06 - A Right Approach

A Right Approach Let me not lag with lazy tread behind The holy life whereto the Scriptures call, Nor rush ahead, by hasty zeal inclined, Imagining what is not there at all:

Let me be glad to learn from any pen, But yet alert to turn from error’s way, To learn by watching where devoutest men Have seen mirages and have gone astray:

Blest heavenly Paraclete, my Teacher be, Lead me, illume me, all my mind possess;

Stir, but control me, tutor me to see Shining and clear, the "way of holiness".

J.S.B. we are eager to get right into our subject with least delay. Yet I am persuaded that many of us, because of present-day influences upon our thinking, need the preparatory counsels of this chapter on a right approach, if we are readily to grasp the teaching of Scripture on the nature and possibility of personal holiness. A Right Approach to Scripture

It is unlikely that those of unevangelical persuasion will peruse these pages; yet on the off-chance it may be wise to insist here that there must be a right attitude to Scripture. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century Albrecht Ritschl waved his beguiling wand over the intelligentsia of Germany. He was the apostle of a new Christian perfectionism; but it was a hypothetical perfectionism based on a naturalistic interpretation of Scripture. He was followed by Scholz, Karl, Holtzmann, Wernle, Clemen, Pfteiderer, Windisch, and others; all penmen of the "history-of-religion" school; all in open revolt against the nicknamed "miser­able-sinner Christianity" of Lutheran and Reformation tradition; all tied to the apron-strings of a rationalistic "higher criticism"; and all having a de-supernaturalizing approach to the Bible.

Those men received or rejected the documents of the New Testament according to a literary detector-apparatus of their own invention for their own convenience. In dealing with Paul’s teaching on sin and holiness they accepted as genuine or repudiated as spurious this or that epistle according to an arbitrary critical facility which wonderfully suited their own individual viewpoints but left them disagreeing among themselves.

There can be no true doctrine of Christian holiness going with a defective attitude to Holy Scripture. If Jesus is only a religious pathfinder, or a Christ emptied down to the level of human falli­bility, and if Paul’s doctrine is not the inerrantly communicated teaching of the Holy Spirit, what vital reason is there why I should listen to them? Their word has no more finality than any other which is merely human. On the other hand, if our Lord is the Divine Fulness incarnate, and if Paul is a controlled penman of the Holy Spirit, and if the Bible is the inspired Word of God, then there is certainty, authority, finality, and we may truly know what holiness is.

There is another reason, too, why we need to insist on a right attitude to Scripture. Even among those of us who glory in the Scriptures as the Word of God, it is easily possible to let a theory usurp the authority of the Word itself. There are those who think that if the Wesley school or some other format of holiness teaching be proved wrong, the holiness teaching of the Word itself falls to pieces. I thought so myself at one time, until I saw my theory had fitted me with coloured spectacles. If we are truly to learn God’s way of holiness we must come to the Word with minds unfettered by merely human theory. A True View of Sin

There must also be a right approach to the vexatious human malady known as innate sin, i.e. hereditary sin-tendency. A defective view of sin can only lead to some concept of holiness which is not truly Scriptural. In much of our holiness teaching today, hereditary "sin" is treated as a sort of separable entity within us, usually called the "old nature", or the "Adam nature", but that idea is a misleading error arising from the misconstruing of those Pauline phrases, "old man" and "body of sin" and "the flesh". The first two of those phrases (as we hope to show) should not be supposed to refer to an "old nature" within us; while "the flesh" equally definitely means a disseminated malfunctioning, not a concentrated growth or hard core which can be "eradicated", torn up by the root, or surgically excised by a "second blessing". As I make these comments thus frankly and early, let me ask the kindly tolerance of gifted and beloved brethren in the ministry who preach (as I once did) what I am here disapproving. I know how much certain views of Romans 6:6 and related passages mean to them (as they do to myself). Therefore I speak with the more respect. We shall be examining those Scriptures later. For the moment I simply urge that with unchained thinking we ponder these preliminary observations which I am convinced are necessary to a right approach. That obstinate idea of our inherited sin-bias as an incumbent "old man", or "body of sin", or cankerous concentrate within us, must go. "Sin that dwelleth in me" is not to be thought of as a "something" which, although it is deep-seated within me, is not an actual ingredient of the present human ego, and which may therefore be "done away", or bound, gagged, and held down so that it cannot wriggle free. No, sin is an infection inhering in and diffused throughout our fallen human nature itself; a disease coextensive with our present being. We must rather think of sin, therefore, as blight in a tree, or a degenerative blood-disease in a human body. You cannot cut blight out of a tree, or anaemia out of a human body; yet the blight may be counteracted in the tree, and disease may be counteracted in the body, so that in proportion to the cure the tree produces good fruit, and the body regains healthful normality.

We repeat for emphasis (as it is vital): sin is a disease-condition co-extensive with our nature, and therefore not eradicable on a moral or spiritual operating table. I know that there are cases in which, through conversion to Christ, the drunkard’s thirst for liquor, and the drug-addict’s craving for narcotics, and the habit-slave’s sickly perversity, have suddenly disappeared (as many a freed convert has testified and demonstrated); yet all such cases only serve to corroborate what we are saying. By way of parallel, malignant growths like cancer may be surgically removed from a human body, but the elimination of any one such local expression of a disease does not cure the general degenerative blood-con­dition which accompanied it. All the drunkards and drug-addicts and others who have been instantaneously freed by specific interventions of the Holy Spirit have later found themselves up against the same general disease-problem as all the rest of us— "sin that dwelleth in me" (Romans 7:17, Romans 7:20, Romans 7:23).

Regeneration and Renewal That leads me to a further observation. Do some of us need corrected perspective as to the nature of regeneration? Even though there cannot be any such total "eradication" of sin as some earnest groups have taught, is it not Scriptural to say that our human nature itself may be refined? One becomes suspicious of such dogged platitudes as "God never improves the old nature; He gives us a new nature." Is not that distinction unscriptural? Where do we find our pre-conversion condition called the "old nature"? We certainly read about the "old leaven" (1 Corinthians 5:7-8) and the "old sins" (2 Peter 1:9); and "old things passed away" (2 Corinthians 5:17); but where do we read about the old nature? I am open to be informed. It is no use quoting Romans 6:6, for in that verse the expression, "our old man", as we hope to show, is not a name for something inside us as individuals, but a Paulinism for the whole human race as it is in Adam.

It is the misunderstanding of Romans 6:6 which is mainly responsible for this usual doctrine of "old" nature versus "new" nature, in the Christian believer. At my conversion to Christ, the Holy Spirit effected a new spiritual birth within me, thereby imparting a new spiritual life; but did that new life come to me in the form of a new nature having a distinguishable existence of its own, so that now, within the confines of my one human personality, two natures competitively subsist—an "old" nature and a "new" nature, neither of which is strictly identifiable as myself? If that idea of the "two natures" is true, then, of course, the hackneyed saying is valid: "When you sin, it is always the old nature, for the new nature cannot sin." But is that two-natures idea true? (See on that our companion volume, His Deeper Work in Us.) The real truth is, that when the Holy Spirit regenerated me, He regenerated me. He did not merely transfer to me, or create inside me, a new "nature"; He infused new and regener­ating spiritual life into and through my own human nature, so that I became a spiritually renewed human being. And having been thus regenerated, I myself, in my own human nature, may become more and more refined by that same gracious Holy Spirit; for His first infusion of the new spiritual life is meant to become a suffusion of my whole personality. Have we not all known consecrated and matured Christian believers whose moral nature itself in all its impulses and desires and affinities has been refined? Was the lovely difference in them merely that a "new" nature, a something not the real self, was now ascendent over an "old" nature, also a something not quite the real self? Then to my way of thinking, that is no real regenera­tion or sanctification of the personality. Just underneath the so-called "new" nature is the unchanged, evil thing, the so-called "old" nature, the pre-conversion ego still remaining. Conversion, regeneration, has only added something; it has changed nothing! For myself, I cannot accept that; and I wish we could abandon some of our shibboleths which artificially defend it.

What about Ephesians 4:23, "Be renewed in the spirit of your mind"? What about Romans 12:1-21, "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" ? Those texts urge a deep-going renovation in born-again Christian believers. But if already regenerated persons are to be still further "renewed", in what sense can they be? The usual idea of two distinct natures in the Christian—the "old" and the "new", cannot hold up against such texts. For according to that usual theory, when we sin, it is never the "new" nature, but the "old"; so the above-quoted texts about "renewal" cannot refer to the "new" nature, for that does not need renewal; yet neither can they refer to the "old" nature, for that (so the theory tells us) cannot be renewed. What then? Why, surely, those texts which we have quoted, like others which might be given, indicate that there may be, and should be, a renewal of our human nature itself. That idea of the two mutually antagonistic "natures" needs to be discarded. The new life imparted to us by the Holy Spirit is not to be thought of as a "new nature" implanted within us, yet somehow distinct from what we actually are; it is rather to be thought of as a wonderful, new, blight-counteracting sap spreading throughout the tree, or as the transfusion of rich, new, health-bringing blood through the entire blood-stream of an ailing body, or better still as being, in actual fact, a vitalizing new life from the Holy Spirit, interpenetrating the whole of our mental and moral and spiritual nature. Let us recapture the great and precious truth that human nature itself may be sanctified and refined by the Holy Spirit. Have we not all sung and prayed with wistful longing many a couplet such as, "O Thou Spirit divine, All my nature refine"?

I believe, with the older theologians, in "total depravity" and "original sin", yet both those scowling phrases can be misread. When we aver the "total depravity" of our Adamic human nature, we dare not mean that our humanhood is totally bad. If it were, we would be demons, not humans. From beginning to end the Bible recognises the good as well as the evil in our fallen nature. Acts 10:35 is representative when it says, "In every nation he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is acceptable to Him." Everywhere in Scripture, and quite apart from our Christian doctrine of regeneration, men are exhorted to righteousness, nobility, virtue, charity, goodness. By "total depravity" we mean, not a complete moral rottenness, but that every part of our nature, as members of Adam’s fallen race, is infected and damaged by hereditary sin-effects. The Bible view of our tripartite human nature: spirit, soul, body, is that spiritually we are dead; morally we are corrupt; physically we are weakened and mortal. When we speak of "original sin" we must distinguish between commission and condition. There is no commission of sin in an infant. There is no more a committing of sin in the ungrown infant than there is in a bird or a squirrel. Sin, in the sense of committing it in thought, word, act, only comes with the dawn of moral consciousness. I remember the shock it gave me when, as a young believer, I read a printed sermon on "Infant Salvation", by my great preacher-hero, C. H. Spurgeon, in which he speaks of "infant guilt". Spurgeon was strongly Calvinist, yet how such a clear-brained prophet as he could ever espouse such a freak idea as infant guilt still puzzles me. "Guilt" is a legal term, and refers exclusively to transgression. There is no guilt where there is no transgression; so, as there simply cannot be moral transgression in a babe, neither can there be guilt. By "original sin", then, we mean only an inherited condition; a condition, alas, which comes into this world with fresh repetition every time there is a human birth.

Ever since Pelagius, in the fifth century, there have been sporadic rebellions against the doctrine of "original sin". Never was there a more cultured repudiation of it than by the German scholar, Ritschl, as the last century slipped away. He was not content even with the Pelagian conceit of a will originally poised without bias. No, we each come into the world with a bias for the good. According to him, we all sin, as we grow, because immaturity is no match for environment. We sin because we are born into a "kingdom of sin". But in the language of logic, that argument is hysteron-proteron, a reversing of the true order; for that universal sinfulness or "kingdom of sin" into which we are born is itself a product of original sin.

Yet there was one aspect of truth emphasized by Ritschl which needed new notice, namely, that besides "original sin" there is original goodness. Let none of us who hold the doctrine of "original sin" think it treasonous to believe also in the inheritance of propensities for good, for this does not mean that unregenerate man has any goodness which can contribute to his regeneration or salvation. Unless we recognise that besides innate proneness to evil there is innate good, we provoke confusion and become other than truly Scriptural. All the way through, Scripture assumes and appeals to this presence of a remaining good in our hereditary humanhood, and it does this without in the slightest degree diminishing its exposure of our constitutional perversity. Un­regenerate man is spiritually dead, but he is not morally dead, even though perverted. Conscience bears witness to that (Romans 2:15). We shall not gain a fully Scriptural idea of our intended sanctification unless we recognise both of these two hereditary aspects—"original sin" and original good. Because there is "original sin" holiness must be divinely INWROUGHT. Because there is original good, our nature may be divinely REFINED. Yes, regeneration regenerates ME. It does not merely attach to the "me" a supposed "new nature". It is I myself who have become spiritually reborn; and the new life is meant to renew my whole moral nature.

Christian Standing and Privilege

Also, the more I reflect upon it, the surer I become that we cannot have a true disposition toward the New Testament teaching on holiness unless we have a discerning appreciation of our standing and privilege in Christ. Nobody thanks God more than I for the Protestant Reformation. Nobody glories more than I in its triumphal arch of the "doctrines of grace", with its shining keystone "justification by faith". Nobody marches more posi­tively than I under the aegis of Luther and Calvin. Yet do not some of us who march under that honoured banner need to re­think this matter of our standing and privilege in Christ?

Let me explain. I am not saying that the so-called "miserable sinner" emphasis of the Reformers is wrong. More than ever, in these days of hurried living and harried thinking, we need jolting out of our undisturbing psychiatric euphemisms for sin, and our palliating views of human corruptness. More than ever, despite our twentieth-century science and culture, we need the Refor­mation emphasis on sin.

Yet, even so, the "miserable sinner" emphasis may be overdone to the point where it actually incapacitates our response to the New Testament message of inwrought holiness. The Christian life was never meant to be an everlasting "penitent form"; a continual returning of the prodigal from the far country; an incessant repetition of the publican’s groan, "God be merciful to me, a sinner." We Christian believers, alas, are still sinners; but we are no longer merely perpetual petitioners for pardon. We have found the "everlasting mercy" and the blood-bought "forgiveness" which covers all our sin! Although, alas, we still grieve our Father, we are no longer prodigals; we are at home, restored to true sonship, and in filial fellowship with Him! We are no longer "standing afar off", like the publican, and distantly begging, "God be merciful (literally, be propitiated)"; for the one all-inclusive, eternally-final propitiation has now been made on our behalf, and we have entered into it!

All the New Testament epistles were written to Christian recipients, and they all alike assume that the new Christian standing has fundamentally changed all the relationships of those who are "in Christ Jesus". The standpoint is, not that we are fervently seeking forgiveness but that we are already forgiven in a way which puts us on a new footing—"Even as God also in Christ forgave you" (Ephesians 4:32). We are not just seeking peace with God, but "being justified by faith we have peace with God" (Romans 5:1). We are already "delivered out of the power of darkness, and translated into the kingdom of God’s dear Son" (Colossians 1:13). We are already the restored, regenerated "children of God" (1 John 3:2). We are already "sealed with the Holy Spirit" as the "earnest of our inheritance" (Ephesians 1:13-14).

All the many such New Testament references add up to a magnificent certitude of ASSURANCE—an assurance of eternal salvation in Christ, and of unlimited welcome as sons of God at the throne of "the Majesty on high". Therefore we no longer limp there in prodigal’s rags, or uncertainly beg as abject aliens. We draw near with filial confidence, gratefully to appropriate what has already been guaranteed. To do so is not presumption; it is God-honouring faith with a blood-sealed warrant. The whole Hebrews epistle is written to show us that it is doubt, not faith, which is God-dishonouring. We are to "come BOLDLY to the Throne".

Such, I insist, is the true attitude of the born-again in Christ; and it alone is the approach which prepares Christian hearts to receive, through consecration and faith, the promised blessing of inwrought holiness. Yet although that attitude undoubtedly concurs with the New Testament epistles, you would scarcely think so, according to much of the "miserable-sinner" emphasis which is supposed to glorify God the more by dwelling with mournful constrictedness on our ugly sinfulness and destitute wretchedness.

Perhaps I can best exemplify by a quotation. It comes from a renowned and saintly preacher who in every dimension was a bigger and better man than I; and, therefore, simply out of ardent admiration I quote without naming him.

"Our guilt is so great that we dare not think of it. ... It crushes our minds with a perfect stupor of horror, when for a moment we try to imagine a day of judgment when we shall be judged for all the deeds that we have done in the body. Heart-beat after heart-beat, breath after breath, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, and all full of sin; all nothing but sin, from our mother’s womb to our grave." But is that the true language of the cleansed and regenerated Christian heart? "Our guilt"—but has not all our guilt been borne and removed by the great Sin-bearer? Must we keep speaking of it as though it still hangs over our heads? Is that honouring to God?

"A day of judgment. . . ."—but does not the Word say that the Christian believer "shall not come into the judgment"? Could any guarantee be clearer than John 5:24 or Romans 8:1?

"AH nothing but sin, from our mother’s womb to our grave!" What life-long hopelessness. What starless blackness of night! Even David, in his Miserere, does not indulge such dolorous extremism. Amid his bitterest gush of self-reproach he still believes, not only that a pitying Heaven will "blot out all his iniquities", but that a "clean heart" and a "right spirit" may be divinely wrought within him. Is it not a morbid mistake to think that Christian godliness is made still godlier by traipsing it round in perpetual sackcloth and ashes? Is that true to New Testament emphasis?

"All nothing but sin, from our mother’s womb to our grave!" In this depressing obsession with our vileness is there not (even though unintended) a depreciation of our Lord’s saviour-hood? Does He not "save His people from their sins"? Has He not done a saving work within us, "purifying our hearts by faith"? Alas, we are still sinners, still unworthy, and we realize it more keenly than ever; but blessed be His Name, we are "new creatures in Christ"; He has led us in many a triumph, and His "precious blood" continually "cleanseth from all sin".

"All nothing but sin, from our mother’s womb to our grave!" My deepest Christian sensibilities cry out against it, for it reflects cruelly on the dear Saviour who has transformed this heart of mine from a hovel into His sanctified shrine, and has shed the love of God within it by His Holy Spirit. Again and again my heart has been a temple of holy worship. From the very centre of my being I have loved and adored Him. From the inbreathing of His own life my soul has ascended to Him in longings and prayers and motives and intercessions and grateful responses which I know were unfeignedly sincere. But I must call them all "nothing but sin"! Unless we break free from such erring extravaganzas of "miserable sinnerism" how can we be in a fit state to hear the New Testament voices which call us, as "sons of God", to the experience of inwrought holiness? Not long ago, a very Calvinistic friend of mine strove to per­suade us that this lopsided drag of "miserable sinnerism" is a "precious doctrine" inasmuch as, by continually jagging us into a hurting sense of our shameful wickedness, it "magnifies the abounding grace of God" and begets within us "more dependence on Christ." But which of the two, in reality, "magnifies the abounding grace of God" the more—my continued floundering in sins, or my being saved out of them? Which of the two makes me the more grateful to the "abounding grace of God"—repeated pardon for hapless defeats, or imparted power bringing victories? Which of the two increases my "dependence on Christ"—"the precious doctrine" of my ugly sinnership and abasing unworthiness, or the truly Apostolic doctrine of my new sonship in Christ, and my union with Him in moral conquest?

There is a right and wrong "miserable sinner" attitude. It is the wrong which we here sincerely disapprove. May we never forget the New Testament emphasis, that the Christian belongs to the new, in Christ, rather than to the old, in Adam. It has been truly said, "The Christian belongs to what he is to become; not to what he has left behind." The same New Testament which humbles us to the dust as sinners, also calls us "saints". It says that we already are saints, positionally, in Christ, and that we are to become saints of His in our character.

Fascination with Theory

Let me add a final caveat against slavery to holiness theory. A review of the successive holiness schools and schemes during the past two hundred years shows with disturbing repetition the almost mesmeric effect which a captivating tangent can exercise over the mind. Men have mistaken theories for theorems, and novelties for certainties, sometimes with dire consequences.

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century there developed in Germany a remarkable movement which became known as Die Heiligungsbewegung, that is, "The Sanctification Movement." There was no German-Evangelical National church into which it did not penetrate. In the space of one generation it became a movement of such influence and scope as the German Protestant churches had never seen since the Reformation. In its spiritual aspects it was a German counterpart of convention movements in England. Indeed, it grew from the same origin as they did, i.e. the meteoric holiness campaign of Robert Pearsall Smith, and W. E. Boardman’s book, The Higher Christian Life.

More than any other, Theodor Jellinghaus gave complexion and safeguard to the main movement in Germany. His "Higher Life" doctrine was derived from Pearsall Smith and Boardman’s book. He himself wrote a number of books, but that which set forth the standard theology of the "Higher Life" was his massive volume, The Complete, Present Salvation Through Christ. For nearly forty years he was the earnest, gifted, trusted leader of the movement. Never did a man more diligently persevere in advo­cating the "higher life" doctrine after the Smith and Boardman distinctive pattern, with the usual teaching as to Romans 6:1-23, and the crucifixion of "our old man", and the reckoning of oneself to be "dead indeed unto sin".

Eventually, in grievous disillusionment, he felt conscience-bound publicly to renounce the teaching which he had championed so faithfully through the years. In 1912 he issued a book, Avowals About My Doctrinal Errors. What it cost him thus openly to demolish that which had been the most precious and conspicuous emphasis of his long and revered leadership, few can realise; but he had at last concluded that the fond theory was not true either to Scripture or experience. His book came as a shock to the Christian public, the more so because it was the honest recanta­tion of such an one as Jellinghaus. How far he was right or wrong, of course, is a matter of individual opinion; but Jelling­haus himself remains a sad monument to the heart-rending disillusionments which come through hallucination with specious theory.

There is an old proverb which says that some people "cannot see wood for trees". It is equally true, in this sacred concern of individual holiness, that some of us may hardly see Scripture for theories. I believe our usual theories of holiness have gone seriously astray in their particular teaching as to Romans 6:1-23, and their theoretical "two natures" in the believer, and the supposed destroying or rendering "inoperative" of the so-called "old nature" by an inward crucifixion with Christ. My conviction is, that until we disentangle holiness teaching from those popular errors we shall never recover the glad simplicities of sanctifica-tion as taught by the New Testament. Into those matters we shall probe later. Meanwhile, I do not ask that my own views be accepted on any aspect, but that we come to the teaching of Scripture with open mind, so as to learn the real meaning and know the real blessing of holiness.

Let me recapitulate: for in these days of shaken foundations and theological chaos this matter of a right approach needs all the more emphasis. There must be a right approach to the Bible as the authentic Word of God. There must be a right approach to the hereditary sin-bent in human nature—for if we are wrong as to the malady we shall be wrong as to the remedy. There must be a right approach to the meaning of regeneration, and a clear­sighted appreciation of our true Christian standing. Also, as we have just added, we must free our thinking, as far as possible, from bondage to stereotyped theory which we may hitherto have accepted and assumed to be Scriptural merely because it is con­ventional or associated with imposing names.

Among those who travel with us through these chapters it is not unlikely that some will be Eradicationists after the thorough­going Wesley pattern. Perhaps others may be Counteractionists after the earlier or present-day Keswick form of presentation. Others may be Pentecostalists holding the now characteristic concept of complete sin-expurgation through the so-named "bap­tism of the Holy Spirit". Other readers may be full-time Christian ministers—which I sincerely hope may be the case, for one of my saddest retrospects as I now look back over the past fourteen years of continuous travel in U.S.A., Canada, Britain, and else­where, is the number of earnest evangelical ministers who shy away from the subject of holiness because of the unsatisfactory theories and controversy connected with it. I ask of one and all a prayerful open-mindedness as we now get into these studies; for this matter of Christian holiness is sacred and vital above all other spiritual concerns.

Teach me, O Lord, as only Thou canst teach;

Tutor my erring mind, illume my eyes, That I, with prayerful, guided upward reach, May grasp the vital truth which sanctifies.

Come to me through the Paraclete divine;

Teach me my heavenly birthright to possess; My mind, my brain, my will, my all be Thine, And Thy suffusing life my holiness.