Delayed, Belated, But Finally Here: Contagious Holiness, pt. 2

Again, my apologies for the long delay. Life got a little busy around here between the beginning weeks of school and Hurricane Ike roaring up through the middle of Ohio (!). Hurricanes and the Midwest are not a combination I'd ever imagined before, but it was interesting! But back to contagious holiness:

The first time I see contagious holiness at work in the Old Testament is actually all the way back in Eden. God created Eden as the perfect paradise, a place of abundant life surrounded by chaos and wilderness. God commands Adam to take care of this garden and maintain it (Gen 2) and to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen 1). G.K. Beale in The Temple and the Church's Mission observes that the language used to describe Adam's commission indicates that Adam is not only to care for the garden but to expand its borders as well. So let's follow the logic: Eden is a place of abundant life, where rivers flow from it to water the earth. Eden is also the place where God comes to "walk with" man, so it is a place where God meets with and communicates with man. Eden is a place of order and a focal point of God's creative ability. These things together depict a place where God's rule, his sovereignty, and his presence, are active in a unique and powerful way. By any definition, this makes Eden a primordial temple. Adam's charge to expand its borders is equivalent, Beale says, to expanding God's rule on earth. Beale bases his conclusions not just on the language of the text but also on his understanding of how ancient civilizations would have understood the Eden account.

But what does this mean? Well, if Eden is a sort of organic temple, and God's plan for Eden was that it expand over the earth, then God's plan from the beginning of earth's time has been that his presence and his rule spread throughout the earth, not just in an omnipresent, omnipotent way, but in a special, active way where not just humanity but all of creation are determined to fall in with and pursue his will in all things.

Again, what does this have to do with holiness? My answer is that if holiness is being set apart to God for service and devotion to him, I can find no better description of the process outlined above than sanctification. Seen in this light, Adam's job was to expand the borders of a holy place, to infect the lands around Eden with a sense of being set apart to God for active obedience and service to him. Yes, God made the world, and so it technically is all his anyway. But he created mankind with the freedom to choose: to choose sin, and thus spread evil everywhere he goes, or to choose holiness, and to spread the rule of God everywhere he may go. And we--the church--have been commissioned to do the same: to infect those around us with this same sense of being called to set ourselves apart from sin as a people holy to God, expanding the borders of the kingdom throughout the world.

Contagious Holiness

The idea of "contagious holiness" has sort of made the rounds in recent years, most notably in Craig Blomberg's Contagious Holiness: Jesus' Meals With Sinners. In this book, Blomberg took a look at what it meant that Jesus ate with sinners. In a culture where purity was key to one's standing before God, this was a tremendous break not only with tradition but also with theology. Blomberg concludes that Jesus' meals were in fact a sort of parable-in-action: Jesus showed God's contagious holiness in a very human way to demonstrate the new way of the kingdom.

Blomberg's book is well worth the read if the above description intrigues you. He's done a superb--and thorough--job of discussing a concept not many have really touched on. But by the end of the book, it was clear to me that Jesus' eating habits was not the only example of contagious holiness in his ministry.

In fact, I think the idea of contagious holiness begins way back in the Old Testament, back as far as the Tabernacle and sacrifices Eden and can be see drawn larger than life in the prophets. In fact, it seems quite possible Jesus was deliberately evoking these images and stories in his actions, demonstrating contagious holiness not just as part of his announcement of the new kingdom way but as a fulfillment of the prophecies and symbols of the Jewish Scriptures. With this in mind, in the next couple of posts I'll tackle some Old Testament passages and talk about a new way Jesus brought holiness: through his healing ministry.

Now here's my disclaimer: these will really be more like outlines of ideas based on these passages and certainly not publishable as is. I'm still putting this together in my mind, so I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

Addendum: I've recently come across some ideas that mean I need to rethink some of my approach and incorporate some new information, so it may be another couple of days before I get to the good stuff!