Todd Wilken, Issues, Etc: In the Old Testament you could find this. God told you where it was. He told you in the Old Testament where he was. Moses sees a burning bush on a mountain side. He goes up to see what it's all about, and the God who speaks to him from this burning bush tells him to take off his shoes for he is standing on holy ground. In the Old testament it was a place. It was things. There were people who were holy. God's own people were called holy because of God's holiness. Is the same true of holiness now in the New Testament?
[Program and guest introduction]
Wilken: Why is it best that we begin in the Old Testament to talk about holiness?
Kleinig: Because without the understanding that the Old Testament gives us of holiness, it's very easy to misinterpret and misunderstand what the New Testament has to say about it. And what's most important in the Old Testament is the understanding that only God is holy and that anything or anybody's holiness borrows holiness from God himself. And that's in a very tangible way. God communicates his holiness to his people via the most holy things in the most holy place.
Wilken: I want to come back to the Old Testament roots for this idea. Let's dispel some of the misconceptions about holiness. I think the primary one—among, kind of in the Protestant context—is that holiness is primarily a moral quality or a moral character that I possess or that you possess. How would you correct that?
Kleinig: Yes, there's no doubt that if you talk about holiness, particularly here in North America, people immediately think in moral terms. So if somebody is holy, they're a moral person, and an immoral person is unholy. Now, there is some connection between, with morality and holiness, but holiness is not morality. And sanctification is not moral self-improvement or even spiritual self-improvement. So for example, the body and blood of Christ is holy, or the temple is holy. Things are holy. A name is holy: God's name is holy. It doesn't make sense if you think of holiness in terms of morality or even of sinlessness. But it's very hard on the other hand to say what's meant by God's holiness, because all the other attributes of God have to do with the way God resembles human beings. We say God is loving. But he's not just loving like human beings, but he's supremely loving. Or he's almighty. We have some power, some might. He's almighty. But when we come to God's holiness, we're dealing with the way God is unlike any human being, and so there's no analogies possible anymore.
Wilken: I hadn't thought of that before. I mean we do take these other attributes of God, and it is essentially the superlative of things that we, even in our fallenness, possess or God possesses incompletely. Is that a good place to begin outlining the concept of holiness—God's otherness than us, his being holy other than we are?
Kleinig: That's partly it, but it's also very misleading, because as soon as I think in terms of otherness or even transcendence, I think in terms of God's remoteness, rather than his presence. So God is holy in the midst of us; God is holy with us. And God's holiness has to do with God's presence with us. So it's not so much remoteness or even his otherness in the sense that he's different—but yet not alien to us, because he made us and we are made in God's image. So God's holiness is a power; it's a state of being in which we share something of the power or being of God.
The remainder is equally good. I recommend the interview to you.
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