the same love. I remember someone once suggesting that righteousness is the first commandment and justice is the second. The two hinges of God’s presence in the world. Perhaps the argument is mute if we understand more completely what holiness means.

Dr. Purkiser from The Wesley Center for Applied Theology explores the issue of holiness and social impact: “What we need to recover is the insight that “personal gospel” and “social gospel” are both perversions of the New Testament. There is only one Gospel. To split it is to destroy it. We cannot choose between doctrine and ethics, between creed and life, between inner experience and outer conduct, between individual salvation and social action. Both are in the New Testament and are not divided. What God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

E.  Stanley Jones said it well: The clash between the individual gospel and the social gospel leaves me cold. An individual gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body, and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost and the other a corpse. Put the two together, and you have a living person. I want and need one gospel - a gospel that lays its hand on the individual and says, ‘Repent, be converted,’ that lays its hand on the corporate will and says, ‘Repent, be con­verted’-one gospel, two applications.

Tom Sine in The New Conspirators describes a generation of believers who are starting to grasp the essence of holiness as the embrace of both righteousness and justice. He speaks passionately about world poverty,  ”The only way poverty will become history is for those of us whom God has entrusted with God’s generous resources to critically evaluate our own lives and priorities. It is estimated that today over 200 million Christians live in dire poverty. Isn’t there something terribly wrong, in the international body of Christ, when some of us live palatially and other Christians can’t keep their kids fed? Isn’t it past time to recognize that we live in an interconnected global village in which there is no longer such a thing as a ‘private’ lifestyle choice?”

The Manual of the Church of the Nazarene states; “We understand Christian holiness to be inseparable from ministry to the poor in that it drives the Christian beyond his or her own individual perfection and toward the creation of a more just and equitable society and world. Holiness, far from distancing believers from the desperate economic needs of people in our world, motivates us to place our means in the service of alleviating such need and to adjust our wants in accordance with the needs of others.”

Holiness cannot be about my own personal relationship with God. To make it that small of an experience is to miss the meaning of shalom and the fullness of the ‘blessing’. Both its message and its power is rooted in how we live in holiness and how we live out our holiness in the here and now. Holiness as John Wesley has suggested, is social. It is about an internal revolution that reflects a counter cultural message lived not just in theory, but in the hearts of people. This in turn overthrows ’superpowers’ with the power of the gospel. It is John Wesley’s heart ’strangely warmed’, it is Oscar Romero, shot while administering the sacrament to the poor, it is William marching on white horses straight to parliament and Catherine preaching up a storm to crowds from the rich side of town; it is Wilberforce, sleeping in a coffin the same size as slave ship hold to identify with the poor and working at great expense for his entire life for the abolition of the slave trade; it is Finney’s evangelical campaigns marked by his parallel fight for women’s equality and civil rights in America, it is Martin Luther King Jr. declaring a prophetic picture of how things can be when love comes to town.

Holiness is the manifestation of righteousness and justice from the inside-out. So, let’s be Just Holy.

Writer: Capt. Danielle Strickland is currently the Social Justice Director of the Southern Australia Territory. She digs traveling, reading, running, speaking, basketball and movies. Her passion is grace, mercy and justice… and all the stuff in between. Her favourite question is ‘how hard can it be?’ and most of her days are spent answering it.

2 Comments to Just Holy (Part 3)

1. Thanks for the 3 articles by Danielle. While not agreeing with everything she has written I am in basic agreement with her that seeking after holiness involves more than our “personal” holiness but extends to our doing mercy.

   Our Creed must lead to deeds just as it did for the Booths, Wilberforce and many others.

   We must not retreat to our enclosed Christian Retreats and ignore the needs of the world but we must go out into the world preaching/telling/teaching the Good News not only in words but in action.

   While Danielle and others suggest socialism as a vehicle I would suggest that such is possible within a capitalistic system also.

   Danielle has hit on one of the problems today very clearly in Part 3 when she talks about those Holiness Preachers who live an exorbitant lifestyle, who hold to a prosperity gospel but ignore the needs of the dispossesed and downtrodden.

   It reminds me of the Minister here in Winnipeg who pastors a large congregation in the city who lives in a halfmillion dollar home and runs the congregation and its ministries like the personal family business.

   We must know that to please and follow God we must
   love God
   seek justice
   practice mercy.

   That is truly being holy.

   John Stephenson
John Stephenson on August 21st, 2009

2. There is only one Gospel because there is only one Torah - Jesus knew nothing of a Judaism divided into two worlds, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, or personal and relational.
Eleanor Burne-Jones on August 21st, 2009

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