After reading Forde's treatment of sanctification I can see several main conclusions he has drawn. The thesis statement of his article is this, "Sanctification is simply the art of getting used to justification." Below are some other quotes I've taken to show Forde's conclusions.
"It [sanctification] is what happens when we are grasped by the fact that God alone justifies."
"It is what happens when the old being comes up against the end of its self-justifying and self-gratifying, however pious. It is life lived in anticipation of the resurrection."
"Now, living morally is indeed an important, wise and good thing. There is no need to knock it. But it should not be equated with sanctification, being made holy. The moral life is the business of the old being in this world. The Reformers called it "civil righteousness." Sanctification is the result of the dying of the old and the rising of the new. The moral life is the result of the old being's struggle to climb to the heights of the law. Sanctification has to do with the decent of the new being into humanity, becoming a neighbor, freely, spontaneously, giving of the self in self-forgetful and uncalculating ways."
"Talk about sanctification can be dangerous in that it misleads and seduces the old being into thinking it is still in control. We may grudgingly admit we cannot justify ourselves, but then we attempt to make up for that by getting serious about sanctification."
"Conditional thinking is wedded to the schemes of law and progress characteristics of this age. Sin is understood primarily as misdeed or transgression of such a scheme...The logic would then be that with the help of grace one progressively gains more and more righteousness and thus sins less and less. One strives toward perfection until, theoretically, one would need less and less grace or perhaps finally no more grace at all."
"Whose fault is it if the scheme doesn't work?...Either I have not properly responded to or cooperated with the free divine grace, or most frightening of all, the God of election who presides over such grace has decided, in my case, not to give it."
"So it is impossible to put God's unconditional act of justifying sinners for Jesus' sake alone together with our ideas of progress based on conditions. It doesn't work either logically or in the life of faith."
"So it is always as a totality that unconditional grace attacks sin. That is why total sanctification and justification are in essence the same thing."
"The second aspect of the transition of the Christian from old to death to life, is that all our ordinary views of progress and growth are turned upside down. It is not that we are somehow moving toward the goal, but rather that the goal is moving closer and closer to us. This corresponds to the eschatological nature of the New Testament message. It is the coming of the kingdom upon us, not our coming closer to or building up the kingdom. That is why it is a growth in grace, not a growth in our own virtue or morality. The progress, if one can call it that, is that we are being shaped more and more by the totality of the grace coming to us. The progress is due to the steady invasion of the new. That means that we are being taken more and more off our own hands, more and more away from self, and getting used to the idea of being saved by the grace of God alone. Our sanctification consists merely in being shaped by, or getting used to, justification."
"Sanctification under the invasion of the new, however, holds out the possibility of actually coming to hate sin, and to love God and his creation, or at least to make that little beginning. It is not that sin is taken away from us, but rather that we are to be taken away from sin heart, soul and mind, as Luther put it. In that manner, the law of God is to be fulfilled in us precisely by the uncompromising totality and unconditionality of the grace given."
"If we are turned around to get back down to earth by grace, then it would seem that true sanctification would show itself in taking care of our neighbor and God’s creation, not exploiting and destroying either for our own ends, religious or otherwise. It would mean concern for the neighbor and society, caring for the other for the time being. Here one should talk about the place of morality and virtue and such things. Although we do not accept them as the means by which we are sanctified, they are the means by which and through which we care for the world and for the other. This is what the Reformers meant when they insisted that good works were to be done, but one was not to depend on them for salvation."
In my next post I intend to comment on some if not all of these quotes.
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