Purity
Living for the glory of God purifies and delights the soul.
While the Reformation was not based on moral reform as other reforms were, it nevertheless addressed the heart corruption and sin of the people. The key difference is that it lit the light of God’s word on the matter and proclaimed the gospel of God’s grace as the means of true purity. The glory of God broke through in new and beautiful brilliance such that a personal relationship with God became the driving desire behind purity. Later Reformers would summarize the whole goal of salvation as glorifying God and enjoying Him forever. Therefore, purity became an interest of unencumbered fellowship with our gracious and loving Creator and Savior, and not a matter of merit or acceptance. Love and pleasure compelled praise and purity.
Holiness Moved to Its Proper Place
The medieval church did not neglect holiness; it took holiness with great seriousness. But it located holiness in the wrong place and gave it the wrong job. Holiness was the road to acceptance with God, measured by works of satisfaction and merit, and its highest form was thought to lie outside ordinary life, in the vows of the cloister. The married farmer was a Christian of the second rank.
The Reformers moved holiness, without lowering it. They taught that acceptance with God rests entirely on Christ’s righteousness received by faith, and that holiness follows acceptance rather than purchasing it. Tyndale put the point bluntly. If he lived chaste, he wrote, he did not do it to obtain heaven thereby, “for then should I do wrong to the blood of Christ,” nor did he look for a higher room in heaven than those who live in wedlock.1 Purity was no longer a ladder. It was the fruit of a tree already made good.
The Second Half of the Double Grace
The deepest root of the Reformation’s teaching on holiness is the doctrine of union with Christ. Calvin taught that by partaking of Christ through faith we receive a double grace: reconciliation with God through Christ’s blamelessness, and sanctification by Christ’s Spirit, that we may cultivate blamelessness and purity of life.2 The two gifts cannot be separated, because Christ cannot be divided. “Christ justifies no one whom he does not at the same time sanctify.”3
So purity is not a second project the Christian takes up after being saved. It is Christ Himself, by His Spirit, living out His life in those He has made His own. Luther captured the order in one of his most quoted sentences:
Good works do not make a good man, but a good man does good works.4 Martin Luther
Love, Not Hire
Because the believer’s acceptance is settled, the motive for holiness changes entirely. Tyndale described the change in a phrase that every preacher can use: “Bond-servants work for hire, children for love.” Before the gospel, the natural man rages against God’s law; afterward, having tasted how sweet a thing the bitter death of Christ is, believers “begin to love again, and to consent to the law of God, how that it is good and ought so to be.”5 Luther said the same: the inner man, rejoicing in Christ, has only this task before it, “to serve God with joy and for nought in free love.”6
This is what the opening paragraph above means when it speaks of love and pleasure compelling praise and purity. The Heidelberg Catechism makes gratitude the whole frame of the Christian life: we do good works because Christ, having redeemed us by His blood, also renews us by His Spirit after His own image, that with our whole life we may show ourselves thankful to God.7
Dying and Rising Daily
Holiness in the Reformers’ teaching is not a single moment but a lifelong pattern of repentance. Calvin described repentance as having two parts: the mortification of the flesh and the quickening of the Spirit, a daily dying to sin and rising to newness of life, both flowing from our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection (Romans 6:4–6).8 Tyndale named three services that a believer’s good deeds perform: they assure him that the Spirit of God is in him; they tame the flesh and kill the sin that remains in him; and they do his duty to his neighbor.9
The disciplines of the Christian life remain, but their purpose is transformed. Luther told his readers to fast, watch, and labor just as much as they found sufficient to keep down the wantonness of the flesh, never as a way to be justified.10 The means God uses are the ordinary ones: the Word read and preached, the sacraments, prayer, and the fellowship and discipline of the church.
Ever a Sinner, Ever Righteous
The Reformers were realists about sin in the believer. Sanctification is real, but in this life it is never complete. The Westminster Confession describes it as throughout in the whole man, yet imperfect in this life, there abiding still some remnants of corruption in every part, whence arises a continual and irreconcilable war.11 Tyndale held both truths at once: a Christian is ever a sinner in the law, “yet in the promises he is ever righteous through faith in Christ.” And whoever truly longs to do the will of God, “though he fall a thousand times in a day, doth yet rise again a thousand times, and is sure that the mercy of God is upon him.”12
That realism is a mercy. It frees the struggling believer from despair, because his standing does not rise and fall with his progress. And it frees him from pride, because whatever progress he makes is the gift of Christ.
Cautions
Against perfectionism. No believer reaches sinless purity in this life (1 John 1:8). Teaching that promises otherwise either crushes tender consciences or teaches people to redefine sin downward until they can claim victory over it.
Against license. Free justification is not permission to remain in sin (Romans 6:1–2). A faith that produces no love is, in Tyndale’s word, a dream. The faith that justifies is never alone.
Against outward conformity. The law requires love “from the bottom of the heart,” as Tyndale never tired of saying. Purity is not managed behavior but a renewed heart.
Against confusing the church’s holiness with civil enforcement. Reformed cities such as Geneva and Zurich at times enforced public morals through civil penalties. Whatever may be said for the civic order this produced, it could blur the line between the holiness the Spirit produces and the conformity a magistrate can compel. The Reformers’ own theology supplies the corrective: true purity springs from faith and love, and no law can create it.
