There is always a group in the church saying “we need to be more holy”. They are not wrong—we are not yet free from sin. However, the track record of holiness movements throughout history has been poor. Some of them have even gone off the rails in one fashion or another, sometimes resulting in the unnecessary death of the followers.

Holiness movements that have historically been successful seem to share several characteristics. First, they inspire by the example of their life but merely invite others to join them. Jesus, for example, preached the need for repentance and joining the Kingdom of God/Heaven, he simply invited others to his value system and way of life. St. Anthony, did not even set out to issue a call to holiness; he simply felt convicted by a sermon, sold everything and became a hermit to seek Christ whole-heartedly. The result was that he inspired many people to do likewise, and ended up founding the Desert Fathers monastic movement, which after St. Benedict made it less difficult, became Western monasticism. Similarly, St. Francis just tried to literally live as Christ lived, owning nothing and helping others, and attracted many followers and had the goodwill of Italy.

Contrast this with a less successful but well-known movement. The Puritans were English dissenters who had fled to the Calvinist Netherlands, but were disillusioned that it was too tolerant. In Geneva, John Calvin was able to implement the four things he thought that a godly society required, one of which was a presbytery who held the faithful to account, and in Geneva, about 15% of the people had to give an account of themselves because of missing church services, etc. In Leiden, however, the presbytery only had authority over people that were willing, and to the Puritans, how could you build a godly society that way? So they went to America and founded colonies with the goal of being an example of what a godly society would look like, including their own presbytery, which sanctioned some people playing cricket on Christmas Day the first year. The Massachusetts Bay Colony had dissenters within two years of settlement in 1630, and within a few decades had to compromise and give communion to those who were not entirely Puritan. By 1800 the Boston area had rejected its Puritan convictions, and perhaps even Christianity—Yale was founded in 1701 because Harvard was too godless (although that may have been merely a departure from Calvinism), and Park Street Church in Boston was founded 1803 because of the lack of good churches. The Unitarian Universalist website cites opposition to Calvinism as the reason they were founded. Even to this day the Boston area retains the Puritan intolerance of dissenting views: question that gender is not malleable or that homosexuality is anything other than a liberating good would be socially very risky. Wealthy satellite communities of Boston have a palpable self-righteousness of “we are on the right side of history”, as opposed to those “deplorables”, as Hillary Clinton said. Since New England settled west to Minnesota, and on the West Coast, the consequences of the Puritan legacy exerts a large effect on American culture. The legacy of the Puritans is so far from being the “city on a hill” that John Winthrop intended, compared to the Franciscans or the Benedictines, that it seems a cautionary tale.

A similar, more recent, attempt is the Moral Majority and the Christian Right’s attempt to restore an imagined golden age of a Christian nation by means of legislating Christian rules. But why should non-Christians obey Christian rules? Even John Calvin with his presbytery insisted that people must voluntarily submit to God, and he never held any political power at all in Geneva; he influence was entirely by example and from his preaching. Furthermore, trying to legally enforce Christian laws in a democracy where the majority has abandoned Christian values is a complete waste of time. And certainly the consistent downward trajectory of Christianity in the twentieth century is a testimony that whatever we have been doing is completely ineffective. Perhaps, like fundamentalist Calvinism in Boston, what we have been doing is partly responsible for the turn away from Christian values.

A second characteristic of successful holiness movements is that they are not rebellious. St. Francis publicly lived a lifestyle that contrasted the lifestyle of the Church hierarchy—widely seen as corrupt, at the time—with how Jesus lived. The Pope was initially inclined to reject Francis’ request to approve his group, but he was submitting, and then he had a dream that persuaded him to accept Francis, who infused new vitality into the Church. In contrast, around the same time John Wycliffe denounced the Pope as the Antichrist (in addition to translating the Bible in to English, among more positive things). Unsurprisingly, he was killed as a heretic. Francis followed the example of David, who was just trying to stay alive, not leading a holiness movement, but even so he refused to kill Saul, the Lord’s anointed, despite Saul being a clearly unrighteous leader. Again in contrast, many of the Puritans were Separatists, who thought that the Church of England was so corrupt (with Catholicism) that it could not be reformed, so they went off and did their own thing. This is essentially still rebellion: a rejection of the authority of the church and replacing the existing authority, it just was a conflict-avoidant rebellion.

A third characteristic of successful calls to holiness is that holiness is not the end. If “holiness” is the end in itself, it becomes simply “keeping the rules”. True holiness, as Jesus said is doing the will of the Father, not obeying laws. The Pharisaic movement was a holiness movement, and aimed to ensure that Israel obeyed God’s law, but created more restrictive extra commandments as a hedge—if you never mix lamb and dairy, you cannot break the commandment not to boil a lamb in its mother’s milk. However, keeping the law was never the purpose of the Law. The Law was the means by which a nation could live in a loving relationship with the divine, something that was utterly foreign in the ancient world. The pagan gods did as they pleased (as the powerful do), and people had discovered certain rituals that kept them in the gods’ favor. Unlike Israel, however, the relationship was not a relationship of caring love, like Yahweh to Israel. Nor could a community be sure it was in the gods’ good graces, unlike Israel which had a set of written guidelines. By the time of Christ, Israel’s relationship with God was a source of some jealousy among pagans. But as David noted, God was not concerned about giving the prescribed sacrifices, but about justice and a contrite heart. Likewise Micah says God is interested in justice, mercy, and humbly walking with God, not with sacrifices. It was never really about keeping the rules, and when keeping the rules is all the matters, well, every metric is gameable. The Pharisees apparently had figured out how to gain status for keeping the rules but still be able to do what they wanted.

The Egyptian monastics kept a very strict discipline, but as the monks that John Cassian interviewed in Conferences, it discipline was in an attempt to pray without ceasing, to think about God all day long. I think that some of their assumptions were from pagan Greek philosophy instead of biblical thinking (for instance, that God is pure mind, the emotions a distraction at best, and our material existence is something to be overcome on the way to becoming pure spirit). They exerted a huge influence on the Church despite their unnecessary asceticism, partly because everyone agreed with Greek assumptions (like American Christians pretty much agree on individualism, despite American individualism being unbiblical). But it was also partly because they articulated deep insights into sin and holiness. Among the things Cassian writes is that there are three levels of virtue: obedience because of fear of punishment (the master/slave dynamic), obedience because of hope of reward (the hired hand dynamic), and obedience because you love virtue itself. Obedience out of fear ceases when the fear goes away. But when you have learned to love virtue itself, “obedience” is just a natural consequence. (Cassian noted that this level came as a completely new idea to him.)

St. Francis similarly was not living literally like Jesus because that was the goal, but rather because he wanted to portray Jesus. He presented Jesus in many creative ways, including the first Christmas manger scene, which he prepared with live animals and people, and invited the people of the nearby town. (The townspeople were recorded as having been deeply moved by the visceral experience.) Jesus himself was not homeless because he thought that poverty was a virtue, although as God revealing himself to mankind he did make a point of associating with the poor, but because he had a mission. He was inviting the people of Israel to an expanded relationship with God: the Kingdom of Heaven. (Part of the mission, of course, was to make the invitation possible by dying for our sins on the Cross, but that did not require itinerate ministry.)

However, a call to holiness should remember two parables of Jesus, which suggest that even Jesus was expected to see some ugliness in his kingdom. He compares the Kingdom of God to a field of wheat in which an enemy planted weeds. However, while the employeeds of the owner call for “holiness” (getting rid of the weeds), the owner says that holiness is not easily distinguished and to wait until harvest to avoid accidentally pulling up the wheat. I’ve known some people that rejected the Church because they were hurt by a rigid holiness (broadly speaking) culture. How many people in Boston in the late 1700s rejected orthodox Christianity because rigid Calvinism was pretty much the only option, and they could not see how a good God would predestine people to an eternity of torture (a position which most of Christianity joins them in rejecting)?

In the second parable, Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a mustard seed: it is an almost invisible seed, but it grows into a sizeable tree which birds inhabit. Focusing on just the birds, in the parable of the sower told by Matthew shortly before, the birds ate the seed of the Gospel, suggesting that the birds are not possible. Yet Jesus says they will be in the tree. So we should expect some bad mixed with holy. After St. Francis died, one of his followers was distressed that some rather unholy members of the order had maneuvered into leadership. God’s response compared them to birds in a tree, telling the monk that he saw what was going on, and that he had a plan for dealing with the birds. However, God’s plan did not try to make it impossible for there to be birds, just that he would deal with them individually. Indeed, this is the same way he dealt with the wheat and the weeds, individually.

While we need holiness, and we need a call to holiness, we should expect to see unholiness even in the actual Kingdom, at least until the Judgement. Successful calls to holiness focus on the individual, and invite people primarily through their own example of journeying to become joyful children of God. This is more like yeast working through the dough than guarding the tree with shotguns or trying to wrap the tree in wire mesh.