Holy means Whole: According to the Warning to Be Discerning

A friend of mine recently shared the story of how much they enjoyed their Christian college education, and yet how much they lamented the lack of warnings at their school about reading certain writers who were contrary to the Christian faith. What they were lamenting was how many of their friends naively thought this stuff was harmless and invited these thinking patterns into their lives. The outcome was rather devastating. I experienced much the same thing when I went through college. I still can't believe the naive carnage.

It is not that either of us wants to impose avoidance of all writers outside the Christian faith. Instead, we want to have our eyes open every time we read. It does not matter whether it is non-Christian, Christian or biblical. It is important to discern between good and evil. If everything was good, then we could be totally carefree when we read. I hope some day to enjoy that in eternity, but right now you have got to have your eyes open. There is both good and evil in this life, and you need to be discerning as to good friends and those who would make bad friends. Of course, none of us human beings are all good or all evil, even with the fruit of God's longsuffering, yet we still need to discern what is predominate in someone's life.

Likewise, sometimes you can trust scholarship as good scholarship and sometimes you can't trust scholarship, because it is bad scholarship. I am not a scholar myself, so I have to rely on scholars to help me discern my way in the case of the foreign and biblical languages. Yet I can discern my way and recognize the good guys or the good stuff versus the bad guys or the bad stuff. This is through the basic principles that inform all discerning people. In this very real world, because we should be discerning, we need to hear more than one side of a controversy, because there is good and there is evil. So I need to remind myself of this often.

I struggle with the lack of discernment by Christians and non-Christians regarding the meaning of holy, the most important descriptive word for God's moral character. Sometimes Christians get careless, act without discernment and then get themselves in trouble. I've seen this in my own life more than I want to admit. Sometimes, too, people trust people who are themselves trustworthy, but who made the mistake of trusting someone not trustworthy. So people get taken indirectly rather than directly.

I've tried to be as discerning as I can about the meaning of holy. I've tried to distinguish the good from evil, whether it comes from a good man or good woman or whether it comes from a bad man or a bad woman. There is saying that goes like this: "All truth is God's truth." I would add to this another: "All lies are the devil's lies." While the first saying means we should read other literature outside of just Christian literature in a Christian's education, the second means Christians should read Christian and all literature with eyes open for lies. Why read non-Christian literature with our eyes closed, when we cannot do that even with our own Christian literature? One quick example is that Martin Luther condemned Copernicus' ideas about astronomy as unbiblical, because of the account of the sun stopping in the sky in Joshua. Most Christians know now that this was one of Luther's bad moments, though not characteristic of him. Because of these kinds of exceptions, we must be very discerning. So you have to separate the two things, good and evil.

What has disturbed me is the bad things I have found in researching the meaning of holy. First, was finding meanings for holy that I had not been taught, when I was growing up. My first hint of failure in my Christian education was discovering the meaning "wholly" in Strong's concordance too late in my Christian life. Second, was finding that the meaning of "separation" or "be separate" in some contexts made no sense. For example, "separate the separate" makes little sense in Ezekiel. It is somewhat empty, because it gives no reason for why something is separate. It ends up arbitrary and without purpose. Third, is the failure of lexicons (technical dictionaries) to solve the problem of what this word means, while some lexicons present their findings as though it is not based on a failure of scholarship, but on a great success. The truth is that the etymology is "controversial" according to Norman Snaith, even when he supports the meaning of separation. Many other scholars say the same thing on both sides of the divide over etymology, whether they think it means separate or whole. Fourth is the failure of the historical authorities to solve the problem. You can go back to even Jewish authorities and you will find Rashi (separate) and Rambam (it says something more) disagreeing over what holy means. Likewise, Christian authorities since the time of the Reformation and early Renaissance (I'll read further back when I get time) taught that it meant primarily whole and secondarily separate until the late 1800s, then new authorities taught it meant separate, then another set of authorities taught it meant wholly separate (or other) and finally in the late 1900s there was a small resurgence in favor of whole. So in the end, I go back to looking for what makes sense, because that is how I will discover the good in defining the word holy.

We need to plug both meanings back into biblical contexts. First, we need to put "separate" or "be separate" back into the Bible where we previously used words like "holy, sanctified and saints"; and see if it makes sense. I think we can see already that it is at least plausible or the idea would not have lasted a century. This has been tested for some time. But after this being tried for a long time, there are still plenty of problems. It seems to be tied to a little nonsense. It carries a lot less impact in the text when already the idea of separation or dividing is present in the text through other words with that meaning. Take, for one example, the creation story where God "divides" and then He later "sanctifies." If He is dividing again, why not just use the same word? There are other examples too, like that of the one I mentioned already in Ezekiel. Second, we need to put "whole" or "be whole" or "make whole" into the Bible where we previously used words like "holy, sancified and saints"; and see if it makes sense. I am discovering that it does.

Right now that may seem controversial, because of majority opinion. But the important thing in discernment is observing things. And with words, we have to test to see whether they produce sense or nonsense. It takes time to discern sense, when there is more than one text to observe. But we can start with the important one in Genesis 1-2. I've written on this in earlier blogs, so I won't repeat it here.

At this time, we are also stuck with a set of definitions that at best are a close approximation to what it should be. We still have differences in points of view among good people. But now and in the future, we have the ability to get beyond just a close approximation of what the word means. We have many professional linguists in our midst, where in the past they were few in number. The tools of linguists today go beyond the tools of yesterday. Wycliffe Bible translators has been translating the Scriptures into many more languages than just Latin, German, English, etc. This has meant that our tools are better equipped to identify the universals of language, which is the big breakthrough needed for words like holy. It is like later astronomers finally having the aid of the telescope to confirm Copernicus' views on astronomy. We have the tools now to finish the job.

So join with me. Let's make the careful observations needed to discern the good from the bad. Let's find the defects in what we have been taught, let's fix them and build a better tomorrow for ourselves and for our children. Amen.

In Christ,

Pastor Jon