Sanctification

The hagios word group means set apart for God before it means morally improved. That is why a tent can be holy, and a day, and a bowl. When the New Testament calls Christians saints, hagioi, which it does over sixty times, it is not paying them a compliment about their conduct; it is saying whose they are. Keep that in front of you, because it explains a set of texts that otherwise look like flattery of some very badly behaved congregations.

So there are two senses of sanctification in the New Testament and both are real. The first is definitive: something already done, complete, and never repeated. 1 Corinthians 1:2 addresses the Corinthians as 'sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy', and the letter that follows describes a church with a man sleeping with his father's wife, lawsuits between members, and drunkenness at the Lord's Supper. 1 Corinthians 6:11 says, 'And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God', where the sanctifying is past and, strikingly, stands before the justifying in the sentence. Hebrews 10:10 says we have been sanctified through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. John Murray gave this sense its usual modern name, definitive sanctification, in an essay of 1967, and his argument was that Reformed teaching had allowed the progressive sense to swallow the other one, so that a decisive break with sin's dominion, which Romans 6 treats as an accomplished fact, had been turned into a target.

The second sense is progressive: something being done, incomplete, and commanded. 1 Thessalonians 4:3 says, 'For it is God's will that you should be holy: You must abstain from sexual immorality' (the Greek noun behind 'holy' is hagiasmos, sanctification, which is why older translations say 'your sanctification'). 2 Corinthians 7:1 speaks of 'perfecting holiness in the fear of God'. Hebrews 12:14 says, 'Pursue peace with everyone, as well as holiness, without which no one will see the Lord.' 2 Corinthians 3:18 has believers 'being transformed into His image with intensifying glory'. Nobody in any tradition denies either list. The differences between traditions are differences about the relation between the two, about how fast and how far the second can go, and about who is doing what in it.

The grammar Paul uses to hold them together has a name in the literature: the indicative and the imperative. He states a fact about what God has done, and then issues a command that the fact makes sense of. Romans 6 is the model. Verses 2 to 10 are indicative: you died with Christ, you were buried with him, your old self was crucified. Verse 11 is the pivot, a command to reckon the fact: 'So you too must count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.' Verse 12 then starts the imperatives: 'Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body'. And verse 14 gives the reason: 'For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace.' Rudolf Bultmann, in a 1924 essay, put the pattern in a formula that has stuck: become what you are. Bultmann meant something by it that many who quote it would not endorse, but the observation about Paul's grammar is sound and is now common property across the traditions.

Two errors sit on either side of this grammar and both are common in preaching. The first keeps the indicative and drops the imperative, so that a believer is told what is true of them and never told to do anything, and the commands of the New Testament become a description of what will happen automatically. The second keeps the imperative and drops the indicative, so that a congregation is exhorted every week and never told what has already been given, which produces either despair or pretence. Test any teaching on the Christian life you meet, including this lesson, by asking whether both halves are still there and whether the second is still grounded in the first.

Romans 7:14-25 is the most argued-over paragraph in the New Testament on this subject, and a student who can state the main readings fairly is already ahead of most preachers. Get the text in front of you. 'We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin.' 'I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do. But what I hate, I do.' 'I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh; for I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.' 'For in my inner being I delight in God's law.' And the ending: 'What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God, through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with my mind I serve the law of God, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.'

Before the readings, notice three places where the BSB's English has already made a move that a reader of the Greek would have to argue for. The first is 7:14, 'I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin'. 'Unspiritual' translates an adjective built on sarx, flesh, and the English word can sound like a description of someone without the Spirit, which suits the first reading below; the KJV's 'carnal, sold under sin' sounds more like a believer behaving worldly, which suits the fourth. 'As a slave' is also an addition, since the Greek says only 'sold under sin'. The second is the BSB's heading 'Struggling with Sin' above verse 13; headings are the editors' and not part of the text, and the heading names a struggle without saying whose, so each reading will hear its own speaker in it. The third is Romans 8:2, where the BSB prints 'set you free' and a footnote records that the Byzantine text and the Textus Receptus read 'me'. If 'me' is original, Paul ties the deliverance of chapter 8 straight back to the 'I' of chapter 7, which is welcome to readers who take that 'I' as a believer; if 'you' is original, the link is less direct. Translations differ on which to print, and the BSB prints 'you'.

The first reading takes the speaker as an unregenerate person, either Paul before Christ or a representative figure under the law. Its supporters include most of the Greek fathers, Arminius, John Wesley, and a large part of modern critical scholarship; Douglas Moo's version is that the speaker is the unregenerate viewed from a Christian vantage point. The case is that 7:14 calls the speaker 'sold as a slave to sin', which is what Romans 6:17-18 says the reader has stopped being ('though you once were slaves to sin'); that 7:23 has him captive to the law of sin, while 8:2 says the law of the Spirit has set you free from the law of sin and death; and that the chapter's announced subject in 7:1-6 is what the law does to those still under it. The difficulty it has to answer is verse 22, 'For in my inner being I delight in God's law', since Romans 8:7 says the mind set on the flesh does not submit to God's law and indeed cannot.

The second reading takes the speaker as a regenerate believer, and specifically as a mature one, since only a person in whom the Spirit is working could hate his sin this accurately. Augustine held the first reading as a young man and changed to this one in his anti-Pelagian period, a change he records himself. Luther, Calvin, the Reformed confessional tradition, John Murray, C. E. B. Cranfield and J. I. Packer all take it this way. The case is verse 22 and the present tense throughout, which switches at verse 14 and never switches back; that only a Christian delights in God's law in the inner being; and that the paragraph accounts for the experience of every serious believer, which is a pastoral argument rather than an exegetical one but is not therefore worthless. The difficulty it has to answer is 7:14 and 7:23, the language of being sold as a slave to sin and held captive to the law of sin, which looks like a straight contradiction of chapter 6.

The third reading denies that the 'I' is autobiographical at all and takes it as a rhetorical device. W. G. Kümmel argued in 1929 that the first person here is a stylistic figure rather than a report of Paul's inner life. Later versions identify the speaker: N. T. Wright reads the 'I' as Israel under Torah, retelling the nation's story from Sinai onwards, which fits the chapter's announced subject and its heavy use of the commandment; Stanley Stowers argues for prosopopoeia, speech in character, with the speaker a Gentile attracted to the law. Ernst Käsemann read it of Adamic humanity. The case is that ancient writers used the first person in exactly this way, that the chapter is about the law rather than about anyone's biography, and that Philippians 3:6 has Paul describing his pre-Christian conscience as untroubled, which sits awkwardly with reading Romans 7 as his own former agony. The difficulty it has to answer is the sheer sustained intensity of the passage, which most readers find hard to hear as a literary device, and the fact that the device has to be identified differently by each of its own defenders.

The fourth reading takes the speaker as a Christian, but a defeated, carnal or immature one, from whose condition the believer may and should graduate into the victory of chapter 8. This was standard in older dispensational teaching and in much Keswick preaching, and it is the version most English-speaking evangelicals over sixty were raised on. The case is that it accounts for the present tense and for the delight in God's law while preserving chapter 8 as a real deliverance rather than a restatement. The difficulty it has to answer is that the New Testament nowhere else divides Christians into two permanent classes; 1 Corinthians 3:1-3 is the only candidate and it is a rebuke aimed at a temporary condition, not the naming of a tier. It also has to explain why Paul's own answer in 7:25 is a person, Jesus Christ, rather than a technique.

State the honest position. This has been argued continuously since the fourth century by readers of the first rank on every side, and it is not going to be settled in a lesson. What you should take from it is a caution. Each of the four readings, held rigidly, produces a recognisable pastoral style: the first can imply that a struggling Christian is not converted, the second can imply that no improvement should be expected, the third can leave a struggling believer with no text at all, and the fourth can produce a two-tier church. If your doctrine of Romans 7 is doing that to the people in front of you, the problem may be the doctrine.

The Reformed account. Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, in which the whole person is renewed after the image of God and enabled more and more to die to sin and live to righteousness; it is real, it is progressive, and it is never complete in this life. The Westminster Confession's thirteenth chapter says the work is throughout, in the whole man, yet imperfect in this life, with remnants of corruption in every part, from which arises a continual and irreconcilable war, the flesh lusting against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh. Its texts are Galatians 5:16-17 for the war, Romans 8:13 for putting to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit, 2 Corinthians 3:18 for transformation 'into His image with intensifying glory', and Philippians 3:12-14 for an apostle who says he has not yet obtained it. Two things follow. First, the believer's effort is real and commanded, and the Reformed tradition has produced a large literature on mortifying sin, of which John Owen's treatises of the 1650s are the most demanding. Second, the expected outcome in this life is progress with setbacks and no arrival, which is why the tradition is sceptical of any doctrine of a second decisive experience. Its named weakness is the mirror image of its strength: an account that expects no arrival can slide into expecting nothing much, and Reformed writers themselves have complained about congregations who can explain why they are not perfect better than they can explain why they are not improving.

The Lutheran account. Lutherans agree that sanctification is real and that good works follow faith necessarily, and they insist on locating the whole of it inside justification rather than after it. The characteristic instruction is to return to your baptism, and its texts are Romans 6:3-4, Galatians 3:27 and Colossians 2:12, all of which describe the Christian life as the working out of something done in the water. Luther's Small Catechism says that in baptism the old Adam in us should by daily sorrow and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily come forth and rise up to live before God in righteousness and purity; the Large Catechism says a Christian life is nothing else than a daily baptism, once begun and ever continued. So the movement of the Christian life is not upward along a scale but backward and downward into something already given, again each day. Gerhard Forde's formulation, that sanctification is the art of getting used to justification, is a modern statement of it and is disliked by some Lutherans for sounding passive. Its named weakness is exactly that charge: an account that refuses to measure progress can find nothing to say to a believer who is not making any, and it has been accused, from inside and outside, of leaving the imperatives of the New Testament without much work to do.

The Wesleyan account, stated as Wesley framed it rather than as it is usually reported. Wesley taught that after justification and the new birth a believer may be entirely sanctified, and by this he meant perfect love: the heart so filled with love of God and neighbour that no contrary temper remains. His texts are the ones a reader should look up before judging the doctrine: Deuteronomy 30:6, where God promises to circumcise the heart so that Israel will love him with all their heart and soul; Matthew 22:37, the greatest commandment, which Wesley took to be a command God would not give without intending to fulfil; Matthew 5:48; 1 Thessalonians 5:23, where God is asked to sanctify the reader completely; and 1 John 4:18, that perfect love drives out fear. Read his definitions in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, whose final form dates from 1777, and note the denials, which are as important as the affirmations. He denied that it frees anyone from ignorance, from mistake, from infirmity or from temptation. He denied that it is absolute, or angelic, or Adamic perfection. He denied that it cannot be lost. He defined the sin it excludes narrowly, as a voluntary transgression of a known law of God, and acknowledged that on a broader definition of sin no one is free of it. He held that it is received by faith and not by works, that it may be given instantaneously, that it is preceded and followed by gradual growth, and that a believer should expect it now. And he never claimed it for himself. Anyone who summarises this as sinless perfection has substituted a phrase Wesley disliked for a doctrine he spent fifty years qualifying. Its named weakness is the definition of sin on which it turns: if sin is only what is voluntary and known, then the account holds together, and if scripture's account of sin is wider than that, the doctrine's central claim is weakened at its foundation. Wesley knew this was the pressure point and addressed it directly, which is more than many of his popularisers have done.

The Keswick or higher life account. The Keswick Convention began in 1875 in the Cumbrian town of that name, founded by the Anglican clergyman T. D. Harford-Battersby and the Quaker businessman Robert Wilson, with the motto All One in Christ Jesus. It grew out of the Higher Life movement, whose best-known books were W. E. Boardman's The Higher Christian Life of 1858 and Hannah Whitall Smith's The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life of 1875. Its teaching differed from Wesley's at a specific point: where Wesley spoke of the sinful nature being cleansed, Keswick spoke of it being counteracted, held down by the indwelling Christ as a stone is held up by a hand rather than removed. The believer enters this by a crisis of full surrender and then maintains it by moment-by-moment trust, which is the origin of the phrase about letting go and letting God. Its texts are Romans 6:11, on counting yourself dead to sin (the KJV says 'reckon'), which Keswick teaching read as the decisive act of faith the rest depends on; Galatians 2:20, 'I no longer live, but Christ lives in me'; and above all John 15:4-5 on remaining (abiding) in the vine, from which the language of moment-by-moment dependence is drawn. Romans 6:13, presenting yourself to God, supplied the surrender. Its appeal was enormous and its missionary fruit was real; a great deal of nineteenth and twentieth century mission came out of that convention.

The criticisms of Keswick are also real and they come from people who were inside it. B. B. Warfield attacked the movement at length in a series of essays gathered after his death under the title Perfectionism, arguing that it rests on a defective account of the union of divine and human agency and imports a quietism foreign to Paul. J. I. Packer, who as a young man was badly damaged by the teaching, set out his critique in Keep in Step with the Spirit in 1984: he argued that the doctrine promises an experience it cannot deliver, that it therefore manufactures either pretence or despair in people who surrender fully and find themselves unchanged, and that its analysis of the flesh is closer to a Platonic division of the person than to Romans 7 or 8. It is only fair to add three things. Keswick's defenders replied that the criticisms attack the movement's worst popularisers rather than its better teachers, and men like Handley Moule, Bishop of Durham, held it in a form Warfield's description does not fit. The convention itself moved away from the older formulations in the twentieth century. And the criticism has cost the critics something too, since dismantling a doctrine of victory leaves a preacher owing his congregation an account of what does change, which is the debt the last two sections of this lesson try to pay.

The Catholic account starts from where the previous lesson left it. Because justification is the real making just of a person, growth in holiness is not a separate department but the increase of the same thing; Trent's tenth chapter is headed on the increase of justification received, and its sixteenth chapter treats eternal life as both a grace promised and a reward for good works done in grace. The engine of it is what the tradition calls sanctifying grace, a created participation in God's own life given with justification, together with the infused theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and the gifts of the Spirit; actual graces are the particular helps God gives for particular acts. Merit belongs in this account, and it is essential to state it as Catholic theology states it: merit is always grace-enabled, never puts God in anyone's debt, and is possible only because the person is a living member of Christ. The sentence the tradition uses to keep this straight is Augustine's, that when God crowns our merits he crowns nothing other than his own gifts.

The practical shape of the Catholic account is sacramental and it is worth a Protestant reader understanding it from the inside rather than as a list of ceremonies. Growth happens through the Eucharist, through confession, through prayer, through the works of mercy, and through the ordinary duties of a state of life. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium in 1964 devoted its fifth chapter to the universal call to holiness, insisting that this is the vocation of every baptised person and not of religious orders only, which was a deliberate correction of a long-standing distortion in Catholic practice rather than a novelty. Purgatory belongs to the same logic: if the thing required is a real transformation, and a person dies genuinely in grace but not yet wholly transformed, something must complete it, and purgatory is the name for that completion rather than a second chance. The named weakness, pressed by Protestants and by some Catholics, is that a system in which grace is received through defined channels and progress is genuinely measurable can be lived as a scale of achievement, whatever the doctrine says, and Catholic pastoral writing has a long literature on scrupulosity that shows the danger is not theoretical.

The Orthodox account describes the same territory with a different centre of gravity. Its organising idea is not the increase of a quality but participation in God, so the Christian life is the progressive healing of a nature disordered by death and the passions, and its goal is the deification described in the previous lesson. The word for the human side of it is synergeia, working together, and Philippians 2:12-13 is the text that governs it: the working out and the God who works in are stated in one breath and are not treated as rivals dividing a fixed quantity of credit between them. Orthodox writers insist that this is not a claim that God does part and we do the rest; the whole is God's and the whole is genuinely ours, as a sail does not compete with the wind.

The practical shape of the Orthodox account is ascetic and liturgical. The central practices are watchfulness over the thoughts, called nepsis, the struggle against the passions, fasting according to the church's calendar, confession, the Eucharist, and unceasing prayer, classically the Jesus Prayer. The standard collection of teaching on all this is the Philokalia, assembled by Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth and published at Venice in 1782, which gathers writers from the fourth century to the fifteenth. A Western reader should not conclude that this is monasticism exported to the laity as an optional extra; the tradition holds that the same disciplines apply in measure to everyone, under a spiritual father's direction. Gregory of Nyssa supplies the doctrine's most distinctive feature, in The Life of Moses: because God is infinite, progress into him has no terminus, so perfection is not a state to be attained but an endless advance, which the tradition calls epektasis from Paul's straining forward in Philippians 3:13. That is why the Orthodox account has no equivalent of entire sanctification and would regard the idea of arriving as a category mistake. Its named weakness, pressed by Protestants and acknowledged by Orthodox pastors, is that a tradition of such ascetic seriousness can produce, in the wrong hands, a piety measured by observance and a laity who assume that the real Christian life happens in monasteries.

Every tradition in this lesson holds that God works holiness through appointed means, and the disagreements are narrower than the rhetoric suggests. The Westminster Shorter Catechism's answer 88 says the outward and ordinary means by which Christ communicates the benefits of redemption are his ordinances, especially the word, the sacraments and prayer. Lutherans say the same and press harder on the sacraments as the place where the promise is applied to you in particular. Catholics and Orthodox name the seven sacraments or mysteries and set the whole liturgical year around them. Wesley, in his sermon on the means of grace in 1746, listed what he called the instituted means, prayer, searching the scriptures, the Lord's Supper, fasting and Christian conference, and added what he called prudential means, chiefly the class meeting and the band, which were the mechanism by which Methodist holiness was actually produced and which is the part most often forgotten by people who admire the doctrine.

Notice what all of these have in common, because it is the most practically useful thing in this lesson. The means of grace are ordinary, repeatable and corporate. None of them is an experience. A Christian who wants to grow is told, by every tradition here, to hear the word read and preached, to receive the sacrament, to pray, to fast, and to be known by other Christians who will ask him how he is doing. The disagreements are about how the sacraments work and how many there are, not about whether a solitary Christian pursuing holiness on his own has misunderstood the instructions. He has.

Then the law. The Hermeneutics track has already argued the question of how the Old Testament law binds a Christian reader and which commands are culture-bound, and this lesson is not going to repeat that argument or pretend to improve on it. What belongs here is the narrower question of what function the law has in the life of someone already justified. Luther's fundamental distinction is between law and gospel as two words of God doing two different things: the law commands and accuses and drives a sinner to Christ, and the gospel gives what the law demands. He taught two uses, a civil use restraining evil in society and a theological use exposing sin. Calvin agreed and added a third, at Institutes 2.7.12, which he called the principal use: for those already in whom the Spirit lives, the law teaches what pleases God and exhorts them to obey. Lutheranism then had its own fight about this. Johann Agricola argued in the late 1530s that the law has no place in the Christian's life at all, Luther wrote against him, and Article VI of the Formula of Concord in 1577 affirmed a third use of the law for believers. Some modern Lutherans, Forde among them, have argued that Article VI conceded too much and that preaching the law to Christians reintroduces exactly what Luther overthrew. The Reformed hold that a law-free Christian life is not in the New Testament, and point to the apostles' unembarrassed use of commands.

Catholic and Orthodox theology frames this differently again, and the difference is worth naming rather than assimilating. Neither tradition organises its ethics around a law and gospel dialectic, because neither begins with the problem the dialectic was built to solve. Catholic moral theology works with natural law, the virtues, the commandments and the beatitudes together, and treats the moral life as the growth of a person towards their end in God rather than as a response to an accusing word. Orthodox teaching speaks of the commandments of Christ as therapy for a diseased nature, medicine rather than statute. A Protestant reader who hears those as evasions of the law and gospel distinction has not understood that they are refusals of the framing, which is the same move the previous lesson recorded on justification.

Where does this leave a student. With a set of genuine disagreements that you can now state, and with a large area of agreement that is more practically useful than the disagreements are. Every tradition treated here holds that holiness is God's work and that the believer is commanded to work; that it is pursued through ordinary means in the company of other Christians; that it will not be finished in this life, though they differ on how far it can go; and that a person who is not being changed at all has something to answer for. What divides them is how much change to expect and by what mechanism, whether there is a decisive second work, and whether the law still speaks to the justified. Know which of those you hold and why. And keep in view the person from the last inquiry question, thirty years in and still fighting the same sin, because every one of these accounts has something to say to them and not one of them says that the fight itself is evidence against their conversion.