Thus far, Webster has made it clear that ‘revelation’ is the umbrella term that must overarch all the other Christian talk about Scripture, etc., and he gradually narrows the discussion. The narrowest of the first chapter is ‘inspiration’ (on that more later), and the middle term is what he calls ‘sanctification.’ He admits the strangeness of using the term to describe Scripture, but I think he works it out very well.
“In its broadest sense, sanctification refers to the work of the Spirit of Christ through which creaturely realities are elected, shaped and preserved to undertake a role in the economy of salvation: creaturely realities are sanctified by divine use. But it is important to emphasize that the divine ‘use’, though utterly gratuitous, is not simply occasional or puctiliar, an act from above which arrests and overwhelms the creaturely reality, employs it, and then puts it to one side. The sanctity of creaturely realities is certainly unthinkable without reference to the event of sanctification, for the creature’s holiness is God’s ‘living work, the fruit of his intervention and the effect of his presence … the event of his coming, the personal and decisive gesture corresponding to his love and freedom.’
But precisely in its free transcendence of that which it employs in its service, divine use has a properly ‘horizontal’ dimension as well as a sheerly ‘vertical’ dimension. There is an election and overseeing of the entire historical course of the creaturely reality so that it becomes a creature which may serve the purposes of God. Sanctification is thus not the extraction of creaturely reality from its creatureliness, but the annexing and ordering of its course so that it may fittingly assist in that work which is proper to God.”
[John Webster, Holy Scripture, 26]
