Piper / Mathis Acting the Miracle

God's Work and Ours in the Mystery of Sanctification
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4335-3790-5
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

Sanctification  |  noun  |  sa(k)-t-f-k-shn : a big word for the little-by-little progress of the everyday Christian life Fighting sin is not easy. No one ever coasted into greater godliness. Christian growth takes effort. But we are not left alone. God loves to work the miracle of sanctification within us as we struggle for daily progress in holiness. With contributions from Kevin DeYoung, John Piper, Ed Welch, Russell Moore, David Mathis, and Jarvis Williams, this invigorating book will help you say no to the deception of sin and yes to true joy in Jesus.

 John Piper is founder and lead teacher of desiringGod.org and chancellor of Bethlehem College & Seminary. He served for thirty-three years as a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and is the author of more than fifty books, including Desiring God; Don't Waste Your Life; and Providence.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Piper, John

Mathis, David

Leseproben

Introduction

The Search for Sanctification’s Holy Grail

David Mathis

Sanctification talk is notorious. If you’ve made the rounds in Christian circles for long enough, you know. You know.

Gather a dozen thoughtful, biblically and theologically informed Jesus followers. Steer the conversation in the direction of sanctification—what it is and how you pursue it practically. Then take a step back, watch, listen, and give it some time.

If you let the discussion go long enough, and it gets into just about any detail, you’ll soon be able to discern a dozen distinct perspectives on the nitty-gritty of sanctification.

Opinions on sanctification are like elbows, some might say. Everybody’s got ’em.

Sanctification Gets Personal

As much as any Christian doctrine, sanctification gets personal—indirectly when we talk about the what, and then in particular when we address the how. As soon as we’re saying what sanctification is, it’s inevitable that the lines soon must be drawn to how we live. And the more defensive we are about our way of life, the less open we tend to be about having Scripture revise our notions about sanctification.

At the level of definition, as John Piper will explain in more detail in chapter 1, the fancy English word sanctification is simpler than it sounds. It’s built on the Latin word sanctus, meaning “holy.” Sanctification is the modest theological term we Christians typically use to refer to the process of being made holy.1 For the Christian, whose standard of perfect human holiness is Jesus, the God-man, sanctification is essentially becoming more like Jesus—“conformed to the image of his Son,” as Romans 8:29 puts it.

Another way to talk about sanctification is Christian growth or maturation. It’s a big word for the little-by-little progress of the everyday Christian life. It encompasses how every professing Christian should be living, where holiness is heading, how fast the progress should be, and how it happens in real life.

Look up. Can you see the controversies swirling overhead?

It’s Just Complicated

Not only is it personal, but sanctification talk also gets prickly quickly because it immediately involves so many massive realities in the Christian worldview and their coming together in daily life: grace and works; law and gospel; faith and the Holy Spirit; Christian obedience and pleasing God; love and good deeds. The stakes are high. Weak spots in our theology will turn up, before long, in our understanding of sanctification. It doesn’t take long before a wacky doctrine elsewhere begins to mess with our doctrine of holiness. True, Christian theology is a seamless garment, and every doctrine eventually relates to every other, but sanctification calls the question faster than the others and has the tendency to accentuate our problem areas.

But the fact that sanctification gets personal so quickly, and theologically complicated so fast, doesn’t mean sanctification talk is to be avoided. On the contrary, it means that it’s all the more important. We neglect careful, biblically informed reflection on this doctrine to our detriment, to the minimizing of our love toward others, and to the diminishing of the glory of God. Difficult as it can be, we must venture to speak about these things. We must talk sanctification.

Two Types of Sanctification

To make things a touch more complicated, the New Testament has two ways of talking about sanctification. For starters, we should clarify that this is a book mainly about the sanctification that theologians call progressive. Even though the biblical texts bear out two types, Christians throughout the centuries have found it most helpful in theological discussion to refer to the progressive type as simply “sanctification.” But the Scriptures also teach us about a kind of sanctification we can call “definitive.”

Definitive sanctification is the status of holiness we receive simultaneous with conversion and justification.2 It is the setting apart of believers, reliant on the holiness of Jesus, such that even the most unholy of those who truly have faith can be considered “saints” (holy ones, Rom. 1:7 and 1 Cor. 1:2) because they are “in” Jesus, the Holy One. “Sanctify” is used in this definitive sense in Hebrews (9:13–14; 10:10; 13:12), as well as in Paul, who says to the Corinthians, “you were sanctified” (1 Cor. 6:11). It is this definitive sanctification that marks the clean break with sin we hear about in Romans 6:11 (“Consider yourselves dead to sin”), Galatians 2:20 (“I have been crucified with Christ”), and Colossians 3:3 (“you have died”), among other texts.

But sanctification is also progressive. We are increasingly “set apart” as we progress in actual holiness, which flows from the spiritual life we have in Jesus by faith. This is the way the term sanctification is typically used theologically, and this is the focus of this book.

Piper will add more in the first chapter, but for now, suffice it to say that we are aware of, and greatly appreciative of, the often overlooked doctrine of definitive sanctification. We lament with David Peterson that “definitive sanctification is a more important theme in the New Testament than has generally been acknowledged,”3 but for our purposes in this book, take sanctification in the normal theological parlance of progressive sanctification, unless otherwise noted.

Beware of Slogans

Because of the inherent complexity of sanctification, involving not only these two types but also all these moving pieces (Jesus’s person and work, the Spirit’s work, faith, our works, grace, law, gospel, obedience, and more), there is a great temptation to oversimplify things. Because sanctification with all its tentacles feels like an octopus larger than we can comfortably tame, we may prefer our own little theological house pets that we can train and remain captain of. It’s nice to have a slogan that can keep it simple for stupid humans and make us feel like we’re in control.

Enticing as it sounds—and convicting as it may be to hear about if you’ve tried it—the well of sanctification reductionisms soon runs dry. “Let go and let God”—it won’t be long before that creates some problems. “Simply obey”—that won’t do it either. Nor will attaining some “second work of grace.” “Just get used to your justification”—attractive, yes, but there’s another reductionism at work here.

It’s as if we find the biblical data to be just too numerous and complicated, and what we really need is to search for sanctification’s holy grail. It must be out there somewhere—surely, there’s some quick fix, some theological secret to discover, some doctrinal key that unlocks what holiness really is and how to have it.

But if there’s any key to sanctification, it’s this: abandon your search for the key. At least abandon the search for a shortcut. Let your quest for the holy grail of sanctification end right here and right now and commit to a sanctification not of only, but of all—all the Scriptures, all of Christian theology, all the Bible’s salvific pictures, and, most ultimately, all of Jesus.

Simply Getting Used to Justification?

For one, let’s take a reductionism prevalent in the broadly Reformed community with which many readers of this book associate: the holy grail of justification by faith alone. One Lutheran spokesman, whom some Reformed would happily echo, says that sanctification is “simply the art of getting used to justification.”4

Just off several years’ fighting back a fresh assault on justification from various new perspectives on Paul, this precious doctrine, which became the occasion for Martin Luther to pioneer a sorely needed reformation, has become especially dear to many of us. So justification as a silver bullet for sanctification is enticing to those of us who love double imputation, Jesus’s “alien” righteousness, and making much of God’s free grace toward the ungodly.

The best possible meaning of such a slogan would have in view not just justification but the full panoply of initial and ongoing graces applied to the believer at the outset of the Christian life—new birth, faith and repentance, justification, definitive sanctification, adoption, and more. It would be better to say that progressive sanctification is based on definitive sanctification. Christian growth means learning to live like who we already are in Jesus, living out in and through us the holiness that is already ours in him.

But even on this best possible reading, there is so much more to be said, and this epithet for sanctification ends up betraying a sloppy understanding of justification or sanctification or both. Justification by faith alone is a beautiful, wonderful, essential doctrine, worth defending to the death. If we had the space, I’d love to give some extended effort here to celebrating this vital doctrine. True Christian theology can’t do without it and must not minimize it in any way. It is an essential aspect of our relationship to Jesus. But it’s not the whole. The Scriptures have much more to say to us than simply get to know your justification. That way of saying it is careless at best, if not tragically misguided. What we need for practical...