Preface: A Sanctification Story
1.1 Filled with the Holy Spirit (part 1)
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8. Of course, this is not exactly the way I grew up hearing entire sanctification preached from Acts. In fact, the holiness tradition did not use Acts 4:31 as an example of entire sanctification. Entire sanctification was understood as a single, "definite" event, not a repeatable one. It was a filling with a very distinct purpose, not one of broad, potentially varied empowerment. So I strongly rejected Acts 4:31 as a sanctification text at one point.
In the last part of this chapter, I want to look at the verses in Acts that I grew up associating with entire sanctification. I want to show why virtually no New Testament expert -- including Wesleyan scholars -- reads them that way today. I also want to show how we might miss some fundamental aspects of New Testament theology if we read these passages in Acts in terms of entire sanctification.
9. When I was a teenager, I read through the entire Bible in the King James Version (KJV) and highlighted in orange every verse that mentioned holiness or sanctification. But, when I went to seminary, I learned what is called "inductive Bible study" or "IBS." In IBS, you learn to read a verse in light of the verses that come before and after it in the flow of thought. This would complicate things for me.
I grew up with the KJV, which numbers and lists each verse separately as if each verse is a self-standing proposition in its own right. While this way of presenting verses is very conducive to memorizing Scripture, it tends to work against reading the verses in context. The staccato of verse, verse, verse tends to interrupt the flow of thought.
Another feature of inductive Bible study is of course reading the words in the light of what the original Greek and Hebrew words of the Bible meant at the time the books were written. This can be difficult because there were no dictionaries back then. The scholars of the last couple of centuries have invested an immense amount of time trying to learn the texts and archaeology of the ancient world to know this background.
If you think of it, the author of 1 Samuel used Hebrew words that he (presumably) and ancient Israel used at that time. Contrast me reading through the KJV. How did I define the words? Obviously, I defined the words using the dictionary in my head. Where did I get this dictionary? I got it both from growing up speaking American English and, perhaps more significantly in this case, from the holiness preaching of my childhood.
Given my "dictionary," whenever I saw the words holiness or sanctification, what I heard was "a second, definite work of grace whereby the heart is cleansed from inbred sin." But of course, the Bible never defines holiness or sanctification in this way. It is a theological definition from my tradition. It is nothing actually said explicitly or systematically in the biblical texts.
This is a somewhat startling realization even if it is obvious once pointed out. Does Acts 2 say that the disciples were sanctified, let alone entirely sanctified? No. Does Acts 8 or Acts 10 say that the Samaritans or Gentiles were sanctified when they received the Holy Spirit? No. The verb sanctify appears twice in Acts (20:32; 26:18). [3] The word holiness never appears. "Entire sanctification" never appears.
So where would we get the idea that the Spirit-fillings of Acts were experiences of entire sanctification? We would get the idea from the glasses we bring to the text. It's not mentioned in the text itself. It rather comes from the dictionary in our heads that we have grown up with.
10. As I began to read the Bible in context. I would read one of those verses I had highlighted in orange and would conclude that it wasn't exactly talking about what I had thought it was. "Oh," I would say to myself, "that particular verse isn't really talking about entire sanctification." I had brought a beautiful theological system to the text, but the text itself often wasn't really saying quite the same thing.
Important to say, I wouldn't be writing this book if I didn't believe it was possible to reconstruct an understanding of entire sanctification. I believe it is, and I have already begun to sketch out that reconstruction in the first part of this chapter. However, in this last part, I am showing how the way I grew up hearing the doctrine was exegetically problematic. This is one of the reasons why the doctrine is so seldom preached today.
Initially, I read the biblical text on this subject in a pre-reflective way. That is to say, I was not aware of my own "dictionary" and assumptions when coming to the biblical text. I was wearing glasses without realizing it. I did not realize that the text could be read differently, nor did I have any concept of the distance between the way I read the text and the way the original audiences would have heard it.
In the context of Acts, the Spirit-fillings are almost always initial experiences -- except for 4:31. The Day of Pentecost is the first coming of the Spirit in the story world of Luke-Acts. As you probably know, Acts is volume 2 of a two-part series. The coming of the Spirit at Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise that John the Baptist makes in Luke 3:16. It is the inauguration of the age of the Spirit. [4]
In the world of Luke-Acts, the disciples could not have received the Spirit prior to Pentecost. Pentecost is the birth of the church, the first fruits. It is the beginning.
Similarly, Cornelius and the Gentiles are just believing in Jesus for the first time in Acts 10. The previous followers of John the Baptist are just believing in Jesus for the first time in Acts 19. In both cases, they receive the Holy Spirit at the time that they are baptized. The same goes for Paul in Acts 9. In short, these are all initial experiences. They were not Christians before because they were just now believing in Jesus. They were "pre-Christians" in some ways before but not believers in Christ.
The incident at Samaria in Acts 8 is very exceptional in this regard. Given the lenses of the holiness movement, the story at Samaria would be the norm. You get baptized and then, sometime later, you are sanctified. But Acts 8 is a strange event in Acts. They have been baptized and the Holy Spirit should have come. Why hasn't the Holy Spirit come?
Something is wrong. Call Peter and John because they should have received the Holy Spirit when they were baptized. They lay hands on them. They receive the Holy Spirit. Whew! Now everything is the way it is supposed to be.
11. In the end, we should not be surprised to find that receiving the Holy Spirit is an initial experience in Acts. After all, this is exactly what Acts 2:38 told us from the very beginning. In this verse, Peter tells the crowds in Jerusalem exactly how to get right with God: "Repent and let each of you be baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus for the forgiveness of sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." There it is in plain sight. Receiving the Spirit is part of the initial event of becoming part of the end times people of God. [5]
Indeed, I would come to realize that the nearly exclusive focus on entire sanctification in my understanding of the Spirit had clouded a fundamental aspect of New Testament theology. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit is the indicator that one is part of the end times or eschatological people of God. A Gentile like me could repent. I could make a confession of my sins and a confession of faith in Christ. I could even be baptized as Acts 8 shows, and yet not yet be saved.
Receiving the Holy Spirit is the sine qua non of membership in the people of God in Acts and Paul. How could I have missed it? Romans 8:9 says that if someone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they don't belong to him. 2 Corinthians 1:22 and Ephesians 1:14 both talk about the Spirit as the arrabon or "earnest" of our future inheritance.
Anyone who has bought a home knows that "earnest money" is money that both guarantees that you are the one getting the home and that serves as an initial deposit toward the purchase of that home. Accordingly, the New International Version (NIV) translates the word as a deposit that guarantees our inheritance. Again, this is about the initial "purchase." The language relates to the event of joining the people of God.
2 Corinthians 1:22 also refers to the Holy Spirit as "sealing" us. Some of the older holiness preachers and writers took this sealing as something like the sealing of a jar -- a finishing work as it were. But the NIV rightly adds the words "of ownership." The Holy Spirit is a seal of ownership, like a brand on a horse or an embossing seal on a book. Once again, we are talking about an initial experience.
I would come to realize that I had completely missed one of the most fundamental dimensions of "pneumatology" -- the theology of the Spirit -- in the New Testament. To be fair, I would learn that Wesleyan theology also believes in "initial sanctification." Wesleyan theology believes that we receive the Spirit when we "get saved." I just don't remember ever hearing this preached growing up because the focus of encountering the Spirit focused almost exclusively on a second event in the Christian life. But, as it turned out, the New Testament focuses almost exclusively on an initial event.
12. Interestingly, I would also learn in seminary that John Wesley himself didn't preach or teach sanctification by way of the stories of Acts. For him, passages that talk about perfection in the King James Version were more frequently used (e.g., Matt. 5:48; Heb. 6:1). He also equated sanctification with an experience of perfect love (1 John 4:17-18). Accordingly, we can still believe in entire sanctification even if we don't equate it with Acts 2.
Nevertheless, in my mind, the dissociation of sanctification from Acts 2 has contributed significantly to the decline in preaching on sanctification. It's just easier to picture sanctification if we place it in a story form, which is why I believe Acts 4:31 can be very helpful. Wesley's more heady sermons just require more mental effort.
Larry Wood, who taught theology at Asbury at the same time as Bob Lyon, has tried hard to show that Wesley himself assented to preaching holiness from Acts. [6] The ultimate origin of this approach was John Fletcher, who was also part of the British holiness movement. Wood has shown that Wesley knew of Fletcher's approach and assented to it.
However, there is a big difference between an assent we can find in the footnotes of history and the clear way that Wesley approached sanctification in the bulk of his writings and preaching. Here again our paradigms are in play. If you create a word cloud of Wesley in relation to the teaching of Christian perfection and sanctification, Acts hardly features at all. [7]
13. Let me return to the key point of this chapter. While in this second part I have deconstructed to some extent the way the holiness movement preached sanctification from Acts, the goal is not to deconstruct the preaching of holiness or entire sanctification. The goal is to clear the ground for an approach that is exegetically sound. Preaching on holiness will not increase if we insist on forcing it on texts that do not want to bear it!
Instead, I have suggested that Acts 4:31 is a much more fruitful text, even if it was not specifically about entire sanctification. What Acts 4:31 tells us is that we can be filled with the Holy Spirit more than once. We can be filled with the Holy Spirit for specific purposes. We can be empowered for certain tasks.
One of those special empowerments can be when we have fully surrendered our lives to God to the extent we know. This logically opens the door for the fullness of the Spirit in our lives. We will continue to explore this possibility in the chapters to come.
[3] Neither of these instances indicate they refer to a second experience. Rather, they seem to refer to the initial event of joining the Jesus movement.
[4] Some have cleverly tried to argue that the disciples first received the Spirit in John 20:22 where Jesus tells the disciples to receive the Holy Spirit. But this verse is not part of the story world of Luke-Acts. In Luke-Acts, Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise and there is no place for another filling in between. At most, we might take John 10:22 as John's allusion to the Day of Pentecost, not as a separate event. It is part of John's story world but not Acts'.
[5] For simplicity, I will avoid discussion of the fact that these Jews were already part of the people of God. It's much easier to speak of the Gentiles in Acts 10 becoming part of the people of God since they were not Jews. I've decided to use the imprecise language here of joining the eschatological people of God, which is the renewed Israel which includes Gentiles.
[6] Laurence W. Wood, The Meaning of Pentecost in Early Methodism: Rediscovering John Fletcher as Wesley's Vindicator and Designated Successor (Scarecrow, 2002).
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