Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (1998)

Sanctify Them in the Truth

Stanley Hauerwas has long argued against one of the hallmark assumptions of modernity: that the truth of the gospel can be discovered apart from its embodiment in specific communities of faith, and the habits, virtues, and commitments that define those communities. In this new volume, Hauerwas reminds us that for Christians there is no such thing as truth that is not embodied truth. The Christian life, he argues, is not about being in possession of "the truth," defined as a set of timeless and universal principles of belief and action. Rather, it is about learning and living the life of truthfulness toward God and one another. In other words, sanctification and truth - which stood together so naturally in Jesus' prayer in John 17 - have come unglued in the modern world. Drawing on a wide variety of sources and insights, including his own background in the Wesleyan tradition, Hauerwas sketches a blueprint of how the contemporary church must rejoin the two if it is to remain faithful to its calling.
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