Holy Future

Some thoughts arising from a sermon by Toby Sumpter yesterday, where he worked out an understanding of holiness whose roots are in the first use of “holiness” terminology in Genesis 2.

Sabbath is the original holy “thing,” and it is holy time, which is consummated time, the time at the end. This suggests several things. First, biblical holiness should be construed as fundamentally temporal rather than spatial. This is perhaps in contrast to the conceptions of holiness in other ancient religions, as detailed, for instance by Mircea Eliade.

Second, though, holy space in other ancient religions has a temporal dimension, but in general it is backward looking. Holy space is the space where one can encounter the moment of origin. Ritual is a recapitulation and recovery of a past event, reactualizing mythic time (Eliade again). Biblically, perhaps, holy space is instead the space where the future has already been realized. It is not a throwback but an anticipation forward.

And, third, this perhaps gets at what it means for God to be the Holy One: He is the God who has always already reached the end, the One who not only was and is, but is to come, the God of eternal Sabbath. Plug in Jenson.