Prolegomena to Propositional Sanctification

Contemporary Christian accounts of sanctification display significant conceptual divergence across academic theology, pastoral literature, and popular discourse. Sanctification is variously construed as moral progress, spiritual formation, therapeutic integration, or experiential ascent. While these approaches often appeal to Scripture, they frequently diverge at a more fundamental level—not primarily through explicit exegetical disagreement, but through differing and often unarticulated assumptions concerning authority, judgment, and the locus of interpretive control. This paper argues that many modern difficulties surrounding sanctification are therefore prolegomenal rather than exegetical. The instability arises not from a denial of sanctification, but from uncertainty regarding who or what possesses the authority to define holiness, to judge obedience, and to interpret progress. Where these functions are tacitly reassigned from divine revelation to subjective experience, psychological frameworks, or moral intuition, sanctification becomes conceptually elastic and doctrinally unstable, regardless of orthodox intent. In response, the study advances a jurisdictionally ordered and propositional account of sanctification governed by six theological commitments: the final authority of Scripture; the inseparability of sanctification from union with Christ; the monergistic efficacy of divine action exercised through real obedience; the persistence of the noetic effects of sin in the regenerate; the necessary distinction without separation of Law and Gospel; and the certainty of God-wrought perseverance. These commitments are not presented as conclusions derived from methodological neutrality, but as governing conditions required for coherent theological discourse on sanctification within a Reformed confessional framework. By treating sanctification first as an act of divine authority before it is analysed as moral transformation, the paper reorders the doctrine under judgment, covenant, and promise. This ordering preserves sanctification from reduction to moralism without lapsing into passivity, and from experiential subjectivism without evacuating embodied obedience. The resulting account aims to clarify the doctrine’s conceptual boundaries, locate it ecclesially and eschatologically, and provide a stable framework within which obedience and assurance may be addressed without conceptual contradiction