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The Transformation Gap

How could I be so sure of being saved and on the way to my home in heaven when I was so far away from home in my present life? And how did the gap between the two develop in the first place?

My conversion to Christ had brought an initial spurt of change but soon settled down into basically the same old life when measured by my experience of anger, rage, worry, pride and self-centeredness. I wasn’t partying hard, but neither were most of my non-Christian friends. What was the difference between them and me? Was it just that I was forgiven? I was leading people to Christ and doing many good things for people, but something was missing. While I preached on loving our enemies, I too often lived in contempt of anyone who got in the way of my ministry goals, and now that included my own wife!

This led me to a reexamination of what the Bible calls “the abundant life.” I concluded that there was indeed a difference between the kind of life exemplified by Jesus and Paul, and which Jesus calls us to, and what my expectations were for life in Christ. In my ministry I became aware that most people don’t believe the life exemplified by Jesus and Paul is possible today. At best it may have been possible for a few “star athletes,” biblical heroes who no longer exist.

But to my surprise I found in my study of church history that deep and radical life change was not only possible but was expected of believers as recently as the late nineteenth century. The transformed life was seen as the church’s main mission, and without it others wondered whether a person was saved or if the church was still on task. Somewhere after the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840s) the expectation of transformation was diminished. Among evangelicals the transmission of new life in Christ by example, imitation and training in a “living faith” was reduced to a weakened understanding of discipleship. Disciples of Jesus were no longer made, just converts who were Christian in name and doctrinal beliefs only.

The Transformation Gap Appears

Henry Ward Beecher, a great preacher and national leader of the late nineteenth century, exemplifies the shift in Christian expectations. He struggled with his marriage and was at least inappropriate with several women under his ministry. He caused a national scandal by having an affair with a business associate’s wife. Much like the biblical King David, Beecher tried to cover it up and intentionally ruined the jealous husband’s career, which tarnished Beecher’s national work toward abolishing slavery.

Underneath his hypocrisy was a strong belief in the God of love, but not the God who loved him enough to deliver him from sin. Sometime before his affair he expressed the dilemma his theology created in regard to God and his sins, “I know that he will forgive them—but will he deliver me from them?” he asked. “It is not a want of faith in Christ for the past that I lack—but, O, that I might have a Christ who should assure me of rescue and purity in every period of my life to come!”

It is uncertain whether he really came clean and owned up to his sin. He ended up being ridiculed but blindly supported by his church during a civil trial that held the nation’s attention. The preacher was acquitted due to a “he said, she said” morass of circumstantial evidence.

His pitiful cry captures the growing ambiguity today regarding what change is possible for the followers of Jesus in this life. This tortured example of the fall of a well-known and productive Christian figure is one that has been repeated many times since. Sadly such behavior is not as shocking now as it was then. We do not flinch when famous or not-so-famous pastors fall. Pastors were once respected and trusted more than all other professionals but now fall just behind politicians and dangerously close to lawyers in the polls. How did this change come about?

Historian and theologian Richard Lovelace has correctly identified a gap or hole in current evangelical theology and experience. He termed it the “sanctification gap.” The gap falls between God’s initial work of justification and his final work of glorification. Sanctification is the process of becoming progressively more like Christ by cooperating with God to become holy. In terms of Christian spiritual formation, it is thelife change or transformation that occurs after conversion and before death. In church history, sanctification is the element missing for the last one to two hundred years, at least since the last of the great