Why I Believe in Victory Over Sin 1

Why I Believe in Victory Over Sin
I grew up in the Wesleyan Church with preaching on entire sanctification. In a time when the doctrine was preached less and less, I heard many sermons about an instantaneous, distinct action that God performed in the lives of Christians to free them from the power of sin. In a moment, God was said to remove the part of you that made it almost impossible for you to defeat the temptations in your life. In its place He filled you with love and the power to live a holy life.

You hardly hear preaching like that anymore, even in the Wesleyan Church. The decline in preaching on "holiness" led Keith Drury ten years ago to write an article about the death of the "holiness movement." He was not celebrating, just observing. I myself would attribute the death of this kind of preaching to a number of factors, including 1) the difficulty in matching the doctrine to our experience, 2) the "baptistification" of American Christianity, and 3) our difficulty in finding the doctrine clearly in the Biblical text.

With the approach of a Wesleyan meeting on the subject of salvation in relation to our Discipline this month, I thought I would blog some of my thoughts on our doctrine in this regard. I'm viewing this blog as a kind of "amicus brief," a friendly word from an interested but outside party. I am only one biblical scholar, but I have some views I'd at least like to be considered in discussion, particularly before someone goes and "chucks" our Wesleyan heritage. I love my Baptist brothers and sisters, but it would be a shame for us to "give in" on some things where our understanding of the Bible is actually more accurate than theirs.

I submit these entries in three parts. In the first I want to commend our tradition for its belief that the New Testament teaches victory over sin in the life of a believer. I can honestly say that I do not know of a single verse in the entirety of the New Testament that teaches that a Christian cannot help but sin. I want to stake my claims against the prevailing, "we can't help but sin" sentiment in American Christianity today. That will take several entries as I show how skewed so many of the biblical interpretations are of the relevant passages.

In the second part I wish to address the question of Christian experience. We find that Paul has a particular standard he sets as the expected and ideal. But we also find that his churches sometimes failed to reach that standard. I want to be practical. There is an element of "becoming what you are" to the matter of sin in the life of a believer.

Finally, as a postlude, I may make a few comments on some of the pre-modern elements in the interpretations of the holiness movement of the past. These are interpretations and ways of splicing the biblical text together that didn't really work and in fact probably took us a little off track. If the survival of holiness depends on these interpretations, then I don't think we will see it resurrected.

Let's see what happens...