Monthly Archives: October 2015

Passive Sanctification?

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he outlines why the concept is attractive to some:

Passive sanctification is an error that has stalked and hurt the Christian church and many Christian lives through the years. The basic idea is that personal holiness is achieved without any personal activity, without any physical effort. Rather, holiness is received the more we are enabled to yield, to give up, or to believe.

The older form of this error has been summed up in the phrase, “Let go and let God.” We are passive and God is active. The more passive we become the more active God becomes. The less we try to succeed the more God will succeed in us.

The newest form of this error can be summed up in the phrase “Believe in your justification and you will be sanctified.” The idea is that the more you believe in your justification the more holy you will become. As faith receives and embraces justification, spiritual growth will happen. Faith simply receives, and this automatically produces godliness. There is no effort or activity on our part, apart from the effort of believing and receiving what Christ has already accomplished. Sanctification happens by believing in our justification.

There are a number of reasons (good and bad) why so many Christians are attracted to this modern version of passive sanctification.

1. Keeps justification central in the Christian life

Although we are only justified once, by our initial act of saving faith, yet we need to appropriate that justification time and time again. We do need to understand it more, believe it more, know it more, and experience it more. Remember it, recognize it, realize it, relax in it, and rejoice in it. Yes!

2. Reduces the danger of legalism in the Christian life

Some Christians have the tendency to think “I’m saved by God’s sovereign grace, but now it’s over to me.” “I get in by Christ’s work but I go on by my work. I’m saved passively but I’m made holy by my activity.” The Christian life then becomes a ceaseless round of activity, service, obligation, targets, resolutions…and failures, disappointment, frustration, etc. By helping the Christian return again and again to their justified status, the danger of legalistic activism is avoided. Continue reading →

Earliest List of the Canon

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What is the Earliest Complete List of the Canon of the New Testament? scholars like to highlight the first time we see a complete list of 27 books. Inevitably, the list contained in Athanasius’ famous Festal Letter (c.367) is mentioned as the first time this happened.

As a result, it is often claimed that the New Testament was a late phenomenon. We didn’t have a New Testament, according to Athanasius, until the end of the fourth century.

But, this sort of reasoning is problematic on a number of levels. First, we don’t measure the existence of the New Testament just by the existence of lists. When we examine the way certain books were used by the early church fathers, it is evident that there was a functioning canon long before the fourth century. Indeed, by the second century, there is already a “core” collection of New Testament books functioning as Scripture.

Second, there are reasons to think that Athanasius’ list is not the earliest complete list we possess. In the recent festschrift for Larry Hurtado, Mark Manuscripts and Monotheism (edited by Chris Keith and Dieter Roth; T&T Clark, 2015), I wrote an article entitled, “Origen’s List of New Testament Books in Homiliae on Josuam 7.1: A Fresh Look.”

In that article, I argue that around 250 A.D., Origen likely produced a complete list of all 27 New Testament books–more than a hundred years before Athanasius. In his typical allegorical fashion, Origen used the story of Joshua to describe the New Testament canon:

But when our Lord Jesus Christ comes, whose arrival that prior son of Nun designated, he sends priests, his apostles, bearing “trumpets hammered thin,” the magnificent and heavenly instruction of proclamation. Matthew first sounded the priestly trumpet in his Gospel; Mark also; Luke and John each played their own priestly trumpets. Even Peter cries out with trumpets in two of his epistles; also James and Jude. In addition, John also sounds the trumpet through his epistles [and Revelation], and Luke, as he describes the Acts of the Apostles. And now that last one comes, the one who said, “I think God displays us apostles last,” and in fourteen of his epistles, thundering with trumpets, he casts down the walls of Jericho and all the devices of idolatry and dogmas of philosophers, all the way to the foundations (Hom. Jos. 7.1).

As one can see from the list above, all 27 books of the New Testament are accounted for (Origen clearly counts Hebrews as part of Paul’s letters). The only ambiguity is a text-critical issue with Revelation, but we have good evidence from other sources that Origen accepted Revelation as Scripture (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.25.10). Continue reading →