Thinking the holy for Christians, and specifically for reformational Christians, appears a difficult task. It remains needed, however, for the prophetic and apostolic witness to Jesus Christ insists on the importance of holiness from start to finish.

Many view holiness as accidental or expendable or even as a legalistic and conformist posture opposed to the freedom of the gospel. But Sanctification is one of the gifts of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In today’s excerpt from Sanctification, author Michael Allen explains why holiness deserves such consideration and how it requires a steady focus on the holiness of God.

THINKING THE HOLY

As Moses would tell you, you have to approach the holy in the proper way. The burning bush demands a specific posture and mode of…

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Our current series, Sanctification, looks at elements of the forthcoming volume by Michael Allen in the New Studies in Dogmatics series.

Your treatment of sanctification is itself a whole dogmatics in miniature. What led you to take this approach?

Two things have been formative here.

First, I’ve been increasingly alert to the way in which Christian moral teaching falls on deaf ears, it seems, not only in our wider culture but even within churches. It seems to me that we not only struggle with what we might call biblical and theological illiteracy, that is, unfamiliarity with the material, but perhaps more subtly with a complete misperception of its meaning. Words like “holy” are assumed to carry mainstream social meaning and, perhaps, Christ is taken to be…

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Our current series, Sanctification, looks at elements of the forthcoming volume by Michael Allen in the New Studies in Dogmatics series.

Listening to Augustine

In the year 413, Augustine wrote a small work entitled “On Faith and Works” (De fide et operibus). He responded to some men who “think that it is wrong and even absurd that one should first be taught how to live a Christian life and then be baptized. They think rather that the sacrament of baptism should come first: the teaching concerning morals and the life of a Christian should follow afterwards.”[i]  Augustine suggests that there are three concerns to be addressed. We do well to note how he distinguishes the key issues without in any way dismissing one for the sake of…

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Our current series, Sanctification, looks at elements of the forthcoming volume by Michael Allen in the New Studies in Dogmatics series.

The harder part of theology can oftentimes take the form of bringing into relief that which we are most likely to overlook. We miss things for a variety of reasons. Sometimes we miss things because they are so foreign or odd to us, whether they are literarily odd or culturally exotic. We may even know that they are baffling and, therefore, avoid them altogether. Sometimes we miss things because they seem so straightforward and familiar. We presume that a word in the Bible means just what it might in our ordinary experience, as if the fact that it was written in koine…

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Our current series, Pro-Nicene Theology, offers doctrinal and exegetical entries to the key tenets of basic Trinitarian orthodoxy as developed in the early centuries of the church. For introduction to the series, see the first part of this post.

Our entryway to this series should begin where Gregory Nazianzus started his theological orations on God and Christ.[1] In Oration 27, Gregory does not cut right to the issue of deity or number, of unity or essence. Rather, he introduces this cycle of theological homilies by attending to fundamental matters of divine self-revelation and, correspondingly, of human knowledge of the true God. He observes that theology, the knowledge of God, is the greatest need for everyone, for all need to remember God; yet he immediately qualifies the…

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