Holy Lives

Holiness is one of the central themes of Scripture. You can’t get very far into the Bible without coming across descriptions of God as holy—as, in fact, the holy one. You also can’t get far without encountering God’s command to his people to be a holy people. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”, Moses is instructed to tell the Israelites in the wilderness (Leviticus 19:2, cf. 20:7, 26; 21:8). Leviticus is a book that is very much concerned with holiness: with the holiness of God and the holiness of his people, even the holiness of certain actions and things and places. But it’s not just Leviticus; holiness is a theme that runs throughout Scripture, from God blessing the seventh day and making it holy at the beginning of Genesis to the great vision of the holy city in the book of Revelation.

Yet, for all of its centrality in Scripture, we don’t hear a great deal about holiness these days. There is something quite appealing—and obviously right—about imagining the Christian life as an apprenticeship to Jesus, or a set of practices, or a “missional” life. We are more hesitant, I suspect, to think of that life as a holy life.

There are a number of reasons for this. The language of holiness is a weighty and demanding language. It is also a strange one to us. It plunges us into a world of flaming swords and burning bushes; of fiery coals scorching the flesh of lips and of offerings smouldering on altars; of a God whose name is given yet in an utterly mysterious way, who is encountered not in idols made by human hands but who speaks “out of the fire, the cloud, and the deep darkness” (Deuteronomy 5:22), the immortal One who dwells “in light inaccessible” (1 Timothy 6:16), surrounded by cherubim and seraphim. A world, too, in which pharaoh’s soldiers lie in their watery graves, in which the sons of Aaron are consumed by the Lord’s fiery presence and the son of Adimadab struck down beside the ark of the covenant.

This world is one remote from the achievement society that has come to shape our lives, including much of the way we think about Christian faith. Pick up nearly any recent book on discipleship or the church or mission and you will find much talk of projects, strategies and initiatives. This is the defining language of a society that has made everything the subject of achievement, of success, and, indeed, of failure. For the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, this achievement society is characterised by an overwhelming positivity.¹ Its motto is “Yes, we can”. Everything is doable with enough “up-skilling”. All aspects of our lives are subject to an instrumentalist rationality. Everything becomes a project—even our relationships, which, we are told, are things we must “work at” and get something from. Even the self is a project for this ideology. As entrepreneurs of the self we have to work constantly at living our “best lives” or being the “best versions” of ourselves.²

The language of holiness has little place in all of this. Our contemporary culture orders our lives in ways that make the command to be holy seem alien and archaic. One of the things that the images of holiness I mentioned above all have in common is that they do not regard the fulfilling of that command as a project on which we can set to work. There’s no strategy for holiness—no six steps to a holy life. Like prayer, holiness exceeds and is at odds with the language of technique and calculation, self-improvement, and efficiency that we have become so accustomed to using.

This may be one reason we find the language of holiness troubling. But there is a deeper reason. To talk about holiness, we have first to talk about God. In a culture in which we are preoccupied with what we are doing, and how we are fashioning and refashioning ourselves, contemplation of God is not a productive use of our time. It’s not productive because a holy God does not fit easily into our projects, schemes, and initiatives.

The picture of God that emerges in Scripture—in both the Old and the New Testaments—is more unsettling than we often admit to ourselves. This is not because God is some kind of dreadful, vindictive deity who has it in for human beings. That, in fact, is what the other gods are. And God, Scripture tells us over and over again, is not like the other gods. “Who is like you, O LORD, among the gods?” Moses sings after God rescues the children of Israel from their enslavers; “Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?” (Exodus 15:11). The question is, of course, entirely rhetorical. “There is no one like you among the gods, O LORD”, the Psalmist proclaims, “Nor are there any works like yours” (Psalm 86:8).

As it happens, it is this idea of God’s uniqueness or incomparability that is what the language of divine holiness has in view. When we say that God is holy, we are not talking about some distant being who looks down from on high on all of our failings and confusion with revulsion. God’s holiness does not mean that he is like that awful, morally uptight school teacher who once chastised you in front of all your peers for growing your hair past your collar. It means, actually, that in some really fundamental way he is not like that kind of teacher at all. Then again, neither is he like the nice teacher who accepted you for who you really were. When it comes down to it, he isn’t actually like anything or anyone else at all. He is incomparable. He is uniquely himself. He is the measure of all measures—and so the measure without measure.

Which is unsettling. I think that something like this uneasiness is what Scripture often has in view when it talks of “the fear of the Lord”. It’s not a fear of punishment so much as the sort of fear we experience when we encounter a presence that we can’t quite fit into our plans, and that doesn’t depend upon us in any way—a presence that exists outside of the nexus of giving and receiving within which we mortal, time-bound creatures exist, develop, grow and decline. A reality that is somehow just there, fully present, wholly and utterly itself. A reality that we can’t negotiate with or manage.³

People in Scripture who encounter angels experience this kind of fear, not because the angels themselves are terrifying creatures but because as messengers of the Lord they bear his presence. The disciples experienced it when in the middle of a raging storm on the sea of Galilee, they saw Jesus command the wind and the waves to be silent.⁴ It’s not just a question of power, at least in the sense in which we often use that word, but of encountering a presence that is set wholly apart from human calculation.

That God is set apart in this way—that he is uniquely himself—is what Scripture means when we it calls him holy. But that is not all it means because God does not keep his holiness to himself, but makes other things holy—other things, and places. Above all, he makes a people holy. God decides that alongside himself there should be a people that are his people, his “special possession” as Peter puts it (1 Peter 2:9). He sets this people apart from all the other peoples and dedicates them for his good purposes. Just as he called creation out of the nothingness, so he calls a people “out of the darkness into his marvellous light” (1 Pet. 2:9).

This people are not self-made. As “the Holy One of Israel”, the Lord is the one who makes Israel—and the Church. He is their “Maker” (Isaiah 45:11). “I will take you as my people, and I will be your God”, the Lord declares (Exodus 6:7). As the Apostle Peter tells struggling believers in Asia Minor, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (1 Peter 2:10). The agency here is entirely God’s. The church is not a group of people who have gathered themselves, but a people gathered by God, called out of a world that is “passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:31). As such as they are a “human echo” of God’s holiness.⁵

There is something utterly astonishing about this. The human project is ultimately a project of death and destruction, despair and hopelessness.⁶ Noting the prevalence of depression and burn-out in contemporary culture, Han claims that such things are not incidental to the achievement society, but its product. The achievement society ends in despair.⁷ The point here is not simply one about the ways in which our lives are saturated with technology and media. It is not just that we are live under the relentless imperative to be more productive and efficient. It’s that what is driving all of this is a need to secure our own lives, to “pro-ject” ourselves—literally, to throw forward a self.⁸ However, this quest does not bring security but its opposite: it leaves us exposed to the merciless and deathly forces that roam the world and seek to devour human beings.⁹ That God would call a people out of “the empty way of life” inherited from their ancestors (1 Peter 1:18), that he would establish this people, and guard them, is a marvel.¹⁰ That there exists in a world that is dying a people who have been “reborn into a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3) and so do not need to secure their own lives, a people summoned “out of the darkness into [God’s] marvellous light”, is a wondrous thing.

“Nothing is holy but the holiness that God works in us”, Martin Luther observed.¹¹ If we are holy it is because God is holy and his holiness is at work in our lives. What then are we to make of the Lord’s command to his people in Leviticus: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”? Is this a command, or is it in fact a promise—We shall be holy because the Lord is holy? Or could it possibly be both?

Such a possibility does not exist within the achievement society. A command cannot also be a promise. It can only be a command, and it is entirely up to me to fulfil it. As we noticed above, people within the achievement society swing between presumption—believing they can fulfil endless imperatives—and despair—feeling that they are unable to do anything at all. The gospel works differently. The words of the Lord are both commands and promises—or better, they are commands because they are promises. It is because the Lord is working his holiness in us that we are able to live into that work. The holy work of the Lord in us does not reduce us to passive objects on which God acts. Rather it frees us to respond to God’s work in our lives.

The command to be holy, then, is not like the sort of commands issued in the achievement society. It’s not a matter of trying really hard to be good at something. Still less is it about trying to be the “best versions” of ourselves. Instead, it is a matter of being transparent to the presence and work of God in our lives. It is saying “yes” to that work. It is living into the sanctifying work of the living Spirit of God.

What does it look like to say “yes” to the holy work of God in our lives?  Firstly, the work of holiness that God accomplishes in us finds particular expression in baptism. We tend to think of baptism first and foremost as something that we do—an act by which we declare to people that we are really serious about following Jesus. It is this, but secondarily. In the first place, baptism is not something that we do but something that is done to us. In baptism, God separates us from the “empty way of life” that we ourselves had lived. He puts us to death—and raises us into new life, and so sets us apart from the world that is passing away into nothingness. It is this setting apart and marking out that connects baptism to holiness. It is in our baptism that we become the “human echo” to God’s holiness.

Secondly, the holy living into which we are called is not marked by the sort of busy and confident and anxious activity that characterises people who are always working on themselves. Neither is it marked by the attempt to be calm and serene. A holy person is not someone who has conscripted God into their project of self-improvement, whether that project takes the form of ceaseless activity or passive inaction, presumption or despair. God is not summoned into our presence; we are summoned into his. And so holiness for us will involve humility.

Such humility is embodied in faith and repentance. Faith is not a heroic effort—against the odds—to believe. It’s not trying really hard to follow Jesus. Peter tried that. “My life for you I will lay down”, he tells the Lord (John 13:37), forgetting that it is the one to whom he is speaking who as the good shepherd will lay down his life for Peter (see John 10.14-15). Before Peter can lay his life down, he must first receive his life form Christ. And when he does lay his life down, it will not be as a heroic gesture, but as the completion of a long pattern of receptivity to Christ.

Faith is saying “yes” to God’s holy work in our lives. And this will often be accompanied by repentance, which is the acknowledgment that, left to our own devices, we try to protect ourselves from God and his call upon our lives. For us, I suspect, repentance will often take the form of recognising our readiness to slip back into thinking that everything is up to us—that we need to be constantly acquiring skills; that holiness is about being good at something rather than being transparent to the presence and work of God. We will often need to repent of the sort of anxious desire for competence and mastery that marked our lives before our baptism. To try to secure our lives—to turn holiness into one more of our projects—is to deny the reality of what God has done and is doing in us. It is to deny that we are “his possession” not our own.

Thirdly, holy living will be characterised by trust. This trust is not just trust that God has begun his holy work in our lives but also that he will fulfil it. We can hear the word of God, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy”, as a joyful command because we have first heard it as a consoling promise. The origin of the church is to be found in the decision of God. So Peter addresses believers as “the elect”, “the chosen”, reminding them that God is their maker. And if their beginning is determined by God, so is their end. By God’s mercy they have been birthed again “into a living hope” and “into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading”—a holy people who will become holy. Again not because of their own decision, but because God in his holiness has decided that they “shall be holy” too.

Holy living begins in baptism. It is marked by faith and repentance. And it is hopeful, for it trusts that God is at work reordering our lives towards his goodness. It is always transparent to God’s work. It involves concrete actions on our part, but those actions are actions that point not to our own abilities or moral standing but to God and God’s work. Holy people are people who point to God, who praise God constantly as the “author and finisher” of their faith (Hebrews 12:2). God is the one who called us into holiness, and he is the one who will accomplish that good work in our lives. “You are a chosen people”, Peter tells the church, “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praise of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light” (1 Peter 2:9).

¹ See Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
² On “achievement-subjects” as “entrepreneurs of themselves” see Han, The Burnout Society, pp.8ff.
³ This is a theme in much of Rowan Williams’s work. See, e.g., Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2007); see especially Chapter 1.
⁴ Admittedly, this is not entirely clear in Mark’s version of the story (Mark. 4:35-41). But see the account in Luke 8:22-25.
⁵ John Webster, Confronted by Grace: Meditations of a Theologian, eds. Daniel Bush and Brannon Ellis (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), p.131. I am much indebted to both Webster’s sermon “The Way of Holiness” in that volume (pp.127-34), and his more systematic unpacking of the language of holiness in Holiness (Grand Rapids, MI/Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2003).
⁶ See Peter Leithart, “God is Mocked” at https://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2013/03/god-is-mocked/.
⁷ See Han, The Burnout Society.
⁸ See Rèmi Brague’s helpful discussion of the word “project” in Brague, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), pp.11-15.
⁹ See Peter’s description of the devil as a “roaring lion, who “prowls around, looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
¹⁰ See Douglas Harink, 1 & 2 Peter, Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2009), p.59.
¹¹ Martin Luther, The Catholic Epistles, trans. Martin H. Bertram and Walter A. Hansen, Luther’s Works 30 (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 1967), p.6.