For the last 25 years or so, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has been tussling over "righteousness by faith." This is not an unusual happening, either in terms of the Adventist Church or Christianity as a whole. The truth is, of course, that contention over how Cod sees human beings goes back to the days of Martin Luther, Paul, and even Cain and Abel.
In the Adventist setting, the role of "justification" and "sanctification" (if we still dare to use such tired words!) has been at the center of the debates.
As the debate has developed, it has assumed increasingly defined nuances and distinctions, making the differences more numerous and difficult to handle. This contention hardened into competing theological, ecclesiological, and interpersonal poles, until what had once been a simple, beautiful experience that changed people's lives, became all but insipid, and for many, something to be suspected and avoided.
Early in my own experience I discovered the blessing of the inner work of Christ (sanctification). The wonder of this experience took deep root in me. Later, however, I saw that I by all means still needed the forgiveness and grace of Christ. I needed the perfect goodness of Another to cover my own failures, and even the best of what I did for God. And so God opened the eyes of my heart to His work for me (justification). This has been surpassingly valuable to me.
Each of these two aspects of the whole represent long periods of my adult spiritual life. It's not as though I ever jettisoned one in favor of the other. But while embracing the one, I often placed it above the other, and then got into debilitating ecclesiastical debates defending my position.
Recently, I have begun to make more authentic long-term peace between these two great aspects at the core of the New Testament message. The peace began to dawn when I decided to revise it and rediscover my early "sanctificationist" roots. I was finally ready to unite the work of Christ in me with what He has done for me, honestly coordinating the two biblically and experientially.
And so, elementary as it may seem to some, a third conviction has emerged, one as strong as either of the other two: That we have a great need to gather up all of the work of Christ, both that done in us and that done for us. It is not as though we should do this by collecting fragmented, competing theological viewpoints, but that we bring the essential parts of the biblical whole together into a living, cohesive organism that evokes the profound experience it was designed to stir up in us.
Doing this calls for the healthy integration of justification and sanctification; combining the objective and the subjective elements of the work of Christ. Doing this we come to see how each complements the other in our experience, and how together they complement the whole, so that each is given its due influence in our daily experience.
Very significantly, I have also come to realize that it is when the Holy Spirit and His work are embraced, that the two are made one in the human soul.
In a thought-provoking summation, Laurens van der Post exposes the innate tendency of human beings to divide the indivisible: "I have always believed that the balance between primitive and civilized values has never yet been fairly struck in any society.... I would suggest that the primitive [a state that Van der Post consistently championed] is a condition of life wherein the instinctive, subjective, and collective values tend to predominate; the civilized condition of life is where the rational, objective, and individual take command. Throughout history the two have been at one another's throats because it appears that the value of one depends on the rejection of the other."1
In this valuable insight, van der Post does not, of course, have the Christian gospel in mind, but he nevertheless describes a general human tendency that certainly manifests itself in the way Christians all too often manipulate the gospel and present their dichotomized arguments about it.
As we like to point out, the brain and the heart are distinct and yet inseparable, so within the body of the gospel each part performs its unique function, but in absolute unity with each other. As with heart and brain, there are obviously distinctions to be noted and honored, but in the end, the two are persistently one, a single unit working together to sustain life itself.
That which God has joined together, let not man put asunder. We do not have the authentic whole until we have brought together all its parts. It is our greatest privilege to bond the realities that God has united in the core mes sage of the Bible and emphasize their original, biblical purpose in our lives and in the lives of our people.
