Teaching Holiness

Approaching the Roots of Salvationism

Dear Comrade!

I hope you are well and feeling blessed. With Christmas only a few weeks away, I hope you have built space into your diary to look after yourself as well. Remember that in all of the busyness, you need to take time for yourself and your faith. Don’t let yourself become so consumed by the requirements of the season that you leave yourself worn out afterwards.

The Salvation Army is a holiness movement. Holiness is deep in our bones. But holiness is also something which we can sometimes be a bit hesitant to preach about and teach to our people. This might be because holiness can feel a bit like being ‘self-righteous’, or claiming to be better than other people. It might be because we are not confident in explaining it to others. It could be that we are just not sure where we stand with the different ways of thinking about holiness, and we don’t have the mental space to engage properly in the discussions. Or, it could be something else entirely.

I think that good holiness teaching is essential for any church, but particularly for the Army. If we wander away from holiness, we wander away from ourselves. However, there is a lot of debate amongst the different denominations about what holiness is. Even within the Army, the understanding of holiness has changed over the years, and different people approach holiness in different ways. I will not be going over these different points of view in this letter. If you want that kind of thing, check out my blog instead. Rather, I will set out a fairly universal foundation of holiness and then offer some suggestions about how to teach it.

At its core, holiness is about how God's love manifests in the world. The Bible tells us to be holy because God is holy. What does it mean to say that God is holy? It means that holiness is a reflection of who God is. Who is God? God is love. Foundationally, God is love. We know this through scripture and through the self-revelation of God in Jesus. God is love, and God is perfect. So divine love is perfect love. Holiness is what God is, and God is experienced as perfect love. So we can say that at its most basic level, holiness is perfect love.

This is a view shared by the church fathers, by medieval scholastics, by Luther and Calvin, by Wesley and Finney and Palmer, and by the Booths and Brengle and Coutts, and Clifton. Holiness is the perfect love of God, active in the world.

There are lots of other ways of thinking about holiness, many of which are exclusive of each other. But they all share that same foundation, rooted in divine love. When Christians are commanded to be holy, they are commanded to share in the perfect love of God which is demonstrated in Jesus and made possible through the Holy Spirit.

The perfect love of God is naturally attuned towards that which isn't God. God freely gives of God's self, in creation, in Christ, and in the Holy Spirit. Holiness is God's givenness to us. We might have thought of holiness as separation or difference or purity. But the incarnation should challenge these assumptions. God's radical difference from us is held in tension with God's assumption of humanity in the incarnation. Holiness commits to that which is different. Perfect love loves that which is imperfect.

For us to be holy does not mean becoming separate from the world but becoming more deeply committed to the world. It is in the world that the Holy Spirit is at work, and like the old song says, it is for the world that Jesus died. Holiness means being part of the world, just as Jesus was, but simultaneously participating in the deeper meaning of the reality of the world, which is revealed to us in Christ's death and resurrection.

The work of the Holy Spirit in sanctifying us enables us to participate in Christ's holiness. To share in Christ's holiness means being turned away from our selfishness and towards our neighbour. It means loving our neighbour, praying for our enemies, feeding the hungry, and devoting our entire being to God. God's perfect love perfects our imperfect love so that we can share in Christ's work of grace for and in the world.

Holiness is not given to us for our sake, it is given for the sake of our neighbour, so we can act in Christ's place for their sake.

Given that it's only the basics of something greater, all of that might seem like a lot to try and fit into a twenty-minute sermon.

However, the starting point is simple and comes straight from the doctrines. It is the privilege of every believer to be sanctified. Holiness is not for an elect few. Access to the perfect and perfecting love of Christ is not hidden behind special rituals, guarded behind secret oaths, or limited only to those who earn it. Holiness is a gift from God for those people who are ready for it.

This means that when we are teaching holiness, we are offering it as something for everyone. There is only one qualifier - we need to know that we are not holy. We cannot share in Christ's holiness unless we first acknowledge and understand that we are not holy, that we are fallible and fallen people who are inclined towards selfishness and sinfulness. We should not reserve the teaching of holiness only for a select few. Instead, we should boldly offer the opportunity for sanctification to every member of our congregation.

Second, sharing in Christ's holiness does not make a person a better Christian than someone who is not sharing in Christ's holiness. The experience of sanctification is not a mark of moral superiority but is entirely the acceptance and reception of a gracious gift from Christ through the Holy Spirit. Only by knowing our sinful failings can we ask for and accept the gift of holiness. Holiness does not mean a person can claim superiority but rather means they must be even more aware of their sins and the amazing magnitude of grace.

Third, sanctification can be experienced in a moment of high emotion, but it can also be a simple sense of acceptance or a step in faith to claim what is not felt.

There are no rules about what the experience of sanctification is like. Just as each person has their own unique relationship with Christ, each person has their own experience of sanctification. When calling people to sanctification, it is important to emphasise this point.

If a person thinks they must have a particular experience in order to have been sanctified, then it can be really limiting. I have very little emotional engagement in my faith. If the only evidence of my relationship with God has to be an emotional experience then I'd never have any evidence at all. God works in the way that is best for the individual. We must not limit God, or make people doubt their faith because it does not work for them in the same way that it does for others.

Fourth, sanctification and the resulting holiness are not about us. I think the most important part of sanctification is not how we see ourselves but how our attention is turned towards others. By moving away from the moralistic position on holiness and instead seeing it as relational, we are opening ourselves to the kind of love that Christ exemplifies. Holiness is perfect love, and love is something that we do for other people.

Holiness means opening our eyes and hearts to the people around us. When we are teaching holiness, we are not teaching a kind of divine self-help plan. Nor are we offering a get perfect quick scheme. We are offering a way of radically decentering ourselves so that we can centre the neighbour in our lives and attention. Holiness is all about how we love the neighbour.

Finally, teaching holiness comes from a place of vulnerability. We are dependent upon the grace of God for our sanctification. It is not something we can earn or learn. We can prepare ourselves for it and seek after it, but it is always the gift of God. To call people to holiness means to expose them to their own brokenness and need for grace. This means being ready to reveal our own absolute dependence on grace rather than any false ideas that we can do this thing called discipleship in our strength.

I think this is one of the most transformative elements of holiness: In learning to love our neighbour, we are exposed to our own dependence on grace. As we remember our dependence upon grace, we learn to accept that God loves us.

That God loves us is something we can take for granted. But knowing that we are loved by God, in all our brokenness and damage, all our trauma and mistakes, all our sins and failures and faults, is what can allow us to finally accept ourselves. And as we accept that we are broken but loved, sinners but saints, then we start to be transformed by the love of God into a person who can share in the love of God for the neighbour. This is why holiness is both perfect love and perfecting love. Not because it makes us morally perfect but because it perfects our capacity to love.

I hope this has inspired you to spend more time preaching and teaching about holiness. There are lots of resources out there about holiness. So many that it's probably more of a case of discerning the good ones rather than finding any to use. But hopefully this has given you a good start.

If this has been helpful and you haven't already, please subscribe below. It's completely free, and it means you'll get this letter straight into your inbox at 9 a.m. every Monday morning.

Next week, we are thinking about how to plan a bible study. So that's something to look forward to! Until then, you are in my prayers.

Grace and peace

Chris