Reframing Holiness: Human Flourishing, not Legalistic Rule-Keeping
- Matt O'Reilly
- Jun 11
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
One of the problems with the word holiness is the baggage. When people hear you talk about holiness, their minds tend to think of it within a framework of legalism. If you want to be holy, here are the rules. Keep the rules, and you'll be holy. Break them, and you're not. And often, the rules are written to their advantage, not yours. In the holiness-as-legalism framework, God is a cosmic killjoy - always looking for opportunities to catch and condemn the rule-breakers. This is a problem because the Bible doesn't frame holiness in terms of legalism. No, across the pages of scripture, holiness is about freedom and flourishing. It's time to reframe holiness.
Mission Critical
Reframing holiness with a biblical vision of flourishing is critical to the renewal of Methodism. The broad tradition - sometimes called the pan-Methodist movement - is in a season of recovering its "grand deposit." Wesley and his contemporaries worked with the conviction that God had raised them up "to spread scriptural holiness." And we thankfully live and work in a period where there is significant renewed interest in the classical Wesleyan understanding of holiness. As evidence, the denomination of which I am a part has included that original language of spreading scriptural holiness in its mission statement. That move signified a clear and explicit intent to align our new denomination with the classical and evangelical Wesleyan tradition. I'm grateful for that.
Nevertheless, we also live with the consequences of a mainline Methodism that de-emphasized doctrine in favor of a social gospel. That means that many, many people who find themselves in the midst of this renewal are not deeply familiar with biblical and classical Wesleyan teaching on holiness. That is, holiness as flourishing, not legalism. As the Global Methodist Church was discerning whether to include "scriptural holiness" language in its mission statement, one worry was that our congregations simply weren't familiar with the langauge of holiness. And when they were, they tended to think of it in that legalistic framework. How can we build a mission statement around lack of knowledge and understanding? Well, now that we've included the langauge of holiness in our mission statment, we have to shepherd people into a deeply biblical vision of holiness. That means we deconstruct holiness as legalsim and reconstruct holiness as flourishing.
...the Bible doesn't frame holiness in terms of legalism. No, across the pages of scripture, holiness is about freedom and flourishing.
Toward a Theology of Holiness as Flourishing
That said, here are three ways of speaking that reframe holiness away from legalism and toward wholeness.
Holiness as participation in God's character.
One of the first things we learn about holiness in the Bible is that holy is the word for God's character. Once God delivers the Hebrew people from captivity in Egypt, his holiness is at the forefront of their formation. What does it mean for God to be holy? Well, it means he's not like all the false gods they encountered in Egypt. And it means he is always and consistently does what's it right. God's holiness is that aspect of his character whereby he always does what he ought to do.
What's particularly striking is that God intends to share that with his people. Read Leviticus 19. You'll repeatedly hear that God is holy. It's a refrain that recurrs again and again. But the point of that text and others like isn't simply to highlight God's holiness; the point is to begin shepherding the people of God into sharing God's character - his holiness. God is holy, we are told, and that means his people must be holy, too. And if God's holiness is that aspect of his character whereby he consistently does what he ought to do, then sharing his holiness with his people means they become the kind of people who consistently do what they ought to do. They do what's right. And they do what's right in relation to others - God and neighbor.
So holiness isn't about keeping a list of arbitrary rules. Instead, holiness is about participating in the life and character of the triune God. And if there's anything we can say about the shared life of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, it's that they flourish in unity and in relation to one another. Holiness is about our participation in that flourishing - the flourishing that characterizes the Trinity.
Holiness as perfect love
Another way of reframing holiness as flourishing is to talk about it in terms of perfect love. John Wesley was quick to do this, and we should be, too. What does it mean to be holy? It means we embody the two great commands of Jesus - love God with your whole self and love your neighbor as yourself.
If holiness is about legalistic rule-keeping, then the focus is on us and all our shortcomings. It's about our performance and particularly about our poor performance. It's about all the ways we don't measure up. The focus is on the modification of our behavior. It should be clear. The focus is on us.
But if we frame holiness in terms of Jesus' command to love God and neighbor (and enemy!), then the focus shifts from self to other. The heart is turned outward. The invitation is to embody the self-denial and selflessness that Jesus calls for when he calls each disciple to "take up their cross and follow me" (Matthew 16:24). Perfect love is other-oriented love. Jesus came to bring his love to perfection in us (1 John 4:17-19).
Holiness as happiness
If you spend much time looking at books on human flourishing, you're going to run into the question of happiness. What's striking is that John Wesley frequently linked happiness - true happiness - with holiness. Not only that, he sees this as a way of framing the overall biblical narrative and our experience of salvation. Reflecting on the transgression of Adam and Eve, Wesley puts it this way in his sermon on "The New Birth":
So had he (Adam) lost both the knowledge and the love of God, without which the image of God could not subsist. Of this, therefore, he was deprived at the same time, and became unholy as well as unhappy.
The solution to this loss of both holiness and happiness, comes through the new birth:
except he be born again, none can be happy even in this world. For it is not possible, in the nature of things, that a man should be happy who is not holy ("The New Birth").
"you must be born again;" otherwise it is not possible you should be inwardly holy; and without inward as well as outward holiness, you cannot be happy, even in this world, much less in the world to come ("The New Birth").
For Wesley, happiness and holiness not only belong together, they are central to the work of God in us through Christ and the Spirit. These are only a handful of instances. There are plenty more. Religion in its truest and purest expression is about consistent holiness...and, therefore, consistent happiness. If we follow Wesley's lead, it could help us shift perceptions about holiness from legalism to wholeness that is happiness.
God's Best for Us
I've lately found myself saying that you can summarize the whole Bible as the story of a holy God preparing for himself a holy people. If we want people to recognize that such langauge is good for them, then we need to recognize that they may very well have some holiness baggage if they think holiness is all about legalism. We may not like it, but we have to deal with it. Across the Bible and across our theological heritage, holiness is about happiness and wholeness.
Holiness is about flourishing.
It's our job to offer that vision to the church and to the world.
Dr. Matt O'Reilly is Lead Pastor of Christ Church Birmingham in Alabama, Director of Research at Wesley Biblical Seminary, and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Pastor Theologians. A two-time recipeint of the Stott Award for Pastoral Engagement, he is author of Free to Be Holy and Paul and the Resurrected Body.
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