Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 66:2 (Jun 2023)
Article: Holiness: God’s Goal For Human Life
Author: John N. Oswalt

JETS 66:2 (June 2023) p. 267

Holiness: God’s Goal For Human Life

John N. Oswalt

^* John Oswalt is Visiting Distinguished Professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary, 204 N. Lexington Ave., Wilmore, KY 40390. He may be contacted at john.oswalt@asburysem inary.edu. This is a lightly edited version of his plenary address delivered at the ETS Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, on Wednesday, November 16, 2022.

A classic comedic opening line is: “A funny thing happened to me on the way to the theatre,” with the funny thing usually being something quite unexpected. That line is appropriate to the experience of the evangelical church in the last seventy years. A funny thing has happened to us on the way to social prominence. If the media spoke of the church in the 1950s, they were primarily speaking of the “mainline denominations.” That has all changed since then. Today, if the media speaks about Christians or Christianity, they are talking about us, the evangelicals. Evangelicalism has taken center stage. Yet in that same period, as we have become the face of Christianity, the moral life of the nation has gone into the cesspool.

What has happened? Why have we not made an impact on the life of the nation? I suggest that the answer is that the gospel we have preached has not actually anticipated such a change. Do you remember the popular bumper sticker of several years ago? It said, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” Does that not seem a little odd in view of Jesus’s words in Matthew 5:48, “You must be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect”? What was that bumper sticker saying? It was saying that no one should expect the behavior of a Christian to be substantially different from that of the lost. Both Christians and the lost behave badly, but Christians are forgiven.

On this view, the gospel accomplishes just two things: deliverance from the consequences of sin, and the assurance of eternal life. Now we may say, correctly, that orthodox evangelical theology teaches the necessity of regeneration. But is what I have just defined very far away from what the typical evangelical believes? More than twenty years ago George Barna said, “Christians fail to transform the culture in which they live because they are neither grieved nor humbled by their sin.”1 We expect to sin, he said. Certainly, holiness in its dictionary definition of moral excellence, is the grand desideratum—how could it not be, given Leviticus 19 and 1 Peter 1—but it is a chimera, a carrot on a stick, calling us forward to a destination we cannot reach in this life.