The Centrality of Holiness to Christian Faith: Why Holiness Has Become Irrelevant in Postmodern Religion

The greatest dangers to evangelical faith, I believe, lie as much in what we do know as in what we don’t. They lie not only in the doctrinal fog represented on many a church pew each Sunday but also in the great truths of Christian faith which are professed on those same pews but which, nonetheless, now lie dormant. It is, then, the problem of weightlessness that troubles me, the fact that truths which are owned—like the majesty of God, his love, his holiness, and his work of giving us an inspired Scripture—are losing their power to rearrange our lives and may even inoculate us against moral and spiritual correction.

This is but a particular case of a more general problem. The general problem is that God, in this deeply secularized culture, is now inconsequential for how life is actually lived. He is irrelevant to its essential dilemmas and its endless bafflements. Even the “oh, my God!” exclamations that pepper so many conversations are themselves meaningless and largely unnoticed. The difference, though, is that those who are secular do not profess that God is anywhere but on the periphery of their internal radar but in the Church we are declaring that he is at its center. And when, in this circumstance, it turns out that he is not then the salt of his character loses its saliency in the life of the Church, a fact which is then compounded by the Church’s blindness to what has happened.

I blundered onto this problem almost inadvertently. Like so many other people I had had the sense that the ground was moving beneath the evangelical world beginning some time in the 1970’s. Initially, this was just an uneasy sense. In 1989, however, I was the recipient of an extraordinarily generous grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts which sprang me loose to ponder this question in a more deliberate way. The result was my book, No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? which came out in 1993. I did not know it at the time but that grant had, in fact, launched me on a trajectory for this book needed to be followed by a second which came out in 1994, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams. And now, in 1998, the third volume is appearing and is entitled Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church must Recover its Moral Vision. One way or another, though, each of these books is concerned with truth’s lost saliency in the life of the Church today.

In this essay, I want to juxtapose what I wrote about the holiness of God in God in the Wasteland with what I have done in Losing Our Virtue. This last book is examining how our moral culture has worn very thin in society. It is asking what happens in the Church when its own virtue becomes as thin as that in society? What does Christian faith mean when we can no longer speak meaningfully of sin? And what happens to the reality of God, to God as holy, when our understanding of moral absolutes has gone? What it means, of course, is that God’s holiness becomes inconsequential and our virtue correspondingly becomes empty. However, we need to understand the dynamics at work here far better than we do. In short, we need to understand why holiness has become irrelevant. So, first, I want to consider briefly holiness in God and then, second, I want to ask what happens to our understanding of that holiness when we live in a society which has been morally gutted and, as a consequence, has replaced the older moral universe which we once inhabited by one that is dominantly therapeutic.

The Holy

What the holiness of God means is rather clear; it is what it means to us that is problematic and obscure. After all, do we really knit our brows and cock our heads when we read David’s exhortation to “extol the Lord our God” for “the Lord our God is holy” (Ps. 99:9)? Is it a mystery as to what David had in mind? And do we wonder why Jesus names his father “Holy “ in the great prayer in Jn. 17? Or that when the curtain is pulled aside and we glimpse the worship of heaven, the words in which God is worshipped are these: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty who was and is and is to come” (Rev. 4:8).

The holiness of God we know is his absolute purity, his incomparable goodness. It is all that is in God that stands over against all that is wrong, bent, fallen, broken, and corrupted in our world. Yet his holiness is more positive then negative, more active than reactive. It is God, going out in all his moral excellence to do his work. It is this that Ananias and Sapphira learned the hard way (Acts 5:1-11); it is this that the writer to the Hebrews had in mind when he said that “it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb.10:31); and it is this which was most profoundly exegeted for us in the Cry of Dereliction at the Cross.

God’s holiness emerged in two lines of thought in the Old Testament. In the first, God was revealed as being elevated, exalted, and lifted up; in the second, we are given the reason for this. It is because of his burning purity that he is separate from us, cut off from us, and lifted up over us. When Isaiah saw God “high and lifted up” (Is. 6:1), he knew himself to be a dead man. Indeed, those who know most about God are those upon whom the sentence of death is felt most acutely. When Luther offered up his first Mass, prior to his understanding of the doctrine of justification, he shook like a leaf at the approach of the Holy. He could barely complete his sentences so weak had he become. And in a number of places in his works there are poignant reminiscences of these earlier days when, as he put it, he used to tremble and turn pale at the name of Christ. His sense of God’s holiness was deep and despairing and afterwards his sense of gratitude because of Christ’s Cross was correspondingly breathless and ecstatic.

I wonder if we moderns can even enter into Luther’s experience, so remote have we become from the moral world which he inhabited. That mental world has been replaced by one which is, for us, psychological. In a moral world, people believe; in a therapeutic world, they feel. In the one there is a moral texture to life and in the other there is not. In the former, people therefore seek salvation; in the latter, they merely seek to be inwardly relieved and pleased. Today, we have churches filled with the nicest people who know nothing of the soul’s breathless wonder in the presence of God’s grace but who are, nevertheless, intent upon feeling right about themselves and their world. It is this transition from a moral reality, at the center of which is God’s holiness, to a therapeutic world, at the center of which are our feelings and intuitions, which now frames our understanding of ourselves, of reality, and of Christian faith. It is this which we must now explore.

The Therapeutic

The transition from the older world which we once inhabited culturally to the newer one in which we now find ourselves today has taken place through four major shifts in our thinking in the twentieth century, each of which feeds into the others. These I have developed more fully in Losing Our Virtue and can only summarize here.

First, we have moved from thinking about virtues to thinking about values. Virtues, last century, were the aspects of good character which people believed should be cultivated. Whether in the traditional form—wisdom, courage, self-control, justice—or in the more explicitly Christian form produced by the Holy Spirit of say honesty, kindness, and compassion, virtues made up the essence of the Good. They were absolutes. They were the marks of desirable character that people believed were norms for all. The transition from this moral order to our psychological world has therefore seen the Good eclipsed, even in our understanding, and replaced simply by private preference. With 67% of Americans no longer believing in moral absolutes, and with American society drowning in its own individualism, values are simply what is personal, desirable or important. One person’s values may be entirely different from another’s. In short, virtues have now been replaced by values.

Second, we now see personality as more important—and certainly more saleable—than character. Last century, when the virtues were prominent in peoples’ discussions, and central to their vision of what life was about, character was preeminent and personality as we think of it today was unknown. This was to be one of the creations of the twentieth century. In fact, the first sign of things to come was the sudden shift of interest in the advice manuals as the century turned. They had formerly dwelled on character and its functions—citizenship, duty, morals, manners, integrity—but now personality came into focus and words like charming, dynamic, exciting, stunning, magnetic, forceful, and creative began to describe the personalities which were most desirable. Thus it was that the self-sacrifice of the old, which was a function of character, was replaced by the self-realization of the new. This shift was given a visible embodiment in 1936 when the nation’s imagination was captured by Dale Carnage’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. This book really took the techniques which traveling salesmen had perfected in using their personalities to clinch sales deals and applied these to all of life. It was the first major piece in what has become a floodtide of self-help literature and it was a clear signpost to the new thinking.

This literature rode the wave of the third major change which occurred. It is the shift from thinking about nature to thinking about self. Human nature has been variously described, but common to all of these descriptions has been the thought that whatever it is it is common to all people. In its Christian version, human nature has been understood in terms of the imago Dei. It is the belief that despite the particularities of age, gender, or ethnicity, of place, culture, or civilization, and regardless of the different gifts that are possessed and the occupation which is followed, human nature and sin remain essentially the same the world over. If this were not so, the Christian gospel would be different in the first century from what it is now, different in Africa from what it is in Asia. The fact that there is only one gospel, applicable to all people, in all times, and all places means that the surface particularities of gender, ethnicity, and culture do not change or disturb what we all have in common: that being human means that we share the same nature made in the image of God and now marred in the same way by sin.

The self, by contrast, is unique to each person and is not the same in any two people. It is interesting to note that one can hardly find a reference to the self in Freud and technical psychology was subsequently slow to develop a vocabulary around the self. What appears to have happened, though, is that the popularizers of psychology, many of whom had been raised in or had connections with Liberal Protestantism, successfully launched this understanding in the culture and the more technical psychology and psychiatry were forced to follow suit and had to develop a vocabulary for the self.

Today, when we think of the self we think of our own unique interior, our individual perceptions of life, that combination of experiences and circumstances which are ours alone and which are woven together somewhere within ourselves. This is what gives us a sense of being a self unlike any other self in the world.

These popularizers who launched this cultural revolution also parted company with Freud on another matter. Carl Rogers, for example, who had grown up on the idealism of the Y.M.C.A., found the earlier Freudian talk about the dark, twisted, subterranean urges that lurked within entirely distasteful. Indeed, this talk was as incomprehensible and as revolting to him as Calvinism had been to his forebears. It was a far sunnier view of human potential that he adopted and in time this fed into a broadly accepted “liberation psychology,” as John Rice calls it. This is not a view that is adopted by one particular school of thought but, rather, is a set of assumptions common to many. These assumptions, now believed across the entire culture, are as follows: first, the self can be found; second, it is essentially benign; third, it contains within itself, as does the body, its own sources of healing; finally, others are a threat to its reality. It is this last point which lies behind the trashing of many a marriage bond because the other spouse is “no longer able to meet my needs.” However innocently all of this may be stated, this quest for the self, this personality ethic, this readiness to charge malice to anyone who stands in the way of one’s desires, is as dangerous to the preservation of our society as some of the madcap schemes hatched in our most subversive militias. In fact, this is the solvent which single-handedly has the power to dissolve everything which holds together our society.

The final change is that of moving from speaking of guilt to talking of shame. It is true, of course, that we also use these two words interchangeably as, for example, when someone might say: “the guilt and shame I felt in having to turn my brother in to the police was excruciating.” Today, however, there is also a growing difference in what these words mean. Guilt comes from the older moral world. And while we are now thoroughly aware that there is such a thing as false guilt, it is also the case that there is such a thing as real guilt. This kind of guilt is the violation of an external, objective norm. It is the inward reflex of our moral nature to knowingly having sinned, of having broken a moral law. Guilt is the compass point which lines up our actions in the moral world. In the emerging psychiatric literature today, however, shame is quite different. It is what lines up our actions in the social world. The compass direction is horizontal, as it were, and not vertical at all. Shame is the sense of internal embarrassment which we might feel about who we are or what we have done. But, in the absence of a transcendent reference point and in the twilight of our moral world, this sense has no moral understanding. We therefore believe that it can be resolved by psychological technique and that the atonement is unnecessary. Furthermore, the most liberated person is the one who is most shameless. Thus it is that our moral life has become entirely secularized.

And thus it is, too, that the therapeutic has triumphed, replacing the older moral concerns with those that are psychological. We now translate many of life’s wrongs into diseases; we focus these in the self; we think that their remedy can be found within; and, as we shall see, insofar as there is a religious dimension to all of this, it takes the form of recasting God as the source of our inner healing. We are therefore more interested in wholeness than in holiness, more interested in happiness than in righteousness, and more interested in feeling good than in being good.

The Disappearance of Sin

Twenty five years ago, Karl Menninger wrote his Whatever Became of Sin? In this book, he argued that the language of sin that had been used to describe our moral disorder was fading fast. On the one side, what were once called sins had now become crimes. On the other side, what were once called sins had now become diseases. And what lay between these two realms were only the most inconsequential of matters. Thus sin contracted in its range of meaning as well as in its moral importance. What Menninger described has, since then, only accelerated. In 1952, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders listed sixty mental disorders. By 1960, these had swelled to one hundred and forty five and by 1993, we found in our midst no fewer than four hundred and ten. Is the explanation that we are now more adept at recognizing these diseases or is it that we are trying to understand more and more of our moral disorder in terms of disease?

Is there any doubt that this loss in our understanding of sin is what makes the entire therapeutic enterprise seem plausible? I do not have in mind here the professional therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists but, rather, the way in which psychological language has escaped this professional confine, entered the culture, and spilled out in all directions, in the process giving us the concepts by which we commonly process life’s most difficult and painful problems. This is, in fact, a secular spirituality, one which came to cultural prominence in the encounter groups of the 1960’s, the flood of self-help literature that began to engulf us in the 1970’s, and the recovery groups of the 1980’s, all of which has become big business, nourishing numerous writers, publishing houses, and dispensers of advice. In the process, we have all become both our own clients and our own therapists.

Philip Cushman, in his Constructing the Self, Constructing America, has spoken of psychotherapy as one of our two principal healers, the other being advertising. What advertisers do is, in varying degrees, to offer both a product and the reasons to buy that product. The reasons which are offered, however subtly, often have to do with the inadequacies which we feel and which are skillfully surfaced: we are not as beautiful or as handsome as we would like, not as important, not as socially prominent, not as sought after, not as personally attractive. And the wonderful thing about this is that our inadequacy can be resolved simply by the purchase of a product! Advertisers are the priesthood of our prosperity, as devoted to the good things in life as pastors should be to the Good in life. And yet, in a strange way, they are plying the same waters down which our cultural psychotherapy is moving. The difference is mainly in the means. For the one, it is a technique; for the other, it is a product. For in an affluent age the gospel gets boiled down to this: to have is to be and to have not is to be damned.

In any culture, it is important to know who the healers are. In ours, as has been suggested, the healers are cultural psychotherapy and advertising. It is revealing to ask of them to what it is that they are offering their services; for if we know what the malady has been we know what the diagnosis was. If we know what the cure is, we know what the ailment is understood to be. And here none of the aches of the modern (or postmodern) self—its emptiness, its boredom, its rages, its insecurities, its hopes and hopelessness—are thought to be connected in any way with the moral world in which, by creation, we actually are embedded. And the regeneration which our two most prominent healers are offering can therefore be had by purely human means.

Preach It!

This secularized doctrine of regeneration poses, I believe, the most formidable opposition to a biblical understanding of ourselves and of the world current in the marketplace of ideas and experiences. It is more formidable than New Age because it is less obvious and more ubiquitous. It is more dangerous than Islam which, in America, is largely contained in Black communities where it has actually accomplished what the Black church has failed to do: it has brought some semblance of order to communities ravished by moral disorder and that is no mean benefit. And it is more formidable than the various gospels emanating from the liberalized end of Protestantism because it is common, ordinary, and everyday, and not tied in to the intellectual elite of the Left. So, how is the Church meeting this powerful challenge? The answer, I’m afraid, is “not very well.”

In her study, All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism, Marsha Witten examined a number of recent sermons all preached on the prodigal son and his brother. These sermons were gathered from only two denominational groups: Southern Baptists and Presbyterians (PCUSA). This probably reduces the extent to which her conclusions can be generalized but they do, nevertheless, show the mechanism at work in many a pulpit today rather clearly.

Between these two groups there were some differences. For example, the Southern Baptists, for what would appear to be obvious reasons, were drawn to the prodigal son and his experience; the Presbyterians were rather more taken with the older brother which is probably also telling! However, the similarities far outweighed the differences.

What we see in these sermons is preachers who are caught between the secular idea that the self can be found, crafted, developed, actualized and healed and the biblical idea that the self (insofar as the Bible speaks of the self) is corrupted, fragmented, rebellious, and incapable of healing itself. It was here that the battle was fought and, for so many of these preachers, lost. What emerges from their attempt to negotiate these tricky waters is a secularized gospel message. What is the human problem? So many of these preachers, having imbibed the cultural atmosphere replete as it is with assumptions about the self, said that the basic problem in life is that the self’s capacities for relations is not being realized. Alternatively, we are not in touch with our feelings which are our guide to who we are and, indeed, to reality itself. That we are not in touch with our feelings was the most pervasive understanding of sin in these sermons. And salvation was then configured to take account of this understanding. Salvation is really feeling better about ourselves. In 82% of the sermons, therefore, the value of God to people lay in the benefits he provides by way of calming our jangled nerves, taking the uncertainty out of some of our decisions, and placing us in a stable family, the Church (well, a somewhat stable family!).

Witten wryly remarks that the God of Calvin and Luther has, in these sermons, disappeared. In his place is one far less transcendent, far more mellow, one who feels our pain as any good Boomer might, and who is so much more user-friendly. This is, indeed, a different God because we have entered a different universe. In a moral universe, you believe; in a therapeutic universe, you feel. In the former, you are preoccupied with what is true and right; in the latter, you are preoccupied with what will make you feel better.

Holiness for Healing

It is not wise in our world filled with so many tortured and unhappy people to appear to be opposed to feeling better! And that is not my point here. The real question is how this happens and what part the moral life plays in it.

I believe our contemporary culture has stood the truth on its head. We typically imagine that we must be healed in order to become holy. If the Bible assumes anything on this it is the reverse, that we must become holy in order to be healed. Yet even this is not quite right. For is it not the case that in this fallen life wholeness is never actually promised to us? We live in a world of sometimes ghastly evil, a world where wrongs are done to us that may never be righted, where virtue may never be rewarded and may be punished, where the wear and tear of life finally brings us down, and where we will know in some degree the whole range of painful emotions from fear to despair to sorrow. The Bible promises no respite from any of this. What it does promise is that in the midst of life’s perplexities and losses the God of holiness and love will walk with us and that he will enable us, as we lean upon him, to do right by others and not simply feel right within ourselves. It is this virtue, this right being with God, that is the key to the holding together of our inner life and this may not produce bullet-proof healing as we so desperately want.

This understanding of ourselves as primarily moral beings actually also provides us with our best entree to contemporary culture. The preachers in Witten’s study, and the more extreme exponents in the Church-marketing movement, foolishly think that the great ally of the gospel today is culture, that if they can simply surf the wave of current thinking about life, or the self, or what is important, the gospel will become irresistible. The problem is that the postmodern culture which these preachers are trying to surf destroys that gospel as Witten shows. No. It is not the culture which is the great ally of the gospel but creation. It is the moral world of which we are inescapably a part through the imago Dei which is the ally. Strange as it may be, then, it is an understanding of life that is couched in biblically moral terms that actually unlocks life’s mysteries and opens the way to believing the gospel. And the lynch pin of this world is the holiness of God. It all hangs and hinges upon him and his character.

The holiness of God therefore reaches across the entire front of biblical faith, linking the nature of the gospel to his being, the meaning of life to the meaning of the Cross. Unless the Holy returns to our faith, to our lives, and to our preaching, grace will be emptied of its meaning and our worship of its reality. “Neither love, grace, faith, nor sin has any but a passing meaning,” P.T. Forsyth wrote, “except as they rest on the holiness of God, except as they arise from it, show it forth, set it up, and secure it everywhere and forever. Love is but its outgoing; sin is but its defiance; grace is but its action on sin; the Cross is but its victory; faith is but its worship.”1 Without the holiness of God, our believing loses its fiber, our piety its sinew, our gospel its mighty deliverance. Without it, evil is trivialized and, in the end, left without an answer in a world that cries out for answers today with a level of pain and desperation not heard in generations. Let us, then, “exalt the Lord our God” for “the Lord our God is holy” (Ps. 99:9).

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Mar/Apr 1998).