Language matters: social holiness

In my new column in the Reporter, I focus approaching the Wesleyan meaning of 'social holiness' with reference to our use of language. My sense is that 'social holiness' is usually used in the church to describe the kind of outreach ministries that involve extending Christian love and aid to the poor and disadvantaged. Less often, the term is used to describe social justice efforts that involve changing unjust systems (whether of a legal or a societal/cultural nature).

I am a big supporter of both outreach ministries and social justice efforts, but the point I made in a recent blog post is that, when we use 'social justice' to describe such ministries, we are mis-using the term. Wesley's use of social holiness was in the context of how God sanctifies us; it was his firm belief that sanctification happens in the context of Christian community.

The reason it is important to attend to the language of our tradition is exactly because our Wesleyan understanding of salvation is wrapped up in it. As I write in my column, Practicing discipline in the use of our historical language is important. It could even help the church fulfill its stated mission - to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Because in a Wesleyan sense we have to realize that we won't do any good transforming the world until we ourselves have been transformed from within ... That can happen to each of us through God's grace, and it always happens in community."

Here is Wesley on social holiness:

In the Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems published by the Wesley brothers in 1739, Wesley criticizes writers among the "Mystic Divines" who recommend "an entire seclusion from men, (perhaps for months or years,) in order to purify the soul." He goes on, "For the religion these authors would edify us in, is solitary religion."

Wesley emphatically rejects this version of sanctification, writing, "Directly opposite to this is the gospel of Christ. Solitary religion is not to be found there. 'Holy solitaries' is a phrase no more consistent with the gospel than holy adulterers. The gospel of Christ knows of no religion, but social; no holiness but social holiness."

Wesley's understanding of social holiness is further fleshed out in the 1748 sermon, "Upon our Lord's Sermon on the Mount (IV)," where he writes, "When I say [Christianity] is essentially a social religion, I mean not only that it cannot subsist so well, but that it cannot subsist at all without society, without living and conversing with other men."

I think what he has in mind here is the kind of prudential means of grace represented in the Methodist society and its attendant sub-structures - the band, class meeting, etc. They are the place where 'iron sharpens iron' (Proverbs 27:17) and where shared testimony, mutual accountability, confession, and exhortation help to nurture holiness of heart and life in Christian believers. That, as I understand it, is the nature of social holiness.

That which comes before

I cover the Wesleyan doctrine of prevenient grace in a recent column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. If you are not a predestinarian - and I am not - then any account of salvation that does not slide into works righteousness has got to take the doctrine of prevenient grace seriously.

I bring this up because of the post I wrote a few days ago about social holiness. In that post, I mentioned an article I was writing for the United Methodist Reporter about the common misinterpretation of Wesley's teaching on social holiness. The article is finished, and I'll post on it tomorrow. But first I wanted to say something about prevenient grace, so that I didn't get ahead of myself with the sanctification stuff.

We clearly live in a 'pull yourself up by your own bootstraps' culture. This is debilitating on the church, particularly in the way it causes preachers to slip into a self-help style of preaching as opposed to preaching a strong doctrine of salvation. It's not that predestination has fallen out of style. It's actually more popular than ever, except that most predestinarians today are soft universalists. That is, they just assume that salvation comes to all in the end. And the logic of universalism means that the best thing the church can do (and by implication the best thing that preachers can preach) is to help people muddle through until modern medicine fails them and they die.

A common corollary belief that goes along with this train of thought is that we are not really all that messed up by sin. And we're certainly not depraved by it! We make mistakes, sure, but when we're thinking in a clear-headed manner, we can pretty much choose the good in a given situation. Sin is an occasional problem. But basically, I'm okay, and you're okay. Let's go buy more stuff and be happy.

Well, this is all a bunch of cultural hooey and a sign of the anemic state of the American church. Sin is real, and we are absolutely broken by it to the point that we aren't just making sinful choices. We are debilitated. It is a state and we are born into it.

(Hell is real, too - a real, metaphysical, possibly permanent separation from God for all eternity - but that's a complicated topic I'll save for another time. If you want a window into one interesting, traditionally evangelical debate about hell, check out Gordon Atkinson's recent post at Real Live Preacher.)

So salvation is important, and it starts not with sanctification but with prevenient grace. It is a sign of God's gratuitous love for us that, "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). The realization of this fact and the power that it conveys are a gift given to us through God's prevenience. This is the substance of our justification. And through it the door is opened to our new birth and sanctification.

These words are not just high falutin' theological concepts. They are descriptive words about the way of salvation, the via salutis, that God invites us to travel. What becomes crucial is that the manner of our traveling is never alone, but rather always in community.

That's where social holiness comes in. Which I will look at tomorrow.

"... no holiness but social holiness"

Are you familiar with that phrase?

If you are a Methodist, you can probably identify it as coming from the pen of John Wesley. But do you know what it means?

If blogs, newsletters, sermons, and periodicals from the Methodist world are any indication, most people assume that, by "social holiness", Wesley meant something along the lines of what we mean by social justice or social outreach ministries.

That's just plain wrong.

A few days ago, as part of a series of posts reviewing Paul Chilcote's Recapturing the Wesleys' Vision, Guy Williams over at Gen-X Missional Wesleyan brought up the issue of social holiness. (Guy uses the term correctly, and you can read his post here.)

I commented on that post, which got my mind buzzing on this subject and particularly on how it is so often misused ... which really stuck in my craw, which connected to a paper I'm writing currently on the practical theology of the class meeting, which led me then to call Dr. Randy Maddox to discuss the issue, which led me finally to start writing a column on it for the United Methodist Reporter that I'm tentatively calling "Language Matters".

Some people might say that I'm splitting hairs - that Wesley really did care about what we would call social justice and that, since he uses the phrase social holiness in other contexts and it seems to fit our purposes, we can just allow it to do double duty.

But that's the kind of undisciplined use of language that just drives me nuts. Look, for instance, in the United Methodist Hymnal from pages 425-450, which are the hymns and prayers under the section, "SOCIAL HOLINESS". These are not social holiness hymns in the Wesleyan sense of the term; they are rather for various forms of social outreach, social justice, and world peace.

So why can't we just reorient the term to the way we see fit? Here's why: If we don't practice and preach a strong doctrine of sanctification, then we tend to fall into the typical Enlightenment mistake that we are born with our reason and will already in good shape, and that all we have to do is employ our reason to see what good needs to be done in the world to make it a better place.

But we Methodists believe in the reality of the depravity that comes from Original Sin, and we believe that it is only through God's grace that our reason and will can be restored enough to the point where we can recognize the good and pursue it in the world. We become healed of the presence and power sin through the process of sanctification.

And that happens through social holiness. Real social holiness.

When we use language loosely, because of the desire to sound Wesleyan (even when we don't know what that means), then we start messing with our entire doctrinal structure. And that's a bad idea. Besides, using Wesley to justify our own ideas because his name has authority is a lazy practice, which can approach intellectual dishonesty. If we want to invoke our founder's name and ideas, we should make sure we know what we are talking about.

By the way, if you are interested in reading about Wesley's understanding of social holiness, the two primary sources are the Preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739), which can be found in volume 14 of the Jackson edition of Wesley's Works, pp. 319-322, and the sermon, "Upon Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount (IV)," which can be found lots of places, including online.

Wish list for 2008

My New Year's resolution for this year is to live more into a life of holiness. I'm in a Covenant Discipleship Group with four other guys, and I know that will be a great source of strength for me. I'm trying to look more at holiness in an integrated way, encompassing my mind, body, and spirit. After all, God wants to transform all of me, not just one part!

But beyond that resolution, I also spent some time a few days ago thinking about what I would like for our church in the coming year. I put those thoughts to paper and shaped them into a my first United Methodist Reporter column for the new year. You can find that column here. Here's a short version:

1) One of the most pressing concerns, I believe, is in helping our young hear the voice of God - and this goes for both laity and clergy. We have declining numbers of both, and the reasons why are complex. My suspicion is that the greatest reason is that families no longer see the church as the center of their lives, but rather one among a laundry list of extracurricular activities. And if that's the case, it is not just a failure of the church reaching the young, but of the failure of the church to nurture God's people overall. That will only change when we once again understand the church as the only community where we can know true life.

2) My greatest hope in the area of worship is that the church experiences a renewal of the celebration of the Lord's Supper. I believe that Holy Communion is the chief means of grace available to us, and if that's the case, we ought to put it at the center of worship! That doesn't mean we have to shortchange preaching, but we should rather understand preaching as a proclamation which finds its fullest embodiment in the sacrament. If the church is about sharing the word of God, we should be eating the sacred meal together at every opportunity.

3) General Conference needs to be clothed in prayer. If you have any questions about that, see General Conference of 2004, General Conference of 2000, etc.

4) I hope that a part of our growing reclamation of our Wesleyan heritage will be a greater understanding of the unity of holiness and compassion. There can finally be no separation between works of piety and works of mercy. We are called to love God and neighbor, and focusing only on one to the neglect of the other produces a thin faith. Lord, give us both!

Covenant Discipleship and growing in the faith

Out of all the aspects of our Wesleyan heritage that have fallen by the wayside over the years, I think that serious attention to sanctification through holiness of heart & life may be the biggest loss. Thankfully, it's not a total loss.

Covenant Discipleship is a movement in the church that seeks to address that core need. It is simple, very un-programmatic, and focused on the Wesleyan concept of social holiness. That is, Wesley believed that all holiness (the conformity of one's heart, mind, and soul to Christ) had to be done in the company of others who could help to "watch over one another in love." For Wesley, that meant making the bands and class meetings a fundamental part of the Methodism of his day. And it is those Wesleyan forms of small group discipleship that Covenant Discipleship seeks to emulate.

The basic idea is that you gather in a group of 4 to 7 people and give an account of your discipleship over the past week. You go every week, as an absolute priority. And you agee to abide by a covenant document that the whole group writes together, and which includes a number of "acts of discipleship" oriented around works of devotion, worship, compassion, and justice. There is no need to buy the latest, hot new small group study. There is no need to frantically search for ways to make CD Groups "relevant" to "younger people." You don't even need Powerpoint. All you need is a willingness on the part of the group members to really engage in the work of their own sanctification.

CD is especially interesting to me, because I think it represents a willingness by one of our general boards and agencies (the GBOD) to commit to a form of ministry that is really seeking to embody a Wesleyan approach to discipleship. But at the same time, CD Groups are essentially a grass-roots movement in the church. There is no heavy-handed attempt to impose them from the top-down. They seem to spring up wherever a small group of people in a local church is willing to take its commitment to discipleship to the next level.

Steve Manskar at the GBOD is the Director of Accountable Discipleship. Check out his online resources, and I'm sure he'd enjoy hearing from anyone who is interested in finding more out about Covenant Discipleship.

As I reported previously in this post, Steve asked me sometime back to become a regular contributor to the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. My column for the Spring 2007 - "The Pursuit of Happiness" - is online now. I'll highlight future columns as they appear. And FYI, the CDQ is a free publication that Steve would be happy to send you if you drop him a line.