Impurity – Thinking Makes It So

Paul continues to use the language of purity and impurity, but it seems radically altered in his hands. Foods are not unclean; there is no hint that bodily conditions (menstruation, childbirth, seminal emissions) cause uncleanness. Indeed, all things are pure (Romans 14:20). But Paul’s logic is a bit more complicated than simply saying that everything is clean.

Some things continue to be unclean to some people. Anyone – here, a believer – who believes that something is unclean, to him it is unclean (Romans 14:14). Impurity is imputed or reckoned (logizomai) to the thing, and when a person reckons something unclean it is unclean “to that one” (ekeino). Nothing is unclean, but thinking makes it so.

Paul deals with a somewhat different case in Titus 1:15. Here it is not the believer who imputes uncleanness to a thing, making it unclean, but rather unbelievers, to whom everything is defiled (apistois ouden katharon). But that impurity is not inherent in the thing either. It is unclean because the person who engages with it is “defiled and unbelieving” (memiammenois kai apostois). The defilement of the person defiles the thing, and the person is defiled because of an uncleanness lodged in the mind and conscience (memiantai auton kai ho nous he suneidesis).

This might seem to be a radical shift from the old covenant, and in one sense it is. Yet, the basically “subjective” and “imputative” notion of impurity is a constant across the testaments. Foods are not unclean, but “unclean to you” (Leviticus 11:4, 5, 6, 7, etc.). Persons do become unclean – women by childbirth (Leviticus 12:1). But even with physical emissions, the uncleanness is slightly distanced from the person. A leper must be pronounced unclean by a priest. Of a man with a discharge from his flesh, Leviticus 15:2 says that “his discharge is unclean” and causes other things to become unclean, including the person (15:5). A woman in her period is unclean “in her menstrual impurity” (15:19); she becomes unclean (15:25), but she becomes impure, as it were, at a second remove, by the impure emission that comes from her flesh.

In any case, Paul’s “subjective” view of impurity is important in all sorts of directions. It gives an important hint to the overall logic of impurity: Things are impure because a person’s mind and conscience are impure; Israel is defiled not because of the things around them but (as Jesus said!) because of what came out of their hearts. Once the conscience is cleansed (as Hebrews 10 says it is), then everything is clean, because the things weren’t essentially impure to begin with. Only the purified are able to see and handle creation as it really is, as the good gift of God.

We might draw some wider conclusions about what might be called Paul’s cultural epistemology. Does he mean to imply that cultural categories are all imputed? If not, what categories are imputed and which are not?