The soul of soteriology.
The soul of soteriology.
Unraveling the threads of sanctification past and present.
One of the more significant debates that has embroiled theologians throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has been over the doctrine of sanctification or how sinners are brought into conformity to the image of God the Son through the agency and ministry of God the Holy Spirit. The ecclesiological landscape is saturated by an assortment of schemes for Spirit-empowered Christian living, many of which tend to inject a measure of complexity to one’s faith ironically by bringing renewed focus to its pragmatic results. This paradox of Christian confusion is at the crux of both the ecclesiological recalibration and the doctrinal revisionism that has shaped much of the modern era. From Finneyite revivalism to Keswickian “higher life” spirituality to Fosdick’s conception of a “social gospel,” the notion of what it looks like for a sinner to be regenerated by the Holy Spirit underwent a series of reassessments with which evangelicals are still grappling today, for good or ill.
Charles Finney’s anthropocentric understanding of salvation and spiritual revival was, in some ways, motivated by a well-meaning concern for the apparent dearth of religiosity in his day. Insofar as those within the church remained affable to their spiritual inertia, the rest of the world remained unchanged. “If the church,” Finney once boomed, “would do all her duty, she would soon complete the triumph of religion in the world” (258). Consequently, the resultant effect of Finney’s paradigmatic pragmatism served to influence future generations of theologians with the impulse that conformity to the image of God’s Son (Rom. 8:29) was a matter of willpower and the spiritual fortitude to “take decisive action,” as Owen Strachan puts it (323–24), in one’s “pursuit of holiness” and the “victorious higher life” Christianity offers. This in no small way led to the development of the “Holiness” and “social gospel” movements, each of which stressed the empirical results of faith at the expense of doctrinal fidelity.
As Strachan points out, Charles Finney’s revivalism “tinkered with the mechanics of the cross, and thus tinkered with the reality of salvation more broadly” (323). Instead of a gospel that was centered on the objective work of Christ on behalf of sinners, Finney emphasized a view of the cross that recast Christ’s sacrifice as the mere demonstration of God’s love and benevolence for the world. In so doing, the soul of Protestant soteriology was displaced from its substitutionary moorings in the hopes of incentivizing moral action. But insofar as the pragmatic byproducts of the gospel are attributed to human efforts as opposed to the ongoing presence and ministry of the Spirit, the biblical understanding of salvation and sanctification is lost. “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you,” the apostle Paul says in his letter to the Romans, “he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom. 8:11). Accordingly, sanctification and salvation are commensurate gifts of grace, by which the work of God’s Son is perpetually applied to God’s saints through the work of God’s Spirit.
Works cited:
Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (London: Thomas Tegg, 1839).
Owen Strachan, “The Holy Spirit and Salvation,” Historical Theology for the Church, edited by Jason G. Duesing and Nathan A. Finn (Nashville, TN: B&H Academic, 2021).