Holy means Healthy and Whole: According to a Simple and Clear Understanding

There are objections that can be raised to my position that holy means whole. I want to deal with two of those and I will deal with others later (and have in some cases before). The first is the objection of not keeping things simple. The second is the objection that it is unclear what kind of wholeness I mean.

Let's begin with keeping things simple. To be simple rather than complex is what one thing is in contrast to many things. It is very important to keep things simple, as shown in a April 2008 documentary on television called "The Woman who Thinks Like a Cow." The point of view of the woman featured was that due to her autism, she had a better sense of the basics of the brain of animals, because their brains are more basic than the typical humans. She was able to baffle the experts through her ability to see the basics. She didn't deny complexity, she just recognized the basics first.

The concept of a whole is simple, except that it is a general idea for many concrete and specific examples. When we are very young and adults teaching us are very careful to keep things simple, we learn about the tail of the kitty or the ear of the dog. We are then talking concretely and simply about one example of parts and wholes. I confess that the concrete examples are simpler than the abstact idea that comes from many examples. Even in the case of the word translated as holy, the word is most likely abstracted from the simple and concrete example of white light, which is a combination of a few colors like red and yellow. So I need to keep things concrete and singular whenever possible, if I am going to keep things simple.

Another way to keep things simple is to talk in the popular words of the day. Something that is heard over and over again is often simpler in people's minds, because of its repeated use. I must confess that health or healthy is the popular word used in Christian circles for what I am trying to say. It is popularized in the phrase "healthy church."

What is meant by that phrase is that a healthy church is one that balances ministry activities like discipleship and evangelism among the other major activities. That is what I mean by wholeness or whole, yet whole is not a popular word in Christian circles like healthy. So it is helpful to use the more popular word healthy more often, if I am going to keep things simple.

Let's move now to keeping things clear. I think one of the main reasons that healthy is more popular than whole, in Christian circles, is because of the dangers from what I will call weird wholeness or muddy wholeness. I find it hard to separate good wholeness from bad wholeness.

Being whole is often not as clear as distinguishing between the cat versus only its tail. My favorite concrete example of a whole in my junior high years would have been a bike versus only the spokes or only the sprocket or only the handle bars. Philosophy has complicated things, or rather made things less clear rather than more clear, as I advanced beyond junior high to college.

In philosophy or in science, there is a view of wholeness that muddies the water. Some try to separate themselves from it by distinguishing between holistic and wholistic. But most people don't see clearly the difference from just changing spellings.

There are two techical words out there, holistic and mereology, that really muddy the water, because the parts they try to fit together are parts that don't relate to my concrete examples of cat or bike. Instead, they try to make a whole from deep philosophical differences, like joining together opposites like good and evil. This kind of whole curdles my stomach. It also doesn't work for car engines. The goal is not to bring together an ecletic collection of cylinders and then just de-power some versus others to balance them out, but to build a refined engine that by its nature loves balance and harmony. Science too struggles with thinking that holism versus reductionism means uniting conflicting things. That is a long way from where I find myself on the map. This isn't in my Bible. While I love the word whole, it is not as clear sometimes as healthy, because it is loaded down with weird ideas, related to what is sometimes called New Age thinking. This is also why alternative medicine gets a bad rap that makes it hard to separate the good from the evil. This creates then the idea that whole or wholeness is a red flag.

So while I will stick by whole as in its concrete examples of dogs, cats and bikes; I've no choice but to start with healthy to keep things clear of strange or different thinking. I want to be simple and clear. Biblically, I think holy supports the idea of a healthy church that balances all the activities of what makes an active church versus an unenergetic church. A healthy or whole church leaves no part out and it balances the parts equally. That is why it is an active church and not an oppressive church, running out of energy to act.

May you and I unite in this simple and clear health and leave behind any complexity or unclear thinking that divides us. While complexity and lack of clarity are a part of life, its not where we should begin. I hope its mostly simple and clear now.


In Christ,

Pastor Jon