Does Christianity Need A New Holiness Movement?

Recently, someone told me that Christianity needs a new holiness movement. I agreed with them—but I meant it differently than they did.

Usually, when you hear the term “holiness movement,” you get the image of Pentecostal camp meetings with revival preachers calling people forward for salvation. Holiness, they say, involves turning from sin to avoid the fires of hell. It involves things like baptism (in water and/or the Holy Spirit’s fire), personal piety, modest attire, and abstention from all things worldly.

A New Holiness Movement?

But such outward displays of religion do little to move people’s hearts. Often, they inflame people with feelings of guilt and shame. At best, they create conformity among members of a congregation. At worst, they involve spiritual abuse through the manipulation of people’s emotions. They convince people of their own unworthiness. Hence, believers try to prove their worth by policing the deeds of others. No—we do not need a new holiness movement, if this is what the term means.

What Does “Holiness” Mean?

What does the Bible mean by “holy,” anyway? Strong’s Lexicon says that the Hebrew word is “derived from the root verb קָדַשׁ (qadash), meaning “to be set apart.” This corresponds to the Greek ἅγιος (hagios), which commonly means the same thing, “set apart, saintly, or holy.” It is often said that the word means “other.”

Aloof, Unattainable, Immovable, & Inconceivable

When we ponder God’s holiness, we generally think of scriptures that remind us that God’s standards are wholly better than ours. For example, Isaiah 55:8-9 says:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

These verses remind us that no matter how good, smart, righteous, generous, gracious, or kind we think we are, God is better. This leads us to believe that God is aloof, unattainable, immovable, and (thanks, Vizzini) inconceivable.

A Perfect Being, Offended by Our Sin

Traditionally, we have understood God’s “otherness” as aloofness. God is a perfect being who is offended by our sin. Since God is so much better than we are, the Church has taught us that “God cannot look on sin.” This leads to the lie that our sin separates us from God. We are taught that we are children of a disapproving God, and that Jesus had to die an agonizing death on the cross to save us. So, we have misunderstood the need for holiness, thinking it is a way to gain God’s approval.

Never Good Enough

If we believe that Jesus’s death was our fault, we must constantly try to win God’s approval and be good enough to earn salvation. When I hear the term “holiness movement,” I think of women with their hair in buns and ankle-length skirts, frowning at any girl brazen enough to show her sexy sexy elbows. I imagine men joining accountability groups to discuss how they failed to “bounce their eyes.” Holiness means never being good enough. And frankly, it gives people a complex!

Holier Than Thou

Holiness means more than God being better. Ironically, it also involves Christians being better than everyone else as well. If God is better than we are, and we believe God has called us to be holy—that means we are supposed to be superior to the rest of the world. This creates a holier-than-thou attitude that is based more on appearance than authenticity of spirit. So, living a life of personal holiness means being simultaneously ashamed of your sin and prideful about your spiritual superiority. According to this misconception, if God is aloof, then God’s people should be equally aloof.

Not Holiness, but Wholeness

But God doesn’t care about that kind of holiness. 1 Samuel 16:7b says that…

“…the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”

In Micah 6:6-8, the prophet warns against trying to win God’s approval through religious performance:

“With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
He has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God?

We cannot win God’s approval by an outward display of religion. What God wants from us is not holiness, but wholeness.

Holiness is Inconsistent with Love

The problem with the traditional idea of holy aloofness is that it is inconsistent with the love of God. We’ve got to conceive of this differently. Perhaps divine love is best summed up in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ^or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Any idea of holiness based on the concept of otherness misses the mark of divine love. It conceptualizes God as impatient, unkind, envious, boastful, arrogant, and rude—a God who insists on God’s own way, is irritable, keeps a constant record of people’s wrongdoings. It perpetuates myths of a God who bears, believes, hopes, endures all our offenses, until God’s love ends in fiery judgment and eternal damnation. If we imagine God’s holiness to be otherness and separation, a God who can’t even look on sin, we’ve misconceived God altogether.

Wholly Alive, Wholly Loving, Wholly Gracious

Instead, if we embrace an understanding of holiness as wholeness, we learn what God’s holiness really means—wholly alive, wholly loving, wholly gracious. If God’s ways are higher than our ways, then we should…

Quit expecting God to be impatient.

Quit expecting God to be unkind (vindictive).
Quit expecting God to be envious.
Quit expecting God to be boastful, proud, rude.
Quit expecting God to be easily offended, and to keep record of wrongs.
Quit expecting God to be rejoice in wrongdoing (like genocide or eternal damnation, for example).
Quit expecting God to be jealous.
Quit expecting God to be territorial.

Wholeness means God has everything God needs. For this reason, God doesn’t need to be any of these things. If God does need anything, it’s for God’s people to start living as wholly as God does. This means for us to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things. It means for us to unfailingly welcome the stranger, understanding that if God is not aloof, neither should we be. If to God there is no “other,” then for us, wholeness means recognizing that we are all one. Since that is true, we have everything we need as well.

Does Christianity Need a New Holiness Movement?

Previously, I mentioned the person who asked me if Christianity needs a new holiness movement. Someone else suggested we need another Great Awakening. Here’s how I answered:

If by “holiness movement,” we mean a renewed trend toward legalism and morality policing, then no, we don’t need that. However, if by “holiness movement,” we mean moving in the direction of wholeness for ourselves and others, then yes, Christianity needs a new wholeness movement.

If by “Great Awakening,” we mean revivalism that results in poor church attenders becoming regular church attenders, no we don’t need that. But if we mean waking up to the needs of others and realizing our own calling to meet those needs, then yes, Christianity needs another Great Awakening. A woke Church will be wholly dedicated to seeing and serving the needs of others, rather than proclaiming that they are “in the world but not of it.” An awakened Church will understand its connection to God and all living creation. Only by awakening can Jesus’s followers be truly holy—which really means “whole.”