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.