Warfield on the "Victorious Life"

A conference entitled “Victory in Christ” was held in Princeton, NJ, in 1916. This was very near the den of the “Lion of Princeton,” one Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield. The Lion was not amused to have a cadre of “higher life” teachers trespass on his home turf. In his essay, “The Victorious Life,” Warfield sets his sights on one Charles Trumbull, a well known higher-life proponent and the editor of the Sunday School Times. You can find this essay in its entirely here (Warfield, "The Victorious Life"), or in Studies in Perfectionism (P & R).

A couple of quotations should suffice to understand the reason for Warfield’s ire with Mr. Trumbull—A badly distorted view of the Christian life gleaned from John Wesley, in which justification and sanctification are grounded in two distinct acts of faith.

According to Warfield, (taken from “The Victorious Life” in Studies in Perfectionism, P & R, 351).

As wave after wave of the “holiness movement” has broken over us during the past century, each has brought, no doubt, something distinctive of itself. But a common fundamental character has informed them all, and this common fundamental character has been communicated to them by the Wesleyan doctrine. The essential elements of that doctrine repeat themselves in all these movements, and form their characteristic features. In all of them alike justification and sanctification are divided from one another as two separate gifts of God. In all of them alike sanctification is represented as obtained, just like justification, by an act of simple faith, but not by the same act of faith by which justification is obtained, but by a new and separate act of faith, exercised for this specific purpose. In all of them alike the sanctification which comes on this act of faith, comes immediately on believing, and all at once, and in all of them alike this sanctification, thus received, is complete sanctification. In all of them alike, however, it is added, that this complete sanctification does not bring freedom from all sin; but only, say, freedom from sinning; or only freedom from conscious sinning; or from the commission of “known sins.” And in all of them alike this sanctification is not a stable condition into which we enter once for all by faith, but a momentary attainment, which must be maintained moment by moment, and which may readily be lost and often is lost, but may also be repeatedly instantaneously recovered.

And this from the same essay (“The Victorious Life,” in Studies in Perfectionism, P & R, 356), in which Warfield identifies the critical flaw in the holiness system.

This novelty is, of course, the sharp separation that is made between Christ’s deliverance of His people from the penalty of sin and His deliverance of them from the power of sin. These things are not merely distinguished as recognizable steps or stages in the process of the one salvation. They are definitely separated as two distinct gifts of grace, of which we may have the one and not the other, which may be—often are—perhaps generally, or almost always are—sought and obtained separately. Of this separation of them from one another, however, not only do the generality of Christians know nothing, but the Scriptures know nothing. Or rather, it is definitely and repeatedly contradicted by the Scriptures. The whole sixth chapter of Romans, for example, was written for no other purpose than to assert and demonstrate that justification and sanctification are indissolubly bound together; that we cannot have the one without having the other; that, to use its own figurative language, dying with Christ and living with Christ are integral elements in one indisintegrable salvation. To wrest these two things apart and make separable gifts of grace of them evinces a confusion in the conception of Christ’s salvation which is nothing less than portentous. It forces from us the astonished cry, Is Christ divided? And it compels us to point afresh to the primary truth that we do not obtain the benefits of Christ apart from, but only in and with His Person; and that when we have Him we have all.