Three Views of Sanctification
My first regular preaching ministry was in a little southern Minnesota country chapel. The ministry was about seventy years old when as a junior in Bible college I began preaching there. The only other gospel preaching church within at least fifteen miles was a small Wesleyan Church.
With no experience in the ministry, I was immediately confronted with a question. It came in the context of our nearness to that neighboring church. I was asked, “Do you believe a Christian’s sin nature can be eradicated?” I knew Scripture (and myself) well enough to answer, “No.” That was my introduction to the reality that born again Christians have differing opinions of sanctification and that those opinions are often warmly debated. The purpose of this article is to briefly outline the major positions on sanctification and to compare them with Scripture.
Perfectionism “holds that the Christian may, in this life, become perfectly free from sin. This view was held by John Wesley in England, and by Mahan and Finney in America.”1 Wesley taught that sanctification begins at conversion and is appropriated by faith. But he also taught that “Christians can be delivered from willful sin and that this level of sanctification [“entire sanctification”] can occur before death.”2
Entire sanctification is “a personal, definitive work of God’s sanctifying grace by which the war within oneself might cease and the heart might be released from rebellion into whole hearted love for God and others.”3 One Wesleyan leader summarized this position, saying “that regeneration and entire sanctification are separate and distinct one from the other, and therefore received at different times.”4
The Pentecostal position is a progression on Wesleyan perfectionism. “Holiness Pentecostals asserted that before one can receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, they must first undergo the crisis experience of entire sanctification.”5
There are several issues with these positions. First, these views equate their particular view of sanctification with a post-conversion crisis experience, most often identified as the baptism of the Spirit. Scripture is clear that Spirit baptism occurs at the time of conversion when the Spirit begins to indwell the believer (1 Cor. 12:13).
Second, the underlying concept of “perfectionism” is not taught in Scripture. The Bible makes it clear that the Christian faces an ongoing struggle with sin (Rom. 7:14–25; Gal. 5:16–25) and that the process of sanctification is a daily, ongoing work of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:16).
The Keswick movement developed its own view of sanctification. These conferences began in England in the years 1873–75. The movement has historically been oriented to an emphasis on victorious Christian living through the power of the Holy Spirit.
“The movement contains much biblical truth and good. . . . The finished work of Christ, and our justification by faith is the source of our sanctification (Rom. 6–8; 1 Cor. 1:30; Heb. 10:10, 14). The fact that the Christian life must be lived by faith (Gal. 2:20; Heb. 11:32, 33) is a fact all too often forgotten. The emphasis on the surrender of the will to Christ is biblical and necessary for victory (Lk. 9:23; Rom. 6:13, 16, 19; 12:1).”6
However, the Keswick movement advocates a “crisis experience” in the Christian life. This experience is different than the Wesleyan or Pentecostal experience, but it is nevertheless a post-conversion experience in the believer’s life. This crisis experience is linked to the baptism of the Spirit. “At this point it is only necessary to say that it is a crisis in the life of a Christian, which none but those who have gone through it in experience, can fully understand. It means that the Spirit of God becomes so real to the man, that his supreme object in life is henceforth implicit obedience to the Holy Ghost.”7
Despite the positive elements in it, we must offer the following criticisms of the movement. The idea that a believer can go without willfully or knowingly sinning is not found in Scripture.
The Keswick view of the baptism of (or with) the Spirit is flawed. This work of the Holy Spirit is mentioned in Matthew 3:11; Mark 1:8; Luke 3:16; John 1:33; Acts 1:5; 11:16; and 1 Corinthians 12:13. When compared to John 7:37, 38, 1 Corinthians 12:13 indicates that the baptism with the Holy Spirit occurs at the time of the Spirit’s indwelling. Believers are thus joined to Christ and indwelt by the Holy Spirit at salvation. It is not a work of the Holy Spirit subsequent to salvation which brings a believer into an experience “to submit his faculties, and his reasoning powers in blind obedience to that which he believes is of God.” This takes the Christian life into a subjectivity that ignores the authority of Scripture.
The Reformed view grounds sanctification in Christ’s work on the cross and the believer’s union with Him.8 This approach identifies three necessary elements in sanctification:
First, sanctification can only occur in the context of a growing union with Christ. We will not grow unless we are identified with Christ. Second, . . . we are sanctified by the truth. The Bible is “one of the chief means whereby God sanctifies His people.” Lastly, faith is the means by which we appropriate our sanctification. Faith helps us to live in union with Christ, accept the fact that we are no longer mastered by sin, and results in the production of fruit in the life of the Christian. Like justification, sanctification comes by faith.9
Our Reformed friends say this and much more that is Biblically based and with which we find ourselves in hearty agreement. We also find some points of departure from this position.
Our first point of disagreement with those of the Reformed persuasion is over the role of the sacraments in Reformed theology. One writer names the sacraments as a means of sanctification as “pointing us to Christ; but they are also a visible, tangible means by which he communicates with us and we with him.”10
Our second difference is over a potential tendency to the idea of eradication in Reformed theology. B. B. Warfield states, “In all accredited types of Christian teaching it is largely insisted upon that salvation consists in its substance of a radical subjective change wrought by the Holy Spirit, by virtue of which the native tendencies to evil are progressively eradicated and holy dispositions are implanted, nourished and perfected.”11 As surely as we must identify the weaknesses in the Wesleyan, Finney, Pentecostal, and Keswick positions, we must point out this tendency to perfectionism in Warfield’s definition of sanctification.
Strong is more Biblical than Warfield in his definition when he states simply, “Sanctification is that continuous operation of the Holy Spirit, by which the holy disposition imparted in regeneration is maintained and strengthened.”12
Conclusion
Many who hold these competing views do agree on some very basic Biblical principles. The means advocated to realize the work of progressive sanctification in a Christian’s life, however, reveal some marked differences.
Dr. Fred Moritz is director emeritus of Baptist World Mission and professor of Systematic Theology and Missions at Maranatha Baptist Seminary, Watertown, Wisconsin.
(Originally published in FrontLine • July/August 2012. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)
- A. H. Strong, Systematic Theology (Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1907, 2004), 877. [↩]
- Mike Sullivan, “Five Views on Sanctification: An In-Depth Analysis” http://www.xenos.org/ministries/crossroads/Online Journal/issue1/fiveview.htm (accessed April 29, 2009). [↩]
- Melvin E. Dieter, “The Wesleyan Perspective,” in Five Views on Sanctification, ed. Stanley Gundry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), 13. [↩]
- Bishop W. F. Mallaieu in C. W. Ruth, Entire Sanctification Explained (Kansas City: Beacon Hill, 1952), back cover. [↩]
- Sullivan. [↩]
- Fred Moritz, book review of Charles G. Trumbull, Victory in Christ (Fort Washington, PA: Christian Literature Crusade, 2000 edition), June 27, 2001. [↩]
- Jesse Penn-Lewis with Evan Roberts, War on the Saints (World Wide Web Edition based on the 1912 unabridged edition), http:// www.apostasynow.com/wots/, Chapter Three. [↩]
- “The Reformed View of Sanctification,” http://mylifeunderthesun. blogspot.com/2006/03/reformed-view-of-sanctification. html, accessed April 29, 2009. [↩]
- Sullivan. [↩]
- “The Reformed View of Sanctification.” [↩]
- B. B. Warfield, “On the Biblical Notion of Renewal” in Biblical Doctrines (Dallas: Digital Publications, 2003), 295. [↩]
- Strong, 869. Strong has weaknesses in his theology, but his section on sanctification is one of the finest I have read. Pastors and other students of Scripture will profit from reading his work on this subject. [↩]