On Racial Equality and Sanctification

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I am part of a holiness movement. Both denominations that I serve, the Church of the Nazarene and the Free Methodist Church in Canada are descended from the Wesleyan Holiness tradition. I am saying this in part as a follow up on the post I made yesterday about justification by faith. In that post I was trying to say that the right response for us, when we become aware of the ways in which we are complicit with racial injustice, is not to try to justify ourselves, but to throw ourselves instead on the mercy of God in repentance, and seek in Christ’s death for our sins our only justification.

This is theologically true. One of the challenges, however, is that so often Justification gets separated from Sanctification in our understanding of the Gospel, so that the “right standing with God” that Jesus offers us does not ever result in a concrete change in how we love our neighbours as ourselves. 

This was, I think, one of the reasons the Holiness Movement began the way it did, to challenge the idea that a disembodied “faith” could save us, without ever needing to see it “play out” in concrete action in the world. This, too, has been one of the failings of the modern evangelical movement, I think, which has communicated that the Gospel is about getting people into heaven by having them “ask Jesus into our hearts,” without ever asking Jesus to change the way their hearts are beating. 

Essentially the Holiness Movement said no to this idea that the Gospel was simply “eternal fire insurance” for heaven, preaching instead that the necessary evidence of our faith in the Gospel was the way in which “Gospel fruit” showed up in our lives.

I’m bringing this up, in part, because many of the stories I have been hearing over the last few days have reminded me of how culpable the white evangelical church really is when it comes to racial injustice, either by actively acting racist, or at the very least by not actively resisting racism.

How could this be? When the Gospel so clearly indicates (at least on my reading it’s crystal clear) that racial equality is God’s vision for his Kingdom?

I would argue that one of the explanations is that white Christians have been content to be “Justified by Faith” without wanting to be “Sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” If we were truly, entirely sanctified we would loathe racial prejudice as the affront to the Creator that it is, and we would long for racial justice the way the Creator himself must long for it. And until we are entirely sanctified, I do not think we can expect to see real, lasting change when it comes to this issue.

So I’m saying this partly to bring Justification and Sanctification back together in this discussion: we can never talk about how we are justified by the grace of God, without wanting to be sanctified by the Spirit of God.

But I’m also saying it to address another impulse that I am noticing in myself, as a white middle-aged male, besides the impulse to self-justification. That is the impulse to “virtue-signal.” It’s one of the reasons I did not respond immediately on social media when news about the protests against racial injustice started to hit my Facebook feed last week. It seemed to me that to jump in with a “like” and a “share” that really cost me nothing would only come across as an empty signal of a phoney virtue I didn’t think I deserved. Of course, the irony is that not saying anything could also be a kind of virtue-signalling, too. If it’s concerned primarily with how my silence will “look to others” it simply becomes a way of saying, “Look at how sensitive I am… I get the issue well enough to hold my tongue….”

Lord have mercy.

Because what I am discovering as I process all this is that just like there is a desire to self-justify when it comes to the evil or racism, there is also a desire to self-sanctify, that is to find a solution to the problem of racism that does not require the supernatural transformation that only the Holy Spirit can effect.

Please don’t get me wrong. I believe that social action, speaking out, taking risks, political protest, personal sacrifice, engaging in dialogue, resisting evil, that all these things have a place. They are essential if we are ever to see justice roll down like a mighty stream. Racism is real, a deeply rooted sin that needs to be addressed as such. But the problem of racism is not that we are racist, per se, it’s that we are unsanctified, and if we were entirely sanctified we would find within us the spiritual resources necessary to address and resist the problem of racism.

I believe that the call which is sounding across the country right now, as cities burn and people protest, is not just a call for us to confront the evil of racism. I believe it is that, but that there is another call, echoing within it, the way deep calls out to deep. It is the call of Jesus to all his followers, and especially his white followers in positions of privilege, to be sanctified today by the Holy Spirit. This is what he always offers us when we repent of any sin: not just a divine forgiveness, but a divine change that empowers us to be different.

Without that divine change in my heart,  I honestly fear that my best efforts to fight racism on my own may amount to little more than an empty signal of a phoney virtue I’m not sure I really have.

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