God commands us “You shall be holy, for I am holy” (1 Peter 1:16), but the debate over how to actually accomplish this command has caused Christians a great deal of anguish over the years.
Purity rings were a big deal when I was in high school. Maybe they did some good for some people, but for most of the girls I knew, the ring was just for when they finally had sex with the ‘right’ person. Also, none of the guys ever seemed pressured to wear a purity ring. Maybe they didn’t need to worry about purity.
As a fifteen-year-old, I couldn’t see any real difference between the annoyingly self-righteous ‘uber-Christian’ kids and the death metal kids with no idea what a purity ring was. Sadly, my impressions as a teenager were not inaccurate.
A study conducted in 1996 recorded several hundred teens who were split between those who had taken ‘virginity pledges’ and those who had not. The team followed up five years later and found that “82% of pledgers denied having ever pledged. Pledgers and matched nonpledgers did not differ in premarital sex, sexually transmitted diseases…. Pledgers had 0.1 fewer past-year partners but did not differ in lifetime sexual partners and age of first sex.”
Joshua Harris, landmark figure and leader in the purity culture movement, shared in The Rise & Fall of Mars Hill podcast what had inspired his iconic book. “The premise of I Kissed Dating Goodbye was that sex before marriage was one of the worst, most dangerous things, one of the biggest deals when it came to the list of sins. At least that was the way I thought as a teenager growing up in an evangelical church… There was so much fear around AIDS. There was so much fear around the possibility of unwanted pregnancy and abortion… Why put ourselves in a situation where we could compromise?”
Harris appeared on a TED Talk in 2017 to apologize for his book. In 2018, he released a full-length documentary that ideologically redacted most of the book; in July 2019, Joshua and his wife announced that they were getting a divorce. Soon after, he decided that he no longer identified as a Christian.
What went wrong? How did one of the largest modern evangelical holiness movements go so awry?
The Collapse into Despair
One of the better-known Old Testament stories is of Moses giving the people of Israel the Ten Commandments. Even those who haven’t read the actual scriptures about this event have at least passing familiarity with the 1956 movie where Charlton Heston stumps out of the wilderness with the two iconic stone tablets. Many people even remember what happened next. Moses was called back up onto the mountain to meet with God again, and the Israelites threw a massive rager of a party that devolved — by some interpretations — into an all-out orgy.
The temptation for readers at this point of the story in Exodus 32 is to scoff or be incredulous. How could these people turn so quickly away from God after witnessing the plagues in Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea?
In his sermon “Be Ye Holy”, David Wilkerson invited his listeners to put themselves in the Israelites’ sandals, so the speak. “You can hear the people talking in their tents, and one man is saying to the other, ‘How can we be holy?’ See, God had already given them the law. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt have no other gods. Thou shall not steal.
“They started playing over those laws in their minds. They saw the terrible fear of God…They saw how sinful and how weak — they could feel the flesh in themselves, their evil desires. They looked at the law of God and said, ‘That's impossible…How can you be holy? How can you be clean?’ I could just imagine this happening: One man finally stands up and says, ‘Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't serve a God that scares you….’”
David concluded, “They got mad at God for making such a big demand to be holy, and they didn't know how to be holy. For him to put such a law on them, and they didn't know how to fulfill the law…. Isn’t it bad enough to be in a world like this where there's so much temptation and trial, then God comes along and tells you're going to be damned if you don't live up to his holy standards?”
In despair over their own lack of holiness and inability to perfectly obey the law, they collapsed into indulging sin. If they couldn’t win according to God’s laws, then they might as well enjoy breaking the law. While this kind of reaction can feel gratifying in the moment, we’re only hurt by it in the end.
The Hyper Legalists’ Way
Not everyone reacts with anger and rebellious indulgence or despair. Some read Peter’s orders to the early church — “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’” (1 Peter 1:14-16, ESV) — and approach the issue in a hyper-legalistic way.
There’s plenty of precedent for this kind of reaction. David Wilkerson said, “I'm a student of church history. Let me show you what I found. There were monks, these are men who wanted to be holy so badly that they thought they'd try to destroy their flesh. They had evil desires in them. Their mind was evil; their eye was full of lust. It scared them, and they heard God say be holy…
“Some monks slept on bundles of thorns and piles of broken glass…thinking if they'd suffered through their body and felt the pain, that would push all the evil out of them.”
Since monasteries have somewhat gone out of style since medieval times, envisioning what would compel people to follow this way of life may feel difficult; but we are not so very different in modern times, however much we might like to convince ourselves otherwise.
David noted, “Folks, you say, ‘That's foolish; that's stupid’, but look in our modern days. I'll tell you what I've been through, even I'm only 50 years old. When I was a kid, to be holy, your hair had to be a certain way…. I went into a church once when I was a boy, and the priest — This is the truth — had a yardstick tacked to the door. He stamped the door of the church, and the women had to have their dresses at a certain length… A short dress was of the devil!”
He went on, using another example. “One of the great holiness preachers of all time was Dr. Pink. I've got almost all of his books, and he preached nothing but holiness, you see. He said, ‘It's a sin to cook on Sunday. We cook all our meals on Saturday, and we serve it cold on Sunday.’
“Now he was an Englishman. He said, ‘Except for tea. We do cook our tea.’” David noted ironically. “You see what you get into with all the rules and regulations?… Almost everybody says, ‘Well, I've got this one thing in my life. If I could just get the victory over this one thing, I'd be a holy person.’ No, you wouldn't. Something else would come in and suck up into that place.”
This was the great existential anguish that Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk himself, most famously wrestled with in his early years: If we have given up everything and punished our flesh without mercy, why does our conscience still groan beneath the weight of sin? Is there any hope for us to achieve holiness?
Those Purified by Faith Alone
The answer that Martin Luther found to those questions catapulted him into wild fame and controversy, ultimately making him one of the most influential men in modern Western history.
Luther was studying the book of Romans, particularly this passage: “For in it [the gospel] the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” (Romans 1:17, ESV). He wrote, “There I began to understand that the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, namely by faith. And this is the meaning: the righteousness of God is revealed by the gospel, namely, the passive righteousness with which the merciful God justifies us by faith…. Here I felt that I was altogether born again and had entered paradise itself through open gates.”
In his own words, David Wilkerson explained this as “When God demands you to be holy, admit you can't be holy on your own power. So surrender to the righteousness of Jesus Christ. Give up fighting the battle yourself, and surrender by faith to his promise to make you holy…. I believe Jesus Christ can give you a holiness so powerful, so much like himself, that you could walk through hell itself.”
This was how Paul, a former Pharisee, could write to the Ephesian church, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10).
Faith comes first, then holiness is given to us as a gift. After those critical first steps in which we play a minor role, we should find in ourselves the desire to live a very different sort of life.
Our trouble comes the instant we invert those steps. “Behave better, work hard, then you’ll be holy, and God will love you.” It’s like turning the pyramids upside down; this perspective and lifestyle has no stability or longevity. Only a true biblical perspective of “God loves first, God grants grace, we accept in faith, and God gives us holiness” will give us the ability and desire to live as new creations, holy and pure.