Holiness is in the heart of Christian teaching. Numerous times in the Torah God is saying to His people, “Be holy for I am holy” (Lev 11:44-45, 19:2, 20:26, 21:8). Apostle Peter tells us to “be holy in all you do” (1 Pet. 1:15).

The main idea of the concept of holiness is separation or apartness. The popular claim is that to be holy is to be separated from the world. Multiple things can be implied by the ‘world’. In the tradition that I grew up in, the idea of holiness was to abstain (stay apart) from alcohol, extramarital sex, clubs, TV, ‘unchristian’ music, stylish clothes, playing cards, etc. Some may revise the list, but they still have a number of things to stay apart from.

I holistically believe in holiness; however, I see a problem with the concept of holiness that I just described. I think we should not be thinking of holiness as separating from, but separating for. Obviously, there will be things we, as Christians, will have to separate ourselves from, but that should not guide our holy Christian living. If our behavior is directed by the list of things we should stay away from, without really doing it for anyone, then we will inevitably end up being legalistic, not holy.

To be holy, we need to be separated for. Who we are being holy for determines what we are being holy from. Practically speaking, we abstain from extramarital sex for our spouses and for the Lord. We stay away from alcohol for the sake of our children, whose childhood would be destructed by a consistently drunk parent. And so on.

If what we are staying apart from is not really for anyone, then maybe we should lift the ban on whatever we are staying away from. Following this paradigm, we are able to affectively stand against legalism and be God’s holy children living relationally in community.