Pietism and Holiness - Part 1
R. J.Rushdoony,
In Hebrews 12:14 we read, “Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.” Our subject in this session is Sanctification, a very important and basic doctrine of scripture. The Shorter Catechism, No. 35 says, “Sanctification 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.”
What the catechism tells us is that the divine priority in sanctification, or growth in our holiness is God’s free grace. 1 Peter 1:2, which is one of the texts the catechism cites, links and grounds sanctification and God’s election and foreknowledge. Ephesians 4:24 makes clear that sanctification follows from regeneration. Moreover, in sanctification, our nature is renewed and remade in all our being after the image of God in conformity to the last Adam, Jesus Christ. The Spirit of God then leads us into the holiness, which is required of this new human race, the new humanity in Jesus Christ. We are not perfectly sanctified in this life, but we die more and more to sin by the renewing of the Holy Spirit. Our growth is in terms of obedience to the law of God.
1 John 3:4 tells us, as it defines sin, sin is the transgression of the law. There you have sin defined by scripture. 1 John 3:4. Sin is the transgression of the law. Well, holiness means, therefore, obedience to the law. It is the obedience of faith, to God’s word. This is why John Murray, in a study of sanctification, titled it Sanctification (The Law). This is the way it should be.
In a humanistic society, you will have a rebellion against the power emphasis of society, it’s in the name of something that’s just as bad, self-realization or self-fulfillment. Let’s break the power structure and give man the freedom to realize himself. Of course, wherever you had this, the power structure is ready to go along with it, because the more people become involved in self-realization, the more heedless they are of justice, and the more the power structure grows in its concentration of power. However, very much of history, this business of self-realization and self-fulfillment has had pretentious and self-righteous names. One of the most common is the rights of man, human rights. When people are talking about human rights, they’re not talking about right in the sense of right and wrong, of justice, righteousness. They’re talking about getting what’s mine, a very different fact.
Moreover, pietism is not holiness. The doctrine of sanctification, or holiness, because the two words are one and the same, they are translations in the New Testament of one and the same Greek word. Sanctification and holiness is grounded on justification and regeneration. Holiness stands on God’s objective work in Jesus Christ, whereas pietism rests on man’s subjective experience. Thus, there is a world of difference between holiness and pietism. In holiness, I rest wholly on Christ’s work, and I grow in terms of him and his word. In pietism, the emphasis is on my subjective experience and the cultivation of a higher sensitivity of feeling. Pietism, from the beginning, in the 18th century, stressed man’s experience. It down-graded the doctrine of imputation for experience. Imputation, of course, has reference to the imputation of our sins to Christ, the objective work of Christ, but what takes place outside of man does not interest the pietist, so that doctrine of scripture that deal with something beyond human experience, such as the doctrine of the trinity, the atonement, justification, creation, and so on, do not interest the pietist. Wherever we turn, we see pietism ready to surrender one doctrine of scripture after another as not important. We don’t want to fight about the non-essentials. The essentials are those that are experiential to them.
Now, pietism shifts thus the orientation from Christ’s work to man’s experience. From the glory of God to the salvation of man, and the result is a man-centered faith. The word piety appears only twice in the Bible. In 1 Timothy 5:4, it has reference to the duty of children and grandchildren towards elders. It means to show respect. It is used in Acts 17:23, but translated into English as “worship,” and this is its meaning there. The English word “piety” has a Latin derivation. It has an alien meaning to the biblical doctrine of sanctification and holiness. What God requires of us is holiness, not pietism. Holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord. We are told that we must not fail of the grace of God. We must not fail of the grace of God, as Hebrews goes on, that is, fall short of the grace which is required of us, and that grace manifests itself as peace, not bitterness. An obedience to God’s law, not fornication. Nor being profane as was Esau, and profanity means to be outside of the temple, literally, or outside of the Lord. Holiness is separation to God and active obedience by faith to his every word.
Too often, holiness, or sanctification, is defined as mere negation. The same is true of separation, a doctrine which is very closely related. When people talk about separation, too often they mean you separate yourself from a number of things. You don’t do this, and you don’t do that, you don’t do that. Now, it’s true that holiness, separation, mean among other things, such a separation, but in the doctrine of holiness, the first separation, the basic separation is within us. It’s from the old man, the old Adam in us, from our sin, unto Jesus Christ, the new man. From our old nature to our new nature, that’s at the heart of holiness and separation. Now, that separation then leads to an outer separation, but if we begin by speaking of holiness and separation in terms of things, we reverse the doctrine in its order, from external to internal, rather than from internal to outer. That leads to a very serious warping of the doctrine.
Moreover, when we stress the outer things, we reduce the doctrine of separation and holiness to mere negation. That is, separation from evil. Whenever you have this kind of doctrine, of holiness and separation, the result is the revival of an emphasis, whether it’s called that or not, on asceticism. You don’t do certain things. You develop an ascetic temperament, but the heart of holiness is a separation from the old man and the humanity of Adam to the new man and the new humanity of Jesus Christ. To be holy therefore, is to be, because we are a new creation in Jesus Christ, dedicated to his service and to obedience to him. It means, moreover, that because we live in terms of the new man, when we look out at the world, we see it as God’s world, and I’m going to use a simple illustration that is not mine.