Having completed
his exceedingly problematic attempt to refute alternative positions on
sanctification, Barabas proceeds to positively set forth the Keswick method of
holiness. Keswick considers
“sanctification as a process, as a crisis, and as a gift.”[1] The order places “process” first, because it
“is the best understood, and not because it is the first in the order of time,”[2]
for in the Keswick theology any process in sanctification takes place only in a
significant way[3]
after the experience of crisis and the receipt of the gift. Over the course of a twenty page chapter[4]
on the crisis of consecration, Barabas states that it is “very characteristic
of Keswick” and “some of its basic teachin[g]” to affirm that “sanctification
is a process beginning with a crisis.”[5] Once again, in this matter Keswick follows
Hannah and Robert P. Smith and the Broadlands, Oxford, and Brighton Conventions.[6] The “crisis must take place before we really
know the process. . . . The process succeeds the crisis.”[7] The crisis takes place when one makes a
“complete personal consecration” to God, “also referred to as dedication and
full surrender.”[8] The crisis has a “positive side . . .
surrender or the committal of oneself to Christ and the pledge to be eternally
loyal to Him as Lord and Master . . . [and] a negative side[,] . . . [t]o deny
self . . . [to] definitely and for ever cho[ose] the will of the Lord Jesus
Christ as [one’s] Guide and Director through life, in place of [one’s] own
will.”[9] In fact, “God’s blessing of deliverance from
the power of sin is not to be had” until a Christian makes this full surrender,[10]
for “the divine Potter . . . cannot shape the human vessel unless it is
committed into His hands and remains unresistingly and quietly there.”[11] In the Keswick theology, “Consecration is . .
. the starting point of the sanctification process,” which is only continued as
“the response made to God at consecration is continued.”[12] The crisis “decision is the inescapable
condition of progressive sanctification.”[13] Progressive sanctification cannoc commence
before the crisis of consecration.
In
terms of sanctification as a gift, explicated by Barabas for twenty-one pages,[14]
Keswick teaches that we are “asked . . . to accept holiness by faith in the
same way that we accept justification by faith.”[15] According to “Keswick, we are not sanctified
by self-effort or by works, but by faith in what Christ has done for us at
Calvary. Sanctification, like
justification, is by grace alone.”[16] Keswick affirms that “if we wish to make any
progress in holiness, we have to give up belief in the value of self-effort in
holiness. . . . sanctification . . . is not something for which we have to
struggle or strive[.] . . . Sanctification is primarily and fundamentally
‘neither an achievement nor a process, but a gift, a divine bestowal of a
position in Christ.’”[17] It is “the heart and essence . . . of Keswick
teaching . . . [that] [f]reedom from the dominion of sin is a blessing that we
may claim by faith, just as we accept pardon.”[18] Since believers are “identified with Christ
in His death to sin . . . [they] need no longer serve sin,”[19]
although it is supposedly possible for “all Christians . . . [to] be in
terrible bondage . . . under the power of sin.”[20] They “have a legal right to be free,”
however, and obtain “[d]eliverance . . . not . . . by struggle and painful
effort, by earnest resolutions and self-denial, but . . . by simple faith.”[21] The “special message . . at Keswick . . . [is
that it] is possible to serve sin again, but not necessary, for Christ has
freed us.”[22] This “freedom is only potential . . . [and]
Keswick leaders often say that God’s method of sanctification is not suppression or eradication, but counteraction.”[23] Keswick reproduced the teaching of
Broadlands, Oxford, and Brighton[24]
to affirm that the sinfulness within the believer “is something fixed and
permanent, and will remain in us as long as we live. . . . The principle of
counteraction is . . . basic to Keswick teaching.”[25] The “locus
classicus on” the Keswick doctrine of sanctification as gift is “Romans
vi.”[26] As the Holy Spirit counteracts indwelling sin
in the Christian, the believer “ceases from his own struggles to live a holy
life, and enters the ‘rest of faith’ . . . the secret of perfect and constant
victory over temptation.”[27] Thus, “the heart and core of Keswick teaching
is its doctrine of sanctification by faith. . . . The Keswick position,”[28]
which is derived from Hannah W. Smith,[29]
“is that in Scripture sanctification comes by faith, and not in any other way.”[30] According to Keswick, for a believer to be
sanctified he must: 1.) recognize the
truth of the Keswick doctrine, “the scriptural method of progressive
sanctification,”; 2.) have “proper faith,” which involves “the believer’s
consent to die to every fleshly desire in him,” and 3.) “hand over the fleshly
deeds of the body to the Spirit for mortification . . . Romans 8:13 . . . [and]
stand in faith in the knowledge that he died to sin in Christ at Calvary. It is the Holy Spirit’s responsibility to do
the rest. Sanctification is thus the result, not of attempts at suppression of
the flesh, but of faith in the finished work of Calvary.”[31] Such is Keswick’s method for receiving
sanctification as a gift.
The process
aspect of sanctification, which is dependent in the Keswick theology upon
experiencing the sanctification crisis and receiving of sanctification as a gift,
is discussed by Barabas on half a page.[32] Barabas discusses sanctification as a crisis
for over twenty pages, and sanctification as gift for over twenty pages. Why only a tiny discussion of sanctification
as a process on one-half of one page?
This huge contrast exists because, for Keswick, “Sanctification is
primarily and fundamentally ‘neither an achievement nor a process, but a gift[.’]”[33] Little emphasis is placed upon sanctification
as a process because Keswick believes that through the course of the Christian
life the “indwelling tendency to sin . . . is as fixed and constant as any of
the laws of nature,”[34]
so that “purity can become a maintained condition, but never a state,”[35]
the “tendency to evil” being merely “counteracted”[36]
but left entirely unchanged, and “the tendency to sin [being] . . . simply
counteracted.”[37] Victory over sin, Keswick affirms, “is not a
question of progressive attainment.”[38] Little emphasis is placed upon sanctification
as a process because there is little or nothing that actually changes within
the believer. Keswick believes that it
“is astonishing that theologians have not seen this”[39]
theology of counteraction and rejection of actual inward renewal in the Bible.
While
Keswick is correct and commendable in calling believers to surrender themselves
completely to God, in its emphasis upon the believer’s union with Christ, and
in its affirmation that strength to grow spiritually is derived from the Lord
Jesus through the Holy Spirit, there are serious problems with the Keswick
doctrine of sanctification as crisis, gift, and process. First, it is certainly true that when a
believer is deliberately allowing, tolerating, and positively regarding sin in
his life his growth in holiness will be greatly hindered or even reversed. However, it is not true that real steps in
sanctification cannot take place before a post-conversion crisis, nor that
“God’s blessing of deliverance from the power of sin is not to be had” until
such a crisis takes place.[40] On the contrary, all Christians are delivered
from the power of sin. It is not true,
as Keswick affirms, that “all Christians . . . [can] be in terrible bondage . .
. under the power of sin”[41] or
that, as Hannah W. Smith taught[42]
and Keswick proclaims, Christian “freedom [from sin] is only potential.”[43] To state that, for Christians, “our
individual self is entirely and completely under the power of sin”[44]
is flatly false. Since believers are
“not under the law, but under grace,” God promises that “sin shall not have
dominion” over them (Romans 6:14). Such
freedom is not merely potential, but actual.
Romans six does not establish the mere possibility of freedom from sin
for the Christian, but establishes that all Christians are indeed free from the
bondage of sin, and as a result, they will—not merely may—grow in
holiness. The commands to the believer
in Romans six to reckon and yield are not based upon a mere possibility of change,
but upon a certain promise—grace guarantees that sin “shall not” dominate them. Keswick, adopting the emphasis and Broadlands
teaching of Hannah W. Smith,[45]
affirms that death to sin and spiritual life are not in any sense a practical
reality until, by an act of reckoning, the Higher Life is entered into. Scripture, on the contrary, commands a
believer to reckon himself dead to sin and alive to God because he already is
so and is already freed from the dominion of sin and under the reign of grace
(Romans 6:11, 14). The power and
promises God made in the New Covenant ratified in Christ’s blood secure the
certainty of the believer’s sanctification.
The Keswick doctrine of a merely potential deliverance from sin for the
saint is far too weak.
See here for this entire study.
[1] Pg. 85, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. Barabas
states on the same page that Keswick accepts the classical doctrine that
“experimental sanctification is the day-by-day transformation of the believer
into the image of Christ, and is progressive in nature. Beginning at regeneration, it continues all
through life, but is never complete.”
However, the description of sanctification as process, crisis, and gift
is “more characteristic of Keswick” and is “more often” employed than the
classical doctrine.
[2] Pg. 99, Chapter 5, The
Law of Liberty in the Spiritual Life, by Evan Hopkins. Barabas indicates his dependence upon
Hopkins’s exposition (pg. 85, So Great
Salvation). Hopkins’s “discussion of
‘God’s Gift of Holiness’” at Keswick in 1899 was also “quoted at length by
Steven Barabas, in So Great Salvation”
(pgs. 404-405, Keswick’s Authentic Voice,
ed. Stevenson; the actual address by Hopkins follows on pgs. 436-442).
[3] Barabas states:
“Much is made by Keswick of sanctification as a crisis. It is true, Keswick says, that sanctification
invariably begins at regeneration. There
can be no question about this. On the
other hand, many Christians do not make the progress in sanctification that
they should. . . . For this reason real progress is often not made until they
come to a spiritual crisis” (pg. 86, So
Great Salvation).
[4] Pgs. 108-127, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[5] Pg. 110, So Great
Salvation, Barabas. Keswick writers
do indeed regularly affirm such a crisis/process model; for example, Watchman
Nee wrote that sanctification “usually takes the two-fold form of a crisis
leading to a continuous process” (“A Gate and a Path,” The Normal Christian Life, Watchman Nee).
[6] See, e. g., Hannah
W. Smith’s preaching of Keswick’s crisis-process model on pgs. 125ff., The Life that is Life Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands Conferences,
Edna V. Jackson. London: James Nisbet & Co, 1910. Robert proclaimed at Oxford:
It is to bring you to a crisis of faith that we have come
together[.] . . . We preach this, not as a finality, but as the only true commencement of a life of progress[.] .
. . [T]he Rest of Faith . . . is not a finality but the true and only
commencement of a life of progressive sanctification. . . . It was constantly
pointed out that, so far from [the Higher Life] being the finality of Christian
experience, it was but the commencement
of a course of “progressive sanctification[.]” (pgs. 42, 51, 278-279, 332, Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion
of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874.
Chicago: Revell, 1874. Italics in original.)
[7] Pg. 114-115, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. Compare
the belief of Evan Hopkins in “the crisis that prefaced the process . . . the
crisis must take place before the process has its beginning” (pgs. 56, 94-95, Evan Harry Hopkins: A Memoir, Alexander Smellie).
[8] Pgs. 109-110, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[9] Pgs. 116-117, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[10] Pg. 109, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[11] Pg. 112, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[12] Pg. 116, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[13] Pg. 125, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
Interestingly, Barabas wrote concerning this crisis decision: “For many people the crisis is
prolonged—perhaps even over years—and the decision is made piecemeal; for some
there are stages in the crisis and in the decision[.] . . . The decision is the
inescapable condition of progressive sanctification” (pgs. 124-125). One wonders what state the person is in who
makes the decision piecemeal and in stages; is he still a carnal Christian, has
he ascended to the Higher Life of the spiritual Christian, or is he a third
type, the carnal/spiritual Christian, a sort of half-and-half that has both not
yet met the condition that begins progressive sanctification and yet has also
met it, so that progressive sanctification can begin and yet has not
begun? Note that this carnal/spiritual
Christian has, because he has surrended much, but not yet all, of his life to
God, made progress in sanctification, as he is certainly further along than the
alleged category of Christian that is still totally in charge of his own
life. However, although he is further
along, since he has not yet fully surrendered, he still cannot even begin the process
of progressive sanctification, according to Barabas. Barabas’s contradictory arguments are just
another example of the fact that “Keswick furnishes us with no carefully
prepared, weighty discourses of a theological nature” (pg. 51). His contradictions, unintelligibility, and
incoherence are good Keswick teaching.
[14] Pgs. 86-107, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[15] Pg. 86, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[16] Pg. 86, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[17] Pg. 88, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. Barabas
quotes Ruth Paxson, Life on the Highest
Plane, Vol. II, pg. 107.
[18] Pg. 89, So Great
Salvation, Barabas.
[19] Pg. 89, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[20] Pg. 90, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[21] Pg. 90, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[22] Pg. 92, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[23] Pg. 94, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[24] For example, the Oxford Convention set forth the Keswick
doctrine of counteraction:
The
natural tendency of Peter was to sink [when walking on the water]. Jesus counteracted this, and Peter walked on
the water until he took his eye off from Jesus and looked at the waves. Our tendency by nature is to sin, but faith
in Jesus meets this tendency to evil [and] . . . brings into operation the law
of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus, which sets us free from the law of sin
and death. (pg. 53, Account
of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, Held at Oxford,
August 29 to September 7, 1874. Chicago: Revell, 1874)
Thus,
for Keswick, as at Oxford, there is no actual growth in the believer’s inward
holiness—indwelling sin is not eradicated, but only counteracted, so that the
Higher Life keeps one above water but devoid of any actual progress.
[25] Pg. 95, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. Compare
the teaching at the Oxford Convention:
[S]ettle it once for all that
we shall never find anything good in ourselves of any kind whatsoever. Christians are apt to think they can have
stocks of virtues laid up in themselves [that is, that God actually makes them
holy in progressive sanctification, but this is false.] . . . God’s way is . .
. just like drawing on a bank. Our money
is in the bank, not in our pockets. God
never gives us anything [inwardly.] . . . We get up each morning with nothing,
and we go to bed with nothing. (pgs. 302-304, Account of the Union Meeting for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness,
Held at Oxford, August 29 to September 7, 1874.
Chicago: Revell, 1874)
[26] Pg. 89, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[27] Pg. 95, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. It is
noteworthy that an examination of the personal journals of T. D.
Harford-Battersby, co-founder and chairman of the Keswick convention, “do
not bear witness to unfailing victory, to neverbroken peace,” but to a kind of
spiritual life that is entirely consistent with the classical Baptist and old
evangelical view of Romans 7:14-25 (pgs. 188ff., Memoir of T.
D. Harford-Battersby, Harford). Mr.
Harford-Battersby’s private journal was more honest about the continuing
reality and influence of indwelling sin in the regenerate than was the public
preaching of the Keswick theology.
[28] Pg. 100, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[29] Mrs. Smith wrote: “We can do nothing . . . [o]ur only part . .
. is to stop working” (Journal, 1867, reproduced in the entry for March 26 of The Christian’s Secret of a Holy Life,
Hannah W. Smith, ed. Dieter). Compare
Evan Roberts’s exhortation to be “simply trusting and not trying,” a maxim on
sanctification that was also adopted by Pentecostalism (pg. 65, Azusa Street: The Roots of Modern-Day
Pentecost, Frank Bartleman, ed. Synan).
[30] Pg. 100, So Great
Salvation, Barabas.
[31] Pgs. 106-107, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[32] Pg. 85, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[33] Pg. 88, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[34] Pg. 47, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[35] Pg. 47, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[36] Pg. 49, So
Great Salvation, Barabas. Keswick
theology often affirms that Romans 6:6 does not actually teach that the body of
sin is progressively, through mortification, “destroyed,” but that it is merely
“counteracted.” As noted in the
discussion above in the section “The Body of Sin Is Indeed Destroyed, Not
Merely Counteracted,” this conclusion of Keswick is false.
[37] Pg. 49, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[38] Pg. 96, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[39] Pg. 104, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[40] Pg. 109, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[41] Pg. 90, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[42] E.
g., pg. 128, The Life that is Life
Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands
Conferences, Edna V. Jackson.
London: James Nisbet & Co,
1910.
[43] Pg. 94, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[44] Pg. 139, So
Great Salvation, Barabas.
[45] E.
g., pg. 128, The Life that is Life
Indeed: Reminiscences of the Broadlands
Conferences, Edna V. Jackson.
London: James Nisbet & Co,
1910.
