WALKING IN NEWNESS OF LIFE  ·  REFORMED VOICES ON SANCTIFICATION

John Murray on Definitive Sanctification

The Once-for-All Breach with Sin as the Ground of Walking in Newness of Life

The Anchor Text  ·  Romans 6:4 (ESV)

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

Key terms: περιπατήσωμεν (peripatēsōmen, “we might walk,” aorist active subjunctive, hortatory) and ἐν καινότητι ζωῆς (en kainotēti zōēs, “in newness of life”). καινότης (kainotēs) denotes newness of kind, not merely of time — a new order of existence, lived out as a manner of walking.

CENTRAL TRUTH

For Murray, the believer’s walk in newness of life rests on a decisive, once-for-all event: in union with Christ’s death and resurrection the Christian has already died to sin and been definitively set apart. Progressive sanctification is therefore the outworking of a breach already accomplished, never the achievement of one still pending.

SECTION 01

The Author

John Murray (1898–1975) was a Scottish Reformed theologian of Free Presbyterian background who served as professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, from 1930 to 1966. Classically Reformed and Presbyterian in conviction, he was prized for exegetical precision and dogmatic care, and is widely regarded as having advanced Reformed reflection on the application of redemption. His principal works include Redemption Accomplished and Applied (Eerdmans, 1955), the two-volume The Epistle to the Romans in the NICNT series (Eerdmans, 1959, 1965), Principles of Conduct (Eerdmans, 1957), and the four-volume Collected Writings (Banner of Truth, 1976–1982).

SECTION 02

The Work

“Definitive Sanctification” first appeared as an article in the Calvin Theological Journal 2.1 (April 1967): 5–21, and was reprinted, with its companion essay “The Agency in Definitive Sanctification,” in the Collected Writings of John Murray, volume 2 (Banner of Truth, 1977), 277–293. The same argument is compressed in Redemption Accomplished and Applied and worked out exegetically in his Romans commentary on 6:1–7:6.

SECTION 03

The Argument

Murray’s signal contribution is the recognition that the New Testament speaks of sanctification not only as a progressive work but as a definitive, once-for-all act occurring at the inception of the Christian life. Romans 6 is the controlling text. The “death to sin” of 6:2 is not a daily dying but a past, decisive event — a breach with the realm and dominion of sin, effected by union with Christ in his death and resurrection. As physical death severs every relation to the realm one leaves, so the believer’s death with Christ severs the reign of sin. From this definitive breach flows newness of life (6:4), and the imperative of 6:11 — “reckon yourselves dead to sin” — is the call to count true what God has already made true.

Murray himself frames the decisive language carefully. Of the New Testament’s sanctification vocabulary he writes that it is used “with reference to some decisive action that occurs at the inception of the Christian life,” and that it would be “a deflection from biblical patterns of language and conception to think of sanctification exclusively in terms of a progressive work” (Collected Writings, 2:278). The breach is grounded in the cross itself: “the decisive and definitive breach with sin that occurs at the inception of the Christian life is one necessitated by the fact that the death of Christ was decisive and definitive” (2:285).