CARNALITY AND HUMANITY: Exploratory Observations

J. Kenneth Grider

What ought we Wesleyans to mean by carnality, and how ought we to view the difference between carnality and humanity-including acquired human aberrations such as prejudices?

While I do not presume to understand fully what carnality is, in distinction from what is essentially human and the acquired aberrations of the human, I should like to make some exploratory observations about what it does and does not consist of; and about what we therefore are cleansed from and not cleansed from when we receive by faith the Pentecostal experience of entire sanctification through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. I should like also to discuss essential human nature such as temperament, and aberrated human nature such as acquired prejudices and hostilities.

Some of these observations, of course, are tenuous. All of them are given here with a "respond please" at the bottom.
Constituents of Carnality

Carnality is not necessarily evidenced by hostility or anger or nervousness in which a sanguine person might become red-cheeked and might be lacking in interpersonal equilibrium. Such reaction might stem not from an Adamic detriment, but from natural temperament; or from righteous anger as obtained in Jesus when He cleansed the Temple; or from what Jesus felt when He healed a person on the sabbath and was questioned about it, "and he looked around at them with anger" (Mark 3:5); or from resentment toward a parent or a fellow church member due to aberrating experiences in one's early life; or from nervousness due to physical or emotional problems. It is only the detriment due to Adam's bad representation of us, which detriment we come into the world with, that we are cleansed from when original sin is expelled at the time of our entire sanctification. That is a great deal to be cleansed from, actually, as I will be suggesting as we talk about carnality further. Wesley even felt (incorrectly, I think) that the change at our entire sanctification is "immensely greater than that wrought when he [anyone] was justified."1 Yet, although to be cleansed from carnality is a significant matter, it is less that to be cleansed from what is essentially human, such as temperament and the sex drive--and the 101 deficiencies that we come by during this life (e.g., prejudices).

Carnality is not in itself culpable. No guild attaches to it. Thus, no one will ever go into perdition for Adam's sin alone. It is true that "all sinned" when Adam sinned, according to Rom. 5:12, where the aorist hemarton appears, which does not mean "all have sinned" as in the KJV, but "all sinned." He really did sin when our representative did, even as a college really does lose a race when its representative loses. But because of an unconditional benefit of the atonement, the "free gift" referred to in Rom. 5:15-17, which was given to all, the guilt of Adam's sin has been waived--although the depravity itself, the bias to sin, is cleansed only when believers are baptized with the Holy Spirit. In support of this kind of view H. Orton Wiley says, "Thus the condemnation which rested upon the race through Adam's sin is removed by the one ablation of Christ. By this we understand that no child of Adam is condemned eternally, either for the original offense, or its consequences. Thus...culpability does not attach to original sin."2 John Wesley was of the same opinion, as is well known.

A spin-off of this way of seeing the matter is that it is incorrect to preach "holiness or hell." Justification is what changes eternal destiny; not entire sanctification. The exhortation to "pursue after holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord" (Heb. 12:14), refers to holiness in the broadest sense, begun in regeneration.

The imperative to receive cleansing from carnality is that one will then be in the establishing grace ( 1 Thess. 3:13) and will not find himself leaning away from God due to the carnal propensity to sin, and will experience the countless benefits of the Holy Spirit's pervasive indwelling presence.

I am using carnality, here, principally as the sin which remains in the believer after justification--the state or condition of sin (not an entity, not a thing), which inclines the believer to acts of sin). It is not to be thought of as a physical substance, of course, but as a state which is relational--in which, being deprived of special helps of the Holy Spirit, we become estranged from God and biased toward acts of sin. When this exists in the unbeliever, its strength is greater that when in the believer, because it is not then countered by the Holy Spirit (who indwells a person after he becomes a believer, according to Gal. 5:17 and Rom. 8:9).

Although the word carnality might suggest to some that it is simply that aspect of the Adamic detriment which relates to the body, our life in the physical flesh, I wee the word, in the Scriptures, to include the entire detriment we have received from the racial fall in Adam. This is why Paul said to the Corinthian Christians, "babes in Christ," who were filled with envy and strife, and who were divided in to four factions (although the actual word for "divisions" is not in any early extant manuscript) that they were "yet carnal" (I Cor. 3:3). They were not among the pneumatikoi, which I think is the same in Paul as not being among the teleioi; but instead were carnal.3

While the word for "carnal" is a cognate of sarx, and while sarx has many meanings, including the body, and the soft material on the e bones of the body, it is often used, particularly by Paul, in an ethical sense, as the opposite of being in the Spirit. Thus we read in Kittel, "For Paul, orientation to the sarx or the pneuma, is the total attitude which determines everything.... Life is determined as a totality by the sarx or the pneuma."4 Those who are "in the flesh" cannot please God (Rom. 8:8); but those who are "in the Spirit" (Rom. 8:9) can, it is implied. One might "live after the flesh" (Rom. 8:13); and yet, they that "are Christ's" (Gal. 5:24), are truly Christ's, "have crucified the flesh" (Gal. 5:24).

John Wesley referred to carnality by many terms. He called it "pride, self-will, unbelief."5 Particularly as it indwells believers, he called it a "bent to backsliding," "sin in a believer, " and "a proneness to depart from God."6

Not now thinking so much about what it is in the believer, but of what it is in the unbeliever, it is a total corruption of our nature--a total depravity, arising from being deprived through Adam's fall of certain ministries of the Holy Spirit.7 Some Wesleyan theologians have not taught this; they have taught that only the moral nature of man, and not, e.g., his rational nature or his physical nature, suffered due to the Fall; and some of them, as we shall se presently, do not teach that the moral nature is fallen to the extent that not good decisions are possible apart form grace.

A.M. Hills says that "Motive is anything which may operate as a reason for action or as influence to it,"8 and I wee this as a good definition of motive. But he taught that fallen man can implement even a motive to a good action apart from grace. He writes, " We can set aside unworthy motives, and cease thinking of unworthy things; we can enthrone the rational and the moral in our lives, aver the incitements of the appetite and passion, and thus escape the doom of being the passive victims of impulses to evil."9 continuing this kind of clear Pelagianism, he says, "Therefore we are free moral agents, truly the author of our character, and justly responsible for our conduct."10 And he continues to reveal his acceptance of the modernism of his time (this book was published in 1931) by saying, "We must have this capacity for moral and religious motives, or we are only animals."11 More Pelagian word could hardly be chosen that when he writes, "This conviction of a self-determining power, or a control of the will belonging to us, is as universal as man."12 No seventh of Romans at man's citadel, here, in which the unregenerate are enslaved to sin; so that the good they would do, they cannot do; and the evil that they would not do, they do (Rom. 7:15). Jesus said, "Without me ye can do nothing" (John 15: 5). He told us that "a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit" (Matt. 7:18), and made it clear that of himself man is corrupt, when He said, "How can ye, being evil, speak good things?" (Matt. 12:34). And he said, "No man can come to me, except the Father draw him" (John 6:44). We are free if the Son has made us free, according to John 8: 36.

James Arminius, who actually was accused of Pelagianism, taught nothing of the sort. Of fallen natural man he said, "In this state, the free will of man towards the true good is not only wounded, maimed, infirm, bent, and weakened; whatever except such as are excited by divine grace.''l3 He also says, "Our will is not free from the first fall; that is, it is not free to good, unless it is made free by the Son [see John 8: 36 ] through the Spirit."14

John Wesley taught similarly. Speaking of John Fletcher and himself, he says that they ". . . absolutely deny natural free will." 15 Wesley continues, "We both steadily assert that the will of fallen man is by nature free only to evil.''l6

Wesley taught that "there is in every man a 'carnal mind,' which is enmity against God; which is not, cannot be, 'subject to' His 'law': and which so infects the whole soul, that 'there dwelleth in' him, 'in his flesh,' in his natural state, 'no good thing.'"17

S. S. White, my distinguished predecessor, seemed to teach an inclusive Fall when he wrote, "Original sin is a condition in which all the faculties of man, understanding and will, and affections have been perverted. It is a total corruption of the whole human nature.''l8 Yet he did not believe that carnality, or original sin, makes the body sinful. He says, in the same book, "Thus the chief foundation-stone of those who reject eradication-belief in the body as sinful-is proved to be unscriptural.''l9 I myself understand that the body, too, is infected by carnality. Paul seems to have meant to teach this when he said, "I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members" (Rom. 7:23, RSV). Paul also says that "your bodies are dead because of sin" (Rom. 8:10, RSV). And he adds that God "will give life to your mortal bodies" (Rom. 8:11, RSV), as though their bodies needed it. The body, also, is included in the complete or whole or entire sanctification which Paul prays that the Thessalonian believers might come to enjoy. He says, "May the God of peace himself sanctify you wholly [holoteleis]; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless" (1 Thess. 5: 23, RSV).

S. S. White had perhaps understandably (because of the era) so imbibed the Kantian moralism of his principal theology teacher, Drew's Olin Alfred Curtis,20 and the view of his professors at Chicago University, the bastion of American modernism when White received his Ph.D. degree there in 1939, that he refuses to admit that fallen natural man is unable to do any good thing. He writes, "Like God, man is capable of acting consciously toward an end, and aware of the fact that there is a right and wrong between which he can and must choose.''2l He also says, "On the other hand, the man who is born in sin still has a sense of right and wrong, still has a capacity for God, and on occasion can do that which is in itself good."22 White even gets carried away in this kind of teaching to such extent that he writes, "No wonder Shakespeare said, 'What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and loving, how express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god!' "23

Although in the same book White talks about a "racial bent to sin,"24 and says that "man is a fallen being,"25 he is a Wesleyan theologian who, like A. M. Hills just before him, nudged Wesleyan theology away from Wesley's view, as Chiles says that so many Methodist theologians have done.26
The Human and Its Aberrations

One whole set of deficiencies that we come by during this life, and that are not nullified when the carnal mind is expelled at the time of our entire sanctification, is prejudices.

Take racial prejudice. It is not inherited from Adam; we do not enter the world with it. We acquire it from our environment. Black children hear their parents and others speak derisively against whites, and young whites hear blacks bad-mouthed by their parents and others. And the prejudice has more than mere word estimations as its source. The odd appearance of a person of a different race is a small part of it. Added to that are differences in culture, training, economic status, ways of expressing faith. The Apostle Peter was guilty of anti-Semitism in reverse, being prejudiced against Gentiles, and it obtained well after the time of his entire sanctification at Pentecost. Peter said to Cornelius and other Gentiles, "'You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit any one of another nation; but God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean'" (Acts 10: 28, RSV). After a time of two-way conversation with them, Peter added, "'Truly I perceive that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him'" (vv. 34-35, RSV). The routing of Peter's learned prejudices about the dietary differences between Jews and Gentiles and about God's supposed favoritism towards his kind of folk, the Jews, occurred through the Holy Spirit's special instructions to Peter well after the time when he had had the Adamic depravity cleansed through the Pentecostal baptism with the Holy Spirit.

And even this special revelation of God did not assure that Peter would conduct his life consistently under social pressures. He was still subject to mistakes, to too great a desire simply to please people. That is why, more than 14 years later than the time of Peter's ministering to the Gentile Cornelius by special revelation, Paul needed to help him. Paul says, "But when Cephas came to Antioch I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. For before certain men came from James, he ate with Gentiles; but when they came he drew back and separated himself, fearing the circumcision party" (Gal. 2:11-12, RSV). And Paul adds, "I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'" (Gal. 2:14, RSV).

If Peter's Pentecost did not rout his prejudice against Gentiles, nor his too-great desire to please people, we may suppose that our Pentecost will not nullify such matters either. People today who have had their Pentecost might, e.g., still be prejudiced against persons from a certain area of the nation. A church board member of a New England church might be thought to have a very poor suggestion to make to the board just because he hails from the deep South and evidences it by this dialect every time he speaks. The New Englander might have been educated at exclusive Harvard, or at least brought up under its shadow, and he might hold a stereotype image of a Southerner as unenlightened even if the person might have been trained in a university of the South. One might think that no good thing can come of Nazareth; or Arkansas; or staid Vermont; or a liberally oriented denomination; or out of a sharecropper family; or from the Rockefellers; or from the West "where all those cults flourish'; or from women.

Peter, who was impulsive enough to cut off a person's ear n the Garden of Gethsemane (John 18:10), was still impulsive by temperament after his Pentecost. His baptism with the Holy Spirit had no sooner happened than he stood up and started preaching right out there on the street to the jostling throngs of pilgrimagers.

And Peter and John decide to go to the Temple at three o'clock in the afternoon to thank God for what has happened, and they help a beggar to be healed of his lameness, Peter doing all the talking. It is as though, if John had quietly made a suggestion, Peter would have said, "Who asked you to say anything, young fellow?" (see Acts 3:1-11). And a crowd gathered around, marveling at what had happened, and Peter did all the talking again (vv. 12-26). John might have been called one of the sons of thunder, but he was no match for the forthright Peter. All he was good for was to keep Peter company when the two apostles were slammed into jail overnight (4:3). Again, the next day, when the two were tried, John, a full-fledged apostle, the one Jesus loved the most (John 19:24; 20:2; 21:7, 20), wasn't even permitted to say anything in his own defense. Peter did all the talking again (Acts 4:5ff).Both men were officially on trial before Annas the high priest, and both were asked to defend themselves, but John was silent as King Tut. John later wrote much more of our New Testament that Peter did, and he seems not to have been quite as "ignorant" (Acts 4:13) as Peter was, since only Peter needed a secretary to write down one of his Epistles. So John might have been more articulate that his fellow fisherman and more calm in the defense. But he got to say exactly nothing, according to Luke's account. All he was good for, again, was to go back to jail with the big sanctified talker.

If a person today tents to talk too much, or otherwise to act impulsively because of a sanguine temperament, entire sanctification will not transform him into a different type of human being However, with the Holy Spirit indwelling a person in a pervasive fullness, he has a "TelePrompTer" Inside him all the time, and this will help the sanguine person-and the person of mild temperament-more and more to bring his temperament into subjection to God's will.

I even tend to believe that homosexuality, as a tendency, will not always be extirpated when we are converted or when we are sanctified wholly. It is probably a learned trait. Even if it is helped along by a congenital trait, it only obtains pronouncedly in a small percentage of persons.27 It cannot be a characteristic of carnality, else all persons would be so troubled. When carnality is extirpated, therefore, homosexuality as a tendency might or might not be corrected. God might choose to work this special kind of miracle on behalf of a person even as he might extirpate the tendency toward drug use at the time of one' entire sanctification. But to be changed to a heterosexual, s I see it, so that there would be no more propensity towards a person of his own gender that a heterosexual person feel, might not necessarily happen at one's conversion or at one's Pentecost. Again, the individual is enabled by the Holy Spirit's indwelling fullness to order life as God directs. A I tend to see the matter, and the manner seems to require our attention increasingly these days (witness the homosexual denomination that might soon ask for membership in the National Council of Churches, and the controversy over ordaining a and marrying homosexuals especially in the United Methodist Church 28), we should counsel a homosexual to believe that God will regenerate him and sanctify him wholly; and that, if he is not changed in his gender interest by a special miracle, he should not fulfill his homosexual desires with a partner even as a heterosexual does not fulfill his sexual desires with a partner except in God's plan of marriage. Perhaps his inclination will be gradually changed. It is possible that Paul's vigorous opposition to homosexuality in Romans is opposition to its practice (1: 22-32).

Entire sanctification is a sanctification, a cleansing, that is entire. No carnality, or original sin, remains to deprave our faculties, to incline us to acts of sin. Carnality has infected, as a fever does, our entire nature, including the body and the reason and the will and the emotions, and carnality is entirely extirpated. This state or condition of a bias, a leaning towards the life of sin, is crucified, destroyed, eradicated if you please. Even so, entire sanctification is not a panacea; it does not right the derangements due to aberrating experiences that have happened during this life. Besides what I have already spoken of, there are numerous other psychological and physical and social problems that are not corrected when entire sanctification occurs-although we then have the help of the pervasive indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a growth in grace through which there can be a gradual lessening of these problems. Only glorification, another word for immortality, will extirpate them completely; and even then, we will not be gods.

Among human aberrations that cannot be treated carefully here are the inclination towards tobacco and alcohol and drugs. Again, I tend to believe that they are acquired desires, that they are not necessarily extirpated when one is converted or when Adamic sin is expelled. If it is suggested that they are expelled in all persons, including persons at a rescue mission, at justification, when the "washing of regeneration" (Titus 3:5) cleanses us of acquired depravity as such, I would suggest that I question whether this universally occurs. The acquired propensity to sin that we are cleansed of in the laver of regeneration is probably a cleansing that helps us to reorder our lives so that we are enabled to break with the life of or the practice of these and other sinful habits (see also Eph. 5:25-27, RSV). We would be enabled not to use tobacco or alcohol or drugs, but they might not be simply revolting to a person who has had the habits, in the way they are likely to be to others.
Conclusion

What ought Wesleyans to believe, then, about carnality and humanity-including the acquired human aberrations such as prejudices? As I see it, we ought to differentiate between carnality and humanity better than sometimes we have done. We ought to mean by carnality, especially that in unbelievers, the entire detriment we receive from Adam's bad representation of us. That is, we ought to mean by it original sin, and we ought to understand that it consists of a depravity which affects all the aspects of human nature: reason, will, emotions, the body. Because of the Fall, and therefore due to carnality, or the flesh, or indwelling sin (Rom. 7:17, 30), or "sin" or "the sin" (see Rom. 5:8), the reason is not trustworthy, making revelation in the Scriptures and in Christ so imperative; the moral nature is fallen, so that we cannot do any good thing without the aid of special grace; the emotions are fallen, so that our affections are not set on things above, but are "inclined toward evil and that continually"; and even our bodies are sinful, and need to be cleansed by a sanctification that is entire (1 Thess. 5: 23) .

As I see it, further, we ought to place in the human area whatever is essential to human nature as such-e.g., the sex drive, the desire to be appreciated, the desire for self-protection, the various kinds of temperament. The carnal infection of them is extirpated at our entire sanctification, but they remain. This is what is meant when it is said in Wesleyan circles that entire sanctification does not dehumanize us.

Besides this, I have meant to say that in entire sanctification we are cleansed from whatever detriment we receive from Adam, and therefore from whatever spiritual detriment we come into the world with, but not necessarily from learned or otherwise acquired mental or emotional or physical aberrations. Among these are prejudices of sundry kinds, hostilities that we seek by the Spirit's help to control or overcome, homosexual tendencies, tobacco and alcohol and drug propensities, etc. The Holy Spirit, after our Pentecost, indwells us pervasively, i.e., not hindered by indwelling sin; and he helps us not to disobey God willfully due to any of these aberrations, and more and more to become liberated from them-until glorification, when the liberation will become complete.

It follows from this kind of understanding that we ought not to expect overmuch of the grace of entire sanctification: at that time Adamic sin is extirpated, but not human traits as such and not aberrations that have been acquired environmentally. It also follows that much charity is called for in our interpersonal relations within the Wesleyan movement because (1) we cannot necessarily tell what are carnal and what are human attitudes and reactions and actions in other persons; and (2) we ought not to expect entire sanctification to extirpate from people the aberrations which we acquire during this life, such as prejudices and hostilities.

Implied in all this is my view that the subconscious (or unconscious) is not cleansed in entire sanctification, as E. Stanley Jones taught.29

Also implied is my view that we should not say that the self is crucified at entire sanctification. It is the carnal infection of the self that is crucified (Gal. 2:20; 6:14), not the self itself. The self is trued up; it is more truly itself than previously, not crucified.

Implied also is my view that we ought not to say that after entire sanctification our motives are pure. They are pure in that they are not mixed with carnality. They are not pure, however, in the sense that they are acceptable. They are inward bases for doing what we do, and they can stem from the human nature as such, or from acquired aberrations of the human nature (prejudice, hostilities, etc.); and grace might need to work on them. That our motives are pure is a similar error to that in which people say that this grace gives us purity of intention. Again, the intention is not carnal; but we might very well intend by an action to satisfy a human desire to be appreciated, or an aberrated interest; and the intention would not be at all pure in the sense of being commendable, but instead one that needs some touches of growth in grace.

I think that what I have been meaning to say, mainly, is that we should claim neither too much nor too little for the grace of entire sanctification through the baptism with the Holy Spirit--but especially that we do not claim too much for it, since that has been the direction in which Wesleyan have most frequently erred. I have meant to say, too, that what we are, we are by the grace of God.
REFERENCE NOTES

1. John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, p. 61. I question Wesley at this point because to be justified changes our eternal destiny, and because at this time we pass from death to life, and because we are then made children of God by adoption. Even the power over us of inbred sin is broken at justification, i.e., the enslavement to inbred sin. In entire sanctification the being of original sin is itself extirpated.

2. H. Orton Wiley, Christian Theology (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press), 2:135.

3. See Charles Ewing Brown, The Meaning of Sanctification (Anderson, Ind.: The Warner Press, 1945), pp. 43-46.

4. Edward Schweizer, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich Kittel, 7:135.

5. John Wesley, "On Sin in Believers," Four Sermons (London: Wesleyan Methodist Book-Room, n.d.), p.13.

6. Ibid.

7. The believer has the Holy Spirit indwelling him, according to Gal. 5:17, along with the sarx; but the unbeliever, apart from prevenient grace, is, due to carnality, dead to God. Original sin is not even partly cleansed at regeneration, and yet its effect in a believer is not as great as in the unbeliever.

8. A. M. Hills (Pasadena, Calif.: C. H. Kinne, 1931), 1:356.

9. Ibid., p. 362.

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 364.

13. James Arminius, The Writings of Arminius, ed. Nichols (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House, 1956), 1:526.

14. Ibid., P. 528.

15. John Wesley, in Burtner and Chiles' Compend of Wesley's Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1954), pp. 132-33.

16. Ibid.

17. John Wesley, Standard Sermons, 2:223.

18. S. S. White, Eradication Defined, Explained, Authenticated (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 1954), pp. 35-36.

19. Ibid., p. 66.

20. See his The Christian Faith (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel, 1956).

21. S. S. White, Essential Christian Beliefs (Kansas City: Nazarene Publishing House, n.d.), p. 27.

22. Ibid., pp. 34-35.

23. Ibid., p. 98.

24. Ibid., p. 33.

25. Ibid., p. 32.

26. See Chiles' Theological Transition in the American Methodism: 1790-1935, (N.Y.: Abingdon Press, 1965). Chiles treats various Methodist theologians from Wesley's time to the time of such men as Miley and Curtis and A. C. Knudson and shows the increasing Pelagianism in Methodist theological history.

27. Some authoritative opinion estimates it, however, as high as 10-15 percent. See Norman Pittenger, "A Theological Approach to Understanding Homosexuality," Religion in Life, winter, 1974, pp. 436 ff., p. 441.

28. James Clemons says that the homosexual denomination, Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan community Churches, is not 15,000 in membership and therefore almost meets the minimum denominational size of 20,000 for NCC membership; but that many of its members are evangelical fundamentalists and would be opposed to such affiliation. See the same article for recent dissension over homosexual ordinations and marriages in the United Methodist Church. See his "Christian Affirmation of Human sexuality," Religion in Life, winter, 1974.

29. See his testimony as a frontispiece in Chas. Ewing Brown's The Meaning of Sanctification. The testimony was written for Dr. Brown's book.