Theopedia

Sanctification

“For this is the will of God, your sanctification.”

— 1 Thessalonians 4:3

Definition

Sanctification is God’s ongoing, supernatural work of renewing a believer “in the whole man after the image of God,” progressively enabling him “more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.” Hodge distinguishes it from justification: justification is a transient, forensic act, changing a sinner’s legal standing; sanctification is a progressive, real change of character, “an effect due to the divine efficiency.” Justification is objective, founded on what Christ has done for the believer; sanctification is subjective, the effect of what Christ does in him. Both, however, are equally acts of grace.1

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states that those united to Christ, effectually called, and regenerated “are also farther sanctified, really and personally, through the same virtue, by his Word and Spirit dwelling in them; the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts of it are more and more weakened and mortified, and they more and more quickened and strengthened in all saving graces, to the practice of all true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.”2

Biblical Basis

Paul ties sanctification directly to union with Christ’s death and resurrection: “we know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing… so we too might walk in newness of life” (Rom. 6:6, 4), the same freedom Corinth is reminded it already has: “you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 6:11). This holiness is not optional or merely aspirational: “strive for… the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14), and its pattern is Christ himself, into whose image believers are being progressively conformed: “we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18). Hodge insists this transformation is supernatural rather than mere moral reform, guarding against any account that reduces sanctification to self-improvement achievable apart from the Spirit’s own work.1

Historical Development

Calvin’s doctrine of the twofold grace

Calvin’s Institutes (1559) states the classical Reformed account of how justification and sanctification relate: both are received together, through union with Christ, as a single “double grace” (duplex gratia) rather than as two separate transactions.

“Christ was given to us by God’s generosity, to be grasped and possessed by us in faith. By partaking of him, we principally receive a double grace: namely, that being reconciled to God through Christ’s blamelessness, we may have in heaven instead of a Judge a gracious Father; and secondly, that sanctified by Christ’s spirit we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.”3

Carol Chen’s study of Calvin’s doctrine observes that this move was one of his central contributions against Rome, which had fused justification and sanctification into a single process of infused, cooperative grace: Calvin instead united the two as distinct benefits of the same union with Christ, “keeping them distinct” while insisting they can never be obtained separately, since both come only from a Christ who does not “remain outside of us.”4

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter XVIII. Sanctification,” in Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 212-213. ↩ ↩2

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 13, “Of Sanctification,” para. 1. ↩

  3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.11.1, quoted in Carol Man Fen Chen, “John Calvin’s Doctrine of Twofold Grace of God in Covenant Theology,” in A Historical, Biblical, and Theological Interpretation of Covenants: Unconditionality and Conditionality in Relation to Justification and Sanctification (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 57-58. ↩

  4. Chen, “John Calvin’s Doctrine of Twofold Grace of God in Covenant Theology,” 53-58. ↩