{"id":1895,"date":"2010-03-22T06:54:37","date_gmt":"2010-03-22T13:54:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/blog\/archives\/the_adventure_of_relational_holiness"},"modified":"2023-09-20T10:50:07","modified_gmt":"2023-09-20T17:50:07","slug":"the_adventure_of_relational_holiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/blog\/archives\/the_adventure_of_relational_holiness","title":{"rendered":"The Adventure of Relational Holiness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christians embrace diverse descriptions of holiness.  This diversity arises in part from diverse descriptions of holiness found in the Bible. In Relational Holiness: Responding to the Call of Love<\/em>, my coauthor, Michael Lodahl, and I suggest that love is the core notion uniting these diverse understandings.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the best historical link to relational holiness is the doctrine of prevenient grace found in the theological tradition that sustains holiness theology: Wesleyanism. This tradition arose in large part to the theology of John Wesley as he interpreted the Bible and engaged his world.<\/p>\n

 According to the doctrine of prevenient grace, God acts first or “walks ahead of us,” enabling us to choose salvation freely.  God’s prevenient grace sets the context for and empowers our responses, because God acts first to offer abundant life.<\/a><\/p>\n

In terms of relational holiness, God relates to us by acting first in every moment to provide opportunities for action.  Those opportunities arise out of God’s own actions, the actions of others, and our previous actions.  The relations we have with God and others set the context for our lives.<\/p>\n

God’s moment-by-moment empowering and inspiring calls require response.  God calls us to love, and the particular forms of love emerge from the multi-layered relations in which we live.  Among all possible actions, God encourages us to choose that which promotes well-being. <\/p>\n

When we choose the best to which God calls in any particular moment, we act in holy way. We are holy. In that moment, we are “perfect as [our] Father in heaven is perfect.”  In that moment, we love.<\/p>\n

Relational holiness entails responding appropriately to God’s call to love in a particular way, at a particular time, and in a particular situation. <\/p>\n

In most moments, the opportunities for love will be mundane.  But in others, God offers the chance to love in ways that radically change our world. Whether acting in ordinary or extraordinary ways, God invites us to the abundant life of holiness.<\/p>\n

We might think of the ongoing life of relational holiness as an adventure.  Let’s call it the Adventure Model of holiness.<\/p>\n

According to the Adventure Model, each traveler sets out with others on an open-ended and largely unplanned adventure. The journey will inevitably include challenges, but the traveler will also encounter opportunities for great joy. <\/p>\n

An ever-present and constantly communicating Guide calls out to adventurers each step of the way.  Prior to each step, the Guide presents adventurers with options that emerge in the context of the journey. Without the Guide’s initiating prompting, adventurers would be lost.<\/p>\n

Some options the Guide presents, if chosen, produce happiness and wholeness.  Other options, if chosen, lead to unjustified suffering and evil.  Our own past negative actions and the negative acts of others produce negative options to our adventurer.  The Guide can be trusted, however, to show adventurers how to avoid the negative and choose instead the best paths.<\/p>\n

The Guide encourages adventurers to take the step that causes genuine happiness, healing, and wholeness.  In other words, the Guide calls travelers to love. <\/p>\n

The always-present Guide walks before, alongside, and ahead of adventurers. But the Guide waits upon adventurer’s free response to the options rather than forcing adventurers and thereby removing their God-given freedom.  Like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, every step provides new opportunities and opens new paths.<\/p>\n

Occasionally, adventurers “hear” the Guide’s tutoring rather clearly.  Most of the time, however, adventurers hear only a still small Voice.  Whether the Guide’s instruction seems clear or faint, adventurers are responsible to respond appropriately.<\/p>\n

Although adventurers have the help of a Guide, other help is available on this journey.  No adventurer walks alone.  Adventurers form a community of fellow travelers.  In fact, we might call these travelers “adventurers-in-community.”  Supportive adventurers help one another, while drawing upon the collected wisdom of those who have earlier walked similar paths. They encourage one another. This is social holiness.<\/p>\n

Along the way, adventurers-in-community discover that habits, resources, and customs make the journey better for everyone.  The Guide uses these habits, resources, and customs to encourage these wayfarers.  In fact, adventurers typically come to rely upon these helpful means so much that they cannot imagine how to navigate successfully without them.<\/p>\n

Someday, the adventure’s terrain will be different. Obstacles that lead the travelers astray will no longer exist.  While the thought of that day brings comfort, the greatest comfort comes in knowing that the Guide walks alongside adventures, making the first move to empower and inspire each adventurer’s steps.  Adventurers live with meaning and zest knowing that appropriate responses make the journey better for everyone.<\/p>\n

The Adventure Model of holiness differs significantly from the Slide Scenario of holiness.  The Slide Scenario involves a never-ending cycle of climbing only to slip back.<\/p>\n

In the Slide Scenario, the climber slowly ascends the face of the slide rather than scaling the stairs.  This rise up the slide’s face is possible only as the climber follows various rules, avoids wrongdoing, and remains obedient.  The longer one avoids sin, the higher one climbs. <\/p>\n

Almost inevitably, however, the climber loses footing.  Temptation prevails and sin is committed.  A misstep erases all progress.  The climber slips and slides back to the bottom. <\/p>\n

The fall plunges the climber to the playground sand. Like the mythical Sisyphus who is cursed to push a rock up a mountain only to have it roll back, the process of climbing and falling continues endlessly.  The Slide Scenario is like a game of Chutes and Ladders that we can never win.<\/p>\n

There are many differences between the Adventure Model and the Slide Scenario.<\/p>\n

In the adventure model, adventurers have a Guide who empowers, calls, and to whom we give a response.  The adventurer relies upon that Guide, because no adventurer is able to “pull himself up by his own bootstraps.”<\/p>\n

The adventurer travels with fellow companions and uses habits, resources, and customs that help on the journey.  A misstep does not return the adventurer back to the journey’s beginning.  Rather, the Guide offers new options in each moment based upon the adventurer’s previous actions and varying relations.<\/p>\n

When Lewis and Clark explored the “new” West, they sometimes chose a wrong path on their journey or floated a stream heading the wrong direction. When they realized their error, Lewis and Clark did not trek back to their starting point in St. Louis. Instead, they renewed their adventure from the point of their error. <\/p>\n

Christians who misstep do not return to Christian infancy. What they have learned in their voyage of Christian formation does not disappear in an instant of sin. Instead, God calls them to repent and return to the journey of Christian growth. And that return begins from the point at which they find themselves. A life of love can begin from anywhere, because the God of steadfast love is everywhere.<\/p>\n

The Adventure Model seems more faithful to the dominant love themes of the Bible.  It emphasizes the all-important love of God our guide. If focuses upon our relations with God, while also stressing the importance of our relations with others.<\/p>\n

The ongoing life of loving God, others, and God’s creation, including ourselves, is the life of holiness.  Today we need this adventure in holiness – understood in terms of relational love – more than ever.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christians embrace diverse descriptions of holiness.  This diversity arises in part from diverse descriptions of holiness found in the Bible. In Relational Holiness: Responding to the Call of Love<\/em>, my coauthor, Michael Lodahl, and I suggest that love is the core notion uniting these diverse understandings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[156,7143],"yst_prominent_words":[1287,1829,1830,1831,1832,1833,1834,1835,1836,1837,1838,1839,1840,1841,1842,1843,1844,1845,1846,1847],"class_list":["post-1895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-john_wesley_holiness_and_the_church_of_the_nazarene","tag-holiness","tag-relational-holiness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1895\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1895"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=1895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}