Cambria Kaltwasser teaches theology at Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa. She recently chatted with Steve Mathonnet-VanderWell.

SMV: Cambria, last spring you wrote for the Reformed Journal and we received lots of positive feedback along with several questions asking “Who is this Cambria? Where does she come from and what’s she about?” So please tell us as much as you can about your personal and professional and academic background.

CK: Sure. Well, I think for our purposes, it might be interesting to know that I came from a theological home. My father is a pastor and a theologian. I was raised with plenty of opportunities to think about theological questions and to think about my faith in a more reflective and some might say abstract way.

One thing that shaped me a lot was that my father collected books. It was almost a hoarding situation, maybe! He had about 7,000 books at one point in our house, mostly in his study. These included a lot of theology, but there was also literature and literary criticism and poetry and philosophy and pastoral care – all kinds of stuff. I could just go and find things and read them without anybody else knowing about it. I found everything from Dostoevsky to Albert Camus to Annie Dillard, and eventually Karl Barth.

That reading shaped me as much as anything else growing up. And then I had an eclectic church background. My father came up from a fundamentalist Baptist tradition and he found his way all the way to the United Church of Christ (UCC) after studying at Fuller Theological Seminary. So, I was raised in Congregationalist churches. You might think of the UCC as a very progressive denomination, but my father still had his sort of Baptist leanings too. So, when I was seven years old, I prayed the sinner’s prayer. I asked Jesus into my heart. Later, our family became Presbyterians when my dad took a job as a professor at Oral Roberts University, which is a story for another day.

I was raised with a freedom to ask questions about my faith. I didn’t have the sort of fundamentalist baggage that I now discover many of my evangelical peers have. I definitely never had any hang-ups about origins in the book of Genesis or rigid application of rules from the Bible. I was never anxious about the imperfections of the biblical text.

It was more like I had my father as a conversation partner, and we were thinking things through at the same time. We discussed how to interpret violence in the Old Testament or sexual ethics. I very much appreciate my father’s willingness to say that we never have things completely figured out. We don’t reach the end of needing to ask questions.

I went to college at John Brown University in Arkansas. It’s not all that different from Northwestern College, where I am now, in the sense that both are strongly evangelical colleges. John Brown isn’t Reformed but has a Baptist flavor. I was an English major. I have always had a passion for literature. My minor was religion and philosophy.

During that time, I also studied abroad at Oxford, through a program for Christian college students. There I finally decided that theology was what I wanted to pursue. I was feeling worried that in English I would end up just dissecting texts, without the question of truth being on the table.

I went to seminary with an academic vocation in mind, but, due to the influence of a pastor, I entered the ordination path. It wasn’t hard to convince me to seek ordination, because I had never thought of theology as a purely academic endeavor. That sense is really alien to me. For me, theology always belongs in the church and pertains to faith and the living out of life in relationship to God.

I was eventually ordained, but I was ordained as a professor. That is kind of unusual. It doesn’t happen everywhere in the Presbyterian/Reformed world.  It’s more common to be a pastor and then become a professor. But because our Reformed traditions value education so highly, sometimes in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A), a given presbytery is willing to ordain someone in their teaching vocation, to consider it a “validated ministry.” I also do a lot of preaching, and especially in Presbyterian congregations.

SMV: Cambria, as you know, what intrigued me when I read your little bio blurb, was that you said you were especially interested in sanctification. That was a bit of a red flag for me. We’ve talked so you know that I’m somewhat reactive to the term. For me, and maybe others, sanctification brings to mind sanctimony and religiosity and things like that. Sanctification usually seems to slide into the sort of piety where I have a little smudge on my heart and I keep track of how many sins I’ve committed today – a personal self-improvement project. As Reformed people we’re about grace not perfectionism. Can you tell us what you studied and how you answer my kind of negative impressions around sanctification? 

CK: Those are good and important questions. I’d like to start with a personal narrative rather than with the content, because it might help you to make sense of where I’ve come from and what I’m interested in and also what I’m not interested in.

I would say that “sanctification” was never a word that I was interested in growing up or in college. Through seminary and to this day I’ve maintained very Reformed sensibilities, such as a strong respect for the sovereignty of God and the smallness of human creatures and just a sense of awe at God’s magnificence. And I don’t think that for me that was ever an oppressive kind of theology, although I know for some people it is closely associated with harm they received from the church. For me it was freeing, and I really believed that anything that I could do or offer God as a small, human creature could be no more than filthy rags. That was a piece with the beauty of grace, to me. So for a good portion of seminary, talking about any kind of personal transformation or human agency in faith, all of that smacked of works righteousness.

That was my mentality because grace is the heart of the gospel. I haven’t left that behind, but I have added an interest in human agency. The main way that happened is that I had a professor who not only taught me about the virtue ethics tradition, but, more importantly, was an example of it. He was someone who exemplified justice in the way that he interacted with students and with his colleagues, in the way that he honored different voices and responded well under heat – sometimes at the expense of his own agenda or his own self.

A teacher can have such an influence on our life because they care about us and want to see our growth and our learning. Along the way, we as students pay attention to them and admire them. I paid attention to these little things my professor exemplified that I would call virtue.

SMV: Were you reading Aristotle or Aquinas or Hauerwas or Alasdair MacIntyre?

CK: A little bit, but it started with Augustine actually. I saw that Augustine was a person who cared about how to be human—how to live as a one created by God, set within this human community, redeemed by Christ, and being formed by the Holy Spirit.

The key idea of virtue ethics, although it may sound trite, is to live well. Happiness is to live well. If you really understood yourself as a creature, as a human being, as a mom or a partner or a citizen, in all these different ways, and you really understood the situation in which you’re acting, how would you want to live?  That’s virtue.

It asks, what do I owe my neighbor in this situation? What is the just response in this set of circumstances? How can I respond with patience in this moment? We can only take on virtues because we see them as living examples.

I don’t really care all that much about thinking of my life as a project of self-improvement. I think that’s one thing that people often really dislike about so-called “sanctification.” It smacks of individualism – which I think was one of your concerns. And I get that too. As if the Christian life is just supposed to be about me, perfecting myself, and making myself a little project.

I’m not sure that I have fully found the knockout answer to that problem. It’s more just the idea that goodness attracts us. Virtue is beautiful and that somehow that’s part of our journey with God.  Wherever we see goodness, wherever someone acts with patience or kindness or courage, it’s undoubtedly the work of the Holy Spirit.

I like to think of 2 Samuel 12, when the prophet Nathan confronts David about his sin. Of course, a lot of us are repelled by the idea of pointing out another’s sin. Maybe it seems very rule oriented, a version of Christianity many people had growing up, where the Christian life is mostly about obeying the rules. I see why that would be unappealing, especially because those rules are always imposed by earthly authorities whom we have reasons to question.

But I like this story because it offers a different way to think about being convicted of our sin. When Nathan confronts David about his sins of the murder of Uriah and the rape of Bathsheba, he does it in the form of a story. He says there was this rich man who had all these flocks and everything he could want. He was living by this poor man, and this man had nothing. But the poor man had this little ewe lamb that was so precious to him. It was like a daughter to him that used to fall asleep on his chest, and he treated this lamb like one of his children. The rich man has a visitor come and he just steals the poor man’s lamb and he slaughters it and serves it to the guest.

And this wrenches David’s heart. He expresses his horror at the ferocity of the rich man. He says, this man deserves to die!  And then Nathan says to him, “You are the man.” You are the man, David. And that moment kind of gives me chills. That is an example to me of mortification, in Calvin’s language.

It’s not that somebody has come along and said to David, “You’re transgressing this rule, and you better get into shape because I have this superior knowledge of what God wants you to do.”

Instead, Nathan appeals to David’s own sense of what is good and what is beautiful and what is true and what should not be done and what should be valued and what should be protected. He makes the decision within himself. He condemns this rich man in the story and, as a result, he condemns himself.

The important thing here is that there is a relationship between the good news and our confession of sin. What is the gospel? Who is this God that we’re moving toward? What is this faith that we’re attracted to? And doesn’t it necessarily mean something for the way that we live our lives? We can’t hold our life apart and say, no, the gospel doesn’t have anything to do with that, the gospel leaves everything unchanged.

Of course, I’m lost without grace. But it is grace itself that, by the power of the Holy Spirit, leads us to condemn our sins and to want to live differently. That’s what’s most important to me. There’s a motivation to want to live a new life as followers of Christ, even if we find, again and again, that our lives are all over the place.

SMV: That’s really helpful and interesting in lots of ways. That’s certainly not sanctimony in any kind of perfectionistic “I sinned 14 times today. But in every way, every day, I’m getting better and better.”

And when you talk about role models or seeing virtue and being drawn to it – virtue not being an individualistic thing – I think of what we used to call the “covenant community” in our tradition. No doubt there were rigid and judgmental and hypocritical people around in our communities, but I also think many of us saw people living good lives that we admired and wanted to live like that. The covenant community as a sort of nurturer of virtue because, like your professor, you start to say to yourself I want to be like that kind of person.

Which maybe segues to a question, is there a distinctively Reformed take on sanctification, or a special contribution our tradition makes to the conversation?

CK: I do think that the Reformed tradition makes a unique contribution to sanctification, at least on the Protestant side, because we’re in a broader confessional family with Lutheranism. In the first place, Calvin emphasized sanctification much more than Luther did. Calvin went so far as to make sanctification a distinct theme that’s parallel to justification and not derivative of it. He saw our sanctification as parallel to and simultaneous with justification.

In Calvin’s view, justification and sanctification both stem from union with Christ. These are two aspects of God’s work in us, two sides of the same coin. One side, justification, is Christ setting us right with God on the basis of Christ’s righteousness, completely external to us. And then on the other side of the coin, sanctification, is the Holy Spirit’s work in us, to let our lives themselves become part of the goodness of the gospel flowering forth. In Calvin’s view, you could treat justification and sanctification in either order, but to emphasize the significance of sanctification, Calvin treats it first, before justification.

Secondly, and I think more importantly, is that, by doing this, Calvin unites gospel and law. Just as he sees the old covenant and the new covenant as two forms of the one covenant of grace, so he sees God’s law as always embedded in the covenant and essentially gracious. One place this unity comes out is in Calvin’s discussion of repentance. According to Calvin, we don’t get convicted of our sin, repent and mortify ourselves and then receive God’s grace and grow into the Christian life. That’s not the order of things.

Rather, the sense of our guilt, our need to repent, these happen because we have already received the good news. The gospel has a kind of logical priority over being convicted of our sin. Paul writes, “the kindness of the Lord leads us to repentance” (Romans 2:4). You have to embrace the goodness and beauty of the gospel in order even to be able to comprehend sin or to care about not wanting to participate in it.

It is true that Calvin could still be overly fixated on the role of self-denial in the Christian life. Later, Karl Barth would accuse him of overdoing the talk of mortification, such that it undermined his own emphasis on grace and led back to an incomprehensible picture of the law.

Barth goes so far as to say that God’s law is the form of the gospel, whose content is grace. This means that Barth finally does not recognize a “second use” of the law, one that is independent from grace. The law doesn’t—in fact, it can’t! —scare you about your guilt and drive you to seek a savior. You don’t even know the law and you aren’t concerned about breaking it until you have received the gospel. The law is the outworking of the gospel.

I believe this is the heart of our hang-ups with sanctification. It’s been connected with various lists of rules whose authority over us we don’t accept. The law—these “rules” of the Christian life—has been separated from the gospel. In this form, we simply do not recognize it as good news.  There are various reasons why this happens, often having to do with the tainted authority of those who communicate the rules to us as well as the contested nature of what it is that God is asking of us in any given moment.

Of course, none of that changes the fact that God is asking things of us. The idea for me is that the gospel actually has a content–in the way we live. What I’d really like to drive home is if gospel is just solely the bare message that I get off scot-free, that’s not really very good news. Grace then becomes so thin, as if it is merely a “get out of hell free card.” I don’t want to say forgiveness isn’t good news. Of course forgiveness is good news. But the good news is much thicker and more holistic than that. The gospel has a content–that includes life in harmony with God and how God created us to be and to flourish. And that means that there’s a way that we can live in relationship with each other, that we can respect and help each other to thrive and work together.

And I think this can also help us understand sanctification more broadly than simply an individual purification. The gospel isn’t only about flourishing personally but also as families, towns, in societies, in the government, in the school board. The good news has a content. It is not just the message of forgiveness. It is also the message that God is setting things right on all of these levels, and that the Spirit is enabling us to participate in that setting right.

SMV: Cambria, this has been really fun and I think you have given me a different take on sanctification. I think this notion that the gospel has content is really helpful. Sanctification isn’t really how I can get better, but how we let the Spirit move us into the fullness of what God wants for the world. That’s a really beautiful idea. Thank you.

CK: You’re welcome. And thank you for this time and interview and the good questions.