"Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation"
About this Quote
Ames is policing a definition, and the stakes are higher than they look. In early Reformed Protestantism, words like "sanctification" were doctrinal tripwires: get them wrong and you drift either toward a churchy politics of objects, offices, and ritual purity, or toward a feel-good moralism that can’t explain how anyone actually changes. So he narrows the lane. Sanctification, for him, isn’t primarily about being taken out of circulation and stamped “holy” for a niche religious purpose. That’s a real biblical usage, he concedes, but it’s not the center of gravity.
The subtext is a quiet polemic against a sacramental imagination where holiness clings to things by designation: altars, vestments, clerical roles, even “special” Christian activities. Ames treats that as, at best, an “outward” register of Scripture, valuable but secondary. The sharper move is his pivot to “inward or effectual separation.” Effectual is the loaded term: not a label, not a vibe, but a causally real transformation that changes what a person desires and does. Holiness becomes less about geography (stepping away from ordinary life) and more about a new orientation within ordinary life.
Context matters: as a post-Reformation scholastic, Ames is building a system meant to discipline both Catholic claims about consecration and Protestant temptations toward antinomianism (faith without moral renovation). His formulation keeps the Protestant world open - ordinary vocations remain “ordinary use” - while insisting that grace is not merely forensic or external. It produces a lived difference that can’t be faked by ceremonial distance.
The subtext is a quiet polemic against a sacramental imagination where holiness clings to things by designation: altars, vestments, clerical roles, even “special” Christian activities. Ames treats that as, at best, an “outward” register of Scripture, valuable but secondary. The sharper move is his pivot to “inward or effectual separation.” Effectual is the loaded term: not a label, not a vibe, but a causally real transformation that changes what a person desires and does. Holiness becomes less about geography (stepping away from ordinary life) and more about a new orientation within ordinary life.
Context matters: as a post-Reformation scholastic, Ames is building a system meant to discipline both Catholic claims about consecration and Protestant temptations toward antinomianism (faith without moral renovation). His formulation keeps the Protestant world open - ordinary vocations remain “ordinary use” - while insisting that grace is not merely forensic or external. It produces a lived difference that can’t be faked by ceremonial distance.
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| Topic | Bible |
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