What Does Holiness Require

What does holiness require? I think that is the most Wesleyan way to frame the questions facing the United Methodist Church. The quest for holiness is built into our DNA.

John Wesley’s Minutes of Several Conversations served as the forerunner to the church’s Book of Discipline. One of the questions posed and answered there was this:

Q. What may we reasonably believe to be God’s design in raising up the Preachers called Methodist?
A. To reform the nation, particularly the church, and to spread scriptural holiness over the land.

Minutes of Several Conversations

In various forms, this language found its way into later versions of the Book of Discipline and remains there still in the Discipline’s historical section.

The United Methodist Church’s mission statement – To make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world – is a faint echo of Wesley’s sentiment, but there are substantial differences between the two. For many United Methodists, various conceptions of secular justice have replaced holiness as the church’s guiding vision. To modern ears, holiness sounds old fashioned, a word associated with backward forms of religion.

Early Methodism’s societies, classes, bands, and preaching circuits, however, all existed to lead Christians to lives of holiness. Methodism’s peculiar doctrine of entire sanctification could just as easily be described as the doctrine of perfect holiness. To sanctify means to make holy.

The epitome of sanctification and holiness is perfect love, but Wesleyans never divorced love from a shared commitment to behavioral expectations. The General Rules, for example, laid out specific behaviors that society members were expected to adopt or avoid.

When Wesley spoke about reforming the nation and the church by spreading scriptural holiness across the land, he was speaking from a context very different from our own. The Wesleyan movement was born in a nominally Christian nation with a national church. Wesley, however, denied that his nation was Christian in any meaningful sense. In “To Spread Scriptural Holiness Across the Land,” [Dead link] Henry Knight cites two of Wesley’s sermons, written nearly 40 years apart.

Where, I pray, do the Christians live? Which is the country, the inhabitants whereof are ‘all (thus) filled with the Holy Ghost? Who one and all have the love of God filling their hearts, and constraining them to love their neighbor as themselves? Why, then, let us confess we have never yet seen a Christian country upon the earth.

Scriptural Christianity

What manner of Christians are they [in England and France]? Are they ‘holy as he that hath called them is holy?’… is there ‘that mind in them that was also in Christ Jesus?’ And do they ‘walk as Christ also walked?’ Nay, they are as far from it as hell is from heaven!

The General Spread of the Gospel

Ever the optimist of grace, Wesley believed that the nation – all nations, in fact – could become truly Christian. If God can convert a person, why not a whole nation or even the whole world? Reforming the world begins with sanctifying the individual, but a truly holy people would affect all parts of their society: law, politics, economics, medicine, education, social relationships, and the like. The holiness of a nation’s citizens would be visible in the life of the nation.

So, what does holiness require? There can be genuine disagreement on the way of holiness, especially as how it manifests itself in the world. And even when we agree, in which circumstances do we:

  • Seek universal compliance with the force of law?
  • Commend behaviors to society as “a better way of living together”?
  • Commend behaviors to all Christians as “the way of Christ”?
  • Establish requirements for shared Christian ministry across institutional boundaries. With whom will we partner?
  • Expect Christians to whom we are closely bound to agree to a common way of holy living? This was the expectation of early Methodist societies, classes, and bands.
  • Respect the personal decisions of individual Christians who sincerely, persistently, and thoroughly seek after the ways of God?

Every Christian institution will establish behavioral boundaries for its members. The language of holiness is our native tongue. That doesn’t mean that progressives and traditionalists will come to the same conclusions, but at least they could speak the same language when talking to each other.

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