The Witness to Entire Sanctification

QUESTION: Is there a definite witness to this grace [of entire sanctification]?

ANSWER: Yes, in general terms, I Cor. 2:21, "that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God," There is no specific text. The Spirit shining in our hearts shines on his own work. The sun that prints the pictures reveals it to us.

— Steele's Answers pp. 86, 87.

The Condition for Entire Sanctification

QUESTION: What is the condition of [entire sanctification's] reception?

ANSWER: Faith is the door to all spiritual blessings. My faith, Eph.1:18,19, "That ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe," and "all things are possible to him that believeth." John Inskip was accustomed to shout out in the camp, "There are two persons to whom all things are possible — God and the believer."

— Steele's Answers p. 86. 

An Instantaneous Blessing

QUESTION: Can you prove this blessing [of entire sanctification] may be obtained instantaneously by the believer?

ANSWER: Says Joseph Agar Beet in his "Holiness as Understood by the Writers of the Bible": "It is worthy of notice that in the New Testament we never read expressly and unmistakably of sanctification as a gradual process. The very idea of holiness involves the idea of entirety." Beet thus argues from the use of the aorist tense, and the absence of the present, p. 59. 

— Steele's Answers p. 86. 

The Baptism with the Holy Spirit

QUESTION: Does the baptism with the Holy Ghost effect entire sanctification?

ANSWER: The word "baptism" implies purification.When the word "fire' is added, perfect cleansing is indicated, by the figure of hendiadys, one idea expressed by two words, cleansing and fire. This denotes the complete and final purification, while being born of water and the Spirit denotes [an] initial cleansing less radical. The Pentecostal gift was cleansing in Acts 15:8, 9.

— Steele's Answers pp. 85, 86.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: This was the standard view in the Holiness movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries: Baptism with the Holy Spirit is another name for Entire Sanctification. This reflects the influence of the teachings of John Fletcher, as I argue here: Spirit Baptism: Wesleyanism & Pentecostalism. 

However, Dr. Steele seems to me to backpedal a bit on this issue when challenged by James Mudge's book Growth in Holiness Toward Perfection. His reply to Mudge is here: Baptism With the Holy Ghost. In this response, Steele goes so far as to say: "Hence we conclude that the phrase, 'baptism or fullness of the Spirit,' may mean something less than entire sanctification." He distinguishes ecstatic (or charismatic) fullness from ethical fulness. The one does not necessarily imply the other.

And, further down the page, Steele says: "Our author's chapter on the baptism of the Spirit might have been included in his discussion of irrelevant texts, on none of which do our standard theologians ground the doctrine of Christian perfection."

So, while it is true that Baptism with the Holy Spirit and Entire Sanctification were often spoken of interchangeably in the Holiness movement, their view did not rest upon this identification. 

Freed From the Law?

QUESTION: In what sense are Christian believers freed from the Law?

ANSWER: (1.) It is true that all mankind are, by the atonement, forever freed from the necessity of pleading that we have perfectly kept the law, in order to acceptance with God. We are freed from the necessity of legal justification. Such a necessity would shut up a sinful race in eternal despair. We are freed from the law as the ground of justification. Our ground of justification is the blood of Christ shed for us.

(2.) Nor are true believers, who have received the Spirit of adoption, under the law as the impulse to service. They are not spurred on to activity by the threatened penalties of God's law. Love to the Law-giver has taken the place of fear of the law as a motive. This is specially true of those advanced believers, out of whom perfect love has cast all servile, tormenting fear. Before emerging into this experience, there is a blending of fear and love as motives to service. In this state the believer is not wholly delivered from legalism. But the law is put into the heart of the full believer, and its fulfillment is spontaneous and free. "I will run the way of Thy commandments when Thou shalt enlarge my heart." The Septuagint Version, used by our Lord Jesus, reads: "I have run .... Since," etc. "Without the law," says St. Paul, as an outward yoke laid upon the neck, "but under law to Christ." Love to Christ absorbs into itself all the principles of the moral law, and prompts to their glad performance. Hence, "Love is the fulfillment of the law." This is the meaning of Rom. vii. 6, as translated in the Revision which corrects the blunder of King James' version from a faulty MS., making the law of God die, instead of the believer's dying to it; that is, ceasing to be actuated by its terrors, and becoming obedient from the new principle of love. "But now we have been discharged from the law, having died to that wherein we were holden; so that WE SERVE IN NEWNESS OF THE SPIRIT, and not in the oldness of the letter."

The Antinomian Error

Theological errors move in cycles, some times of very long periods. They resemble those comets of unknown orbits which occasionally dash into our solar system; but they are not as harmless. Often they leave moral ruin in their track. Since all Christian truth is practical, and aims at the moral transformation of men, all negations of that truth are deleterious; they not only obscure the truth and obstruct its purifying effect, but they positively corrupt and destroy souls.

This is specially true of errors which release men from obligation to the law of God. After St. Paul had demonstrated the impossibility of justification by works compensative for sin, and had established the doctrine of justification through faith in Christ which works by love and purifies the heart, there started up a class of teachers who drew from Paul's teachings the fallacious inference that the law of God is abolished in the case of the believer, who is henceforth delivered from its authority as the rule of life. Hence they became, what Luther first styled, Antinomians (Greek anti, against, and nomos, law).

Fulfilling the Law of Love

Infirmities are failures to keep the law of perfect obedience given to Adam in Eden. This law no man on earth can keep, since sin has impaired the powers of universal humanity.

Sins are offenses against the law of love, the law of Christ, which is thus epitomized by John, "And this is His commandment, that we should believe on the name of His Son Jesus Christ, and love one another" (I John iii. 23). Hence the Spirit convinces the world of sin, "because they believe not on Me." The sum total of God's commandments to men with the New Testament in their hands, is faith in Christ, attested by its proper fruits, good works. However dwarfed and shattered by sin that poor drunkard is, so long as he is this side of the gates of hell he is under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, who imparts to him the gracious ability to repent of sin, and to trust, love, and obey the Lord Jesus. His refusal is sin. So long as he has any capacity for love, however small, that capacity is called his whole heart. The law of love says to him in tones of authority, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart." Hence every one is under obligation to be evangelically perfect. Refusal to love with the whole heart is the ground of condemnation, and not inevitable failures in keeping the law of Adamic perfection.

— Mile-Stone Papers, Part 1 Chapter 7.

Sin May Be Destroyed

QUESTION: What evidence does the Greek Testament afford that sin may be destroyed?

ANSWER: (1) The absence of all terms expressive of mere repression. (2) The use in Paul's epistles, crucify, cleanse, destroy (καταργέω, annihilate or abolish — Cremer and Thayer), circumcision without hands, and mortify or kill (Col. 3:5). (3) If this is not the doctrine of the New Testament, Christ's mission is a stupendous failure, because he does not destroy the works of the devil, and perfect holiness is impossible, either in this world or that to come.

— Steele's Answers p. 85. 

Eternal Misery

QUESTION: What texts prove the eternal misery of the impenitent?

ANSWER: Dan. 12:12: "And some to shame and everlasting contempt." Matt. 25:46: "All these shall go away into eternal punishment." Rev. 20:10: "The beast and the false prophet," terms representing human beings, "shall be tormented day and night forever and ever." He who believes only the promises in the Bible, and disbelieves its threatenings, is not a true believer in Jesus Christ.

— Steele's Answers p. 85.

The Fall and Death

QUESTION: Did the fall of man destroy the immortality of the soul?

ANSWER: Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat of a certain tree, lest they die. The death here threatened was not extinction of being or annihilation — a term not used in the Bible — but natural death, the separation of the spirit from the body, and spiritual death, the separation of the soul from God, the source of its well-being.

— Steele's Answers pp. 84, 85.