The question for those engaged in ministry is whether we ourselves have learned Christ as Paul describes, and can then teach others the grace of God in such a way that leads to sanctification in those who have faith in Christ Jesus. Paul tells Timothy, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers” (1 Tim. 4:16).

The matter of sanctification can be simply stated. It has been defined as “the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness” (WSC 35). The manner in which this work progresses in a person’s life, however, is more difficult to fathom. This is evident in Paul’s description of his own experience: “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). With consternation he continues, “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing” (v. 19). He questions with deep conviction, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (v. 24), yet concludes with confidence, “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25).
While the doctrine of sanctification may be simply stated, understanding our personal experience as we continue to struggle with sin is another matter. And personal confusion in our experience may cloud our comprehension of the doctrine itself.
Perplexity concerning sanctification is not surprising in part because it is not new. Historically, the word mystery has been commonly used. The seventeenth-century pastor Walter Marshall wrote a treatise, stemming in part from his own personal struggle, entitled The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, taken from Paul’s statement in 1 Timothy 3:16, “Great is the mystery of godliness.” Another well-known pastor-theologian from the seventeenth century, John Owen, repeatedly uses the word mystery in speaking of sanctification in his treatise on the Holy Spirit, claiming, “The work itself, as hath been before declared at large, is secret and mysterious.” Later, he confesses: “The sense of what the Scripture proposeth, what I believe, and what I desire an experience of, that I shall endeavor to declare. But as we are not in this life perfect in the duties of holiness, no more are we in the knowledge of its nature.”
Despite these difficulties, Marshall and Owen, along with many other Reformed pastors and theologians, have labored to explain the pattern of sanctification and its application as taught in Scripture. In my experience, however, those entering ministry speak with greater clarity about the doctrine of justification than they do sanctification. While confident concerning the necessity of Christ’s death and resurrection for pardon of sin, there may be unease in describing the efficacy of the same for our being conformed to the image of Christ through the work of the Spirit. The question is whether Scripture teaches a clearer pattern of sanctification than we seem able to articulate.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Saturday, February 18, 2023
The social gospellers taught that we may and must “save” ourselves “through love.” For Machen, however, such a doctrine was just “semi-Pelagianism.” For the social gospellers, the hope of the world is to “apply the principles of Jesus” to it, as though He were a mere teacher or prophet. For Machen, however, the “redeeming work of Christ which is at the center of the Bible is applied to the individual soul . . . by the Holy Spirit.” Therefore, we “find no permanent hope for society in the mere ‘principles of Jesus’ or the like, but we find it in the new birth of individual souls.”

World War I turned Europe on its head, brought crashing down the optimism of the Enlightenment, and ushered in post-Enlightenment Europe. In America, however, young people undeterred by the war set about attempting to bring to earth the kingdom of God through social action. They called their message “the social gospel,” and its principal preacher was Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918), who endeavored to address the poverty he found in Hell’s Kitchen (in New York) by preaching a “gospel” of social improvement and working toward bringing about the kingdom of God on the earth through social action. This was their definition of salvation.

J. Gresham Machen (1881–1936), however, also survived World War I and defended a different doctrine, which held that the visible church represents Christ’s spiritual kingdom on the earth and that Christians exist in what John Calvin had called a “twofold kingdom” (Institutes 3.19.15). For Machen, salvation was too grand an idea to be brought utterly to earth. He recognized that Christianity was “certainly a life,” but how was it produced? The social gospellers thought that they could bring about that life “by exhortation,” Machen wrote, but such an approach always proves “powerless.” “The strange thing about Christianity was,” he explained, “that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.” He recognized that such an approach seems “impractical.” It is what Paul called “ ‘the foolishness of the message.’ . . . It seemed foolish to the ancient world, and it seems foolish to liberal teachers today.” Nevertheless, the “effects of it appear even in this world. Where the most eloquent exhortation fails, the simple story of an event succeeds; the lives of men are transformed by a piece of news.”

The social gospel reduced the human problem to material poverty. For Machen, a student of Paul and an Augustinian, our problem is much more profound. In his 1935 radio addresses, he explained that sin is much more than “antisocial conduct,” as the progressives and the social gospellers had it. The true definition of sin is “disobedience to a command of God.” It is, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism so wonderfully says, “any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God” (Q&A 14).

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Protecting religious expression is vital, not just for Christians, but for everyone. Conscience rights are pre-political rights and provide the foundation on which every other liberty is built. 

In February, the U.S. Department of Education announced its intention to rescind the “Free Inquiry Rule,” established in 2020 by then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. According to the rule, universities that receive federal funding cannot deny any right, benefit, or privilege to student organizations simply because they are religious in nature. The common-sense rule was designed to fix the increasingly common practice of campus authorities unjustly pressuring and discriminating against religious student groups. 
For example, during the 2014-15 academic year, the California State University system withdrew recognition from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship because it required its leaders to hold Christian beliefs. In fact, according to a Christian Legal Society fact sheet, similar incidents occurred at the University of Arizona, University of Northern Colorado, the University of Florida, University of Georgia, Boise State University, University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Michigan, and others. One religious organization with multiple chapters was also forced to seek legal counsel regarding its presence at 16 different public colleges and universities in the last four years.  
In 2021, a Ratio Christi chapter at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was denied funding to invite a Christian philosopher for a lecture unless it included “another spokesperson with a different ideological perspective.” In a lawsuit filed by the Alliance Defending Freedom, Ratio Christi argued that the university failed to follow this policy with other groups, but instead spent “hundreds of thousands of dollars in student fees each year to pay for speakers … on topics like sexual orientation, gender identity, reproductive justice, social justice, police reform, and political activism.”  
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