We see holiness in love operational in Christ.Holiness is God's ungraspability (1 Tim. 6:11-16). In us, holiness is
our ungraspability - the wisdom of the world versus the foolishness of God (and God's people). We live according to a different ethic and are both appealing and inscrutable to those who see the love we live but do not join in the fun themselves.
This holiness/ungraspability is Mystery that communicates outrageous love.
And community holiness is about as messy as we can get.
Workshop: Diane Leclerc - The Nature and Function of HolinessThere is a subtle difference between one generation's approach to spiritual experience and its offspring's. For example, in the American Holiness churches the people of the revival years might say, "I look like this because of my experience with the Holy Spirit." Later generations came to say, "This is what you look like if you've experienced the Holy Spirit."
This is the difference between character and characterization.
Building character in the Wesleyan tradition means a synergistic cooperation with God. Practice and the various means of grace fuel personal and collective transformation, and character development. The process goes like this: "Because I yielded to God today, it should be easier for me to yield tomorrow."
Thus, how do I love? I love by being a loving person. And as I love, I become more loving. This is holistic holiness. The emphasis is not on doing good things, but on becoming a good person.
There are arguments out there that insist that the reverse emphasis is the better way to go about being a Christian. But I have seen firsthand, and repeatedly, that the best intentions of people who try to act holy without troubling to become holy produce travesties of faith and mockeries of church. I am convinced that apart from the virtue of love, there is no such thing as an actual Christian.
The Wesleyan perspective of Christian character begins with Aristotle. As explained in Dr. Leclerc's workshop, there are four Aristotlean positions of character as character relates to
telos (
telos = purpose, reason, fundamental fulfillment of being).
- The Vicious Character knows what one should do, but chooses not to, and does not do it.
- The Incontinent Character knows what one should do, chooses to do it, but is unwilling to follow through and does not act upon the choice.
- The Continent Character knows the good, and does the good, but only out of a sense of duty.
- The Virtuous Character knows the good and does the good, for good's sake.
The Virtuous Character is the only one with the potential to live a holy life. Yet, the Continent Character is frequently the height of so-called holiness in our churches. John Wesley would contend that we can only be holy if we do the good for the good's sake, if we do what is right because it is right. Good is doing what we do for the sake of the other.
"Why do I do what I do?" is an important question. Our intrinsic qualities direct our actions. We are born with a purpose (
telos), an intitially pure potentiality. As this purpose is actualized, a person flourishes, becoming who he or she is meant to be.
Human PurposeLove is the purpose for which we are created. We can only find human fulfillment when we are loving. By habituating love, we become increasingly free to love. Ah, but are we not always free to love?
As was explained in the workshop, our freedom is limited by our present levels of experience, skill, or habit. For example, I am free to go into the kitchen right now and bake a batch of delicious vegan cupcakes, substituting agave nectar for sugar, adding a touch of vanilla for rich flavor, and whipping up some frosting from scratch, which I can scoop into a pastry bag and pipe onto my cupcakes to make funky designs. My husband, on the other hand, is not free to do any of this. He would be free to go to the store and buy a cake mix, follow the directions on the back of the box, and make a sweetly tasty mess trying to frost his batch of little cakes with commercially premade frosting.
But then, my husband is also free to take out his euphonium and play exquisite music. I am not free to do likewise. I've never played a brass instrument in my life. Ecaep chose to pursue mastery of the euphonium. I chose to pursue the esoteric art of vegan cupcakery.
Our freedoms are limited by our patterns of choice. Past choices inform present and future choices. So, again, the idea is that because I yielded to God today, it should be easier for me to yield tomorrow.
Wesley's moral psychology describes this process in terms of internal human components. We have understanding, will, liberty (the freedom to act out of character), affections (moods or attitudes, habituated emotions), and temperments (inclinations). Will comes from affections and directs our choices. It is God's grace that molds our affections toward our
telos into temperaments. Temperments solidify into dispositions. Habituated dispositions become character (who one is). This occurs in the central being, the heart.
Nineteenth-Century adaptation of such considerations skewed Wesley's view of holiness toward legalism. Faith became a rational decision accompanied by a sanctioned suspicion of inner feelings and motives. Intellectualist moral psychology emphasized the power of rational self-determination and the control of affections. Will was understood to be the principle of independent rational choice, untethered from any acknowledgment of pattern or habit. Passions and affections became the utterly irrational inner life. Thus
being, as an internal process, was suspect and condemned to be suppressed or excised. "Holiness" meant not
being, but
doing, which is the nature of legalism.
Dr. Leclerc pointed out that there is a deep interaction between holy character and holy acts. Only a holy character can do a holy act. To try to perform holy acts without being holy is futile. Such activities are simply not holy. Now, if we take this view, we must simultaneously recognize that holiness is not, therefore, a
condition that we achieve. Holiness cannot be a static perfection, an epitome of goodness one must attain before one can do holy stuff. Holiness must be
a becoming, a movement within the surrounding currents of love toward further depths of love.
Our purpose/
telos is to love God and to love others as we love ourselves. It is grace that energizes new creations within us and draws us toward our
telos. This is why Christian rebirth is a radical transformation. We are stunningly freed to know the good and to do the good because it is
good, to do good for the sake of love, to be and become holy.
Doing Good for the Sake of LoveThe means of grace, along with various Christian practices, are not ends in and of themselves. Rather, these things open us up to the grace of God. Going to church, participating in communion, praying, fasting, reading Scripture, and so on don't make us holy because we do them. We become holy because by doing these things we are sensitized to the activities of the Holy Spirit in our own lives and in the world around us. I perform spiritual disciplines because they will make me a loving person. These disciplines feed me. If I stop "eating" I will eventually die. So I "eat." Thus am I given the power
to do and the transformation
to be. We must trust the Holy Spirit to draw us into holiness. This is how Christian character develops. This is what Christian perfection looks like.
Mildred Bangs Wynkoop observed that it is possible to talk holiness into a grave. The doctrine of holiness becomes a headstone and the grave is for those who betrayed it. This betrayal is the reason why much of modern Christianity is deemed irrelevant by a postmodern world. Postmodern people seek out authentic characters as models. So Wesley's vision of Christianity exhibits kinship with the postmodern context. For Wesley, true religion is never rational assent alone. All belief and all activity
must come from the heart. Authentic Christianity is an experiential faith that leads to meaningful action in a complex world.
Concluding ThoughtsAfter experiencing this workshop, I finally--
finally--understood the
why of church, and faith, and holiness. For God's sake, the
why of being human. Somehow, I'd been a Christian for ten years, spent all of those years in one form of ministry or another, and received a degree in religion from a Wesleyan-Holiness university--and yet the
why was never explained. Or if it was, it was explained in terms I could not grasp at the time.
This
why has gone a long way toward helping me reconcile myself with Church. I'm not there yet. But I understand things a little better now.
Labels: church, faith, religion, theology
:
for Yevaud's Get and Zara
for Murien and Pip
for Aledanthar
for Tribble Wynken
for Sparks and Huey
for Jinx
for Urlana
for my Alice Plushie profile image and the Evil Plot Bunny
for many of the lovely cyber- plants in my garden.
