Wesleyan Theological Journal Volume 22, Number 2, Fall, 1987 Biblical Foundations for the “Secondness” of Entire Sanctification Frank G. Carver 7 The Use of Hab. 2:4 in Rom. 1:17: Some Hermeneutical and Theological Considerations David S. Dockery 24 Piety and Poverty in James Robert Lee Williams 37 Predestination as Temporal Only J. Kenneth Grider 56 Original Sin as Privation Leon O. Hynson 65 The Relation of the Holy Spirit to the Self Richard S. Taylor 84 “Dialogue” Within a Tradition: John Wesley and Gregory of Nyssa Discuss Christian Perfection John G. Merritt 92 Tongues-Speaking and the Wesleyan-Holiness Quest for Assurance of Sanctification Charles Edwin Jones 117 Book Reviews 125 Editor Alex R. G. Deasley BIBLICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE “SECONDNESS” OF ENTIRE SANCTIFICATION by Frank G. Carver Introduction This seminar focuses on the issue of preaching and teaching two works of grace in a Biblically authentic way. My concern is anchored in my own history. My background is old-fashioned Methodist. I was nurtured on the knees of a praying mother, my spiritual sensibilities were impacted by the presence of a Methodist preacher grandfather, and I was early exposed to the interdenominational holiness camp meeting. My undergraduate years were spent at Taylor University with its holiness heritage, and my call to the ministry led me eventually into the Church of the Nazarene and to Nazarene Theological Seminary. Sometime during those years of transition from adolescence to adulthood an awareness was creeping over me that, although I was fully convinced of the truth of my evangelical and Wesleyan heritage, I was becoming more and more uneasy about the manner in which I heard Scripture used to support and proclaim the holiness message. This was so even though I possessed no criteria at that time by which to judge adequately. I was left with a haunting sense of incredibility about the state of what I now label “holiness hermeneutics.” This feeling was not dissipated by my training at Nazarene Theological Seminary where my knowledge of the Bible was greatly enhanced, but somehow very little of interpretive method penetrated my approach to Scripture. After two years of pastoring a home mission church in western Nebraska I felt called in 1956 to begin graduate studies leading toward a Ph.D. in New Testament studies and to prepare for a teaching career in the Church. As I did so, an inner driving motivation was to grasp the tools and methods necessary for the task of finding out for myself the “how” of the Scriptural legitimacy for the distinctives of the Wesleyan message. All of my academic life I have been at this task of discovering the Biblical foundations of the holiness message for the needs of my own heart and ministry. This quest has permeated my research, my teaching, my writing, and my proclamation. Out of my studies in the Wesleyan heritage 1 and in the whole of Scripture has come a foundational presupposition. It has become unquestionably evident that in terms of our Protestant commitment to the primacy of Scripture in religious authority, the Biblical use of the word “Holiness” can function as a synonym for integrity. There is a profound sense in which holiness is to God what integrity is to man. Old Testament theologians tell us that the holiness of God in its first definition refers to the inner secret of His being, and then second to the revelation in history of His moral character or ethical attributes. We are holy first as brought by redemptive action into the sphere of God‟s life and we are holy second as our lives in response take on the moral character of the God who has revealed Himself in redemptive history. 2 So God‟s holiness is “his utter self consistency,” 3 as Wilbur T. Dayton puts it, and when we become involved in the communication of holiness to man, integrity is a necessary characterization of the hermeneutical process that is appropriate to its object. Holiness as integrity demands that we let the Biblical text speak for itself and on its own terms, and that we are compelled to handle the text with all the honesty, objectivity, and openness of which we are capable. Manipulation, even of a Biblical text, does not become holiness! Holiness proclamation is by definition Biblical proclamation. To proclaim the Biblical message is to proclaim the holiness message! Wesley appears to agree: “I found it in the oracles of God, in the Old and New Testament when I read them with no other view or desire, but to save my own soul.” 4 His own definition of what he was teaching was more often than not expressed in the language of Scripture itself as in his tract, “The Character of a Methodist.” 5 The true Wesleyan is not afraid of the Biblical text. By definition as Wesleyans we are “Biblical” first and “Wesleyans” second; to proceed any differently borders on ideological idolatry. For us as convinced Wesleyans Biblical preaching is holiness preaching! If we do not believe that to proclaim the Scriptures with contextual integrity is to do justice to the message of holiness, then we have no right to the phrase, “Scriptural holiness,” and further we have no authority for that message apart from the subjectivity of a religious experience and the peculiarities of a scholastically transformed tradition. A second basic presupposition from which we work is the general or comprehensive use of the language of the holy in the Old and New Testaments. Holiness in the Old Testament is first of all a religious concept. It involves a relation of exclusive allegiance to the God who alone is holy per se. In the Old Testament holiness is secondly a developing ethical concept. It involves a response in life to God that is exclusive of all that is contrary to the above allegiance to Him, exclusive of all that is contrary to the revealed moral character of the Holy One to whom we exclusively belong. As W. T. Purkiser observes, in the Old Testament “references to the holiness of persons fall into two major classes.” One “is basically cultic or ceremonial: the priestly concept of holiness,” and the other “involves ideas of moral goodness or righteousness: the prophetic concept of holiness.”6 8 In these two complementary streams the sanctification language flows out of the Old Testament into the New. The priestly or cultic stream appears primarily in the Epistle to the Hebrews and infrequently in the Johannine writings. At times it characterizes Paul‟s usage as well as some of the other occurrences in the New Testament. The first thrust of this priestly stream is relational, to be authentically related to the Holy God present in Jesus. The prophetic stream appears primarily in Paul, particularly in Romans where he seeks to prevent his teaching on justification by faith from being perverted in such a way as to license sin. 7 Paul‟s concept of sanctification serves primarily to keep his concept of justification in balance. The first thrust of this prophetic stream is thus ethical, a life consistent with the character of the Holy One revealed in Jesus. From this perspective it is obvious that sanctification as a “second” work of grace cannot neatly and uncritically be identified with every use of the “sanctification” or “holy” language in either the Old or New Testaments. It is interesting that Wesley noted this explicitly in relation to Paul‟s use of the sanctification language: (2) That the term sanctified, is continually applied by St. Paul, to all that were justified. (3) That by this term alone, he rarely, if ever, means, “saved from all sin.” (4) That, consequently, it is not proper to use it in that sense, without adding the word wholly, entirely, or the like. 8 Our present attempt, therefore, is not one of the detailed exegesis of the classic passages that use the sanctification language, as productive and enjoyable as that might be. Instead we will suggest, in a “sharing” rather than a “proving” mode, some approaches and Biblical theological perspectives that I have found helpful and illuminating in my own personal quest. The first is the primary principle of my own working “holiness hermeneutic,” 9 which I like to describe as I. From the Privilege of Grace to the Crisis of Faith The Biblical presentation of holiness as applied to persons is first of all a quality of life flowing from the grace of God in Jesus Christ. Within this as we begin to develop a “Biblical theology of holiness” a hierarchy of concern emerges from the reading of the literature. As I read my Bible I find it concerned first with holiness as a grace relationship to God in Jesus Christ, secondly with holiness as an ethic or response in life enabled by the Holy Spirit consistent with the nature of that relationship, and only thirdly with a chronology of faith-experience through which one enters into a perfected, or thorough-going grace relationship to the Christ of the cross and the resurrection. The nature of the Biblical materials demands that we work both in interpretation and in application primarily from the nature and privilege of the life in grace to the experiential need of some kind of “faith-crisis” for its full realization in day-to-day discipleship. The primary necessity for the “crisis” flows from the gospel‟s presentation of and call to the life of grace, the holy life. As I read his A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, this, I am convinced, was the way of Wesley. His “front line” presentation of “scriptural 9 holiness” was to stress the standard and privilege of the holy life and that often in the language of Scripture itself.