The HISTORICAL Interpretation of Holiness

CHRISTIAN HOLINESS not only has a basis in the Bible; it also has a history in human under­standing. God’s truth never changes. Men’s understanding of that truth does change. Theology, like all other human dis­ciplines, is constantly changing—pushing forward, and some­times regressing.

It is because important insights are often lost that we need a basic acquaintance with the history and literature of the Wesleyan movement. Generations, like groups of people within any generation, may become provincial and cut off from the experience and thought of the Church universal.

One of the major problems of our age is its rootlessness, its lack of any sense of continuity with its past. Part of this, as Kenneth Keniston has pointed out, is due to the rapidity of change in these times in which we live. Because change comes so fast, we suffer an intensification of the present—a heightening of the “now” until we have come to talk about the “now generation,” the “now people.” We are, as Kenis­ton described it, “stranded in the present.” [Quoted in Sheldon Garber, ed., Adolescence for Adults (Chicago: Blue Cross Association, 1969), pp. 74-75.]

Traditionally, to be sure, church people are a conserva­tive crowd. Most of us dislike any change we can’t jingle in our pockets. But change is with us, and Thomas Wolfe was most certainly right when he wrote, “You can’t go home again ... to your childhood ... back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.” [You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941, p. 706.]

But having conceded this much to the present and the changing future, we still need the perspective that comes from at least some awareness of the past. Not all the brilliant theologians and Bible scholars have been born in the twen­tieth century by any means. The same advice might be given to theological reconstructionists that has been offered to young protesters against the “Establishment”: “Don’t scut­tle the ship before you have learned how to build a raft.”

A sense of history provides the correctives needed for some of our one-sidedness. We need the balance that can be found in many of the older holiness classics, such as:

John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life

A. M. Hills, Holiness and Power

Daniel Steele, The Gospel of the Comforter and Mile­stone Papers

J. A. Wood, Perfect Love and Purity and Maturity H. A. Baldwin, Holiness and the Human Element Thomas Cook, New Testament Holiness

And the sound, practical wisdom of George D. Watson, Samuel Logan Brengle, S. A. Keen, Beverly Carradine, and a dozen more.

Men are still writing, and in the Kingdom the new wine may be as good as the old. But the past has insights in it which we need to correct some of the overcompensations we have made-the swing of the pendulum past center point.

Two items are particularly important in the present.

I

One is the common, modern version of Wesleyan “eter­nal security.” It differs from Calvinistic eternal security in that it relates to entire sanctification rather than to justifica­tion and the new birth. It is the notion that in the experience of holiness we have a sort of deposit of grace sufficient for the rest of life, and that sanctification is an end to be gained which when reached insures an easy slide down the slope into the Pearly Gates.

Put in such bald terms, no one would own up to such a view. But in one form or another it is surprisingly common among holiness people. Here the historical interpretation of Christian holiness can help.

Let us hear again the words of John Wesley, and let us inscribe them on the fleshy tables of our hearts:

The holiest of men still need Christ as their prophet, as the light of the world.” For he does not give them light, but from moment to moment: the instant he withdraws, all is darkness.... God does not give them a stock of holiness. But unless they receive a supply every moment, nothing but un­holiness would remain. [A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1966, reprint), p. 82.]

If the Bible makes anything clear, it is that the cleansing which is the heart of holiness is not only a cleansing that be­gins at a definite point of consecration and faith, but it is also a cleansing which continues moment by moment. This is the meaning of the verb tenses in I John 1:7, which liter­ally reads, “If we are walking in the light as He is in the light, we are having fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son is cleansing us from all sin.” It be­gins to cleanse, and it keeps right on cleansing completely and continuously.

The experience of entire sanctification is not an end but a beginning, not a goal but a starting place. True, it is an end of carnal strife and confusion within the soul. It is an arrival at a realization of God’s will for all His people. Yet the end of carnal strife and confusion is for the sake of a beginning of peace and victory. And the point of arrival is but a portal that leads onto a highway stretching across all of life and on into eternity.

We do not retain the grace of God by hoarding it, like the man in the parable-wrapping it in a napkin to bury for safekeeping. We retain it by risking it in the marketplace, investing it in the commerce of human life, spending it freely on others in the assurance that it will return increasing dividends.

The light is present as long as the windows are open to the sun. The holiness to which God calls us is the sanctifying presence of the Lord of Glory moment by moment.

Puzzles as to “how carnality gets back into the heart” of a person who backslides after he has been sanctified are completely artificial. If the light is lost, “all is darkness.” Without a supply of holiness every moment, “nothing but unholiness would remain.” Carnality returns as blindness comes when sight is lost, as poverty returns when a fortune is squandered, as disease recurs when the laws of health are violated, and as death and corruption invade a branch when it is cut off from the vine (John 15:1-6).

Holiness is not a storage battery to be used whenever and wherever, apart from the ultimate source of its energy. Holiness is a throbbing, pulsating connection with the divine Dynamo.

Holiness is not a tank of water. It is a pipeline directly into the Reservoir.

This is the truth in May Whittle Moody’s familiar lines:

Dying with Jesus, by death reckoned mine;

Living with Jesus, a new life divine;

Looking to Jesus till glory doth shine,

Moment by moment, 0 Lord, I am Thine.

Moment by moment I’m kept in His love;

Moment by moment I’ve life from above.

Looking to Jesus till glory doth shine,

Moment by moment, O Lord, I am Thine.

Hannah Whitall Smith in The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life says that, in the ongoing life of holiness, our part is continual surrender and continual trust. [(Westwood, N.J.: Fleming 11. Revell Company, re­print), p. 32.] There is a “once-­for-all” surrender in the moment of full consecration, and there is a “once-for-all” act of appropriating faith. But the going and growing life in the Spirit requires that we contin­ually surrender and continually trust.

Holiness is not only a work of grace; it is the workings of grace. It is not only an act of God; it is a relationship be­gun at a given time and place and renewed and maintained day by day.

This is so familiar to us in human relationships that it is hard to see why we find the idea so difficult in our rela­tionship with God.

There is, for instance, an obvious difference between a wedding and a marriage. The wedding is a “once-for-all” event, permanently identified with a time and place, a calen­dar and a geography. The wedding is unrepeatable. By its very nature, it establishes what both God’s law and human ideal intend to be a permanent union.

But the marriage is not a “once-for-all” event. It is an ongoing relationship.

When the wedding is over, there is nothing more we need to do about it. But we have to work at the marriage. The wedding may take place in church or chapel. The marriage is lived daily in the home, and its implications pervade every other possible association between men and women in the shop, the office, the school, the marketplace, or wherever people are together.

Need it be said that homes which fail do not fail at the time of the wedding, but in the course of the marriage The test does not come during the beauty of the wedding. The test comes when “moonlight and roses turn to daylight and dishes.” The test comes after the “billing and cooing,” when there are too many bills and not enough “coos.” “Which things,” as Paul would say, “are an allegory.”

All that is true about the wedding, and more, is true about the moment when the child of God first enters the fullness of the blessing of the gospel of Christ. It is “once­ for-all.” It begins what is meant to be a permanent state of affairs. It has a time and a place. It is complete. It alters everything that happens, every relationship and every de­cision, from that time on until the end of life.

And all that is true about the marriage, and more, is true of the processes wherein God works in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. The life of holiness is a daily life in the home, the shop, the office, the school, the marketplace. It is not history; it is biography. It is never completed. It never ends.

Just as one cannot have a marriage without a wedding, so one cannot have the ongoing life without the experience of grace that initiates it. But just as the wedding has little value unless it is followed by a sound marriage, the experi­ence of grace doesn’t mean much unless it is the beginning of a deepening and ever richer relationship.

Oswald Chambers wrote, “The test of life `hid with Christ in God’ is not the experience of salvation or sanctification, but, the relationship into which these experiences have led us.’

Chambers went on to explain that “experience is ab­solutely nothing if not the gateway only to a new relation­ship. The experience of sanctification is not the slightest atom of use unless it has enabled me to realize that the ex­perience means a totally new relationship. The experience may take a few moments of realized transaction, but all the rest of life goes to prove what that transaction means.”

The problem, Chambers said, is that “people stagnate because they never go beyond the image of their experiences into the life of God which transcends all experiences.

“We must beware,” he warned, “of turning away from God by grubbing amongst our own experiences.” [If Thou Wilt Be Perfect (London: Simpkin Marshal, Ltd., 1949, reprint), p. 85.]

II

A second item wherein we may learn from history lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the matter just con­sidered. It is the view commonly held today that a single act of sin in the sanctified life immediately cuts off the soul com­pletely from God and plunges it into total rebellion and com­plete depravity once more.

Here again the Wesleyan classics can help us. The older holiness writers — and by this I mean such people as S. A. Keen, G. D. Watson, Daniel Steele, M. L. Haney, Hannah Whitall Smith, Thomas Cook, and Beverly Carradine — al­most without exception said that a sanctified Christian in­volved in an unpremeditated act of sin (what Thomas Cook called a “surprise sin”) could be immediately forgiven and fully restored by confessing that sin and and receiving forgive­ness through our divine Advocate with the Father.

This view is based directly on I John 2:1-2, “My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.”

These verses are set in the context of one of the finest expressions of cleansing from all sin and all unrighteousness in the New Testament (1 John 1:6-10). Nor are they in con­flict with the strong statements of I John 3:6-9, where the grammar shows that repeated sins are in mind.

The purpose of John’s writing in fact is “that ye sin not” (verse 1) — and the grammar is such as to imply, “not even a single time.” The apostle chooses his words carefully. He does not say, “When every Christian sins,” or even, “When any man sins.” The sin is not expected. There is no sugges­tion that it is necessary. The statement is, “If any man sin,” and the conditional form of the statement implies the pos­sibility of its opposite.

Yet when defeat comes, when there is an impulsive and unpremeditated transgression o God’s law, the case is not hopeless. There is an instant remedy. Immediate confession brings immediate forgiveness and cleansing. Christ is the “Mercy Seat” for His own in the moment of tragic defeat as well as “for the sins of the whole world.”

It is true that some have not recognized this possibility. They have suffered a bit, perhaps, from what someone has called “hardening of the categories,” and have been quite vehement in the claim that a single act of sin under any circumstances plunges the sanctified soul into complete depravity and necessitates a definite two-stage restoration involving forgiveness followed later by entire sanctification.

The result of this hardened view is one of two extremes. On the one hand, the Christian trapped into sin may go into despair and throw over his entire covenant with Christ, lapsing into total backsliding. Or, more commonly but even worse, he may cover his sin, rationalize, excuse, or deny it, and thereby drive it into his subconscious. There it festers and poisons the soul and comes out in legalism, rigidity, and a critical, judgmental, suspicious, and defensive attitude toward everybody and everything. Other people must be torn down in order to build up the crippled ego. In extreme cases, actual physical collapse takes place for which there is no medical cure. For while the conscious mind may reject the truth, the heart does not forget.

What we need to remember was said by the “fathers” in many ways:

John Wesley: “A believer may fall, and not fall away. He may fall and rise again. And if he should fall, even into sin, yet this case, dreadful as it is, is not desperate. For ‘we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the right­eous.” [Sermon on Matthew 5:13-16. Works, V, 301.]

M. L. Haney: “One act of disobedience brings defile­ment, and with it comes the consciousness of impurity, and the only refuge is immediate flight to Christ, that the stain may be washed out. Satan will tempt you to throw away all that God has previously done for you, and send you back to the beginning to repent and believe for justification, and the substitution of a new consecration for the former one, that you may believe and be sanctified.... Don’t listen to him; but go straight to Christ with that one offence, and let him heal the wound thus made, and you will again be pure in his sight. If you delay, you will be almost certain to add other of­fences, for one sin paves the way to another, and every mo­ment of delay increases your danger. Therefore hasten while the wound is fresh, and be healed in Christ’s all-cleansing blood.” [The Inheritance Restored, Fourth Edition Revised and Enlarged. (Chicago: The Christian Witness Co., 1904), p. 171.]

S. A. Keen: “There may come spiritual failures to the fully-saved soul, such as temporary disobedience, inadver­tent yieldings to temptations, impulsive indulgences in wrong feelings, occasional lapses into sin.... The anchor that can hold the soul in this fierce storm, is to know that such spir­itual repulses do not forfeit the gracious state of cleansing from all sin, unless they come from a preceding repudiation of its consecration and trust, or are immediately followed by the cancellation of the same. The soul must know, when­ever such spiritual calamities come, that an immediate confession to God, and a reassertion of its trust in the all­cleansing blood, will prevent the forfeiture of its experience, and bring an immediate salvation.” [Salvation Papers (Cincinnati: M. W. Knapp, 1896), pp. 97-103.]

Hannah Whitall Smith: “In this life and walk of faith, there may be momentary failures [defined in the context as conscious, known sin], which, although very sad and greatly to be deplored, need not, if rightly met, disturb the attitude of the soul as to entire consecration and perfect trust, nor interrupt, for more than the passing moment, its happy communion with its Lord.” [Op. cit., p. 163.]

Daniel Steele: “So long as love to God is the undimin­ished motive there can be no career of sin. But faith may be­come weak and love may become weak under the pressure of temptation the child of God may commit a single sin, as [I John] 2:1 implies, and have recourse to the righteous Ad­vocate with the Father, and thus retain his birthright in the kingdom of God. Or he may with Judas pass out of the light into so total an eclipse of faith as to enter upon a returnless course of sin entirely sundering him from the family of God, and enrolling him as a ‘son of perdition,’ a ‘child of the devil,’ whose characteristics he has permanently taken on.” [Half-Hours with St. John’s Epistles (Boston: Chris­tian Witness Co., 1901), Comment on I John 3:9, bc. cii.]

None of this is to excuse sin or treat it lightly. It ought never to happen in the sanctified life. But if it does, it must be dealt with honestly and forthrightly. We have been much less open and clear about this whole matter than our fathers, and much to our detriment.

It must be recognized, to be sure, that there is premedi­tated indication sin, calculated and presumptuous, which is in itself an indication of a backslidden heart. A person so involved, however, had long since lost the sanctifying fullness of the Spirit. When he comes back after his sad journey to the far country, he comes as a rebel to be forgiven and restored. He must then make his consecration anew and receive anew the fullness of the blessing of the gospel.

Even in such a case, there need be no more than a moment of time between the renewed sense of forgiveness and prayer for the cleansing touch.

Without obscuring some real differences between piety in the Old Testament and in the New, this is what happened in David’s restoration after his sin with Bathsheba as record­ed in Psalms 51. Here, with but a moment between, is the prayer for forgiveness of specific sins and transgressions (verses 1-4), and the plea, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.... Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me” (verses 7-10).