Corporate Holiness

Emerging Tuesday Column: The following are notes from my “Writer’s Notebook”—ideas that might develop into a Tuesday Column. They are presented here for two reasons: (a)because some of you only need a seed idea to get what you want from me—something to think about. And (b) some of you like to give your input on the front end—shaping what I might later say. So either take this and think about it, or respond with your input to keith@tuesdaycolumn.com

Corporate Holiness

1/30/02 writer’s notebook

• I think I may have misunderstood holiness most of my life. Or only half-understood it. Maybe we all have.

• I’ve always understood holiness in terms of personal holiness. That is a person becoming holy through God’s sanctification.

• But I’m increasingly finding another half of holiness: the corporate holiness side… a holy church; a holy body of believers.

• Scripture frequently talks about this group holiness, even though we usually take the verses and apply them to individual holiness. But many of the command for holiness are plural—that is calling the church to holiness, not merely individuals to holiness. The church is called unto holiness—the church as a collective body. It is the church that is presented without spot or wrinkle. “Present yourselves” in Romans 12 has often been taken individually—yet it is clearly directed to a group according to the tense. And of course the beatitudes are not values for individuals, but a group. And there’s…

• Of course since the enlightenment and modernism most of us imagine that the only way to produce corporate holiness is to produce a bunch of individual holy people. But the church is more than a collection of its parts. The sum is greater than its parts. The church is the body of Christ no less.

• What would change or expand in our view of holiness if we came to discover this “other half of holiness?”

1. How we treat SPIRITUAL FORMATION would change. We’d quit thinking of discipleship and spiritual formation as forming Christ in persons, but of forming Christ is the group, in the church—that the body of Christ would become the body of Christ.
2. Our view of RIGHTEOUSNESS would shift. Finding human perfection collectively where we can never find it in one person.
3. PROGRESSIVITY. We’d of course see the progressive side of sanctification when we are speaking about a group becoming holy.
4. CRISIS: Is there a crisis of sanctification or filling for groups? “they all were filled with the Sprit” kind of experience?
5. SIN: We can be free praying “forgive us our sins”—even holiness people—when we understand this is a corporate prayer not individual—which church would claim to be without sin collectively?

The notion of personal holiness does not need to discarded but expanded. Expanded to include corporate holiness—making a holy people, not just holy persons. A group can be holy, and should be. If this notion is correct we have a major job to do: clarifying our ecclesiology, our doctrine of a holy people, and then strategies to form Christ in our church communities.

So, is it a biblical and theologically notion?