Thoughts on Sanctification: There are some theological ideas we question because they are unfamiliar to us. Others are much harder to question precisely because they have become so familiar that we no longer realize we are assuming them. I suspect sanctification may be one of those subjects for me. John Gill, in A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, distinguishes between the sanctification of the elect in Christ and an inward sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in the believer. The first concerns what the elect are in Christ representatively and federally; the second concerns what is wrought within them – the new heart, the new man, spiritual principles, implanted graces, and inward holiness. John Owen speaks in the same broad theological tradition, treating sanctification as the Spirit’s creation and preservation of an inward principle or habit of holiness from which spiritual acts and obedience proceed.
“And our first assertion is, that in the sanctification of believers, the Holy Ghost doth work in them, in their whole souls, their minds, wills, and affections, a gracious, supernatural habit, principle, and disposition of living unto God; wherein the substance or essence, the life and being, of holiness doth consist. This is that spirit which is born of the Spirit, that new creature, that new and divine nature which is wrought in them, and whereof they are made partakers.” John Owen, Pneumatologia: Book 3, Chapter 6.
S. E. Pierce, another favorite author of mine, likewise uses this familiar language of inward spiritual life and grace: “That the believer is the child and Son of God appears from his being a partaker of the Spirit of God, who has given him a new nature, and a new understanding, that he might know him that is true, and find, and feel that he is in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ.” Samuel Eyles Pierce.
Nothing particularly controversial there. In fact, that is the point. This is the standard view. Open almost any substantial treatment of sanctification – Reformed, Calvinistic, Arminian, or otherwise – and you will find some version of the same framework, usually with page after page of Scripture marshalled in support of it. It becomes so familiar that eventually we stop noticing that we are working within a theological framework at all. It simply becomes the way we read the passages.
And I was no exception. If anything, the very familiarity of this language made it feel almost self-evident to me. Their language became my language because, while I had always understood sanctification as complete in Christ, I also accepted this familiar account of an inward sanctifying work of the Spirit. New nature. New man. New heart. New spiritual principles. Graces implanted within the soul by the Holy Spirit. That second part of the framework had simply become the way I understood what the Spirit was said to work within the believer.
These are not questions that suddenly occurred to me while reading Gill or Owen. In one form or another, I have been circling around them for quite a while. Over the past couple of years I have found myself reconsidering some of the language I had long taken for granted – the “new nature,” the “new man,” the “new heart,” even the way we sometimes speak of the new birth itself. I have increasingly wondered whether we have taken biblical expressions describing the life God gives, our union with Christ, and the work of His Spirit, and turned them into a kind of inward spiritual anatomy that Scripture itself never quite lays out in that way. I certainly do not pretend to have all of this settled. In fact, this is probably only the beginning of trying to look more carefully at a framework I have lived with for most of my Christian life. For now, I simply want to open the door a little and begin considering some of these things more closely, with the hope of returning to them along the way, the Lord willing. MPJ