Holiness and CommunityWesleyan Center Writers Symposium

Featuring discussion on the manuscript Holiness and Community

The Symposium featured the editors, essayists, faculty, students, ministers, and guests in discussion of the Wesleyan theme of holiness in a pluralistic culture.  

Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University

Christianity is to have one's body shaped, one's habits determined, in a manner that the worship of God is unavoidable. If we have any hope of reclaiming the church as a disciplined body of disciples, then we will need to recover the discipline of the body that at least offers an alternative to the endemic individualist and rationalism of modernity.

Joyce Quiring Erickson, Seattle Pacific University

What is the relation of bodily and emotional health to holiness?What does sanctification mean in an age of Prozac? To what extent are the patterns of our lives shaped by social paradigms inconsistent with holiness? How can originally Wesleyan forms of holiness discipline be restored and how would the restored versions differ from contemporary consumer-oriented versions?
 

Michael Cartwright, University of Indianapolis

What are the differences between empty concepts of holiness and socially embodied practices of holiness in American Protestant Christianity? To what extent has the social embodiment of holiness been displaced by fantasy of the "Once and Future Church"?
 

Ted Runyon, Emory University

Whereas the "Holiness Movement" understood holiness in individual terms, John Wesley saw that there is no genuine Christianity that is not communal. That is why he championed small groups as indispensable to the growth of holiness. The holiness of the individual has its goal the healing of society.
 

Craig Keen, Olivet Nazarene University

Is the holy life truly an "habituated life", in which we are made perfect through our habits? Isn't perfect love instead a matter of living outside of oneself, so that it exists for the other - the lost, the outcast, the forsaken, and the poor?
 

Rodney Clapp, InterVarsity Press

How do we move toward the sort of body of disciples that Stanley Hauerwas urges within developed societies? Are our choices truly autonomous or are our lives out of our control? How can we challenge and disorient the rationalism of individualism that underlie illusion of autonomy and control?
 

Mike Lodahl, Northwest Nazarene College

How does Jesus' parable of the "good Samaritan" expose and critique the postmodern theological notion of "community" as a relatively closed circle of discourse and practice? How can the human experience of empathy lead us to a renewed vision of holiness in the wider community of creation?
 

Sam Powell, Point Loma Nazarene University

What is "church" if Jesus Christ is the last Adam? How can we understand the church both as a historical and sociological community and as the work of the Holy Spirit? What is the relation of holiness to Christian ethics and church's life in the world.