For the past decade or more, I have had an interest in the concept of holiness. The interest was piqued by Dr. Peter Gentry, now retired Old Testament professor from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS) in Louisville, KY. Years ago, I listened to a lecture by Dr. Gentry where he challenged the idea that holiness fundamentally means separation, moral purity, or transcendence. Instead, according to Gentry, holiness is fundamentally about consecration or devotion. Since hearing Dr. Gentry’s lecture and wrestling with this concept in my own life, other friends have also taken time to study the issue. One of those friends is Jon Canler. Jon is a graduate of SBTS, serves at Ashland Avenue Baptist Church in Lexington, KY, and has been a friend for over twenty years. He has taken some time to summarize the issue below.

Finally, I asked Jon to write this because I am continually frustrated when I hear pastors say that holiness means separation, moral purity, or transcendence. It isn’t that I believe they are being unfaithful. Indeed, this understanding of holiness is old and mainstream. It’s simply a frustration that Gentry’s work has not yet had the impact that I believe it should have. Perhaps this post by Jon will help move the needle.

To Jon’s writing, we now turn.

Dating back to the Protestant Reformation, the Reformed tradition has understood biblical holiness (Hebrew root קדשׁ and Greek root ἁγ) primarily in terms of separation. On the one hand, holiness is understood to be a separation from sin, which reflects the idea that holiness is moral purity. On the other hand, holiness is often understood to be an ontological separation between the Lord as God and creation as not-God, a distance signified by the theological concept of transcendence.

Holiness as Separation from Sin: Moral Purity

From the Reformation through the 1870s, Protestant Reformed theologians generally described the biblical concept of holiness in terms of morality. Holiness was primarily separation from sin, conversely, moral purity. See Calvin’s commentary on Genesis 2:3, Ex. 19:10, Num. 11:18, 1 Pet. 1:16, Institutes; van Mastricht’s Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2; Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1, Hodge’s Systematic Theology, vol. 1 for examples. 

Holiness as Separation from Creation: Transcendence

In 1878, W.W. Baudissin released his Der Begriff der Heiligkeit im AT in Studien zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte, which further concretized the idea of קדשׁ as separation. In this work, Baudissin sought the original meaning of the qds (קדשׁ) root by studying the non-biblical Semitic texts available to him using an etymological approach. Baudissin concluded, “First of all, the stem קדשׁ…has the meaning: to be separated, from which the other: ‘to be pure’ could result directly” (p. 20). While purity could be the result of the separation, separation is key. And for Baudissin, this separation is the ontological distance between God and creation as demonstrated by God’s utter transcendence and power over all creatures. Baudissin’s work has influenced Reformed theologians ever since. Louis Berkhoff’s Systematic Theology, J.I. Packer’s Knowing God, R.C. Sproul’s The Holiness of God, John Frame’s The Doctrine of God, and Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology all primarily define holiness in terms of transcendence, with moral purity as a secondary factor.

Holiness as Consecration: Devotion

Though an understanding of holiness as separation has been nearly universal among leading theologians in the Reformed tradition, Peter Gentry—in his No One Holy Like the LORD lecture—has questioned whether the majority consensus most accurately reflects the biblical teaching on the subject.

Reflecting on Baudissin’s etymological work, Gentry avers 

Not only is this etymology entirely uncertain, but Christian scholars, whether biblical exegetes or systematic theologians, have been warned for over half a century of the dangers of etymological approaches to semantics…The best approach to semantic analysis is an exhaustive study of all available usage, not only for the literature in question, but also for contemporary documents in the cultures surrounding the original texts of the Bible. This kind of study was performed already in 1986 by a French evangelical, Claude Bernard Costecalde. Costecalde analysed the respective terms in Akkadian, Ugaritic, and Northwest Semitic Inscriptions in addition to the usage in the Hebrew Bible.

Costecalde’s analysis of Semitic texts—found in “Sacré” in Dictionnaire de la Bible, Supplément 10—concluded, “[A]t all the known stages of their history – even if we are far from being able to specify the dates of each text – we find the idea of “consecration”, of “belonging” in all the Semitic dialects.”

Working in line with Costecalde’s findings, focusing on contextual exegesis of the uses of קדשׁ in the Old Testament, Gentry declares, “As we will see from careful exegesis of Scripture, neither “moral purity” nor “transcendence” are fundamental to the meaning of holy either in Greek or in Hebrew.” Rather, Gentry’s study—notably on texts like Exodus 3, Exodus 19, and Isaiah 6, which are the three biblical texts Costecalde likewise analyzed—leads him to conclude, “The basic meaning of the word is “consecrated” or “devoted.””

Likewise, Sinclair Ferguson arrives at the same definition of holiness as Gentry and Costecalde, albeit from a very different perspective. Whereas Gentry and Costecalde make exegetical arguments, Ferguson, a systematic theologian, makes a theological argument for holiness as devotion in his book Devoted to God: Blueprints for Sanctification. 

Ferguson argues that any attribute of God must be true of God as he always existed in the eternal Trinity before creation. And since there’s no attribute of God in this case involving separation, holiness cannot be defined in terms of separation. Rather, the opposite is true. When we talk about the holiness of the Triune God, “We mean the perfectly pure devotion of each of these three persons to the other two.” Ferguson emphatically concludes, “To be holy, to be sanctified, therefore, to be a ‘saint’, is in simple terms to be devoted to God.”

Conclusion

So, why does any of this matter? In 1 Peter 1:16, the LORD commands his people, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” If God’s people are to make sense of what it means for us to be holy, we must first grasp what holiness is and what it means for God to be holy. The implications for understanding both the holiness of God and the holiness of God’s people are significantly different when holiness is transcendence vs moral purity vs devotion. Definitions matters. It’s only when we properly understand God’s definition of holiness as revealed in his Word that we can be holy in the here-and-now-circumstances of daily life, just as he is ho