Sanctified — by grace alone through faith alone — One Day at a Time

Rod Rosenbladt is professor of theology and apologetics at Concordia University (Irvine, California) and co-host of The White Horse Inn radio broadcast.  The following is an excerpt of his article in Modern Reformation: Issue: “God Justifies the Wicked” Nov./Dec. Vol. 1 No. 6 1992 Pages 8-12, 30-31.

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The motif in the New Testament, and in the Reformation is that Christ’s death was outside of me and for me. It is not primarily something that changes us. After one has been declared righteous by grace through faith, this grace will begin to change us (sanctification); nevertheless its changing us is certainly not what justifies us. In Roman Catholicism, and in John Wesley’s work, what makes us acceptable to God is his internal work of renovation within our hearts and lives.

Thus, through the influence of Arminianism and Wesleyanism, the situation in many evangelical churches bears almost indistinguishable resemblance on these points to medieval Rome. Some of the preaching in evangelicalism–certainly some of the Sunday school material, some of the primary addresses by retreat speakers and Christian leaders-all taken together as the basic spiritual diet, tend to reinforce that old intuition that good people are the ones who are saved and that those who are not so good are the ones who are lost.

The bell-weather test as to where a person stands on this is what he or she does with Romans chapter seven, particularly passages such as, “The good that I would, I do not. And that which I abhor is that which I do…Oh wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?” In many cases, those who are not grounded in the Reformation persuasion have to say this was Paul’s experience before he met the Lord, while those of us from the Reformation perspective would probably say there is no better description of the Christian life in all of the Bible than Romans seven. The reformers really believed that the Christian life was a life simul iustus et peccator-simultaneously justified and yet sinful, and that we would remain in this tension until death. They were eager to proclaim Christ as savior and lord and would never have known the dichotomy expressed by Zane Hodges and other antinomian Bible teachers, but they were absolutely opposed to a self-salvation by self surrender.

Any righteousness that we have, even in the Christian life, is gifted to us. They would not have been especially impressed with the kind of things that have come from the Keswick movement in England, from the German higher life movement, from Ian Thomas, from the American Finneyites, Andrew Murray, or some of the writings of Lewis Sperry Chafer. Here is a quote from the famous B. B. Warfield on Louis Sperry Chafer:

• Mr. Chafer makes use of all the jargon of the higher life teaching. In him we too hear of two kinds of Christians whom he designates respectively carnal men, and spiritual men on the basis of a misreading of 1 Corinthians 2:9 and following. And we are told that the passage from the one to the other is at our option, whether we care to claim the higher degree by faith. With him too, thus, the enjoyment of every blessing is suspended on our claiming it. We hear of letting God, and indeed we almost hear of engaging the Spirit as we engage say a carpenter to do work for us. And we do explicitly hear of “making it possible for God to do things,” a quite terrible expression. Of course we hear repeatedly of the duty and efficacy of yielding, and the act of yielding ourselves is quite in the customary manner discriminated from consecrating ourselves… (Princeton Theological Review, April 1919)

Many of the elements present in medieval theology are replicated in North American fundamentalism and evangelicalism. The family resemblances, if you want to talk across the spectrum of Christian theology, are: Luther/Calvin; Wesley/Rome.

Did the reformers then have any doctrine of sanctification? Of course they did. We are all familiar with the biblical announcements as to what is involved sanctification: the Word, the sacraments, prayer, fellowship, sharing the gospel, serving God and neighbor, and the Reformation tradition acknowledges that there are biblical texts that speak of sanctification as complete already. This is not a perfection which is empirical or observable, but a definitive declaration that because we are “in Christ,” we are set apart and holy by his sacrifice (1 Cor. 1:30; Heb. 10, etc.). Anybody who is in Christ is sanctified because his holiness is imputed to the Christian believer, just as Jesus says in John chapter seventeen, “For them I sanctify myself, that they too may be truly sanctified.” God sees the believer as holy. That means that Wesley should not have terrified Christian brethren with texts such as, “Without holiness, no one will see the Lord.” The Christian is holy–it’s all imputed. And then there are texts that say, “Be holy as I am holy.” What would the reformers do with that? They would say we are called to be holy. But why should we be holy if we are already perfect in Christ? Because we are saved unto good works, not unto licentiousness, according to Romans chapter six; the question has been asked before. The works are done out of thankfulness of heart by the believer who has been saved, not by one who is trying to be saved. Clearly the reformers had a doctrine of sanctification. They believed that the Law in the Bible had three uses. First, it was a civil ordinance to keep us from stealing each other’s wives and speedboats. The civil use of the law applied to the whole culture. Second, the theological use of the law which was to reveal our sin and drive us to despair and terror so that we would seek a savior. Luther believed that was the primary use of the law in all of Scripture. But the reformers also believed in a third use of the Law, and that was as a didactic use, to teach the Christian God’s will for holy living.

If the Christian is reading the Law and says, “This is not yet true of me: I don’t love God with all my heart, and I certainly don’t love my neighbor as I love myself. In fact, just today I failed to help a poor chap on the side of the road who was having car trouble. I must not yet be a Christian,” here the reformers would counsel, “You hurry back to the second use of the law and flee to Christ where sanctification is truly, completely, and perfectly located.” After this experience, the believer will feel a greater sense of freedom to obey, and it is the only way that one will ever feel free to obey. The difference between all “Higher Life” movements and the Reformation perspective finally turns on the question of what Baptists call the assurance of salvation, and what the reformers called fides reflexa (reflexive faith). The answer of the Higher Life movement to the struggling Christian is, “Surrender more,” or, “What are you holding back from the Lord?” The Reformation answer is different.

A friend of mine was walking down the streets of Minneapolis one day and was confronted by an evangelical brother who was very anxious to know whether he was saved and asked just that. “Brother, are you saved?” Hal rolled his eyes back and said, “Yes.” That didn’t satisfy this brother so he said, “Well when were you saved?” Hal said, “About two thousand years ago, about a twenty minutes’ walk from downtown Jerusalem.” The most important thing is that the death of Christ was in fact a death even for Christian failure. Christ’s death even saves Christians from major sins. There is always “room at the cross” for unbelievers, it seems, but what we ought to be telling people is that there is room there for Christians, too. This, then, is what Dr. Manske meant when earlier I referred to his comment that in many evangelical gatherings the motif is Law/Gospel/Law. The Law condemns, driving us to Christ in the Gospel, from whom we receive both instantaneous justification and progressive sanctification for the rest of our lives, according to the Reformation perspective. But in contemporary evangelicalism, the Law can come back and undermine the confidence of the Gospel. It can still make threats; it can still condemn. There is wonderful grace for the sinner out there, and the evangelical is at his best in evangelism. But the question as to whether there is enough grace for the sinful Christian is an open one in many gatherings, and I have had many students tell me, “My last state is worse than the first–I think I’ve got to leave the faith because I feel worse now than I did before.” In many cases, I have had brothers and sisters come up to me after I had spoken and tell me, “This is about the last shot I’ve got. My own Christian training is killing me. I can understand how, before I was a Christian, Christ’s death was for me, but I am not at all sure that his death is for me now because I have surrendered so little to him and hold so much back. My trouble really began when I committed myself to Christ as Lord and Savior.” That can come from the pastoral teaching, the Sunday school curriculum, and everything one’s Christian leaders declare.

There must be a clear and unqualified pronouncement of the assurance of salvation on the basis of the fullness of the atonement of Christ. In other words, even a Christian can be saved. This other gospel, in its various forms (“Higher Life,” legalistic, the “carnal Christian” teaching, etc.) is tearing us to pieces. I must warn you that the answer to this devastating problem is not available on every street corner. It is only available in the Reformation tradition. This is not because that particular tradition has access to information other traditions do not possess. Rather, it is because the same debate which climaxed in that sixteenth century movement has erupted again and again since. In fact, since Christ’s debates with the Pharisees and Paul’s arguments with the legalists, this has been the debate of Christian history. At no time since the apostolic era were these issues so thoroughly discussed and debated, to the point where the lines are clear and the distinctives well-defined. To ignore the biblical wisdom, scholarship, and brilliant insights of such giants is simply to add to our ignorance the vice of pride and self-sufficiency. The Reformation position is the evangelical position.

The only way out is an exposition of the Scriptures that has to do with Law and Gospel: An exposition of the scriptures that places Christ at the center of the text for everybody, including the Christian. All of the Bible is about him. All of the Bible is even about him for the Christian!

I used to tell my students at a Christian college that they had never heard preaching with the exception of a few sound evangelistic appeals. Their weekly diet in the congregation was not a proclamation of the grace to them because of the finished and atoning death of Christ; the grace to them as Christians. That emphasis is desperately needed. And the only way to find it is to go back to when it was done, and it was done in the sixteenth century. The real hope for the church in the west lies with the evangelicals. Barring an unusual act of God, the mainline churches are not going to get the church back on its feet. Generally speaking, they simply do not have a high enough view of the inspiration of scripture to listen to it anymore.

The evangelicals do. They believe that the scriptures are true, but tend to read them as a recipe book for Christian living, rather than for the purpose of finding Christ who died for them and who is the answer for their un-Christian living. We must have that kind of renewal, and it can only come from the evangelicals. The evangelical movement in America must begin reading from the reformers instead of pretending that they are committed only to the Bible, without any system of doctrine, when it is clear what books, tapes, and sermons have shaped their faith and practice. Another thing we are going to have to re-examine in connection with Christian growth is the question of the sacraments–not sacramentalism, but the very nature of the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper), which receives far more attention in the scriptures than in contemporary evangelical discussion and piety. We are going to have to talk about them again. The major themes of the reformers are precisely the ones which the evangelical must be encouraged to recover in this time and place.