“Holiness”
is one of those churchy concepts that has negative connotations for lots of
people. It conjures images of rigid people who look like they’ve been sucking on
raw persimmons tut-tutting anyone who looks like they might be having fun. It
is often presented as following a set of stultifying rules and minding your p’s
and q’s, emphasizing lesser things at the expense of “the weightier matters of
the law: justice and mercy and faith” (Matthew 23:23). And too often it has
been used to insist that some people deny parts of themselves not as a living
sacrifice for the sake of their souls but as a soul-killing sacrifice of death
for the sake of narrow ways of understanding God and humanity. But it need not
mean those things. Rother it is a serious call to an uncompromising orienting
of all that we are and all that we have to the double love of God and neighbor.
Holiness
in fact is a deeply Anglican commitment. One of our great early theologians,
Jeremy Taylor wrote two influential books on the topic in the 17th
century. In the same century, “the most popular book of devotion England has known,”
‘The Whole Duty of Man’ was published anonymously. Benjamin Franklin commended
that book to his daughter. In the 18th century, William Law wrote ‘A
Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life,’ another work that proved hugely
influential. It had a profound impact on John Wesley. Other Anglicans like R.
C. Ryle, J. I Packer, and Rowan Williams have written important works explicitly
on the topic. Others Anglican writers, like Evelyn Underhill, have not written explicitly
on the topic, but their works are soaked with it. We cannot reject the idea of
holiness without rejecting something fundamental to the Anglican way. But how we understand the concept matters.
“Almighty
God, by our baptism into the death and resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ,
you turn us from the old life of sin: Grant that we, being reborn to new life
in him, may live in righteousness and holiness all our days; through Jesus
Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God,
now and for ever. Amen.”
–
Book of Common Prayer (1979), Collect for Baptism
“If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as
the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they
are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual:
the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising
and spoiling sport, and backbiting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For
there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try
to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical
self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes
regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of
course, it is better to be neither.”
– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), Mere Christianity
“By a hideous irony, our shrinking reprobation of
[sexual] sin has made us too delicate so much as to name it, so that we have
come to use for it the words which were made to cover the whole range of human
corruption. A man may be greedy and selfish; spiteful, cruel, jealous, and
unjust; violent and brutal; grasping, unscrupulous, and a liar; stubborn and
arrogant; stupid, morose, and dead to every noble instinct- and still we are
ready to say of him that he is not an immoral man. I am reminded of a young man
who once said to me with perfect simplicity: ‘I did not know there were seven
deadly sins: please tell me the names of the other six.’”
– Dorothy Sayers
(1893-1957), The Other Six Deadly Sins from Creed or Chaos? [The other six
Deadly Sins according to Christian tradition are Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Envy,
Anger, Pride]
“The order of purging is according to the seven deadly sins of the formal tradition of the Church. The Church is not a way for the soul to escape hell but to become heaven; it is virtues rather than sins which we must remember.”
– Charles Williams (1886-1945), The Figure of Beatrice
“It is extraordinary how little the New Testament says
about God’s interest in our success, by comparison with the enormous amount
that it says about God’s interest in our holiness, our maturity in Christ, and
our growth into the fullness of His image.”
– J. I. Packer (1926-2020), Rediscovering Holiness: Know
the Fullness of Life with God
“The best theology is rather a divine life than a divine
knowledge.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), Via Intelligentiae
“They that will with profit make use of the instruments
of virtue, must so live as if they were always under the physician’s hand. . .
they must be used like nourishment, that is by daily care and medication; not
like a single medicine, and upon the actual pressure of present necessity.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Holy Living
“It is necessary that every man should consider, that
since God hath given him an excellent nature, wisdom and choice, an
understanding soul and an immortal spirit, having made him lord over the beasts
and but a little lower than the angels; He hath also appointed for him a work
and a service great enough to employ those abilities, and hath also designed
him to a state of life after this, to which he can only arrive by that service
and obedience.”
– Jeremy Taylor (1613–1667), Holy Living
“It is sure God hath given these promises to no other
end, but to invite us to holiness of life; yea, he gave his Son, in whom all
his promises are as it were summed up, for this end. We usually look so much at
Christ’s coming to satisfy for us, that we forget this other part of his
errand. But there is nothing surer than that the main purpose of his coming
into the world is to plant good life among men.”
– The Whole Duty of Man (1658), Anonymous
“If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not
as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that
it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never
thoroughly intended it.”
– William Law (1686–1761), A Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life
“Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world?
It is not he who prays most or fasts most; it is not he who gives most alms or
is most eminent for temperance, chastity or justice; but it is he who is always
thankful to God, who wills everything that God wills, who receives everything
as an instance of God’s goodness and has a heart always ready to praise God for
it. Could you therefore work miracles, you could not do more for yourself than
by this thankful spirit, for it turns all that it touches into happiness.”
– William Law (1686-1761), A Serious Call to a Devout and
Holy Life
“Because Holiness has entered our world, and appeared in
our nature, we know that men and women can become holy; and are bound, in spite
of all discouragements, to take an optimistic view of human life. The Church is
an undying family which has its face set towards Holiness, and is fed upon the
food which can – if we let it – produce Holiness.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The School of Charity
“The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a
consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to
enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God
and bear the cost.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The School of Charity
“Every Christian communicant volunteers for translation
into the supernatural order, and is self-offered for the supernatural purposes
of God. The Liturgy leads us out towards Eternity, by way of the acts in which
[people] express their need of God and relation to God. It commits every
worshipper to the adventure of holiness, and has no meaning apart from this. In
it the Church shows forth again and again her great objective; the hallowing of
the whole created order and the restoration of all things in Christ. The
Liturgy recapitulates all the essentials in this life of sanctification — to
repent, to pray, to listen, to learn; and then to offer upon the altar of God,
to intercede, to be transformed to the purposes of God, to be fed and
maintained by the very life of God.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Mystery of the
Sacrifice
“We in ourselves are fragile, fugitive things, faulty,
clumsy vessels which yet can be used to hold an unearthly treasure: shrines
which are nothing in themselves, but can become homes of the Holy Spirit, Lord
and Giver of Life. The New Testament is full of this idea. Let us consider
ourselves from this point of view. It will mean revising a good many of our
ordinary ideas before we have done: more and more emphasis on God and his love,
less and less upon ourselves.”
– Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), The Fruits of the Spirit
“Repentance
does not merely mean giving up a bad habit. What it is concerned with is the
mind; get a new mind. What mind? The mind of Christ ―our standard of reference;
learn to look at the world in His way. To repent is to adopt God’s viewpoint in
place of your own. There need no be any sorrow about it. In itself, far from
being sorrowful, it is the most joyful thing in the world, because when you
have done it you have adopted the viewpoint of truth itself, and you are in
fellowship with God. It means a complete re-evaluation of things we are
inclined to think good. The world, as we live in it, is like a shop window into
which some mischievous person has got overnight, and shifted all the
price-labels so that the cheap things have the high price-labels on them and
the really precious things are priced low. We let ourselves be taken in.
Repentance means getting those price labels back in the right place.”
–
William Temple (1881-1944), Christian Faith and Life
“Personal indulgence is a poor preparation for the
difficult experiment of fraternity. . . For fellowship is the hardest of
adventures. It can only be achieved by people far advanced in
self-subordination, in whom the impulse of unregenerate human nature to have
its own way has been supplanted by the carefully developed intuition of the
Whole. The old interior training of the Christian life was admirably adapted to
further this end. It produced unselfish and self-controlled people; if it is
tossed on the scrap-heap and replaced with easy-going practices and a defiant
claim to follow one’s own will, any community will make ship-wreck.”
– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), Social Teachings of
the Christian Year
“The spiritual wisdom of the Church Catholic has taught,
indeed, the supreme importance of personal holiness. To this end she has
enjoined keen self-searching; penitence, confession, reparation; the yearning
of the soul toward personal communion with the living God. . . Social morals
must always be founded on individual virtue. To attain this virtue man must
examine himself straitly, must know the agony of self-abasement, must recognize
his failures, and must seek inspiration in the arduous struggle through placing
his own life beside the highest he knows. The drama of the inner life must be
eternal, whether that drama pass beneath a cloud earth-born or open to the
spiritual heavens.”
– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), The Witness of Denial
“The
simple but important point to be made, then, is that the Christian life –
faith, hope and love; the transformation of the ordinary, mundane and humane;
the turn from self-enclosedness toward God and neighbor – is not an inhibiting,
externally or internally imposed self-discipline; instead, it is identical
with, indeed it is the gift of liberty in and by God the Spirit.
Most
of us know what this means in the Christian life of interpersonal relations. In
all their many varieties, there is nonetheless a similarity about the ways
Christian people are disposed toward others, Christians and nonChristians
alike; there is a quiet and nonoppressive dedication to the good of other human
beings for their own sake under God.”
–
Hans Frei (1922-1988), On the Thirty-Nine Articles in Unpublished Pieces:
Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School archive edited by Mike Higton
“Christian holiness consists not of trying as hard as we
can to be good but of learning to live in the new world created by Easter, the
new world we publicly entered in our baptism.”
– N. T. Wright (1948 - ), Surprised by Hope
“The only excuse for writing about holiness or about holy lives is something to do with . . . a way of pointing to those lives in which something 'works', some wholeness comes through; lives that come across like a brilliant performance of the music or drama of God's action. It helps to notice and think about this or that detail, this or that transition, even if you recognise how far you are from realising it yourself,”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Holy Living
“The holiness of Jesus and the holiness of the church is
something a great deal more than being ‘good’ or ‘virtuous’; it is being in the
place where God through Christ makes peace between earth and heaven. It is
being under the cross, in short. For a Christian to be holy is to be under the
cross. A person may lead a deeply impressive moral life; they may even have a
deeply impressive spiritual life, and yet if they don’t ‘live under the cross’,
we can’t call them holy, in the biblical sense; and that living under the cross
I first of all am acknowledging the unique and unrepeatable debt that we owe to
the grace of God in the death of Jesus, living in gratitude for the gift given
by Christ’s death and it is the seeking, day by day, to let that Cross live and
work in us as we carry the cross in putting away our self-defending,
self-justifying, self-protecting habits in every area of our lives. Holiness is
living under the cross, the place where Jesus makes himself holy, so that we
may be made Holy. It has all been done for us in the cross; God be praised; it
is all, for each one of us to discover, day after day, in that self-emptying,
that self-forgetting struggle to let Jesus live in us. No-one else, no other
power, no other spirit.
So to be holy is to be found in the neighborhood of
Christ’s cross. And that means that our holiness takes us where Jesus goes; our
holiness takes us to those Jesus died for; it takes us into the neighborhood of
those who are forgotten, who have no voice; those who need healing and
forgiveness. It takes us into very strange places indeed and the holy person,
as we all know, is often found in very odd company. The holy person, like Jesus
himself, is to be found not among the righteous but among sinners, not among
the healthy, but among the sick and a holy church is one that goes with its
proclamation and integrity and its fidelity, among those who need healing -
literally who need healing - those whose physical lives are wrecked by pain and
disease and disaster.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), One Holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church
“A
deeper crisis in the workings and siftings of desire . . . Seen in such
theological terms as these, the current crisis is about the failure in this
Web-induced culture of instantly commodified desire, to submit all our desires
to the test of divine longing. . . Is the 'right' to various pleasures
superceded by the call to fidelity? Is my desire for wealth at the cost of
Africa's ravaging ultimately disconnected from my assessment and testing of
other desires, including sexual desires, before God? Thus to bind all one's
desires 'into a tether' is to move beyond the false secular disjunction between
'libertinism' and 'repression', which is based on the presumption that freedom
is found only by throwing off constraint. It is, in contrast, to re-glimpse a
vision of 'freedom' obtained precisely by specific, freely chosen ascetic narrowings
of choice, fuelled by prioritizing the love of God.”
–
Sarah Coakley (1951 - ), The New Asceticism
“The
double love of God and neighbor is not simple, sentimental, or easy. It
requires self-denial. To love God requires us to know God – through the witness
of the Bible, through worship and prayer, through the witness of tradition and
the saints, and through the witness of creation. That also requires continual
self-scrutiny lest we construct an image of God that suits us and then love the
image we have formed for ourselves. To love our neighbor also requires that we
actually come to know our neighbor. That too requires continual self-scrutiny
to examine our own resistance to love and our tendency to project onto others
what we already think they are or should be as characters of the story of our
own making. The double love of God and neighbor requires taking up the cross
and denying ourselves in order to be open to the Other (God) and the other (our
neighbor).”
–
Matthew Gunter (1957 - ) How I Came to Change My Mind on SSU: Part 4. Some
Thoughts on Interpreting Scripture, An Odd Work of Grace: A Bishop’s Blog, Tuesday,
May 26, 2015
“The
first word for Christians is grace. The last word for Christians is grace. And
every day, along the way, is grace, grace, grace. There is nothing we need do –
or can do – to prove ourselves worthy of God’s gift of God’s love and God’s own
self to us. It is freely given to be freely received. And it sets us free – free
to orient ourselves toward the call of Jesus to take up the cross, deny
ourselves and follow him in the way of self-sacrificing, self-giving love. In
doing so, we find our truest self, our deepest joy, our most abundant life, and
peace that passes understanding.”
–
Matthew Gunter (1957 - )
“We renounce the spiritual forces that rebel against God, the, powers of this world, and our sinful desires. The ways of this world can be cruel and dehumanizing. And from time to time, we feel compelled to act on our self-centered interests and impulses Becoming a follower of Jesus does not insulate us from the world's destructive energies or exempt us from selfish impulses. Instead we commit ourselves to a lifelong pattern of resisting those unholy, dehumanizing forces and choosing to participate in God's grace. . . It's the ongoing day-to-day work of living in a fractured world that God is actively mending.”
– Jake Owensby (1957 - ), A full-Hearted Life
“The deepest word that can be spoken about sanctification
is that it is a progress towards true humanity.”
– J. I. Packer (1926-2020), Rediscovering Holiness: Know
the Fullness of Life with God
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