the Rubicon - BY REQUEST - The Problem of Holiness

The Problem of Holiness by Grant Sandercock-Brown ( September 2007)

Since 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 to 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”? Why not just join Amnesty international and skip the conversion thing altogether. The end result is the same.

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.  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

Because holiness is God’s idea and God’s doing, what I think holiness is actually 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. 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.

 “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 not just about us and our inwardness.  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 from Thessalonians.  ”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 19^th 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, may be 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: Captain Grant Sandercock-Brown is a corps officer at Chatswood Corps in Sydney, Australia. He was a secondary school music teacher for 10 years and loves theology, rugby and golf. His first book From a Middle Aged Dad to a Teen Aged daughter has just been published. His claim to fame is that as a singing telegram man he once sang to Elton John. He and his wife, Sharon, have three children.

9 Comments to the Rubicon - BY REQUEST - The Problem of Holiness

1. Hi Grant,
   Great article. You’ve hit the nail on the head.

   The problem for me in this whole debate is (as you say) ‘how do we know someone is living a holy life?’ I agree that the answer to holiness is that it is a spirit-led life, manifesting in spirit-filled people. But how do we recognise this in others? At this point, we begin to come up against the question ‘What is sin?’ There are those who would say they are ’spirit-filled’ etc., but others looking at those say ‘they are leading a sinfull life - how can they be spirit-filled, let alone ‘holy’?’ You see what I mean? Until we can clearly work out our theology, especially regarding who/what God is, and what sin is, we can not even begin to scratch the surface of any discussion on holiness. We need to work out what it means to be a Christian and to be saved, and to know what we are being saved from, before we can start talking about ’spirit-filled living’ and ‘holiness’.

   Yours in Christ,
   Graeme.
Graeme Randall on September 14th, 2009

2. To me this whole idea of being holy is so open to personal interpretation that it really is rendered meaningless. What I consider sin, you may not, and vice versa. My limited experience of those that claim that they (or people they know) are ‘holy’, ‘fully sanctified’ or whatever Christian-speak buzzwords they like to use, really have a pretty weak idea of what sin is. That seems to make it a whole lot easily to self-proclaim their holiness. I really don’t believe it to be possible for anyone to be truly, fully without sin, if indeed sin in all its forms are considered (especially the hard to define ones such as the seven deadly sins).
Jack on September 15th, 2009

3. I pointed out in my article that debating sinlessness isn’t all that helpful, which is the issue that you have both brought up. When they do the redux redux I’ll try and say it a bit better.

   However, holiness is not just personal opinion. You would find a continuing stream of teaching from the church’s earliest days and then re-articulated by Wesley that said holiness had a great deal to do with being a person filled with, changed by and living out the love of God.

   In my opinion anyway …

   Grant
Grant on September 15th, 2009

4. Grant,

   I acknowledge that you did go to great lengths to say that debating ’sin’ is not very helpful. BUT!!!! if you are going to talk about someone who is saved, who is filled with the Spirit etc., what is your criteria for discerning this? That is the sticking point. If one person claims to be filled with the spirit, or claims ‘person X’ is filled with the spirit, another will say ‘they are not and cannot because they still have ‘unrenounced sin’ in their lives.’ They often say ‘Person X is not even saved, so how can they be filled with the spirit and living a holy life?’ Without coming to a strong theological grounding on what sin is, what salvation is etc., how can we possible talk about holiness? At that point, there is no difference (as you point out) between ‘being holy’ or joining Amnesty International or something like that.

   Yours in Christ,
   Graeme.
Graeme Randall on September 15th, 2009

5. The Spirit-filled life is evidenced by fruit, the singular fruit of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. We’ve also been given gifts of discernment to know between good and evil spirits. We’re told to test the spirits.

   God has not left us clueless when it comes to the ability to identify other sheep who hear His voice.
Jeremiah on September 16th, 2009

6. So if someone is ’spirit-filled’ and displays the fruit of the spirit in their life, does that mean that they are holy and sin-free? Does being spirit-filled totally negate the desire to sin? By what definition of sin can they lose their ‘holiness’? I still sense that there are many definitions of ‘holiness’ dependent on who you ask - some say sinlessness, some say being filled with the spirit, some say being totally full of the love of God, with some then tying this into an emphasis on social justice. What is it?
Jack on September 16th, 2009

7. Great stuff Grant. Thanks Rubi-folk for highlighting this important piece.

   God Bless

   Alan
Alan Petersen on September 24th, 2009

8. I suspect the key is in your last but one comment Grant. The reality in the West is that we want our cake and want to eat it too! We need holiness and we want people to be holy but aren’t prepared to make the ’sacrifices’ that are necessary! And there in lies the problem, we see the things we need to give up, whether that be our pet sins, spiritual independence or personal time, as being worth more than things we gain from being released from their bondage.

   For me the things I need to surrender are far more burdens that I carry rather than things to sacrificed. Maybe Jesus understood this when he talked about taking upon his yoke?
Graeme Smith on September 28th, 2009

9. To be short,holiness is a heart full of love like Jesus. Holiness is evident by the fruit of the Spirit being evident and a victorious life. It is not sinless perfection.
   Sometimes the world expects more from us then the Lord does.
   Jesus never sinned and he was called many sinful things.

   I believe holiness is an experience. It can be a second, third , fourth blessing but it is an experience. Holiness is also a growing experience. God said that we should be holy as He is Holy. We have holiness imparted to us by the Holy Spirit. Sin needs to be confessed as soon as possible.

   I know that there are many opinions on this subject but this is what I have come to believe after many years. A study of the word “holy” is helpful and how it is used in Scripture.

   Bob
Robert Deidrick on September 28th, 2009

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