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.