Blessed and Holy: The Possibility of Understanding Them Better Through Exodus 19:1-8 (Credibility: Part 1 of 5)

What is the significance of our emotions, when it comes to defining either blessed or holy?  Let's be more specific.  Are you feeling that the definitions you have been given deserve acceptance?  Or are you rather feeling that they are shameful attempts to define a key word in the Bible?  Emotional intelligence, while it has received some really excellent attention in recent years, is also shackled to outmoded ideas from the 1800's and it lacks a real clear test like that used for logical intelligence.  While testing for the Intelligence Quotient, IQ, is elaborately developed, there is no equivalent test for a person's Emotional Quotient, EQ. Worse yet is that the combination of both together, a person's Credibility Quotient,CQ, is even less developed.  The reason that I began my discussion with questions of acceptance and shame is that these are the basic questions of emotion that relate to the logical question of amount like a test score of say, 90 out of 100..  In school, if I take a test and receive an acceptable score like 90 out of 100, then I feel the pleasure of acceptance.  If I take a test and receive an unacceptable score of 50 out of 100, then I will feel the pain of shame.  So what should be our emotional state?

So what ought we to feel about test scores relating to understanding blessed and holy?  In speaking to Christians in particular, what do the test scores say about the definition of each of these words.  It make shock you to learn that recent scores are lower rather than higher.  The emotional diagnosis is one moving toward shame rather than acceptance.  If John A. Lee is correct, most of what scholars labeled as a definition in a lexicon is simply a good copy of an earlier tradition of definition.  Most of it has not been re-tested.  But in the case of holy, there have been some important (acceptable) advances in scholarship.

First, Jo Bailey Wells, author of God's Holy People: A Theme in Biblical Theology, points out in her excellent summary of recent scholarship on the definition of holy, that the "old consensus that the original etymology was `separation' ... has now been abandoned" (p. 17-18, see footnote 10).

When I speak of outmoded ideas in the 1800s, I am referring to the continuing development of fight versus flight, or the idea that anger and fear are opposites.  Worse yet is the idea that anger is simply another form of fear.  I guess you could call that an update of an odd idea whose time to die has come.

When I speak of a test, I am referring to the need to test emotional intelligence (EQ) in schools just like logical intelligence (IQ)


[I actually wrote a great deal today, but I found the material fits better with part 4 of 5)


In Christ,

Jon