Now I’m confused. What is Southern Holiness? If you are talking about Southern Baptists, they come across as quite worried about sin - no smoking, no drinking, no dancing, etc.
Southern Protestants generally are selectively strict on certain cultural issues. This is perhaps an unfair judgment, but I did grow up in the South, so I’ll go ahead and say it: I think that Southern Protestantism tends to identify holiness with cultural identifiers that make it clear that you are one of the “good ol’ boys” and not the “enemy” (evil Northern liberals). There is a lot of tolerance for moral slip-ups that do not violate these cultural identifiers. Sin is seen as something to be avoided but something which cannot possibly affect your salvation in any way, and only some Southern Baptists (usually those most influenced by genuine Calvinism) affirm the corollary that a believer will persevere in the pursuit of holiness and will not deliberately remain in unrepentant sin.
Here’s a simpler way of putting it: Southern Baptists have certain ideas about what is and is not sinful that are stricter than those held by other Christians. But their attitude toward the consequences of committing sin is not that strict at all. To some extent this is simply something that always goes along with “cultural religion”–as long as you acknowledge the predominant church’s definitions of sin and acknowledge that what you are doing is sin, the church doesn’t care that much about the fact that you do sin. At the risk of being called anti-Catholic, I’ll say that by and large this is characteristic of Catholic cultures as well. However, two things make this problem particularly bad among Southern Baptists: the strong link in the postbellum South between religion and cultural/regional loyalty (with a defensive, paranoid attitude toward outsiders), and the doctrine of OSAS. This produces the result that as long as you say the right things about what is and is not true Christianity, what you actually do doesn’t matter a whole lot. In the Southern Baptist church I attended for a while as a child, my Sunday School teacher’s husband abandoned her for a younger woman, who happened to be the daughter of one of the church elders. He was able to divorce his wife and marry his mistress without (as far as I remember) any negative consequences whatsoever. I don’t think that this was an exceptional case. (My family spoke out against the church’s tolerance of this situation and eventually stopped attending that church–this was one of the events that led us to distance ourselves from Southern Baptists, though we later found another preacher we liked and attended his church for a while.) This laxity is explicitly justified in terms of the doctrines of sola fide and OSAS.
This attitude infects much of Southern Protestantism, including traditions that you would expect to have a very different approach. Hence my remark about “Southern Holiness.” The “Holiness movement” from which I come was, in its original Northern form, an extremely rigorous movement with a strong emphasis on godly living, complete dedication to God, and care for the poor. It was linked closely to movements like abolitionism and “temperance” (i.e., prohibition). It also gave rise to the Pentecostal movement. By and large, in the North these two things (Holiness and Pentecostal) are distinct and even mutually hostile. In the South there are a few of my kind of “Holiness” folks, but generally the word “Holiness” is likely to mean “Pentecostal,” especially in rural areas. This Southern (usually Pentecostal) Holiness tradition talks about entire sanctification and has strict standards in terms of dress, TV-watching, etc. But again it tends to some extent to be a matter of cultural identifiers. (The Southern “Holiness” preacher in Robert Duvall’s wonderful movie
The Apostle is not an entirely atypical figure. And a number of the more scurrilous TV-preachers come from that background (Oral Roberts, for instance, who belonged to the Pentecostal Holiness Church before going off on his own). There’s a lot that is admirable in this Southern Holiness tradition as well–I don’t want to make it out as all bad. Many of them are extremely critical of the prosperity gospel and the televangelists and really do hold up high standards for the Christian life. (In fact, the Holiness movement in general errs in the direction of neurotic legalism!) My point is simply that they are still affected by the general trend of Southern Protestantism.
Regarding Calvinism, how are they OSAS?
They invented the idea, although they generally prefer to use the term “Perseverance of the Saints” to make it clear that they don’t stand with the antinomians.
Are they not "pre-determined to have been saved? So sin wouldn’t matter to them right?
No, absolutely wrong. This is a common misconception and it is the very opposite of the truth. Almost all Calvinists agree with Augustine and Aquinas that God predestines the means along with the end (though they disagree with Catholic Augustinianism/Thomism in denying that God predestines anyone to grace whom He does not also predestine to glory–that is one way of stating the basic concept of OSAS). Predestination absolutely does not mean that you will be saved no matter what you do. It means that God directs you toward eternal life as an archer shoots an arrow at a target (God, being an infallible archer, never misses). The arrow isn’t teleported to the target. It passes through the intervening space. Similarly, a Christian who is among the elect will repent and believe and persevere in doing good works. God will make sure (without violating the integrity of the person’s intellect and will) that this happens.
Edwin
