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The Sanctification Gap
By Richard Lovelace

"There seemed to be a sanctification gap among Protestants, a peculiar conspiracy somehow to mislay the tradition of spiritual growth and to concentrate on side issues. 'Liberals' sought to commend Christianity to its cultured despisers, and to apply its ethics to social concerns. 'Conservatives' specialized in personal witnessing activity, sermons on John 3:16, and theological discussion of eschatological subtleties."

IN 1952, when I was twenty-one and still an atheist studying philosophy at Yale, I picked up a copy of Thomas Merton's Seven-Storey Mountain and began to read about the author's pilgrimage from secular intellectualism to the Trappist Order. As I read, I sensed the reality of the presence of God. It suddenly became clear that behind all the beauty and order in nature and human art there lay a divine creative Wisdom. In Merton's metaphor, it seemed as though a window in the depths of my consciousness had suddenly been opened, allowing a blazing glimpse of new orders of existence. My mind was suddenly filled with streams of thinking which re-ordered my understanding around the central fact of God, streams which I knew were not rising from any source within my natural awareness, which now seemed a desert by comparison. Immediately, irrevocably, I was no longer an atheist. If someone had spoken to me about a "leap of faith," I would not have known what they were talking about, for there was no gap to leap. I felt that I was in contact with God.

I

It was natural that I should plan to become a Trappist, and immerse myself during the next year in John of the Cross and other mystical authorities. Liberal Protestant friends delighted in my new-found theism and sought to persuade me away from the dangers of the Catholic sys-

Richard Lovelace is Associate Professor of Church History at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Massachusetts. Majoring in philosophy at Yale University, he did theological studies at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and at Princeton. Dr. Lovelace indicates that he wrote this article with self-styled "evangelicals" in mind, but he thinks and we agree--that his concern applies to all of us, whatever our label.

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tem, but I did not take them seriously. The Roman Church was the sole possessor of a great tradition of doctors of the spiritual life, physicians of the soul who walked in the light of God's presence. As for Protestant theology, it seemed as supernatural as a Sears Roebuck Catalogue.

I did take seriously one friend's injunction to read the Bible, since that was part of the regular Catholic apparatus; and that led to massive change. Suddenly I became aware of an unbridgeable gulf of sin and guilt which lay between me and the God who was formerly close at hand. Few of my friends seemed to understand my problems; if they had heard of Luther's struggles, they did not connect them with mine. I began to beat the bushes for spiritual counselors who might know the way out of this condition, but all my confidants seemed to assume that I was caught in a pathological delusion. Twice I made a full life's confession to priests, men who did not seem to know much about John of the Cross, and was warned against scrupulosity and advised to follow a Rule of Prayer. Once I sought help in a fundamentalist church, but the apparent shallowness of the activity, the singing, the preaching, and the absence of any sense of luminosity in the people, discouraged me from seeking counsel.

Shortly after this, I did find evangelical Protestants who understood the dynamics of spiritual life, whose spirituality commanded my respect as much or more than the Catholic mystics formerly had, and who had biblical answers for the troubles in my soul. Later I came to realize that they were the historical result of a transformation of "deeper life" teaching by Reformed theology, drawing upon a tradition of Protestant spirituality which went all the way back to the English Puritans. In seminary and graduate school, I pursued the subject of "the history of Christian experience," studying first the Puritans, and then the great streams of evangelical awakening springing from Puritanism and German pietism, especially that greatest of all Protestant theologians of the spiritual life, Jonathan Edwards. I was amazed to find that most Protestants were ignorant of the body of tradition which seemed to me to be the living heart of the Reformation heritage. There was not even a name among Protestants for the sort of thing I wanted to study; Catholics had one -"Spiritual Theology" -but older Protestant scholars, except in the heart of the firestorms of revival, did not seem aware that there was something else to the faith besides catalogues of doctrines and institutions. But there was an increasing hunger for my subject among the scholars of this century, and more and more work building up, often among authors who were not card-carrying evangelicals. It occurred to me that the success of neo-orthodox theology in capturing the center of the church, and the inexplicable failure of

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Reformed orthodoxy in holding its own, might be due in part to the growing interest of the former in Christian experience, and the relative neglect of this by the latter.

What was true among scholars seemed doubly true in the life of the church. There seemed to be a sanctification gap among Protestants, a peculiar conspiracy somehow to mislay the tradition of spiritual growth and to concentrate on side issues. "Liberals" sought to commend Christianity to its cultured despisers, and to apply its ethics to social concerns. "Conservatives" specialized in personal witnessing activity, sermons on John 3:16, and theological discussion of eschatological subtleties. Other sectors in the church argued over issues of real substance, but with such rancor or confusion that one wished that some attention had first been given to sanctification.

Not that the gap was not being filled in some quarters. Enclaves of "deeper life" teaching in various conferences sought to hang on to the revival tradition. Pentecostalism, and later the charismatic movement, offered models of vital Christian life through which many satisfied their hunger for communion with God. Free-style movements stressing prayer or Christian experience sought to transcend the theological battle-lines in the church. Psychedelic experimentation in the youth culture during the 1960's seemed to be another inarticulate expression of the parching thirst for spiritual reality which young people were not finding in standard-brand churches. On the brink of the 1970's, as denominational leaders moved more and more toward secular theologies and ministries of social relevance, the secular city itself seemed about to pass the church going in the opposite direction, searching for oases of living water in the deserts of technology.

II

If the sanctification gap does exist within Protestantism-and the reader may at least grant that it does in sectors of the church other than his own-why has such a thing developed? We can answer this simply by saying that there is always a conspiracy against spiritual power in the church on the part of the world, the flesh, and the Devil. And that is true. Francis Bacon once remarked that for some reason all that is weighty in history sinks to the bottom of the river where it cannot be seen; while straw and stubble rise to the top. It is also true, however, that the historical development of Protestant evangelicalism has predisposed it to lose sight of the central importance of sanctification.

The English Puritans, concerned that the Reformation had been only a "half-Reformation" ("We have reformed our doctrines, but not our lives," says one source from the early seventeenth century), introduced into Protestantism a tremendous stress on initial con-

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version. Their object was to counter dead orthodoxy, mere "notional" or historical faith, by the doctrine of regeneration. Unfortunately, as the result of a rational manipulation of Reformed doctrine which went far beyond Calvin, they loaded into the conversion experience so much of the developed content of Christian growth that in effect they required a man to be a practicing mystic before he could be counted a Christian. Many Puritans insisted on telling the subjects of their evangelism that they were unable to turn to God without the sensible assistance of grace, and that the sovereign God might well refuse the non-elect entrance no matter how hard they sought. Not simply faith in the promises of God's general offer of salvation, but mystical assurance of one's individual acceptance with God, was therefore necessary for valid church-membership.

This approach to evangelism, which might keep the potential convert striving for months in a maze of subjective difficulties before he reached assurance, produced some great saints, men who were in a sense "pre-sanctified," searched out in the deepest aspects of their lives and transformed. But while this net caught a few whales, it must have discouraged thousands of smaller fish. Some Christians, Dwight L. Moody for instance, start poorly in the First Act of the Christian life, but come to real magnificence in the Third or Fourth. It is not surprising that although Jonathan Edwards, in the revivals of the 1730's and 1740's, continued the Puritan teaching on conversion, most of Christendom was skeptical by the end of the eighteenth century. The popular jingle summed up the perplexities of hyper-Calvinism fairly well: "You can, but you can't; you will, but you won't; you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't."

The nineteenth century heirs of the revival tradition modified the Puritan system by allowing easier standards of initial conversion. "I wish I could give you my clinical theology," said Lyman Beecher. "I have relieved people without number out of the sloughs of high Calvinism." The ultimate simplification, of course, was Finney's call for instantaneous commitment and instantaneous conversion, with no waiting period to allow election to set in. The nineteenth century revival leaders were like mechanics examining an engine in which the power-train has somehow been attached to the carburetor, the whole of sanctification inserted into conversion. Seeing that there was no biblical warrant for this, and over-reacting from hyper-Calvinism into Arminianism, they proceeded to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. They disconnected sanctification from conversion, and made it easy for men to enter the kingdom on the basis of simple faith and initial repentance. Having unloaded conversion, however, they failed to reinsert sanctification in its proper place in the development

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of the Christian life, and left the engine with no power-train at all. The divorce from Puritanism was effected, and the sanctification gap was born.

III

Something, of course, bad to be done to make the converts grow; some explanation bad to be given as to why the new believers, no longer pre-sanctified, often proved so fruitless. Finney, who had experienced a post-conversion "baptism" of the Holy Spirit empowering him for service, adapted the two-stage model of the Christian life proposed first by John Wesley in his theory of Christian perfection. If being born again once would not entirely equip the convert, a second experience would surely solve the problem. D. L. Moody, fortunately uninfluenced by most of Finney's theology, fell in with the same two-stage theory, and he and R. A. Torrey wrote many pamphlets urging "the Baptism" of ordinary Christians. Meanwhile in England, the Keswick Conference was developing an alternate system of principles of continuous (n-stage) sanctification, and this "deeper life" tradition ultimately captured a place in Moodyan revivalism in America. Beginning in 1901, however, the more spectacular development of the Finney-Moody concept of the baptism of the Spirit began to flower into modem Pentecostalism. This left some of the American church filling the sanctification gap with a Pentecostal experience, and some of it adhering to the strain of progressive sanctification developed in the deeper life movements. But in far too many fundamentalist churches, little emphasis on sanctification remained at all, except in terms of adherence to a cultic legal code of "separation" inherited from the Puritans. What was best in Puritan mysticism was forgotten, and what was most questionable was kept.

It is hard to overestimate the damage done through this traumatic loss of bearings in the Protestant tradition. One effect was the division of sensibility in the churches since the time of Moody, in which socially concerned churchmen have found themselves pitted against fundamentalists concerned mainly for conversion and code moralism. Walter Rauschenbusch, for example, was rooted in the older tradition of experiential Christianity, but was forced to abandon it for a Ritschlin an theological model because the current revivalism bad short-circuited social concern by neglecting sanctification. It is too much to say that this rift would not have occurred had there been no sanctification gap. But at least there would have been less excuse for it, if the evangelical church had been pursuing Christian growth, rooting out pride, race prejudice, covetous immersion in affluence, and all the deeper forms of sin which easily hide beneath a cover of Pharisaic re-

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spectability. After all, the major argument many Protestant liberals have against "supernatural conversion experiences" is the distinctly natural lives led by many "born-again" congregations. The disintegration of D. L. Moody's followers into divergent parties of fundamentalists and liberals was partly due to a credibility gap between older evangelicals and younger leaders, induced by the elders' neglect or abuse of sanctification.

IV

What can be done about the sanctification gap? The first thing is simply to see that it is there, and this necessity is particularly incumbent upon the "evangelical" sector of Protestantism. Evangelicals can retool, tune up, and de-bug their tradition endlessly in pursuit of an American version of aggiornamento; but unless there is a deepening in the heart of their faith, new methods and new masks are not going to help much. Evangelism-in-depth and two-by-two house evangelism can expand the trade routes of the gospel outside our church walls. but unless what we export is more than a two-dimensional caricature of Christian spirituality, we will not overcome the credibility gap among consumers.

A second step must be the forging of a valid biblical model of spiritual life for Christians in the late twentieth century. We must restudy the Scriptures for this, and the great Catholic mystical tradition, and subsequent movements. I am personally convinced that this must be along the lines of the Reformed doctrine of progressive sanctification (n-stage rather than 2- or 3-stage growth) rather than the simpler model employed by many Pentecostals. "The vigor and power of the spiritual life," says John Owen, "depend upon the mortification of sin." "Sanctification," says the Westminster Shorter Catechism, "is the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness." This presupposes that those areas of life in which we are still walking in death, caught in complexes of sin which unconsciously resist and are at enmity with God, must be brought into the light by the searching application of the Word, and put to death and raised anew by the transforming power of the Spirit. It assumes also that both the inner life and the practical activity of the believer must be under continuous renewal. The vitality of awakening-preaching has always come from its keenness in penetrating defense-mechanisms, uncovering hidden sin, and leading men and women (Christians and unbelievers alike) to repentance. It is this kind of prophetic preaching and counseling which can bring renewal again today.

But we cannot be content merely to move men and women once more into obedience to cultic legal codes. To maintain their

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spiritual vigor and to carry out their mission properly, Christians must be removed from the training-devices of legalism and allowed to walk as men liberated by the work of the cross, freed from human regulations and entrusted to the communion of the Holy Spirit, guiding the believer through the application of biblical principles. This kind of renewal can free the laity for social concern as well as personal demonstrations of Christian love. The mobilization of the laity for Christian social action is a complex matter, and much involved with secular re-education and doctrinal reformulation. But the history of the church in eras of evangelical awakening, when the experience of sanctification released the energies in slumbering congregations and transformed societies, indicates that if the sanctification gap is closed, the distance between evangelicals and liberal activists can be reduced. We need to remember that the proponents of sanctification in the evangelical tradition (the Log College men, Spener and Francke in Germany, Wilberforce and his companions in England, and Finney in America) were the vanguard of social change in their situations.

A third step involves a recognition by contemporary evangelicals of the explosive heritage of spiritual renewal which lies behind them in the eras of revival, and the reassumption of this identity. The pan-denominational consensus which lies behind current evangelicalism was forged in the aggressive revivalist ecumenism of Zinzendorf, in the hundred-year prayer meeting at Herrnhut for the renewal of world Christendom, and in the outpourings of the Holy Spirit which took place through the late nineteenth century in the western churches and in foreign missions. But compared to these renewal movements, modem evangelicalism is in danger of becoming a tame lecture-circuit, a kind of sanctified show-business. Here is where Pentecostals and charismatics reflect the authentic tradition of Protestant renewal. When they commence a venture, it is with hours of prayer, while with the rest of us it is often with hours of talk and organization. The result is often that the charismatics achieve supernatural (if somewhat disorganized) results, while others obtain merely what is organizable. Since the work of the Holy Spirit in personal lives is intimately related to mission, it is unlikely that we can close the sanctification gap until we approach our mission in this dangerous age with the same fear and trembling, the same prayer to be endued with power from on high, that characterized the first apostles. My prayer is that this urgency will return to the evangelical sector of the church today, and my confidence is that this is already occurring.