Read this before you read The Pursuit of Holiness

By Steven L. Childers

Abstract: Steven Childers examines the evolving theology of Jerry Bridges, who initially emphasized "dependent responsibility" in his best-selling (1.5 million), highly endorsed book The Pursuit of Holiness. Over time, Bridges shifted his focus to incorporate God's grace and the gospel as the necessary motive and means for Christians in their pursuit of holiness, correcting his previous emphasis that led to a performance-based spirituality. Childers suggests that readers should consider Bridges' later works for a more complete understanding of his earlier teachings. (9-minute read)

I still remember the day when my Old Testament seminary professor teaching our class on views of biblical prophecy referred to an important lesson that he thought we all needed to learn, called "Fairbairn vs Fairbairn."[1]

Patrick Fairbairn was a respected Scottish Free Church minister, theologian, and author from the late 19th century. The book he published on prophecy early in his writing career was highly endorsed and well-received.

However, during his many subsequent years of writing and publishing, his views on prophecy changed so significantly that people began to promote the binding and reading of his earlier and later books, calling them "Fairbairn vs Fairbairn."

After serving as an administrator with the Navigators ministry for almost 40 years, Jerry Bridges became a Bible teacher and author. His first book, The Pursuit of Holiness, written in 1978, became a highly acclaimed best seller of more than 1.5 million copies.

However, during Bridges’ next few decades of writing and publishing, his views on what the Bible teaches about how Christians should pursue biblical holiness changed so significantly that you could bind and read his earlier and later books together and call them "Bridges vs. Bridges."

A survey of Bridges' book titles from the late 1970s to the early 2010s tells the story, beginning with The Pursuit of Holiness in 1978 and The Practice of Godliness in 1983, and culminating in The Gospel for Real Life: Turn to the Liberating Power of the Cross in 2002 and The Transforming Power of the Gospel in 2011.[2]

As a leader in the Navigators, a ministry that focused significantly on personal discipleship, Bridges struggled with “What is my part and what is God’s part?” in the process of personal discipleship and spiritual growth.

From this struggle emerged a principle he called dependent responsibility that emphasized how we are both: 1) responsible to obey the moral commands of Scripture, and 2) absolutely dependent on the Holy Spirit to enable us. Bridges based his first book, The Pursuit of Holiness, on this biblical principle.

However, in subsequent years, Bridges began learning that a pursuit of holiness, even one that depends on the Holy Spirit for power, that is not also founded on grace and the gospel, can lead people into a legalistic performance mentality in their relationship with God and to spiritual discouragement, even depression.

When I was planting and pastoring a church in North Dallas in 1993, Jerry Bridges was asked to speak at a national conference I attended, sponsored by Ligonier Ministries.

During his conference teaching session, before a gathering of hundreds of church leaders from across the nation, he shockingly confessed to all of us that, although he had written a best-selling book on how to pursue holiness, afterward he realized that he had failed to undergird his teaching on pursuing holiness with the necessary biblical teaching on God’s grace and the gospel as the primary means.

He told us that he had recently discovered, partly through conversations with Dr. John (Jack) Miller, a former Westminster Seminary professor, that his own view of the gospel had been truncated for most of his ministry.[3]

“Imagine,” he said, “drawing a timeline of your life. A dot on the extreme left represents your birth; a dot on the extreme right represents your death. Picture a cross in the center, signifying your conversion. What one word would summarize your greatest need from birth to conversion?” Most of the group replied, “The Gospel.”

“Now,” he continued, “give me just one word summarizing your greatest need from your conversion to your death.” Some said “growth,” others said “sanctification.” Bridges said that for most of his ministry he would have agreed with those choices. Being a Navigator, he said his choice would probably have been “discipleship.” “But today,” he said, “that word would be Gospel.”

After decades of active discipleship, and after writing a best-selling book on the pursuit of holiness, Bridges realized that his view of the gospel had been virtually disconnected from living the Christian life and pursuing holiness. Now he was convinced that the Gospel is needed just as much after conversion as it is before.

Author J. I. Packer calls this view of pursuing holiness without an emphasis on God's grace and the gospel, “merely prayerful self-effort.” It's a view of the Christian life that promotes repentance and obedience to God's law, and always emphasizes prayerfully asking the Holy Spirit for power to change. But at its core, it's without a true belief and trust in God's amazing love in Jesus Christ as the underlying motive and means to be holy.

For more than 30 years after Bridges wrote The Pursuit of Holiness, he passionately pursued a deeper understanding of how God's grace and the gospel provides the necessary foundation and motivation for a life of holiness.

Bridges’ early thoughts on the grace of God in discipleship are reflected in his 1991 book, Transforming Grace. And in 1994, Bridges reflects on the beginning of his journey in his book, Disciplines of Grace:

Shortly after my book The Pursuit of Holiness was published in 1978, I was invited to give a series of ten lectures on that subject at a church in our city. One night I titled my lecture, "The Chapter I Wish I Had Written." The nature of that message was that the pursuit of holiness must be motivated by an ever-increasing understanding of the grace of God; else it can become oppressive and joyless. The study and reflection that went into that lecture started me down the path of further study on the grace of God.[4]

As Bridges continued his pursuit of deepening a better understanding of the relationship of the gospel and holiness, he wrote The Gospel for Real Life in 2003, and in 2012, The Transforming Power of the Gospel. Decades into his journey, he looked back and wrote:

As I began to pursue this truth, I saw to a greater extent how the gospel (that is, the message of what Christ has done for us and continues to do) provides both the foundation and motivation for our role in spiritual transformation, what I call our “pursuit of holiness.[5]

In 2012, four years before his death, Bridges did an interview with Ligonier Ministries’ magazine, TableTalk, in which he reflected on how his understanding of holiness, especially its relationship to the gospel, significantly evolved during the decades after he wrote The Pursuit of Holiness.[6]

Table Talk: You have written numerous books on the topics of grace and holiness. Why did you write on these topics, and how do you hope God will use these books in the lives of His people

Jerry Bridges: From my earliest contact with The Navigators, I sensed the need to apply the Scriptures specifically and intentionally to my life. But I struggled with the question, “What is my part and what is God’s part?” Finally, the Lord enabled me to see from the Scriptures the principle I call “dependent responsibility.” We are responsible to respond to the moral commands of Scripture, but we are absolutely dependent on the Holy Spirit to enable us.

I started to teach this principle of “dependent responsibility.” Then I was challenged by a friend to try writing. My first book, The Pursuit of Holiness, became a bestseller. But I soon realized that a pursuit of holiness that is not founded on grace and the gospel can lead to a performance mentality and even to discouragement. That’s when I began to emphasize grace and the gospel as foundational to the pursuit of holiness.

It is my desire that as a result of reading my books, people will seek to pursue holiness out of gratitude for what God has done for us in Christ. There is no doubt that it is our duty to pursue holiness. But I want believers to desire to do out of gratitude what is our duty to do. I want to see the “ought to” mentality replaced with a “want to” attitude.

TableTalk What do you see as the greatest need in the church today?

Jerry Bridges: The emphasis of my own ministry has been the believer’s personal pursuit of holiness. But years ago, I came to realize the gospel has to be the foundation and motivation for the pursuit of holiness. Believers need the gospel to remind them that our standing with God is not based on our own obedience but on the perfect, imputed righteousness of Christ. Otherwise, the pursuit of holiness can be performance-driven: that is, “If I’m good, God will bless me.”

How, then, can we get Christians to embrace the gospel every day? I believe Isaiah 6:1-8 gives us a paradigm for addressing this need. Isaiah sees God in His holiness, that is, His supreme majesty and infinite moral purity. In the light of God’s holiness, Isaiah is completely undone by an acute awareness of his own sinfulness. This is what we need in our churches today. Because we tend to define sin in terms of the more flagrant sins of society, we don’t see ourselves as practicing sinners.

It is only after Isaiah has been totally devastated by the realization of his own sinfulness that he is in the right position to hear the gospel proclaimed to him by the seraphim: “Your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for” (v. 7).

What happens next? Isaiah hears God say, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Immediately he responds, “Here am I! Send me” (v. 8). What causes such an immediate and spontaneous response? It is gratitude for the forgiveness of his sins as he hears the gospel from the seraphim. Jesus said, “He who is forgiven little, loves little” (Luke 7:47). It is because the vast majority of Christians do not realize how much they have been forgiven that there is so much lethargy in the church today.

There is an inevitable sequence in the account of Isaiah’s vision. It is God (in His holiness), guilt, gospel, and gratitude. It is deep, heartfelt gratitude for the work of Christ as proclaimed in the gospel that motivates us to pursue holiness. But it all begins with an ever-increasing realization of the holiness of God. That is why I see it as the greatest need in the church today.

In Bridges’s 2012 book, The Transforming Power of the Gospel, he beautifully summarizes the findings of his journey, drawing back on what I heard him share almost 20 years earlier at the conference in Dallas:

Before I understood the gospel's important role in our transformation, I thought it was only for unbelievers. Once we became believers, we didn't need it anymore except to share with those who still were unbelievers. I thought all we needed as Christians were the challenges and “how to” of discipleship. After all, Jesus said to go and make disciples of all nations (see Matthew 28:19).

We do need challenge and instruction in discipleship, but we also need the gospel every day in our lives because we still sin every day of our lives. And, as I have already said, the more we grow, the more we see our sin. But because we are performance oriented by nature and our culture enforces that orientation, we want to somehow relate to God every day on the basis of our perceived performance.

If we've been good, as we would define goodness, we feel reasonably secure in our relationship with God. If, on the other hand, we've had a “bad day” spiritually, we tend to feel insecure. In fact, that insecurity may cause us to live in denial of how bad our bad days really are. But we cannot grow spiritually if we do not see our need to grow. And if our insecurity about our day-to-day relationship with God causes us to live in denial about our sin, we will not grow.

This is one reason we still need the gospel every day. It helps us move from a performance relationship with God to one based on the sinless life and sin-bearing death of Jesus Christ. It daily reminds us that from God's point of view, our relationship with Him is not based on how good or bad we've been but upon the perfect goodness and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus, the gospel frees us up to honestly face our sin, knowing that because of Christ's death, God no longer counts that sin against us (see Romans 4:7-8).

During Bridges’ decades-long journey to learn more about the biblical teaching on holiness, he discovered the writings of the 17th-century English Puritan John Owen on the necessary relationship of God’s grace to the pursuit of Christian holiness. Owen is one of the greatest English-speaking theologians of all time.

But we still need to be careful when reading Owen’s books on holiness, because his views also developed significantly over time. The titles of Owen’s books tell the same story as Bridges' book titles. His earlier books in the 1650’s, On Indwelling Sin and On the Mortification of Sin, focused on the believers need to repent and put off sin.

However, decades later, 1n 1684, Owen writes his masterpiece Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ, in which he explains that the greatest form of mortification (putting off the old) is vivification (putting on the new).

In other words, as we learn how to set our heart affections on the far greater beauty and riches of God revealed in the glory of the ascended Christ, then, as the old praise chorus goes, the "things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace."

Therefore, I would still recommend Jerry Bridges’s book, The Pursuit of Holiness. But only after the potential readers understand what I mean by “Bridges vs Bridges”–that Jerry Bridges, like Patrick Fairbairn, John Owen, and many great Christian authors throughout history, often write books later in their lives that reveal their significantly more biblical views.[7]

Recommended popular books on the pursuit of Christian holiness (Amazon Book Links)

• Bridges, Jerry. The Transforming Power of the Gospel. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2012. (187 pages)

• Prior, Kenneth Francis William. The Way of Holiness: A Study in Christian Growth. Rev. ed. Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1982. (172 pages)

Childers vs Childers articles on the Transforming Power of the Gospel (Downloadable PDFs)

• Childers Steven. The Transforming Power of the Gospel. Reformed Quarterly Magazine 14(3):6-17. Orlando, FL: Reformed Theological Seminary, 1995. (7 pages)

• Childers, Steven. True Spirituality: The Transforming Power of the Gospel. Orlando, FL: Pathway Learning, 2001. (10 pages)

Footnotes

[1] This was O. Palmer Robertson, one of my Old Testament professors at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, in the early 1980's. 

[2] A list of Bridge's key books by dates of publication: The Pursuit of Holiness (1978), The Practice of Godliness (1983), Trusting God: Even When Life Hurts (1988), Transforming Grace: Living Confidently in God’s Unfailing Love (1991), The Discipline of Grace: God’s Role & Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness (1994), The Gospel for Real Life: Turn to the Liberating Power of the Cross (2002), The Great Exchange: My Sin for His Righteousness (2007), The Transforming Power of the Gospel (2011)

[3] "I owe a debt of gratitude to my friend Dr. Jack Miller, from whom I acquired the expression 'Preach the gospel to yourself every day.'" Jerry Bridges, Preface to Disciplines of Grace (1994)

[4] Disciplines of Grace: God’s Role & Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness (1994)

[5] Bridges, Jerry. The Transforming Power of the Gospel. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2012.

[6] Ligonier Ministries: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/the-pursuit-of-holiness-an-interview-with-jerry-bridges

[7] I'm grateful that the publisher (NavPress) of Bridges' The Pursuit of Holiness now adds a disclaimer, of sorts, at the end of the book called, A Further Word. However, they still don't mention the glaring absence of the author’s later focus on God's grace and the gospel as the necessary biblical motive and means for pursuing holiness. But they at least warn the reader that The Pursuit of Holiness mostly focuses on the negative, “dependent responsibility” of the Christian, in that it “deals largely with putting off the old self dealing with sin in our lives.” But if the reader wants to learn about the positive side, “putting on the new self,” of their “dependent responsibility” in pursuing holiness, they recommend reading the next book Bridges published with them in 1983. Of course, Bridges’ book, The Practice of Godliness, written soon after his The Pursuit of Holiness, reflects his more mature and more biblical understanding of Christian growth. But it hardly reflects his later, far more mature and biblical understanding of Christian growth in the books he wrote two decades later.

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