Considering a Contemplative View of Sanctification

The final view of sanctification addressed in Christian Spirituality is that of the contemplatives. The Church has a long history with contemplatives, or mystics, that transcends geography and denominations. Some well-known names were contemplatives: Bernard of Clairvoux, St. John of the Cross, Teresa Avila, Thomas Merton and more. In my younger days as a Christian I read Brother Lawrence and The Great Cloud of Unknowing. How does E. Glenn Hinson describe contemplative Christianity?

Contemplatives try to balance the inner and outer life. They usually assert that being will result in doing (which is a far more biblical idea than doing will result in being). They do spend most of their time addressing the inner life: being. Its focus is on communicating, communing and contemplating with God internally. Like Wesleyian sanctification the focus is on one’s love for God. Instead of gaining this thru a second blessing, one pursues it, so to speak, through a series of activities that leads one thru the stages of increasing communion with God. I’m trying to do this justice on its own terms.

“Contemplation has to do with this loving attentiveness to God.”

In contemplation there is an assumption that God is immanent in the created order. He is inescapably near to us. There is no disputing this, the question is “how is He near?”.

In Hinson’s description, there is a “naturalness” to this pursuit of the Divine Lover. He does not clarify and it can sound awfully Pelagian to many ears. Since contemplatives typically eschew theological distinctions, lots of things are vague enough to be misunderstood. Or properly understood.

At the very best, it is typically Arminian. God is a gentleman who never knocks our door down but respects the freedom He gave us. There is a resistibleness to this “grace.” Let me clarify: in Reformed Theology God does not violate the will of the creature, but in regeneration changes the character/nature of the creature so the person’s will is changed. We cannot thwart God’s purposes and plan. In most contemplative theology we, not God, are in the driver’s seat.

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Considering a Pentecostal View of Sanctification

If you are looking for the definitive description of how Pentecostals view and approach sanctification you may want to keep looking. Or maybe this is right on the mark. I hope not.

Russell Spittler’s chapter in Christian Spirituality is largely descriptive, not prescriptive. By this I mean he describes a number of common Pentecostal practices that are viewed as manifestations of the Spirit which have no apparent connection to sanctification (as far as I can tell). He doesn’t mention how they further the sanctification process. I have had Pentecostals tell me that speaking in tongues helps them avoid sin, but never how.

He begins by noting historical developments and their roots in a second blessing theology similar to Methodism. Instead of entire sanctification this is viewed as baptism in the Spirit. It is rooted, again, in a two-stage understanding of Christian experience. This takes the progress of redemptive-history as normative for us. Not in the sense that we should receive the baptism in the Spirit, but that it lags after justification/conversion and is necessarily accompanied by speaking in tongues. He provides very little theological justification for this view or the various manifestations he will describe beyond a few proof-texts. There is no attempt at any systematic understanding of anything.

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