6

SACRED, PROFANE, AND COMMON

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying, If a soul commit a trespass, and sin through ignorance, in the holy things of the LORD; then he shall bring for his trespass unto the LORD a ram without blemish out of the flocks, with thy estimation by shekels of silver, after the shekel of the sanctuary, for a trespass offering: And he shall make amends for the harm that he hath done in the holy thing, and shall add the fifth part thereto, and give it unto the priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering, and it shall be forgiven him. And if a soul sin, and commit any of these things which are forbidden to be done by the commandments of the LORD; though he wist it not [unaware], yet is he guilty, and shall bear his iniquity. And he shall bring a ram without blemish out of the flock, with thy estimation, for a trespass offering, unto the priest: and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his ignorance wherein he erred and wist it not, and it shall be forgiven him. It is a trespass offering: he hath certainly trespassed against the LORD (Lev. 5:14-19).

The theocentric meaning of this passage is that there are degrees of sin in trespass. Some sins are committed in ignorance. The two greatest sins in history were committed by some of the participants in ignorance: the fall of man -- Eve was ignorant (I Tim. 2:13b) -- and the crucifixion of Christ: the Roman soldiers were ignorant (Luke 23:34). Nevertheless, ignorance is no defense. Reparation for transgression is still necessary.

This is the fifth sacrifice: a guilt (reparation) offering.⁽¹⁾ As the fifth offering, it was associated with point five of the biblical covenant model: succession or inheritance. It had to do with continuity. To be restored to the legal status he had enjoyed before the transgression, the trespasser had to offer a sacrifice. The transgression had been individual. The judicial implication of the passage is this: the sanctions God would apply to the transgressor would be personal, not corporate. His sin was not representational. He had transgressed a holy thing or a holy commandment. Thus, the appropriate institutional sanction was ecclesiastical: excommunication. This would cause him to lose his inheritance in Israel: his land, but more important, his citizenship.⁽²⁾ To continue as a free man in Israel -- to leave an inheritance to his children -- he had to offer a sacrifice.

 

A Trespass Offering

A 20 percent penalty was applied to a transgression of a holy thing. Not so with a transgression of one of God's commandments. Here is the theological question: Why the difference?

The King James translators translated the Hebrew word 'asham as trespass. The English word "trespass" is readily associated with a boundary violation, as in "No Trespassing." The New American Standard Bible translates 'asham as guilt. So did the medieval Jewish commentator Nachmanides.⁽³⁾ Grammatically, this is the more precise translation. What is described here is a guilt offering. A person in ignorance commits a transgression of God's law, later recognizes this infraction, and then offers sacrifice to pay for his transgression. He recognizes his own guilt, and he then offers a sacrifice as his acknowledgment. Nevertheless, the King James Version comes closer to the theological meaning of the type of transgression involved: a trespass -- a boundary violation -- in the same sense that Adam's sin involved a transgression of the judicial boundary which God had placed around the forbidden fruit. Adam and Eve were indeed guilty, but their guilt was based on a literal trespass.

Adam's trespass remains the archetype of all sin. Eve's transgression, however, was closer to the sin covered by this passage: one committed in ignorance. Paul writes: "And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression" (I Tim. 2:14). Representatively, she was under Adam's jurisdiction, so she came under Adam's more comprehensive judgment: death. But God distinguished between the two degrees of sin, so He imposed separate sanctions. Eve's punishment was pain in childbearing (Gen. 3:16): an occasional event. Adam's punishment was to sweat daily as he worked to subdue a world now filled with resisting thorns and weeds (Gen. 3:17-18).⁽⁴⁾ Mankind as a species is defined by the work of dominion (Gen. 1:26-28), but the male's labor is more closely associated with this task; the woman's is more closely associated with assisting her husband and extending the human race.⁽⁵⁾ She comes under the general curse primarily through her judicially subordinate position.

 

Holy Things and Holy Commandments

This passage rests on a distinction between holy things of the Lord and holy commandments. A transgression of holy things in ignorance required a 20 percent penalty plus the offering of a ram (vv. 15-16). In contrast, a transgression of God's commandment in ignorance required only the sacrifice of the animal (v. 18). This seemingly minor distinction becomes the basis of the analysis of the present long and highly detailed chapter -- specifically, acknowledging the biblical distinction between the sacred and the common, but denying the legitimacy of a far more widely accepted distinction: sacred vs. profane. As we shall see, one of the most serious errors that has resulted from a misunderstanding of the biblical categories of sacred, common, and profane is the false distinction between what is sometimes called full-time Christian service and secular employment. Full-time Christian service is regarded as sacred; secular employment is seen as common when not actually profane. This theological confusion has led to the retreat of Christians from leadership in the arts, industry, and most other fields. I consider this subject in greater detail later in this chapter.

Protestant Christians have generally been far more concerned about violations of God's ethical commands than His ritual boundaries. They rarely concern themselves with the crime of sacrilege, which was the ultimate sin of Adam.⁽⁶⁾ Part of their lack of concern is legitimate: the sacred spaces of the Mosaic covenant ended definitively with the death of Jesus and finally with the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. But part of their lack of concern is illegitimate, such as their denial of any national covenant in the New Covenant era and their downplaying (or outright denial) of the judicial aspect of the sacraments.

Under the Mosaic Covenant, however, things were very different. An inadvertent violation of God's commands was settled by paying the victim whatever he had lost as a result of the transgression. The ethical transgression covered by this law must have been a transgression of one of God's verbal boundaries; no human victim is identified here. God did not impose a 20 percent payment in addition to the sacrifice of a ram for the violation of a commandment (Lev. 5:17-18). But when someone violated a sacred space or sacred object, he violated God's word (the law) as well as the actual thing or space (Lev. 5:15-16). The transgression was a double boundary violation: word and place. The penalty was therefore greater.

Sacred Boundaries

There is so much confusion over the relationship between the sacred and the common that interpreters have tended to misrepresent the relationship. They have confused the common with the profane. This false interpretation has undermined Christian social and ethical theory whenever it has appeared. It makes the common appear as if it were a realm "naturally" opposed to grace and ultimately beyond grace -- legitimately so in history. This places a boundary around grace. The interpreters have not understood that every created thing begins as common and remains common unless judicially sanctified: actively set apart by God or His law. Nothing begins as profane; it must become profane, just as something becomes sanctified. This may seem like a minor point, but it is not, as we shall see.

The sacred here refers to the sacramental, i.e., having to do with the twin covenantal signs of ecclesiastical subordination: in the Mosaic Covenant, circumcision and Passover; in the New Covenant, baptism and the Lord's Supper. The word sacrament comes from the Latin word sacramentum, a military oath of enlistment.⁽⁷⁾

Anything that violates these holy things of the Lord is considered profane. In contrast, anything that violates a non-holy thing is not considered profane. Such a violation is illegal, but it is not profane. This is the heart of my thesis in this chapter: the association of the biblical concept of profane with unique acts of violation, namely, violations of a boundary surrounding a judicially holy place or holy object. Profanity in the broadest sense is a breach of a judicial wall of separation between the holy and the common.

Leviticus 5:14-19 offers evidence of a judicial distinction between the sacred and the common, but this difference is minimal in the case of unintentional transgressions: a 20 percent penalty for violating either a sacred object or sacred space (vv. 15-16). What kind of boundary had been transgressed? Was it geographical? This seems unlikely. We know that the common Israelite was not permitted to enter the inner core of the temple, on threat of death (Ex. 28:43). He would never have been in a position to commit a tabernacle or temple trespass in ignorance. Furthermore, no common priest in his right mind would have tried to enter the holy of holies. He could not have committed such a transgression ignorantly. So, the element of the sacred here must refer to something broader in scope than the performance of temple rituals.

James Jordan writes that the trespass offering "desanctified Israelites who contacted a holy thing and thereby came under the specially strict laws of the priesthood -- a dangerous position to be in unless you had been consecrated as a priest. Since its purpose was to remove this `priestly' danger, it was always a male sheep (ram)."⁽⁸⁾ Judicially, this was Eve's problem. Adam was the priest, yet she approached the tree and ate first, whether or not he was present, whether or not he was an accomplice (as Jordan believes he was). When a judicially non-sanctified agent comes into contact with something explicitly set apart by God, he has committed a trespass. For this trespass, a special offering is required by God. Under the Mosaic law, this was a ram.

If we are properly to understand the nature of each type of transgression in Leviticus 5:14-19 -- each type of boundary violation -- we must first understand what the idea of the sacred meant under the Old Covenant. Then, and only then, can we begin to understand the meaning of the Bible's concept of the profane.

Profane Violations of the Sacred

What "the sacred" refers to is something pertaining to the ecclesiastical activity of the priesthood in its broadest sense. Something that belongs to God must not be misused or appropriated unlawfully. Something delegated for exclusive use by God's priesthood must not be used by an unauthorized agent, or used in an unauthorized way by an authorized agent. To understand what this improper (profane) usage might have been, we need first to consider what it could not have been. To do this, we must consider false interpretations -- some ancient, some modern -- of the biblical distinction between sacred and common.

Before we consider these false interpretations, it is imperative that we recognize that in the Bible, the contrast between sacred and profane is never a contrast between a sacred object or place and a geographically separate object or place. The biblical contrast of sacred vs. profane is between a sacramental object or place and something common, i.e., something non-sacramental, that is unlawfully inside a sacred boundary. This distinction is ultimately a contrast between something lawfully inside a boundary and someone unlawfully inside.

Both realms on each side of the boundary are judicially legitimate: the sacred realm and the common realm. The contrast in Leviticus 5:14-16 is not between the sacred and the common; it is the contrast between sacred and profane. The biblical contrast between sacred and profane is not a contrast between moral opposites; it is instead a distinction between judicially authorized forms of worship: sacramental vs. non-sacramental. As I argue throughout this chapter, there is a biblical distinction between sacred and profane, but this distinction is not the equally biblical distinction between sacred and common. These two completely separate sets of distinctions have been repeatedly intermingled by commentators. This confusion of categories has led to some disastrous false distinctions, as we shall see.

Christians can better understand the biblical distinctions between "sacred vs. common" and "sacred vs. profane" by considering the difference between a communion meal held during a worship service in church and a family meal eaten at home by a Christian family. Both meals are equally religious. Both meals are legitimately introduced by prayer. But only one meal is sacramental: the church's communion meal. What must be understood from the beginning of our discussion is this: the family meal is not profane. It is common, but it is not profane. Also, it is religious despite its legal status as common.

Gordon Wenham has offered this useful pair of contrasts: common vs. holy (adjectives); profane vs. sanctify (verbs). "`Common' (hol) is likewise the reverse of `holy' (qadosh), just as to `profane' (hillel) is the converse of to `sanctify' (qiddesh)."⁽⁹⁾ To profane and to sanctify: these are acts. This accurate pair of contrasts must itself be contrasted with a common error. The sacred is generally understood as a special thing or place (correct), while the profane is also said to be a thing or place (only partially correct and too often misleading).

This question must be answered: Why is a thing or place identified as either sacred or profane? For example, a person can become profane (Lev. 21:7, 14), but this not because he or she is somehow common metaphysically; it is because he or she is in a unique state of sin judicially, having violated a sacred boundary. The point is, skilled translators are confused about the biblical meaning of profane. This grammatical confusion is a product of theological confusion: a failure to recognize "the profane" as a boundary violation of "the sacred," not a common place or thing.

Violating Sacred Space

It is incorrect to contrast an inherently sacred place with an inherently profane place. A sacred place has been made sacred by the judicial declaration of God or by a priest acting in God's name. It has been sanctified: set apart judicially. It is neither naturally nor metaphysically sacred. Similarly, there can be no naturally or metaphysically profane place in the way that there can be a naturally common place. A profane place is a violated sacred place. It has been the victim of an illegal trespass. The Hebrew word translated most frequently as "profane" (khaw-lawl) is usually translated as "slain."⁽¹⁰⁾ It is sometimes translated as "wounded" (I Sam. 17:52). This Hebrew word means pierced. It conveys the sense of someone's having violated a boundary. The word is not used in the sense of a common place that just sits there being common. A common place cannot become profane, for it possesses no sacred boundary to trespass; only a sacred place can become profane.

There is considerable confusion over the proper English translation of a Hebrew word related to khaw-lawl: khole. This word is defined by Strong as "common, profane (place), unholy." It does not appear frequently in Scripture, unlike khaw-lawl. It was translated by the King James translators as "unholy" (Lev. 10:10),⁽¹¹⁾ "common" (I Sam. 21:4-5),⁽¹²⁾ and "profane" (Ezek. 22:26;⁽¹³⁾ 42:20,⁽¹⁴⁾ 44:23;⁽¹⁵⁾ 48:15⁽¹⁶⁾). Modern translators translate khole almost randomly as "common," "ordinary," "profane," and "unholy." There seems to be no clear pattern of Hebrew usage in the texts. Ezekiel 42:20 and 48:15 are the only Old Testament passages in which khole is used with respect to space. The word should not be translated in these verses as "profane," but rather as "unholy" or "common." The biblical usage of "profane" points to a boundary violation. This usage does not apply in the two Ezekiel passages.

The Sacramental

What is "the sacred," biblically speaking? It is not merely the religious sensibility in man, a need analogous to the need for food or sex, as modern academic usage would have it.⁽¹⁷⁾ Rather, it has to do with the church's sacraments. In its narrowest sense, the sacred refers to formal ecclesiastical acts of covenantal subordination: applying the covenant mark⁽¹⁸⁾ and partaking of the covenant meal.⁽¹⁹⁾ That which pertains to the sacred is formally under the authority of an ordained church officer. This officer's task is to restrict certain people's access beyond certain specified judicial boundaries. These boundaries are always legal and are sometimes spatial.

There is a biblical distinction between the sacred and the profane, yet they are always linked. A sacred act involves the lawful crossing of a sacred boundary, meaning a boundary guarded by ordained priests. A profane act is the unlawful crossing of a priestly boundary, meaning a judicially segregated area of atonement. The transgressor has either invaded sacred space or has misused a sacred object that has been set aside by God for a particular use. The essence of the distinction between sacred and profane, biblically speaking, is judicial rather than metaphysical. The profane act is ritually unauthorized, either because of the legal status of the transgressor (a non-priest) or because of restrictions placed by God against specific acts by even a priest. It is the crossing of the boundary that constitutes the profane act.

The key theological questions regarding the Old Covenant's liturgically sacred spaces or objects are these: Was the specified ritual a means of 1) imparting independent metaphysical power to the participants; or 2) symbolically identifying members of an ecclesiastically separate community; or (3) publicly identifying the legal status of those who were covenantally bound together? Put another way, was "the sacred" metaphysical, symbolic, or covenantal? We can ask the same question about New Covenant rituals, too.

There are three (and only three) internally consistent answers. A person's answer, if followed consistently, will strongly influence his social theory.⁽²⁰⁾ First, the sacred ritual act or the sacred space is autonomously, metaphysically powerful; to violate it unleashes cosmic or supernatural forces (realism).⁽²¹⁾ Second, the sacred ritual act or sacred space is merely symbolic: it serves only to manifest the ethical condition of the participants (nominalism).⁽²²⁾ Third, the sacred ritual act or sacred space is judicially protected by God: a boundary that invokes (calls forth) God's sanctions, both historical and eternal, in terms of His Bible-revealed law (covenantalism).⁽²³⁾

Adam's Transgression

The best way biblically to answer this debate over the nature of the sacred is to consider Adam's transgression. When God announced a judicial boundary around the forbidden tree, did He invest the tree and its fruit with special properties that would automatically produce certain results if touched or eaten? Or was the tree merely symbolic, having no express judicial relationship with God, but only giving Adam an opportunity to prove himself faithful or not? Or was the tree set apart as a unique place of communion, a place declared by God as off-limits to Adam? We need to consider the three views of the sacred and their respective analyses. The first two answers conform to the philosophical categories of realism and nominalism. Both are incorrect. The third position conforms to the biblical category, covenantalism.

A. Metaphysical Boundary.

We know that their eyes were immediately opened after they ate. They recognized their own nakedness and guilt. Was the fruit itself the source of their discontinuous change of perception? Was the tree a gateway to cosmic forces of illumination, a "cosmic tree," to use the language of pagan mythology?⁽²⁴⁾ Did it mark "the center of the world," the supreme sacred space?⁽²⁵⁾ Could Adam and Eve somehow manipulate these cosmic forces to gain further knowledge or power? Was the forbidden tree a microcosm that offered man power over the macrocosm, analogous to the voodoo doll's supposed power to produce analogous effects in the thing represented by the doll? Could Adam and Eve achieve "unity of being" with the universe through subsequent forbidden feasts? Could they achieve self-transcendence? In short, could they become mini-gods, as Satan had promised Eve (Gen. 3:5)?

The Genesis account of their transgression informs us that immediately after their eyes were opened, the forbidden tree was no longer the focus of their interest. They did not seek additional fruit. They did not invoke cosmic forces to protect them or do their bidding. They paid no further attention to the tree. They did not act as though they believed the tree possessed any special properties other than its fruit, which was admittedly good to view and good to eat. Even the serpent said nothing further to them. There was no need for him to say anything. His words and work were over. Adam and Eve had performed the profane act. It was an act of judicial transgression: a trespass.

It is clear that their new-found self-awareness was the product of self-judgment: they had evaluated their act of rebellion in the light of their new interpretation of God's word.⁽²⁶⁾ They did not rush to discover a chemical formula for an antidote to poison fruit. They also did not rush to discover a magical formula to protect themselves from the cosmic forces that the fruit had unleashed. They correctly understood that the fruit was not their problem; God's promised judgment was. The tree had meaning to them only in terms of God's legal boundary around it, which they had transgressed. The fruit was of no further interest or use to them. They referred to it again only under God's subsequent cross-examination.

B. Symbolic Boundary.

What about the tree's unique symbolic status? Was the response of Adam and Eve merely the product of an increase in their self-awareness, a perception induced solely by their act of transgression? In other words, was the tree merely a symbolic agency in the transformation of their own self-awareness, something like an ethical mirror? Was the transformational power of the tree merely psychological? In short, had the transformational power of the tree merely been imputed to it by Adam and Eve?

If the tree served solely as a symbol of man's ethical condition, then on what basis did the radical and discontinuous increase of their mutual self-awareness take place? What was it about eating forbidden fruit that produced their perception of nakedness? Their immediate concern was not that they feared that God would bring judgment against them sometime in the future; it was that they were immediately discomforted by their own nakedness. It was not that the now-partially denuded tree pointed symbolically to their completely denuded judicial condition in the eyes of God; it was that they experienced shame in their own eyes as judges. God had assigned a necessarily judicial task to them when He told Adam to guard the garden.⁽²⁷⁾ Adam's task was to announce preliminary judgment against Satan, for Satan had testified falsely regarding the character of God. "Hath God said?", the serpent had asked. But Adam and Eve had served instead as false judges, rendering judgment implicitly against God and explicitly against God's word.⁽²⁸⁾ Immediately, they recognized that they were wearing no "robes" -- the mark of lawful judicial authority. They were judicially uncovered before each other. Their perceived dilemma had nothing further to do with the tree. Now the primary symbol of their spiritual condition was their own naked flesh. They sought to cover this revelation with fig leaves.

God was not judicially present in the garden immediately after their sin. He did not shout out a warning to them: "I said not to touch that!" He gave them time to respond, either as covenant-breakers or covenant-keepers. They responded as covenant-breakers. They knew that His negative sanctions were coming, but their immediate concern was not their nakedness in His eyes; it was nakedness in their own eyes. Later, they hid themselves from God when they heard Him coming; in the meantime, they felt a compulsive need to hide their flesh from each other.

They reacted as though the psychological effects of eating from a merely symbolic tree -- their sense of shame regarding their own personal nakedness -- could be successfully covered by the leaves of another fruit-bearing tree. A representative of the plant kingdom had been a crucial aspect of this crisis of perception, so they covered themselves with leaves. They did not slay the serpent or some other animal in their quest for a covering. They dealt with their sin symbolically: the tree had become to them a symbol of their transgression, and so their required coverings should be of a similar kind. (Their son Cain was to make a similar evaluation of his judicially uncovered condition when he brought a sacrifice of the ground rather than an animal sacrifice [Gen. 4:3].)

They were wrong. Their problem was judicial, not symbolic. They had not transgressed a mere symbol; they had transgressed the boundary surrounding God's restricted property. They had been involved in a boundary violation. It is not that some sacred object serves merely as man's ethical mirror; it is instead God's law that serves as the mirror.⁽²⁹⁾

C. Judicial Boundary.

"And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked" (Gen. 3:7a). The use of the passive voice here is significant. By whom were their eyes opened? Either by God directly or by their own consciences as God's image-bearers. We are not told which. What we are told is that prior to their act of transgression, their eyes were not open; afterwards, they were. This must mean that "open eyes" in this sense was judicial. They saw what they had done. They evaluated their new condition in the light of God's warning. They understood at least some of the consequences. But, being in sin, they misjudged what would be required to cover the effects of their sin. They twisted their own self-judgment. They made it seem less important than it was, as if it were a sin suitable for self-atonement.

The tree served as a symbol only to the degree that it was set apart (sanctified) by God as His exclusive property. The tree did not reflect man or man's psyche; it represented God as sovereign owner of the cosmos. Its status as a visible symbol (i.e., judicial evidence) of man's covenant status was relevant only in terms of its own designated status as a sanctified object. It had been judicially and verbally set apart by God. The tree was therefore sacred. It was not to be touched or eaten by man until God removed the restriction. To violate this sacred object was to profane it. To eat from it meant death, not in the sense of a poison apple, nor in the sense of a prohibited metaphysical doorway to overwhelming cosmic forces, nor in the sense of a means of man's self-realization of his own inherent evil, but in the sense of inevitable historical and eternal sanctions imposed by an absolute personal God. Eating from the tree changed man's judicial status. This was a profane act. Adam became profane: entering the judicial status of God's declaration, "Guilty as charged." He became sacrilegious.⁽³⁰⁾

Sacred Objects, Sacred Space

Sacred objects and sacred space are familiar themes in the Old Testament. The Ark of the Covenant is an example of a sacred object: it was not to be touched. It had rings on its sides through which poles were to be inserted, so that no one would need touch it when moving it (Ex. 25:14). Furthermore, only the Levites were permitted to carry it (Deut. 10:8). When one man dared to reach out to steady it as it was being moved, God struck him dead (I Chron. 13:9-10). When the Philistines brought the Ark into their territory, God struck down the image of their god, Dagon, and struck them with boils (I Sam. 5). They sent the Ark back to Israel on a cart pulled by oxen. They also placed gold objects into the cart as a trespass offering (I Sam. 6:8).⁽³¹⁾ God dealt even more harshly with the Israelites at Beth-Shemesh, who dared to look into it. For this act of sacrilege, God struck over 50,000 of them (I Sam 6:19).⁽³²⁾

The interior of the Ark itself was sacred space. No one was allowed to look inside it. It was housed in the holy of holies, a sacred room inside the tabernacle and temple. Only the high priest was allowed to enter this space, and only once each year (Lev. 16:2). He had to sprinkle the interior with blood as a ransom payment for himself and the people (Lev. 16:14-15). In short, this most sacred of objects was surrounded by sacred space -- in fact, layers of sacred space, beginning at the national borders of Israel.

What is easily misunderstood is the judicial character of these sacred objects and spaces. It is easy to misinterpret sacred objects and sacred spaces as metaphysical-magical, i.e., power-bearing and power-granting. This was the theme of the enormously popular movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark and its second sequel, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was another in a long Western heritage of fantasies regarding the holy grail.⁽³³⁾ Through techniques of ritual manipulation -- a variant of environmental determinism -- the bearer of such objects supposedly achieves not only supernatural power but also self-transcendence. At the very least, he achieves mystical illumination.⁽³⁴⁾ Crossing the bridge or gateway between heaven and earth is supposedly achieved through possession of such objects and the ritually precise manipulation of them. The hypothetical chain of being between man and God is manifested through the possession of sacred objects or entry into sacred space. The primary concern of the manipulator is with precise ritual rather than ethics. His thinking is governed by the magical formula, "As above, so below." E. M. Butler describes the goal of magic; it is also the goal of modern social engineering: "The fundamental aim of all magic is to impose the human will on nature, on man or on the supersensual world in order to master them."⁽³⁵⁾

Judicial Presence

This metaphysical interpretation of the sacred misses the point. The identifying feature of any sacred object is its unique judicial character. The sacred object brings man into the judicial presence of the covenant God who judges in time and eternity.

Inside the Ark of the Covenant were the two tablets of the law (Deut. 31:26). The Ark served as the earthly throne of God, the place where the high priest annually placated His wrath. This is why the holy of holies in which the Ark was housed was so holy. The biblical formula from which the magical formula is derived is overwhelmingly ethical and judicial: "On earth, as it is in heaven." This phrase appears in the Lord's prayer as part of the identification of God's name as holy -- hallowed -- and a call for kingdom justice in history: "After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven" (Matt. 6:9-10).⁽³⁶⁾

Sacred space is not magical space; it is judicially sanctified space. It has been hallowed -- made holy, meaning set apart -- by God. When a man enters it, he draws close to God judicially. God's place of residence is His place of judgment. He sits on a throne of judgment. Sacred space is holy space: space which is legally marked off by God as the place of required covenantal ritual, where man meets God judicially on a regular basis. Without such lawful access, sacred space becomes a threat to man.⁽³⁷⁾ It is a place of judgment. Entering sacred space requires special acts of judicial separation by man. We read in Exodus: "And when the LORD saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I. And he said, Draw not nigh hither: put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Ex. 3:4-5). The soil within the boundary lines of God's place of residence was not ritually polluted for Old Covenant man; hence, wearing shoes was not ritually (judicially) appropriate. You removed them as your public acknowledgment that you were entering God's place of special judicial presence.⁽³⁸⁾ You had crossed a judicial boundary, so your normal behavior had to change.

If God moves His place of earthly residence -- the place of legal communion with man -- sacred space necessarily moves with Him. Sacred space can move from place to place, just as the tabernacle was moved in response to God's glory cloud, the sign of His presence.⁽³⁹⁾ Sacred space may also be a fixed geographical area, as the temple was in ancient Israel. In the New Covenant order, sacred space moves with the sacraments; the place where the sacraments are lawfully offered is sacred space. Judicially to transgress this space or misuse the objects of the sacramental meal is to commit sacrilege. The threat of profanity was always judicial. Under the Mosaic covenant, this judicial threat was primarily manifested geographically, i.e., an invasion of protected space. The judicial aspect of sacred space was understood far less clearly during the Old Covenant era.

 

Sacred Space in the New Covenant Era

The primary boundaries of life are legal-covenantal. This is more evident today: the New Covenant has drastically reduced the element of the sacred in geographical boundaries, except insofar as there is legal ownership of property by a church. Sacrilege today does not mean the physical invasion of sacred space; it means the transgression of the church's rights of ownership, i.e., the legal immunities associated with ownership, most importantly, the church's legal right to exclude. This may include the right to exclude certain people from a church building under certain conditions,⁽⁴⁰⁾ but it means primarily the rights associated with the exclusion of people from the sacraments. For example, any attempt by the State to infringe on the right of a Trinitarian church to declare someone excommunicate is an act of sacrilege: a challenge to the lawful authority of the church. It is a profane act: a boundary violation.

A profound change came to the gentile world through the New Covenant. The covenantally unique judicial-geographical boundary system of ancient Israel's theocratic kingdom was extended to embrace all the nations through the church. "Therefore say I unto you, The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof" (Matt. 21:43). Other nations -- judicial collectives -- are now told to establish a formal covenant with God. Jesus' Great Commission says: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen" (Matt. 28:19-20). This is a comprehensive, world-transforming commission.⁽⁴¹⁾ The invocation of these national covenants involve boundaries (nations), a covenant sign (baptism), covenant law ("observe all things"), a covenant promise (God's judicial presence), and a time frame (to the end of the world).

Removing Boundaries

Other changes have taken place. In the New Covenant era, the ground is no longer cursed. The whole earth has been definitively cleansed by the historical death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. Today we wear shoes in order to protect our feet, not because the ground is ritually cursed and therefore a threat to judicially holy people, as was the case in the Old Covenant. Unlike Muslims in mosques and worshippers in pagan temples, we do not take off our shoes when we come into the presence of God at church. During the Old Covenant era, from at least Abraham's time (Gen. 18:4), dirty feet meant defilement (Song of Solomon 5:3). Before entering the tabernacle, every person had to wash his feet (Ex. 30:20-21). Jesus told the apostles at the Last Supper that because He had washed their feet, they should wash each other's feet (John 13:14). Yet very few churches continue to practice the foot-washing ceremony of Christ's day, and none has substituted a shoe-shining ceremony. Why not? Because the ground is no longer cursed. Shaking the dust off one's feet is no longer a symbol of God's wrath, as it was in Jesus' day. There is no special dwelling place of God outside of the place of His special judicial presence during formal church worship: ceremonies bounded by time, space, and law, but not bounded by ritual standards of clean and unclean objects or clean and unclean people.

In the Mosaic Covenant, pork was prohibited. So were other kinds of flesh. (There were never any "clean-unclean" distinctions within the vegetable realm.) The Israelites were required to eat lamb at the Passover. Blood had to be shed, but not the blood of unclean animals. In the New Covenant, no meat is eaten at the communion meal. Products of the vegetable realm -- bread and wine -- are required. Why no meat? Because the shedding of judicially atoning blood is behind us. That any Christian could even hint at the possibility of the future re-establishment of the ritual slaying of lambs for a re-enacted Passover meal testifies to the failure of the modern church to preach the progressive conquest of nature by grace in history. The church is failing to preach the progressive restoration of all things through the judicial power delivered to Christians by means of Christ's ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit.⁽⁴²⁾ Judicial peace between God and grace-redeemed man has definitively come, though not finally. We still await the day when lambs will sit down with lions (Isa. 65:25a); we do not await the restoration of temple sacrifices.

Nature and Grace

The removal of sacred boundaries in the New Covenant does not imply that nature (the common) is somehow swallowing up grace (the sacred). It is not that nature is pushing grace into ever-smaller corners of man's existence. The Bible teaches that all of nature is sustained by God's grace, i.e., God's unearned gifts to men, beasts, and even demons. He gives us life, time, knowledge, and power, none of which is in any way autonomously deserved by the recipients. Ours is a providentially sustained world. In the New Covenant, as in the Old, nature does not swallow up grace. Both the sacred and the common are under grace.

God's special grace to His people -- and only to His people -- is the foundation, judicially (justification) and ethically (sanctification), of comprehensive transformation, both personal and cultural. Special grace is marked publicly by the presence of church sacraments. Grace is empowered spiritually by the sacraments, but it is not restricted to (bounded by) the sacraments. Special grace also operates in the realm outside the institutional church: in family and State covenants, and in all the other social institutions that are under the lawful jurisdictions (plural) of family and State.

Not only does nature not swallow up grace in history, the realm of common grace is steadily transformed by special grace, either through widespread conversions or by example and imitation by the unconverted for the sake of the external positive sanctions associated with external covenant-keeping.⁽⁴³⁾ To deny that common grace is affected by what takes place in the realm of special grace is necessarily to deny the covenantal basis of New Covenant history: progress or decline in terms of covenant-keeping. The directionality of history then loses its character as biblically progressive; its events becomes random, covenantally speaking. History is then seen as linear but not progressive.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Profanity, Priesthoods, and Pagans

I have argued that the fundamental distinction between sacred and common has to do with the judicial status of the object or space in question. The distinction between sacred and common is not "magic vs. convention" or "religious vs. secular." It is rather the distinction between sacramental and non-sacramental. The separation between sacred and profane is a very different kind of distinction from the distinction between sacred and common. The distinction between sacred and profane is the distinction between that which is authorized sacramentally and that which is unauthorized sacramentally. Adam became profane in his act of rebellion. He violated a sacred boundary.

Because we enter into the judgmental presence of God during the worship service, Christians do enter sacred space. But this space is sacred because of the judicial presence of God, not because any special attribute attaches to a geographical area. Sacred space and sacred time lose their sacred character when formal corporate worship ends. These acts of worship are sacred only because they are performed in the judicial presence of the ultimate sacred space, the throne of God. The discontinuity -- the boundary -- between sacred and common is judicial. This discontinuity is radical. This is why Paul warns potential participants in the Lord's Supper to judge themselves before partaking. "But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep" (I Cor. 11:28-30). No other meal kills people judicially.

This emphasis on the radical discontinuity between sacred and common raises an important question: Why was there only a 20 percent additional penalty for unpremeditated profane transgressions of the sacred in Leviticus 5:16? This relatively minimal penalty does not seem to reflect the magnitude of the judicial distinction between sacred and common. On the other hand, if the 20 percent penalty is the judicial standard of this differentiation, is there a more fundamental distinction than "sacred vs. common"? To answer these questions, we need to understand the biblical meaning of profanity.

1. Profanity

The use of "profane" in the Bible occurs most frequently with respect to the misuse of God's name. Verbal profanity, as distinguished from verbal obscenity, is the unauthorized invocation of a judicial oath: the curse of God. Ultimately, it is a self-maledictory oath: "May God destroy me if I do not fulfill the terms of His covenant." This is the verbal transgression of a judicial boundary: he who is common is using a sacred means of bringing sanctions -- a verbal act that is judicially sanctioned by God only for the ordained holder of a covenantal office.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Profanity involves either the misuse of God's name for one's own purposes or the performance of ritual acts that misrepresent God.⁽⁴⁶⁾ It always involves a boundary violation. This is why the third commandment -- "Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain" (Ex. 20:7) -- is third: it prohibits the transgression of a boundary (point three of the biblical covenant model). Transgressing a covenantal boundary produces a new judicial status in the transgressor: guilty.

What kind of boundary is this? It is a verbal or ritual boundary that publicly manifests the covenant. This is an act of formal covenant-breaking -- not just the transgression of one of the stipulations of the covenant, but the covenant itself.

And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD (Lev. 18:21).

And ye shall not swear by my name falsely, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD (Lev. 19:12).

And I will set my face against that man, and will cut him off from among his people; because he hath given of his seed unto Molech, to defile my sanctuary, and to profane my holy name (Lev. 20:3).

They shall be holy unto their God, and not profane the name of their God: for the offerings of the LORD made by fire, and the bread of their God, they do offer: therefore they shall be holy (Lev. 21:6).

Speak unto Aaron and to his sons, that they separate themselves from the holy things of the children of Israel, and that they profane not my holy name in those things which they hallow unto me: I am the LORD (Lev. 22:2).

Something has been set apart by God for His own use. It is therefore holy. It is sanctified or hallowed. God places special boundaries around these objects, and these boundaries can lawfully be passed only on God's publicly specified terms. The name of God is one of these holy objects. Since only the priest -- a man who has been set apart judicially by God so that he can draw close to God's place of judgment -- is authorized to pass through these boundaries, any violation of these boundaries is inherently a priestly act. Violators become profane.

2. Priesthoods

Profanity in the Old Covenant era, and also in the New Covenant era, was primarily a priestly misrepresentation of God, either in sacramental word or sacramental deed, such as offering one's child to another god in an act of formal covenant-breaking with Israel's God. In short, profanity is a covenant-breaking or covenant-denying priestly act. Profanity is distinguished judicially from non-sacramental violations of God's moral law. It is a violation of God's priestly law.

Those under the jurisdiction of God's ecclesiastical covenant -- i.e., under His spoken legal word -- are uniquely authorized by God to speak and act in particular ways. This means that they are bound -- i.e., under judicial boundaries -- to speak and act in these specified ways. They have been granted a covenantal monopoly. It is a monopoly -- special legal status -- in both the positive and negative sense: special duties, special penalties. Certain acts must be done in certain ways by certain people. These acts are representative acts. They are hierarchical, as in priestly (hiereus).⁽⁴⁷⁾ At the same time, being legally representative, only representatives are allowed to perform them. These acts must be done by someone (inclusive), and they must not be done by someone else (exclusive).

As God's designated legal representative on earth and in history, the Mosaic Covenant priest's language and conduct had to represent God faithfully. His special legal status carried greater legal liability. Ignorantly speaking or acting in an illegitimate but non-sacramental fashion necessarily invoked ("called forth") a particular penalty. Ignorantly speaking or acting illegitimately in a sacramental fashion invoked a marginally greater penalty: one-fifth. Why only marginal? Because the marginal difference between the sanctions that distinguished the sacred from the common pointed judicially to the near-sacred character of everything in Israel. It testified to the special judicial status of the promised land as a nation of priests (Ex. 19:6). Legal access to sacred judicial space is the key to a correct understanding of the sacred-common distinction and the sacred-profane distinction.

Distinctions Within Perfection

Let us return to the archetype example: the heaven-hell distinction. Better yet, consider this: the post-resurrection new heavens, new earth (Rev. 21) vs. the lake of fire (Rev. 20:14-15). Dwelling in the post-resurrection new heavens and new earth, there will be nothing but perfect humans. This includes Jesus Christ. The perfect humanity of Jesus Christ will possess greater holiness than the perfect humanity of everyone else. By the intervention of the Holy Spirit, Jesus was conceived in perfection, unlike all other post-Adamic humans, and then sustained His salvation through His perfect obedience to God's law. Nobody else can do this in history. He now lawfully sits beside God the Father on the throne; no one else does. But the difference in the degree of holiness (set-apartness) between Jesus Christ's perfect humanity -- not His divinity -- and the resurrected saint's perfect humanity will be of far less magnitude than the disparity between the resurrected covenant-keeper's perfect humanity and the resurrected covenant-breaker's morally perverse humanity. The resurrected saint will have eternal legal access to God's throne of grace; the resurrected covenant-breaker will not.

Similarly, the priest's judicial holiness in ancient Israel was greater than the common Israelite's holiness, but the magnitude of judicial separation between an ordained priest and an Israelite was far less than the difference between an Israelite and an uncircumcised person living outside the land. Priests and Israelites participated in Passover. Uncircumcised men and the women under the authority of uncircumcised men did not.

Degrees of Holiness

Leviticus 5:14-19 deals with transgressions committed in ignorance. Thus, the distinction here between sacred and common was not intended to focus on the radical difference between heaven and hell. It was intended to distinguish priestly activities in Israel from routine activities in Israel. Because so much of Israel's daily life was judicially closer to God than the same activities performed outside the land, i.e., acts performed by those who were not under the Mosaic covenant, it was easier to commit a boundary violation inadvertently within Israel. The Israelites were all far closer to God judicially than were uncircumcised pagans who lived outside the boundaries of the land. The Israelites served as priests to the whole world: representative agents between God and pagan mankind.⁽⁴⁸⁾ They were guardians of a boundary. The priests served as God's representative agents mediating between Israel and God. They, too, were guardians of a boundary. The magnitude of the covenantal separation of the second boundary was not nearly so great as the magnitude of the first.

There were degrees of culpability and responsibility under the Mosaic Covenant. This fact was reflected in the degrees of official holiness -- holiness of office and holiness of behavior -- that were required as one approached the holy of holies, the place where God dwelt judicially. The high priest could go into the holy of holies to offer sacrifice only once a year. He was under tight restrictions; if he performed his task in an unauthorized fashion, he would be struck dead (Ex. 28:33-35). The closer someone came to God's geographical place of judgment, the more vulnerable to God's sanctions he became. A series of judicial boundaries marked one's movement away from the holy of holies and out of the land.⁽⁴⁹⁾ These boundaries marked a reduction in monopoly legal status as men moved away from the temple and toward the world of paganism.

3. Pagans

It is common to speak of the religious condition of the pagan as profane. Everything he does supposedly is profane. But this raises a theological problem: How can his legal status be profane if he is so far from God judicially? If it is true that profanity, biblically speaking, is legally a violation of some priestly aspect of covenant law, how can the pagan accurately be said to be a profane person? In the Mosaic Covenant era, sacred objects and sacred space were exclusively inside the geographical boundaries of Israel. The pagan could violate no priestly boundaries if he was outside the land of Israel. How could the pagan have committed a profane act? To answer this question, we need to discuss the legal status of the pagan.

The pagan in the Mosaic-era Covenant was an uncircumcised male, or a female not under the lawful jurisdiction of a circumcised male,⁽⁵⁰⁾ who lived outside the covenant: no legal access to Passover. Most pagans lived outside the geographical and cultural boundaries that God had drawn around His people as their protected area of dominion. Within these judicial boundaries, a unique system of law prevailed.⁽⁵¹⁾ The question then arises: How unique? This raises the fundamental issue of theonomy.

The pagan was under a temporal and eternal obligation to obey all of God's civil laws except those that applied explicitly to the administration of the land of Israel, which means primarily the jubilee land laws (Lev. 25)⁽⁵²⁾ and the laws of ritual defilement and cleansing: the laws marking the holiness -- i.e., set-apartness -- of the Israelite nation of priests. God did not give to the pagan nations a judicial revelation of His holiness comparable to that which He gave to those inside the land. The Israelites were unique: greater revelation, greater responsibility.

This does not mean that pagan nations of the Mosaic era were legitimately under different moral standards, i.e., not under the moral requirements and civil sanctions of the Ten Commandments. Bahnsen's comments are appropriate: "The fact that God was dealing with Israel in a redemptive and covenantal fashion, and not setting His electing love upon any other nation (cf. Amos 3:2),⁽⁵³⁾ did not introduce a disparity or difference in moral standards between Israel and the nations. All those who wander from God's statutes -- indeed, all the wicked of the earth -- are condemned by God, according to Psalm 119:118-119."⁽⁵⁴⁾ This passage in Psalms reads: "Thou hast trodden down all them that err from thy statutes: for their deceit is falsehood. Thou puttest away all the wicked of the earth like dross: therefore I love thy testimonies."

The Mosaic-era pagan was always under the non-geographical and non-priestly stipulations of God's covenant law. This means that he was not under the rules that applied to the ecclesiastical priests of Israel. He did not possess their priestly status. He did not come close to Israel's sacred spaces. Then how could he have been profane? Only as a son of Adam. What Adam imparted to his heirs was his judicial status as a covenant-breaker, that is, a sacred boundary violator. Adam served as a legal representative for all mankind. He was mankind's high priest. He administered lawful access to the two sacred trees. These two trees were the only sacred objects in the garden. They grew in the sacred places where man could eat a sacred meal of communion with his God. Only one tree was prohibited to him: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam immediately⁽⁵⁵⁾ violated the boundaries -- physical and temporal -- of this prohibited tree, i.e., profaned it. By eating of it prematurely and in direct violation of God's law, Adam ate in communion with his god, Satan. He thereby became a profane man -- the most profane man in history.⁽⁵⁶⁾

Every pagan son of Adam is profane in a general sense: as God's image-bearer who broke the covenant. As a covenant-breaker on his own, he is not testifying accurately in word and deed to the moral character of the Creator. He begins life as a covenant-breaker: an heir of Adam, the high priest who committed sacrilege representatively for all mankind. Because he is born with this judicial status, he does not become a profane person by his self-consciously profane acts. He merely identifies himself as a judicially profane person in history. He progressively works out in history the legal status he was born with -- a kind of perverse form of progressive sanctification. He sets himself apart from God both judicially and morally as time goes on: negative progressive sanctification. (Perhaps we should call this process regressive sanctification.) Nevertheless, the Old Covenant era pagan was not profane in a Mosaic priestly sense. He was not a designated priest of God.⁽⁵⁷⁾ He was outside the formal boundaries of God's covenant with national Israel. So, in a general Adamic sense he was a profane person; in a specific Mosaic sense, he was not.⁽⁵⁸⁾

What Constituted "Ignorant Profanity"?

It has taken us considerable space -- none of it sacred -- to get to the question of what, exactly, the law of Leviticus 5:14-19 referred to. A profane act under the Old Covenant necessarily involved the church, for it involved some aspect of the sacraments, i.e., the priesthood. To violate the office of priest, either as a priest or as a layman, was considered profane. If done in ignorance, there was an added penalty of one-fifth.

There was an ownership principle involved. God had established legal boundaries around the sacraments: spatial boundaries and liturgical boundaries. These were ultimately ownership boundaries, analogous to the boundary He placed around the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That which belongs exclusively to God is specially protected by law. Jesus' distinction between God and Caesar would apply here: render to each what is lawfully claimed by each (Matt. 22:21).⁽⁵⁹⁾ God is sacred; Caesar is common. (It was this confession that later became the legal basis of the Roman Empire's persecution of Christians.) Jesus' distinction between God and Mammon would not apply here: no one should ever serve Mammon. No one should ever be profane (Mammon: false worship). What was established in Leviticus 5:14-19 was a legal distinction between sacred and common, not between sacred and profane. That which is common cannot be profaned.

What did the church in the Mosaic Covenant require? The sacrifice of unblemished animals, for one thing. What if a man had ignorantly offered an animal with a defect -- a disease, for example? He had mistakenly brought the wrong animal to the altar. He owed another animal, plus a penalty payment of one-fifth. Since he could not kill one-fifth of an animal, a monetary equivalent according to the shekels of the temple was allowed. To offer a blemished animal was the equivalent of stealing from God -- profaning His table-altar (Mal. 1:8-12). God's warning was clear: "But ye have profaned it, in that ye say, The table of the LORD is polluted; and the fruit thereof, even his meat, is contemptible" (Mal. 1:12).

What else would have come under the law against profanity? Tithes. The tithes were to be set aside to God. They were His property, collected and administered solely by the priesthood. To refuse to pay a tithe to the local Levite was the legal equivalent of stealing from God (Mal. 3:8-9). If a person discovered in retrospect that he had earned more net income than he had originally calculated, he owed more to God. This would have been an unintentional transgression. He now owed the tithe, plus an animal sacrifice, plus an extra 20 percent on that portion of the tithe that he had neglected to pay. If he had earned an additional ten ounces of silver, he owed, first, an additional ounce to the Levite. He would also have been required to offer an animal sacrifice, plus pay an additional one-fifth of an ounce to the Levite.

A person might also have made a complicated vow to God. If he neglected to fulfill all of its terms, he would have owed the extra payment.

 

New Covenant Sanctions

In the New Covenant era, as in the Mosaic era, the general status of priest, which is inherited by all men from Adam through physical birth, must be distinguished from 1) the special status of priest, which is inherited from Jesus Christ, the second Adam,⁽⁶⁰⁾ through legal adoption ("new birth"),⁽⁶¹⁾ and also from 2) the judicial office of priest, which is obtained only through ecclesiastical ordination. The first distinction between the priesthoods -- special priest vs. general priest -- reflects the fundamental difference between heaven and hell: saved and lost. The general priesthood is profane (heirs of Adam's transgression); the special priesthood is not profane (heirs of God's redemptive grace). This is not a marginal distinction. It marks a radical judicial distinction that far exceeds the distinction between the ordained church officer and the layman. The eternal sanctions are very different, so the degree of violation is different.

The second distinction is marginal: ordained special priest (guardian of the sacraments) vs. non-ordained special priest (guardian of the kingdom). The differing sanctions of Leviticus 5:14-19 reflect this marginal difference. In the Mosaic era, a profane act of transgression of the holy things committed in ignorance was of marginally greater magnitude than a violation of a the commandments committed in ignorance. The first required a ram plus a 20 percent penalty (Lev. 5:16); the second did not: ram only (v. 18).

Today, pagans and priests are mixed together geographically. How could a covenant-breaker ("Adamic priest") commit an unintentional act of sacrilege? There are no animal sacrifices today. He is not covenantally under the church. He does not pay tithes. He does not make vows to the church. There seems to be no easy way for him to commit an unintentional profane act. One example would be the case of a person who takes communion without being a church member, not understanding that to do so lawfully, he needs to be under church authority as a member. (Churches that practice open communion lure ignorant people into profanity.) But what would be the penalty? An additional one-fifth of what? Another example would be verbal profanity: calling down God's negative sanctions against another person. Only ordained priests may do this publicly. In a culture in which such language has become common, this practice can become habitual, i.e., unintentional. It can go on only where biblical law is not enforced.

The civil government of every nation should impose sanctions against public verbal profanity. It is a form of assault. The third commandment is binding on all nations. No one is allowed by God to transgress the boundary placed around His name. No civil government ought to tolerate such transgressions. The inherited general status of priest to which all men are born as sons of Adam brings all men under God's civil laws regarding profanity. It is on this legal basis, among others, that the civil government of a formally covenanted Christian nation could and should bring sanctions against certain practices of cults and rival religions: their public transgression of God's sacramental boundaries. Sacrilege is a civil offense.

This fact is denied by defenders of religious pluralism, who regard pluralism as the civil manifestation of the sacred in history. This is why pluralism is in principle a violation of the third commandment. A refusal to defend God's sacred boundaries places the civil magistrate, who acts as an ordained representative of both God⁽⁶²⁾ and society, in the legal position of an accomplice of those who do transgress them. Pluralism is a civil order that is established judicially by taking God's name in vain: the invocation of an oath to a false god who threatens to impose non-biblical sanctions.⁽⁶³⁾

Unintentional sacrilege seems far less likely in a modern nation that is not formally covenanted to God. That it could take place in Old Covenant Israel is clear. It is far less clear how laws against unintentional violations of priestly boundaries would apply today.

With this understanding of the sacred, we are now ready to investigate a series of false distinctions: ancient and modern, sectarian and academic, and fundamentalist-pietist. They must all be avoided if we are to do justice to the biblical distinction between sacred and common.

 

False Distinctions Within Ancient and Modern Religion

There is no doubt that the realm of the sacred in ancient Israel was located inside specified geographical boundaries. The Bible does not even remotely suggest, however, that the larger realm outside these special geographical boundaries was an inferior place in terms of its inherent "being." If anything, the closer a man dwelt to sacred space in the Mosaic Covenant era, the more vulnerable he became to God's judgments. This is why an unpremeditated and unintentional violation of God's holy things bore an additional penalty of 20 percent -- not overwhelming, but nonetheless a penalty. The sacred was a zone or object of greater ritual precision and deeper foreboding. It was something surrounded by a judicial boundary. What was to be feared here was the possibility of committing a profane act.

This biblical distinction between the judicially sacred and the judicially common has been subtly transformed by those affirming very different theological categories. Those who promote counterfeit covenants have attempted to shift the sacred-common distinction to either a magical-metaphysical view of the distinction (realism/organicism) or a symbolic-psychological view (nominalism/mechanism-contractualism). Both approaches are theologically incorrect.

1. Realism: Sacred vs. Profane (Re-defined)

The Bible's judicial distinction -- ritually and representatively -- between the sacred and the non-sacramental (i.e., common) has almost universally been redefined as a contrast between the sacred and the profane, with anything that is not sacred defined as inherently profane. This is a very serious misunderstanding of the Bible's distinctions: sacred vs. common and sacred vs. profane. Speaking of the common usage of sacred and profane, Hastings' Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics comments incorrectly: "The etymology of the word `profane' (lit. `before or in front of the shrine') may give us a certain amount of guidance because of its spatial suggestiveness. There immediately arises in our minds the idea of a walled or fenced enclosure within which only peculiarly precious objects and specially privileged persons may remain, and outside of which there is a world of rigorously excluded persons and things having lesser assigned worth than those within. . . . Another idea, related to the foregoing and also suggested by the spatial etymology of the word `profane,' is that of absolute, abrupt, and rigorous separation between the sacred and the profane. The sacred enclosure is definitely separated by [a] wall or some other effective protection from the profane world, and access from the one world to the other is only through a rigorously-guarded portal."⁽⁶⁴⁾

According to this view, the barrier marking off sacred space from profane space may be verbal, spatial, temporal, ritual, or a combination. The taboo marks the dividing line -- line in this case may be metaphorical -- between the two realms. The priesthood becomes a separate class of people based on their God-given access to the holy or set-apart objects. "Everywhere also elaborate ritual is accompanied by the most zealous care for the separation of the priestly class from the ordinary community."⁽⁶⁵⁾

The space outside of sacred space is seen as "the profane world." It is therefore unclean, cursed, or in other ways a second-class place of residence. Those who live there are themselves second-class citizens. There is supposedly a chain of being linking the higher realm of the sacred to the lower realm of the profane. Those dwelling in the "upper story" of the sacred possess more power and authority than those in the "lower story" of the profane. The sacred realm of "grace" is contrasted with the profane realm of "nature." Grace is seen as metaphysically superior to nature, but it is the dwelling place of the few: the priesthood. Nature is seen as the dwelling place for the masses, where popular culture prevails.

The Bible denies all this. It presents the entire world as under the grace of God, from the day that God clothed Adam in animal skins and sent him out of the garden. The garden was too holy for Adam and his heirs because it contained the tree of life, but the realm beyond the garden's boundaries was in no way profane. It was common when compared to the garden; it was not profane. Both the garden and the world outside were equally part of nature: the created realm. The garden, however, was off-limits judicially because the tree of life was off-limits, just as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil had been off-limits. Adam had defied the earlier verbal boundary; this time, God placed angels and a flaming sword at the gate of entry (Gen. 3:24). The garden was holy; the world outside was common; but the world outside was not in any way profane.

Nature and Grace

Given a false, metaphysical view of the sacred and the profane, men erroneously believe that nature swallows up grace in the realm of popular culture. Because nature is supposedly the larger realm outside the narrowly circumscribed sacred boundaries, it then becomes the dominant force in culture. Its laws are less rigorous, which means that its standards -- ethical or ritual -- are lower. Nevertheless, the realm of nature is inevitably dominant in culture, for its domain is far larger geographically and encompasses most people. In short, that which is inferior metaphysically becomes dominant culturally.

This false distinction between the sacred as a realm of existence for a religious elite and the profane as a separate realm of existence for the masses is an important key to a proper understanding of all non-Christian religions. In them, nature always swallows up grace. There is no hope for the masses of men. Nature controls them, even though they may seek to control nature. The historical power of the historical resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ is denied by such religions. That which is identified as the realm of grace -- assuming such a realm is even admitted to exist -- is believed to have authority and power only within the necessarily narrow boundaries of the sacred. Covenant-breaking man's goal is to restrict the influence of the sacred, because of its supernatural power and because of its superior moral authority. The sacred implies transcendent law, and transcendent law implies transcendent judgment. Covenant-breaking man's primary goal in life is to avoid transcendent judgment. He re-invents physical reality in order to further this goal.⁽⁶⁶⁾ In order to remove the sacred from his presence, he is also willing to redefine the biblical categories of sacred and profane, making the sacred a superior but completely separate realm which is closed to most people.

Escaping Grace

Covenant-breaking man frequently seeks to deny the existence of grace. Men deny the relevance of God's grace in history because they deny the relevance of God's wrath in eternity. One theoretical approach denies the existence of the permanent judicial boundary separating history from heaven; the other denies the existence of eternity. The best example of the first approach is Hinduism, which is normally viewed as a deeply spiritual religion. It is deeply spiritual; it is nevertheless anti-grace. For the Hindu, nature is the realm of the masses; it is also the realm of illusion (maya). The true spiritual master is self-consciously involved in a lifetime pilgrimage -- indeed, several thousand lifetime pilgrimages -- to escape from the illusion of nature by becoming one with the non-historical Ultimate, in which all spatial and temporal distinctions disappear. But there is no grace in the system; the process is rigorously governed by karma -- the impersonal ethical law of reincarnation. The spiritual goal is total escape from history.

The other representative way of denying grace is modern humanism. Men are told that there is no escape from history, meaning no grace that transcends it. The humanist's universe is a closed system: closed to God. There is only death, both individual and cosmic (the heat death of the universe).⁽⁶⁷⁾ In both systems -- spiritual Hinduism and materialist humanism -- grace is not seen as a culture-transforming power in history. In the first case, God pays no attention to history, not having any conscious attention to pay. In the second case, there is no God to pay attention.

The gods of ancient paganism were either animistic or civic. They were either gods of the household, including the king's household, or else they were gods of the polis. They were not universal gods, except to the extent that a king might extend his personal power across geographical boundaries. The great chain of being encompassed warring gods and warring men. The gods manifested their power through specific men or cities. Where a city lost a war, its gods also lost the war.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Thus, the realm of the sacred was reflected in the affairs of the supposedly profane. It was believed by all except the Hebrews that mankind could call upon no god that is simultaneously personal and absolute.⁽⁶⁹⁾ Nature alone was seen as absolute, but impersonal. Nature eventually would swallow up grace. Stoicism and Epicureanism are examples of later classical ethical-philosophical systems in which grace disappeared.

2. Nominalism: Religious vs. Secular

Biblically speaking, everything is at bottom religious, for the whole creation is under God, both metaphysically (being) and covenantally (judicially). He created the cosmos. It is forever distinct from the unique being of God. There is a Creator-creature distinction.⁽⁷⁰⁾ Everything is therefore supposed to be formally and publicly acknowledged as being under God covenantally. But covenant-breaking man refuses to acknowledge that he lives under such a covenantal requirement. He seeks other gods to serve -- gods that will respond to his authority and his ritual manipulations.

Covenantal subordination is built into the creation.⁽⁷¹⁾ There is an inescapable hierarchy in all existence. There is no escape from some form of covenantal subordination, meaning religious subordination; men serve either God or mammon (Matt. 6:24). Men see themselves and the world around them through religiously tinted spectacles. They view the world as covenantal subordinates of God or Satan.⁽⁷²⁾

In contrast, very few of life's activities are sacred. That which is sacramental is narrowly defined by God; it refers exclusively to the church of Jesus Christ in its unique, monopolistic capacity as the guardian and administrator of the sacraments. The church's administration of the sacraments corresponds to the priestly activities of circumcision and Passover in the Mosaic Covenant. While the head of the household was involved in both rituals, he administered the rites only in his judicial capacity as a household priest. He was always under formal ecclesiastical sanctions.

Kant's Dialectic: Phenomenal/Noumenal

In modern thought, including modern fundamentalism, there is a familiar theme of "religious vs. secular."⁽⁷³⁾ That which is secular is defined as non-religious. The term "secular" is used as a substitute for man's autonomy. Secularism is inherently atheistic. Secular man assumes that atheism is the antithesis of religion, when it in fact is a deeply religious worldview.⁽⁷⁴⁾ This usage is colored by the presupposition of modern man that religion is the way of the subordinate person, who labors under non-scientific, non-physical restrictions, while the secular is the equivalent of autonomous. This dualism is basically a development of Kant's dialectic between the phenomenal and the noumenal.⁽⁷⁵⁾ The phenomenal realm is non-religious, autonomous, and secular: the deterministic realm of impersonal scientific cause and effect. The noumenal is the realm of the spiritual, the ethical, the irrational, the "uncaused," i.e., human freedom.⁽⁷⁶⁾

In both realms, noumenal and phenomenal, man is understood to be spiritually autonomous. Insofar as he dwells in the noumenal, Kantian man is responsible only to himself. Insofar as he dwells in the phenomenal, he is not responsible at all. He is the impersonally determined, cosmically irresponsible product of this world's cause-and-effect forces. In neither case is he responsible to a Creator God. The "religious" realm is just another side of autonomous man: the nonrational side. It is to this extent inherently secular. Thus, modern usage misleads us: the "religious" in Kant's world is as autonomous as the secular. The noumenal and the phenomenal represent two different, dialectical sides of man's autonomy.⁽⁷⁷⁾

The Denial of Hierarchy

What modern man denies with all his heart is the existence of a realm of judicial subordination to a God who judges men both in time and eternity. It is this condition of judicial subordination that Jesus warned His disciples to consider: "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. 10:28). Modern man rejects such a hierarchical view of man's place in the cosmos. This rejection of God's sanctions has colored modern thought so completely that even Christians are doubtful that God brings predictable sanctions in history, and some Christian scholars actually deny that He does.⁽⁷⁸⁾

Nevertheless, there is no escape from hierarchy. It is a chain of command, not a chain of being. Man is under God; nature is under man; but God is not part of the "being" of man or nature. The God of the Bible is in no sense the god of pantheism. He is a covenantal God who issues commands through judicial representatives. Man will never become God, issuing orders as an ultimate sovereign, for man cannot evolve into God or replace God through revolution. The Mormons have a slogan: "What God is, man will become; what man is, God once was." This is incorrect. What God is, man can never become. But here Christianity breaks with both Judaism and Islam, for Christianity teaches that what man is, the Son of God once was in history, and more than what man is: perfectly human, yet also divine, without intermixture. So announced the Athanasian creed (c. 430 A.D.).⁽⁷⁹⁾

Covenant-breaking man denies this chain of command, preferring instead the idea of a chain of being.⁽⁸⁰⁾ The chain-of-being philosophy of ancient paganism is reincarnated in modern humanism. Modern man simply inverts the chain-of-being hierarchy that prevails in pagan religions. Unlike the older pagan view, where the sacred was viewed as superior to the profane, for Enlightenment man the religious is subordinate to the secular. The "real world" is the realm of science and mathematics, of stock market profits and physical fitness exercises -- what Sorokin called sensate culture.⁽⁸¹⁾ The not-so-real world is said to be the realm of religion: prayers, rituals, dreams of heaven to come, and "pie in the sky by and by" -- contemptuously dismissed as the realm of children and old women (of both sexes). It is the realm of symbols: meaningful only to those who believe in them, unlike the universal authority of reason and mathematics. Those who dwell in the religious realm are generally thought of as failures: people who could not compete successfully in the real world, and who fled to the symbolic in search of "higher" meaning -- a meaning that cannot be expressed in real-world categories, but which is invented by the very participants. A familiar sensate phrase is this: "Religion is a crutch." Only weak or wounded people use crutches.

It is worth noting that the great German sociologist Max Weber was caught on the horns of this dilemma -- this inherent philosophical dualism -- of modern humanism. He contrasted the sublime with the excessively rational, yet he also regarded the sublime as the realm of the weak. First, the sublime: "The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the `disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations." Then, a few lines later, the weak: "To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man, one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him. After all, they do not make it hard for him. One way or another he has to bring his `intellectual sacrifice' -- that is inevitable. If he can really do it, we shall not rebuke him."⁽⁸²⁾ On the contrary, from the rationalists of the Enlightenment to Humanist Manifesto II,⁽⁸³⁾ those who do return to Christianity's supernaturalism are severely rebuked.

Sacred and Secular

The humanist insists that there is no essential (metaphysical) distinction between the secular and the religious. The realm of religion is regarded as a realm of man's invention. It is "merely" a realm of symbol and myth, of mystery and imagination. The distinctions between the religious and the secular realms are explained as strictly nominal: named by men rather than real. Modern man believes that the noumenal is merely nominal. Modern man is usually a nominalist, not a realist. The realm of grace is understood as being no different at bottom (metaphysically) from the realm of nature, and therefore the realm of grace is an illusion: secularizing the sacred. If the reality of the bizarre intrudes on the boundaries of science so that a few scientists on the fringes of science can no longer ignore the evidence, they can stretch the definition of nature so as to include the attributes of the occult and abnormal.⁽⁸⁴⁾

But there has long been an underground humanist alternative to this strategy: sacralizing the secular.⁽⁸⁵⁾ The believer in magic sees a link between man and the cosmos that is based on ritual formulas rather than scientific formulas. This view of man is called realism. What man does on earth mirrors the realm above man and invokes the powers thereof. But there is a metaphysical continuum: the chain of being. Man is not fundamentally different from nature and the supernatural. He is seen as the supreme link between nature and the supernatural. He does not name nature (nominalism) -- does not define it through the power of his reason -- but he commands both nature and the supernatural through the power open to him through special knowledge possessed by the adept. The goal of the magician, like the goal of the scientist, is control over nature. This is why the two realms of ritual magic and of scientific humanism are not inherently separate realms.⁽⁸⁶⁾

One's choice between these two options makes little difference for the Bible's theology of redemption. Both views -- nominalism and realism -- are anti-covenantal. They both rebel against the idea of an absolute judicial hierarchy: God over man. In such a worldview, nature cannot swallow up grace in history, for God is over nature and sustains it by grace. In contrast, whether occult forces invade nature by cloaking themselves in the garb of the Kantian noumenal realm,⁽⁸⁷⁾ or whether the Kantian phenomenal realm of rationally defined and constructed impersonal nature pushes back the mysterious to the edges of man's existence, nature always swallows up grace.

The god of deism is too far away to transform man or nature. The god of pantheism is too immersed in nature to transform man or nature. The gods of animism are at best local forces, too weak to guarantee man's salvation. In the world of atheism, God does not exist, nor does the realm of grace. There is only the realm of nature. Therefore, in all covenant-breaking thought, nature inevitably swallows up grace.⁽⁸⁸⁾

But this view of history is not limited to humanism. A very similar view exists in modern Christianity. It begins with the same false nature/grace distinction. It confuses the Bible's common/sacred distinction with nature and grace. It equates common with nature, sacred with grace.

False Distinctions Within Modern Academia

A strictly spatial or cultural distinction between the sacred and the profane is too "primitive" a distinction to suit modern humanist man. Modern humanist man has abandoned the concept of the profane, except perhaps certain acts that are seen as politically profane. Nazism, for example, is regarded today as politically profane, when it in fact was biblically profane: a pagan religion.⁽⁸⁹⁾ Modern man has invented another distinction to satisfy his need to distinguish between the sacred and the common. He contrasts the sacred with the secular. In this, he shares the belief of modern fundamentalism. In this section, I survey an example of modern humanistic scholarship's re-definition of biblical categories: sacred and profane.

I need to repeat myself: the realm of the sacred should not be contrasted with a [hypothetical] realm called the profane. The sacred or sacramental realm is properly contrasted to the common or non-sacramental realm. Anything profane is the result of a boundary violation of the sacred by the common. A great deal of confusion about this point has been generated by two separate sources within modern academia. First, standard historical and anthropological accounts have been written from the point of view of a false dualism between sacred and profane: the magical realm of the priest, the shaman, or the possessed vs. the secular realm of the non-initiated.⁽⁹⁰⁾ Second, a similar distinction is basic to modern sociological theory: sacred vs. secular.⁽⁹¹⁾ This distinction in twentieth-century sociological thought was pioneered by Numa Fustel de Coulanges' most famous disciple, Émile Durkheim.⁽⁹²⁾ His influence has been enormous, a fact rarely recognized by the international academic community which still lives under his spell and the spell of his many disciples in many fields.⁽⁹³⁾ Nisbet writes: "Of all concepts and perspectives in Durkheim the sacred is the most striking and, given the age in which he lived, the most radical."⁽⁹⁴⁾

Durkheim's False Dualism: Sacred/Profane

Durkheim established the terms of sociological discourse on the sacred-profane dichotomy in 1912, in Book I, Chapter I of his book on Australian aboriginal religion, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: "All known religious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred. This division of the world into two domains, the one containing all that is sacred, the other all that is profane, is the distinctive trait of religious thought; . . . ."⁽⁹⁵⁾ Durkheim did not qualify or tone down this dichotomy in any way, writing that "it is absolute. In all the history of human thought there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition of good and bad is nothing beside this; for the good and the bad are only two opposed species of the same class, namely morals, just as sickness and health are two different aspects of the same order of facts, life, while the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common."⁽⁹⁶⁾

The problem for the sociologist or anthropologist who accepts Durkheim's classification of sacred and profane is to identify the operational and theoretical boundaries between the two realms. What is the nature of such boundaries? How can anyone pass between them without becoming ritually polluted? How can anyone ever escape living in the realm of the profane? Durkheim understood the problem: "This is not equivalent to saying that a being can never pass from one of these worlds into the other: but the manner in which this passages is effected, when it does take place, puts into relief the essential duality of the two kingdoms."⁽⁹⁷⁾ Authorizing a person's move from the profane realm into the sacred realm is the basis of ritual initiation, he argued. The individual is metaphysically transformed by means of ritual: from a profane being into a religious being. "Does this not prove that between the profane being which he was and the religious being which he becomes, there is a break of continuity?"⁽⁹⁸⁾

Durkheim had the biblical categories of sacred and profane almost exactly backwards. What he described is the metaphysical dualism hypothesized by theories of ritual magic. In the Bible, it is nowhere asserted that a person is profane prior to his ritual transformation, becoming sacred -- a "religious being" -- by means of the ritual. On the contrary, in biblical religion, an inescapably religious being -- man -- becomes profane but remains religious when he violates a boundary separating the judicially sacred from the judicially common. In the Old Covenant, he profaned "sacred space" when he crossed such a boundary, and in doing so, became profane himself. There was and is nothing profane about the realm outside the boundary of the sacred. Whatever is inside the boundary can become profane -- ritually polluted -- when someone who is not authorized to enter the sacred space crosses the boundary. That which is sacred, meaning that which is associated with the sacraments, can become profane only through a ritually prohibited act of trespass. What must be understood from the beginning of sociological analysis is this: in biblical religion, everything outside and inside the boundary is equally religious. Everything is under covenantal subordination to the Creator God.

Religious vs. Secular

One result of Durkheim's false classification of sacred and profane has been the reinforcement of that other false dualism: the religious vs. the secular. We can see the connection between these two false dualisms in this statement from Durkheim: "The two worlds are not only conceived of as separate, but as even hostile and jealous rivals of each other. Since men cannot fully belong to one except on condition of leaving the other completely, they are exhorted to withdraw themselves completely from the profane world in order to lead an exclusively religious life."⁽⁹⁹⁾ He identified monasticism and mystical asceticism as examples of this withdrawal.⁽¹⁰⁰⁾

This "religious-secular" dualism, like the "sacred-profane" dualism, also falls into contradictions: again and again, the supposedly autonomous secular realm is found to be infused with religion or even undergirded by it.⁽¹⁰¹⁾ This mixing of the two realms points back to Durkheim's original theoretical error: a false dualism between the sacred as a realm vs. the profane as a separate realm. Biblically, the sacred is one judicial realm; the common is another. The first is distinguished from the second by the unique judicial presence of God. The profane is not a separate realm.

Some recent scholars have recognized that Durkheim's sharp antithesis between the sacred and the profane cannot be maintained, either conceptually or historically.⁽¹⁰²⁾ Nevertheless, this false dualism is sometimes imported into Christians' discussions of society. It reinforces the other dualism: religious vs. secular. This false dualism has undermined Christian social theory for almost a millennium.

"Full-Time Christian Service"

One of the most debilitating errors of modern fundamentalism is its specific misinterpretation of the distinction between sacred and common. There is a legitimate distinction between them, as we have seen: a distinction relating to the office of priest. In the New Covenant order, the ordained church elder is worthy of double honor (I Tim. 5:17). He is a minister. He does not offer sacrifice, but he still maintains the Mosaic Covenant's priestly function: guarding access to the sacraments.⁽¹⁰³⁾ The distinction between priest and non-priest in the New Covenant era is based on election to office. It is an explicitly judicial distinction.

Because of modern fundamentalism's acceptance of humanism's false metaphysical dualism -- religious (grace/sacred) vs. secular (common/nature), i.e., noumenal vs. phenomenal -- the fundamentalist speaks of a unique specialized calling: full-time Christian service. Only an elite minority can be involved in such service, the realm of grace. This minority is to that extent regarded as sacred, even though the fundamentalist definition includes non-ministerial callings in its classification of full-time Christian service. The Protestant doctrine of "every redeemed man a priest" then becomes analogous to the medieval world's "a minority of specially called men as monks." This implies that service outside of the priesthood is not full-time Christian service. It implies that all callings besides that of the ordained priest-minister are somehow not expressly Christian, or at best, less deeply Christian.⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

Biblically speaking, these are unquestionably common callings, i.e., they are not sacramental.⁽¹⁰⁵⁾ But almost nothing in life has ever been sacramental. Even in the garden of Eden, only two trees were sacramental. Everything else in the garden and on earth was common. All of the creation was religious, however. Administering the creation involved full-time, covenant-keeping service. All of life was under God's covenant. In this sense, nothing fundamental has changed since the garden; only the boundaries have shifted.

Enclosing the Kingdom of God

The fundamentalist's distinction between full-time Christian service and, presumably, part-time Christian service implies that everything outside the church is secular. A person is said to be in full-time Christian service only when he withdraws from this secular world. Such an outlook results in a drastic narrowing of the definition of the kingdom of God: a kingdom that supposedly operates only in the realms of the internal and the ecclesiastical. Only within the individual Christian heart and the four walls of some church building does the kingdom of God supposedly manifest itself.⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ The family may be included, but the State is always excluded. The State is seen as the realm of the natural, the common: natural law. The State is therefore exempted from the revealed law of God and removed from the realm of grace. There can be no redemption of the State. And because the State is thereby granted judicial autonomy, it steadily swallows up grace by applying its common sanctions: against personal religious freedom, the independent church, and the Christian family.

That such a dualistic view of life can easily lead to mysticism should not be surprising. While the average fundamentalist might understand that covenantally faithful kings, soldiers, and even farmers under the Mosaic covenant were all involved in full-time service to God, he finds it difficult to grasp the fact that these same callings today, plus all others not explicitly identified as immoral, require full-time Christian service. Fundamentalism's dualistic view of man's labors militates against the idea of any explicitly Christian concept of culture until after the second coming of Christ.⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ In practice, it always means a withdrawal from culture.⁽¹⁰⁸⁾ This is pietism's theological legacy.⁽¹⁰⁹⁾

 

Conclusion

A non-deliberate trespass of a holy thing required a 20 percent penalty payment plus a slain ram. A non-deliberate trespass of God's commandment required only a slain ram. The trespass of a holy thing was the greater (i.e., worse) trespass. The importance today of these two Levitical laws governing these two guilt offerings lies in their distinctions and varying penalties. The Levitical distinctions between "the holy things of the Lord" and "the commandments of the Lord" enable us to discern a fundamental distinction between the sacred and the non-sacramental (i.e., the common or conventional). The common is obviously not profane, for this realm includes God's commandments. There is surely nothing inherently profane about "the commandments of the Lord" or the comprehensive realms of life governed by them. What is profane is any transgression of "the holy things of the Lord." These Levitical laws therefore reveal the error of the standard textbook distinctions drawn between "sacred and profane" and "religious and secular."

The biblically valid distinction between the sacred and the non-sacramental reminds us that all of nature is under grace, either special or common. Without the unearned gifts (grace) of life, law, time, and knowledge, and power, there could be no history.⁽¹¹⁰⁾ The processes of nature have been definitively redeemed by Jesus Christ by His death, resurrection, and ascension.⁽¹¹¹⁾ This is equally true of culture. The Bible is clear: nature is sustained by God's common grace and is progressively sanctified in history in response to His extension of special grace to the church. Grace progressively redeems nature in history because Jesus Christ definitively redeemed nature at Calvary. Nature is therefore sanctified: definitively, progressively, and finally.

It is now the task of Christians to work out progressively in history the implications of what these definitive transformations have already accomplished judicially. Whatever God has declared judicially, He requires to be manifested progressively. This dominion assignment to His people involves extensive personal responsibility, which is why dominion theology is resisted so adamantly by pietists. But the church has been given a written Bible, the Holy Spirit, and the division of labor (I Cor. 12) to enable Christians to extend God's dominion covenant. This historical task is huge, but our tools are more than adequate.

Sadly, most Christians in my generation prefer intellectual slumber and life in a cultural ghetto, living on "hand-me-downs" from the world of humanism. They, too, have adopted the false dualisms of humanism: sacred vs. profane, religious vs. secular, nature vs. grace. They, too, have adopted the view that without Jesus' bodily presence in history, nature swallows up grace.

Nature should not be contrasted with grace, for it is part of God's common grace and can be renewed (healed) over time through comprehensive covenantal faithfulness. Nature should be contrasted with the sacramental: a judicially segregated realm. Both realms are equally under grace. Therefore, nature (the common) -- families, businesses, civil government, etc. -- can be healed progressively in history by special grace. This is one application of the doctrine of the bodily ascension of Christ: overcoming death in history.

In contrast to the biblical view of nature and grace stand all forms of anti-Christianity. In all non-Christian systems, nature swallows up grace in history. Tragically for the history of the church, both amillennialism and premillennialism necessarily adopt this non-Christian view of nature and grace in history (i.e., the period prior to Jesus Christ's bodily return). The world supposedly remains under the accelerating curses of God, deteriorating both ethically and physically (the entropy process). The common blessings of God in history are progressively overwhelmed by the common curses.⁽¹¹²⁾

Nature does not swallow up grace. Nature is not separate from grace; nature is under grace. For example, all Christian service is under God's special grace. All Christian service is in this sense redemptive. When a Christian engages in any honest labor, he is engaged in full-time Christian service. But he is not engaged in full-time sacred service. Sacred service is limited to the performance of the formal duties of an ecclesiastical ministry: preaching the gospel in worship services, serving the sacraments, anointing the sick with oil (James 5:14), etc. Formal church worship involves an added layer of holiness, i.e., judicial separation. This is why it can be profaned.

There is remarkably little discussion of the ascension of Christ in modern orthodox theology.⁽¹¹³⁾ This topic inevitably raises fundamental historical, cosmological, and cultural implications that modern premillennial and especially amillennial theologians find difficult to accept, such as the progressive manifestation of Christ's rule in history through His representatives: Christians.⁽¹¹⁴⁾ In a world in which grace is believed to be progressively devoured by nature, there is little room for historical applications of the doctrine of the historical ascension. Covenantal postmillennialism alone can confidently discuss the doctrine of Christ's ascension, for postmillennialism does not seek to confine the effects of Christ's ascension to the realms of the internal and the trans-historical.⁽¹¹⁵⁾ That is to say, postmillennialism does not assert the existence of supposedly inevitable boundaries around the effects of grace in history. On the contrary, it asserts that all such boundaries will be progressively overcome in history, until on judgment day the very gates (boundaries) of hell will not be able to stand against the church (Matt. 16:18).⁽¹¹⁶⁾

Summary

This sacrifice related to inheritance: point five of the biblical covenant model.

The infraction was ecclesiastical, so the threatened institutional sanction was excommunication.

The civil effect of excommunication was the loss of citizenship (freemanship).

This would lead to a loss of inheritance.

The trespass offering was a reparation offering for guilt.

This offering atoned for a sin that was closer to Eve's transgression: one made in ignorance.

The law distinguished between holy things and holy commandments.

An inadvertent transgression of a holy thing required the sacrifice of a ram plus a 20 percent penalty payment.

An inadvertent transgression of a holy commandment required only an animal sacrifice.

This indicates that transgressing a holy thing was a double transgression: word (law) and place.

Commentators have confused the common with the profane.

This places an artificial boundary around the common, separating it from grace.

That which is sacred is sacramental: ecclesiastically oath-bound.

Anything that unlawfully violates sacred space thereby becomes profane.

A profane act is a boundary violation of a sacred space or a sacramental object.

Because the required sacrifices covered only inadvertent transgressions, this law did not apply to temple violations.

"Sacred" here refers to a violation of the priesthood in its broadest sense.

A profane object is someone who is (or was) unlawfully inside a sacred space.

That which is common is outside a sacred boundary.

The contrast between sacred and common is not a moral contrast; it is liturgical.

A family meal is common; the Lord's Supper is sacred; both are religious.

Wenham's contrasts are correct: holy vs. common (adjectives); sanctify vs. profane (verbs).

There is no inherently profane place.

A sacred space or thing is made sacred by God's judicial declaration; it had been common, but not profane.

A profane place is a violated sacred place.

A sacred space or thing is under the authority of an ordained (anointed) ecclesiastical official who guards an ecclesiastical boundary.

A profane act is a violation of a priest-guarded sacred boundary.

A sacred boundary is not primarily metaphysical or primarily symbolic; it is judicial-covenantal.

Adam violated a judicial boundary, not a metaphysical or symbolic boundary.

The Ark of the Covenant was a sacred object because it enclosed sacred space.

Inside the Ark were the tablets containing God's law: judicial.

A sacred space or object brings men into the judicial presence of God.

Sacred space is judicially sanctified (set apart) space, not magical space: a place of judgment.

Sacred space is the place of man's legal communion with God.

The New Covenant extended the geographical boundaries of redemption, but shrank the domain of sacred space.

Sacrilege today is a more violation of the church's legal immunities more than a violation of sacred space.

The ground is no longer cursed; animals are no longer unclean.

Grace ("the sacred") is not swallowed up by nature ("the common") in history.

Nature is sustained by God's grace.

The sacred and the common are both under grace.

The realm of common grace is steadily transformed into special grace as the gospel spreads and transforms men.

Biblical view: sacred (special judicial presence of God) vs. common; sacred (authorized sacrament) vs. profane (unauthorized sacrament or sacrilege).

Formal church worship services are sacred: judicial space (throne of God).

Profanity is often verbal: an illegitimate invocation of God's name and sanctions -- a boundary violation (Third Commandment).

Profanity is an illegitimate priestly act: hierarchical, representative.

The Israelites were a nation of priests, so individual infractions were easier and more dangerous.

A 20 percent penalty for an inadvertent priestly act by a commoner was a minor penalty. Why so minor?

Profanity is normally a self-conscious violation of a sacred boundary, and it carried a heavy penalty: excommunication.

This was the penalty for refusing to sacrific after having inadvertently committed a profane act.

Everything in Israel bordered on the sacred.

Conclusion: there are degrees of holiness.

It was easier for an Israelite to commit such an act than for a geographically distant pagan: farther from the holy of holies.

Pagans are profane in a general, Adamic sense: heirs of a profane priest.

Pagans were not profane in a specific sense: violators of sacred boundaries within the land of Israel.

Pagans were under the moral law of God, including the law against taking God's name in vain or false worship.

In Israel, inadvertent profane acts had to do with the sacrifices, including the common Israelite's participation: offering animals, tithing.

What about the New Covenant?

Biblical distinction: every man a general priest (fallen) vs. every redeemed man a special priest.

Biblical distinction: special priest (guardian of the kingdom) vs. ordained priest (guardian of the sacraments).

Today's pagans cannot easily commit sacrilege unintentionally.

It is not easy to see how this law against unintentional sacrilege should be or could be enforced in a nation not covenanted to the God of the Bible.

God's moral boundaries did (and do) apply.

In the New Covenant, committing inadvertent profanity is difficult: no animal sacrifices.

In the New Covenant, sacrilege is still a civil offense.

Academic error: the common as ontologically ("being") inferior to the sacred.

Academic error: common = profane.

Academic error: chain of being (power) separates the sacred from the profane (i.e., common).

Academic error: the realm of grace is narrow (priests); the realm of the profane is wide (masses).

Academic error: nature swallows up grace in popular culture, making the inferior.

This view denies the power of God's transforming grace and Jesus' historical resurrection.

Covenant-breakers deny the relevance of God's grace in history, for they deny the relevance of God's wrath in eternity.

Some deny the relevance of history (Hinduism); others deny the relevance of eternity (humanism).

All of life is religious; little of life is sacred (sacramental).

Academic error: the secular is not religious.

Academic error: secular is defined as autonomy; religion is defined as subordinate to the supernatural.

Humanists deny God's chain of command, which is not a chain of being.

They prefer belief in a chain of being to a supernatural chain of command.

Rationalists secularize the sacred.

Occultists sacralize the secular.

All deny the judicial hierarchy: God over man.

In covenant-breaking thought, nature swallows up grace.

Durkheim's error: sacred/profane (absolute dualism).

Durkheim's error: religious/secular.

Fundamentalist error: full-time Christian service as exclusively sacramental-priestly.

Fundamentalist error: kingdom of God ("spiritual") vs. politics, economics, and culture ("secular").

This leads to ethical dualism ("two kinds of law") and mysticism (escape from history).

Footnotes:

1. Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, vol. 3 of The Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 319.

2. See Chapter 31, below: "Slaves and Freemen."

3. Ramban [Rabbi Moshe ben Nachman], Commentary on the Torah: Leviticus (New York: Shilo, [1267?] 1974), p. 55.

4. The technological progress of man in history has begun to overcome God's curses. Air conditioning is one such example. Today, air conditioning in most of the industrial world has overcome the literal application of this negative sanction. (The cultural substitute has been stress, a kind of internalized sweating.) This progress can be seen as a blessing: greater rewards in response to progressive obedience to the external principles of responsible private ownership and the social and intellectual division of labor. It can also be seen as a prelude to widespread cursing following a collapse of the social division of labor as a result of war, terrorism, or mass inflation.

5. Judicially, the New Testament's sanction of baptism has broken down the middle wall of partition between male and female. "For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:27-28). Thus, Paul writes immediately following his discussion of Eve's transgression, "Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety" (I Tim. 2:15). The progressive removal of Eve's Genesis sanction indicates that under the New Covenant, women will progressively work more closely with men in the broader tasks of dominion, thereby breaking down the occupational division of labor. We find that as the division of labor has been extended since the Industrial Revolution of the 1780's, women have found employment in salary-earning occupations -- tasks other than household services -- although they still tend to fill those jobs that are traditionally male-support jobs. There are very few male secretaries, especially serving female executives. Women still leave the work force to rear children in greater numbers than men do. Felice N. Schwartz, Breaking With Tradition: Women and Work, The New Facts of Life (New York: Warner, 1992), ch. 3.

6. See Chapter 4, above, subsection on "The Door of the Tabernacle."

7. "Sacrament," in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, edited by John M'Clintock and James Strong, 12 vols. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1894), IX, p. 212.

8. James Jordan, "The Whole Burnt Sacrifice: Its Liturgy and Meaning," Biblical Horizons Occasional Paper, No. 11, p. 2.

9. Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1979), p. 19.

10. Num. 19:16; 19:18; 23:24; and dozens of other verses.

11. The King James reads: "And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean" (Lev. 10:10). The Revised Standard Version agrees. The New American Standard translates it as "profane."

12. The King James reads: "And the priest answered David, and said, There is no common bread under mine hand, but there is hallowed bread; if the young men have kept themselves at least from women. And David answered the priest, and said unto him, Of a truth women have been kept from us about these three days, since I came out, and the vessels of the young men are holy [kodesh], and the bread is in a manner common, yea, though it were sanctified [kodesh] this day in the vessel" (I Sam. 21:4-5). The Revised Standard Version agrees. The New American Standard translates khole in verse 4 as "consecrated"; in verse 5 as "ordinary." The historical context was the shewbread.

13. The King James reads: "Her priests have violated my law, and have profaned mine holy things: they have put no difference between the holy and profane, neither have they shewed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them" (Ezek. 22:26). The Revised Standard Version translates it as "common"; the New American Standard Version as "profane."

14. The King James reads: "He measured it by the four sides: it had a wall round about, five hundred reeds long, and five hundred broad, to make a separation between the sanctuary and the profane place" (Ezek. 42:20). The Revised Standard Version translates it as "common"; the New American Standard Version as "profane."

15. The King James reads: "And they shall teach my people the difference between the holy and profane, and cause them to discern between the unclean and the clean" (Ezek. 44:23). The Revised Standard Version translates it as "common." The New American Standard Version translates it as "profane."

16. The King James reads: "And the five thousand, that are left in the breadth over against the five and twenty thousand, shall be a profane place for the city, for dwelling, and for suburbs: and the city shall be in the midst thereof" (Ezek. 48:15). The Revised Standard Version translates it as "ordinary." The New American Standard Version translates it as "common."

17. Philosopher Allan Bloom argues that modern American thought, under the influence of German sociology, has replaced the ideas of God and religion with the all-embracing idea of "the sacred." Writes Bloom: "This entire language, as I have tried to show, implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social and personal; and it still conveys something like that. But it has done nothing to reestablish religion -- which puts us in a pretty pickle. . . . As the religious essence has gradually become a thin, putrid gas spread out through our whole atmosphere, it has gradually become respectable to speak of it under the marvelously portentous name the sacred." Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 214-15. He is on target: "These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle." Ibid., p. 216; cf. 230. The popularity of this theme, according to Mircea Eliade, began with the publication in 1917 of Rudolph Otto's Das Heilage (The Sacred): Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1957] 1961), p. 8.

18. In the Old Covenant, circumcision; in the New Covenant, baptism.

19. In the Mosaic Covenant, Passover; in the New Covenant, the Lord's Supper.

20. Gary North, Millennialism and Social Theory (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990), pp. 34-39. I hope to write a book called Sanctions and Social Theory, which will consider in detail these three perspectives.

21. Realism asserts that there is a fundamental unity of being throughout the universe. Everything is inherently connected. In other words, "as above, so below": the reigning view of all magical systems. Plato was the great philosopher of realism, as were the neoplatonists after him.

22. Nominalism asserts that everything is inherently unconnected in the universe. The connections that appear to exist are merely conventional, i.e., thinking makes them so. David Hume was the great modern philosopher of nominalism, and before him, William of Occam.

23. Covenantalism asserts a fundamental distinction between the being of God and the being of creation: the Creator-creature distinction. God literally spoke creation into existence: a fiat act (Gen. 1). He holds creation together by a continuing act of will. All of the connections within the creation are based ultimately on the judicial decrees of God. Because these connections are ultimately judicial, all of nature was cursed when Adam rebelled (Gen. 3:17), and looks forward to redemption (Rom. 8:22). John Calvin was the great theologian of covenantalism; Cornelius Van Til was his most philosophically consistent heir. Johannus Althusius (c. 1600) was the only major -- in my opinion, the only -- modern political philosopher of covenantalism until Rushdoony appeared.

24. The cosmic tree was related to the idea of the cosmic mountain: the axis mundi or axis of the world -- the line drawn through the earth which points to the pole star. It was the link between heaven and earth. See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), p. 111; cf. 266-67, 271, 273-74. On the axis mundi, see the extraordinary, complex, and cryptic book on ancient mathematics, myth, and cosmology, Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time, by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend (Boston: Gambit, 1969). It should be obvious what the source of these cosmic tree and cosmic mountain myths was: the garden of Eden, itself located on a mountain or raised area, for the river flowing through it became four rivers (Gen. 2:10).

25. Eliade writes: "The tree came to express the cosmos fully in itself, by embodying, in apparently static form, its `force', its life and its quality of periodic regeneration." Patterns, p. 271.

26. That it was a new interpretation is seen in their response: sewing fig leaf aprons rather than confessing their sin in prayer and seeking God's forgiveness.

27. "And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep [shaw-mar: guard] it" (Gen. 2:15).

28. Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (2nd ed.; Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987), Appendix E: "Witnesses and Judges."

29. "For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass [mirror]: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. But whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed" (James 1:23-25).

30. See Appendix A, below: "Sacrilege and Sanctions."

31. That the profanation of the Ark of the Covenant was unintentional on their part is proven by the fact that they called their priests and divines to explain the cause of the visible judgments (I Sam. 6:3). They also placed the Ark on a cart drawn by oxen; the animals' selection of the path would tell them whether the Ark belonged back in Israel. By the terms of their test, if the oxen did not return to Israel, the Philistines could safely conclude that the simultaneous presence of the Ark and their boils was a coincidence (I Sam. 6:9).

32. It is not clear that He killed them.

33. The holy grail is popularly imagined as the chalice from which Christ and the disciples drank at the Last Supper. Occultists view it as the equivalent of the philosopher's stone: a means of self-transcendence, the escape from creaturehood. See, for example, Trevor Ravenscroft, The Spear of Destiny (New York: Bantam, [1973] 1974), p. 49.

34. The word used by Indiana Jones' archeologist father in The Last Crusade describing his experience with the grail was "illuminating."

35. E. M. Butler, Ritual Magic (San Bernardino, California: Borgo Press, [1949] 1980), p. 1.

36. It is significant that the call for the coming of the kingdom appears early in the Lord's Prayer, prior to "give us this day our daily bread." What we need to recognize is that this prayer is a covenant document structured in terms of the familiar five points: 1) transcendence (Father who is in heaven, holy name); 2) hierarchy (kingdom come: king rules); 3) law/dominion (God's will -- law -- be done on earth as it is in heaven); 4) sanctions (daily bread, forgiveness of sins); 5) continuity/eschatology (deliverance from evil; hence, kingdom, power, and glory forever). Notice that the call for the kingdom to come on earth (2), manifested by obedience to His law (3), precedes the request for daily bread (4). God's kingdom on earth is therefore not to be regarded as exclusively eschatological; it is identified as historical and progressive -- as progressive as God's provision of our daily bread is.

37. The garden of Eden was such a sacred space. Because the tree of life was within its boundaries, God sealed off its boundaries with a flaming sword and angels. This meant that man was not permitted to come into God's presence there, for it was a place of absolute judgment. To eat sacramentally of the tree of life in an unlawful manner would have meant the attainment of perpetual temporal existence apart from covenantal obedience, i.e., hell.

38. This is still required in Islamic mosques.

39. Meredith G. Kline writes: "God's theophanic glory is the glory of royal majesty. At the center of the heavens within the veil of the Glory-cloud is found a throne; the Glory is preeminently the place of God's enthronement. It is, therefore, a royal palace, site of the divine council and court of judgment. As royal house of a divine King, the dwelling of deity, it is a holy house, a temple. Yet the Glory is a not static structure, but mobile, for the throne is a chariot-throne, Spirit directed and propelled through the winged beings, a vehicle of divine judgment, moving with the swiftness of light to execute the sentence of the King." Kline, Images of the Spirit (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker, 1980), pp. 17-18. Kline's concept of God's judgments in New Covenant history abandons all traces of the chariot-throne imagery and power. See Kline, "Comments on an Old-New Error," Westminster Theological Journal, XLI (Fall 1978). For my response, see North, Millennialism and Social Theory, ch. 7.

40. An example would be the invasion of the Faith Baptist Church of Lewisville, Nebraska, by the local sheriff and his men in 1982. See H. Edward Rowe, The Day They Padlocked the Church (Shreveport, Louisiana: Huntington House, 1983).

41. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., The Greatness of the Great Commission: The Christian Enterprise in a Fallen World (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1990).

42. Gary North, Is the World Running Down? Crisis in the Christian Worldview (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1988).

43. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace: The Biblical Basis of Progress (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987).

44. This is Meredith G. Kline's view of New Covenant history: "Comments on an Old-New Error," op. cit.

45. Under the Old Covenant, the head of a household gave blessings and cursings to children in his capacity as the household priest. My view is that this is still valid, for the same reason: household priestly status of the father. It is a delegated office from the church.

46. Gary North, The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), ch. 3: "Oaths, Covenants, and Contracts." I wrote this chapter prior to Sutton's development of Meredith G. Kline's five-point covenant model: Ray R. Sutton, That You May Prosper: Dominion By Covenant (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1987; second edition, 1992). While the third commandment clearly refers in part to false oaths, and oaths are more closely associated with the invocation of God's sanctions (point four), the primary issue in the third commandment is the defense of ritual boundaries. God's name is holy; it must not be misused. False oaths are illegitimately invoked for purposes of extending one's personal dominion. This includes profanity: to empower language.

47. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, edited by Gerhard Kittel, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1965), III, pp. 257-65.

48. This is why they sacrificed 70 bullocks at the feast of trumpets (Num. 29): to offer atonement for the 70 nations (the world).

49. James B. Jordan, Through New Eyes: Developing a Biblical View of the World (Brentwood, Tennessee: Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1988), ch. 15.

50. An exception was a widow or divorced wife of an Israelite. She had the authority to take a vow without confirmation by husband or father (Num. 30:9).

51. The link between law, boundaries, and dominion is basic to the biblical covenant model: point three.

52. These laws were an aspect of the original conquest of the land, i.e., the military spoils of a one-time event.

53. "You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities."

54. Greg L. Bahnsen, By This Standard: The Authority of God's Law Today (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1985), pp. 237-38.

55. North, Dominion Covenant, pp. 69-75.

56. Some might argue that Judas Iscariot's profanity exceeded Adam's. His act of rebellion against the person of Jesus Christ was committed in defiance of greater revelation than Adam had been given.

57. Prior to the Mosaic law, there were such priests: e.g., Melchizedek, Jethro, and Balaam. Balaam was the last of them, a transitional figure who apostatized in his confrontation with Moses, yet who still possessed powers and insights given to him by God. These priests, who were outside the ethnic boundaries of the people of Israel, had been granted their legal status by God prior to the establishment of the geographical boundaries of national Israel.

58. Today, we would say that a pagan is profane in the general Adamic sense, but not profane in a covenantally Christian sense.

59. Because God brings Caesars to the throne who unlawfully claim far more than a tithe, we are usually to obey even the unlawful claims. God brings such men to power in order to judge us. However, God allowed Jeroboan to revolt against Rehoboam in protest against Rehoboam's taxes (I Ki. 12).

60. "And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit" (I Cor. 15:45).

61. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ: According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love: Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved" (Eph. 1:3-6).

62. On the ministerial office of the civil magistrate: "For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil" (Rom. 13:3-4).

63. Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989).

64. "Profanity," in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings, 12 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918), X, pp. 378, 379.

65. Ibid., X, p. 380.

66. North, Is the World Running Down?, pp. 63-64.

67. Ibid., ch. 2.

68. Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, [1864] 1955), III:xv.

69. Writes theologian John Frame: "The non-Christian, of course, can accept an absolute only if that absolute is impersonal and therefore makes no demands and has no power to bless or curse. There are personal gods in paganism, but none of them is absolute; there are absolutes in paganism, but none is personal. Only in Christianity (and in other religions influenced by the Bible) is there such a concept as a `personal absolute.'" John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1987), p. 17.

70. Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology, vol. V of In Defense of Biblical Christianity (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, [1961] 1978), pp. 11-12.

71. Sutton, That You May Prosper, ch. 2.

72. Jordan, Through New Eyes.

73. Gary North, "Publisher's Foreword," House Divided: The Break-Up of Dispensational Theology, by Greg L. Bahnsen and Kenneth L. Gentry (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. xii-xix.

74. Herbert Schlossberg, Idols for Destruction: Christian Faith and Its Confrontation with American Society (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway, [1983] 1993).

75. Richard Kroner, Kant's Weltanschauung (University of Chicago Press, [1914] 1956).

76. Quantum physics represents the invasion of the phenomenal by the noumenal. See North, Is the World Running Down?, ch. 1; Fred Alan Wolfe, Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Non-Scientists (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). So does the newly developing chaos theory, pioneered by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987).

77. Cornelius Van Til, A Christian Theory of Knowledge (Phillipsburg, Jew Jersey: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1969), pp. 63-64.

78. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, ch. 7.

79. R. J. Rushdoony, Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (Fairfax, Virginia: Thoburn Press, [1968] 1978), ch. 8.

80. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (New York: Harper Torchbooks, [1936] 1960).

81. Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age (New York: Dutton, [1941] 1957), ch. 3.

82. Max Weber, "Science as a Vocation" (1918), From Max Weber: Essays on Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 155. Within two decades of Weber's call for the emotionally weak to return to the traditional churches, the Protestant churches had been completely corrupted morally by their compromises with Hitler, who required all Germans to greet each other with a public salutation, "heil Hitler" -- salvation Hitler. (See footnote 89, below.) After World War II, the German Protestant State church became completely liberal theologically. See Chapter 7, below, footnote 42.

83. "Humanist Manifesto II," The Humanist, XXXIII (Oct. 1973); reprinted in Humanist Manifestos I and II (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, [1973] 1985), pp. 13-23.

84. Lyall Watson, Supernature (Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1973); Thelma Moss, The Probability of the Impossible: Scientific Discoveries and Explorations in the Psychic World (Los Angeles: Tarcher, 1974). Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Impossible Probabilities (New York: Stein & Day, [1968] 1971) seems more occult than scientific, but the book is structured as a popular scientific work.

85. Stephen A. McKnight, Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of Modernity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).

86. Gary North, Unholy Spirits: Occultism and New Age Humanism (Ft. Worth, Texas: Dominion Press, 1986).

87. An example of this is Freudian psychology and especially Jungian. Man's subconscious or unconscious -- personal (Freud) or collective (Jung) -- becomes the doorway of the occult, both in theory and practice.

88. Even in animist systems, the gods are part of nature, affected by what goes on in history, using nature as their means of imposing sanctions. The idea of a sovereign Mother Nature generally lies behind the local gods of animism.

89. On the anti-Christian aspects of Nazi theology, see Thomas Schirrmacher, "National Socialism As Religion," Chalcedon Report (Nov. 1992). He points out that the "heil" of "Heil Hitler!" meant salvation Hitler. It was required by law as a public greeting. Small children at school were told before each meal: "Fold your hands, bow your heads and think about Adolph Hitler. He gives us our daily bread and helps us out of every misery." Schirrmacher offers many other examples of Nazi theology. Modern scholarship has produced a huge quantity of studies on Nazi politics; it has produced almost nothing on Nazi religion.

90. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964).

91. Robert A. Nisbet, The Sociological Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 222.

92. Ibid., pp. 226, 243-51.

93. Nisbet writes: "More than any other figure in the history of sociology, Émile Durkheim seems to embody what has proved to be conceptually most distinctive in the field and most fertile in its contribution to other modern disciplines. Durkheim, it might be said, is the complete sociologist." Nisbet, "Introduction," Émile Durkheim (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 1. He continues: "That he was a masterful teacher is witnessed by the long list of important works in almost every field of scholarship -- history, economics, psychology, law, government -- written by men who acknowledged him as their teacher." Idem.

94. Nisbet, Sociological Tradition, p. 243.

95. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (New York: Free Press, [1915] 1965), p. 52.

96. Ibid., pp. 53-54.

97. Ibid., p. 54.

98. Idem.

99. Ibid., p. 55.

100. Idem.

101. Nisbet, Sociological Tradition, pp. 229-31.

102. Cf. W. E. H. Stanmer, "Reflections on Durkheim and Aboriginal Religion" (1967); reprinted in Durkheim on religion: A selection of readings and bibliographies, edited by S. F. Pickering (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 291-96.

103. This is why the office of chaplain can become biblically perverse if the civil covenant is elevated over the church covenant. If the chaplain is required by the armed forces to baptize the child of any serviceman who presents the child for baptism, irrespective of the serviceman's church membership or outward conduct, then the chaplain is being told to break the church's covenantal boundary. The same criticism can be applied to any pastor in a State-established church who is required to baptize any child merely because of its parents' political citizenship. To do so would be a profane act.

104. Technically, because the Bible prohibits women from administering the sacraments, this distinction implies that no woman can lawfully be involved in full-time Christian service, but very few defenders of this concept are willing to say this publicly.

105. Writing this commentary is not sacramental. Neither is editing it, proofreading it, typesetting it, printing it, or writing advertising copy for it.

106. The definition of full-time Christian is usually widened to include non-profit activities in parachurch ministries, though no explanation is ever offered about how such a widened definition is theologically legitimate.

107. The most widely read contemporary fundamentalist defender of this dualistic view of culture is Dave Hunt., e.g., Whatever Happened to Heaven? (Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House, 1988).

108. The willingness of modern American fundamentalists after about 1975 to get involved in cultural and political activities explicitly as Christians indicates a breakdown of the older theological viewpoint. If this continues, it will produce a major restructuring of fundamentalist theology, especially pretribulational dispensationalism. See North, "Publisher's Foreword," House Divided, pp. xviii-xix.

109. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, ch. 4.

110. North, Dominion and Common Grace.

111. North, Is the World Running Down?

112. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, ch. 4. How there can be both economic growth and population growth over several centuries, including increasing per capita wealth, in a world of declining special grace and therefore (presumably) declining common grace, is a theoretical problem which amillennialists and premillennialists prudently ignore, given their view of history, wherein nature steadily swallows grace. The theonomic postmillennialist can point to the spread of social attitudes and civil laws in the West -- right-wing Enlightenment thought: constitutionalism, contractualism, and capitalism ("common grace principles") -- that are consistent with biblical law. External cultural obedience has brought external blessings, even in the face of a compromised and weakened church. In contrast, the systematic refusal of premillennialists and amillennialists to comment on this ethical-cultural relationship has left them incapable of affirming the details, or even the possibility, of an explicitly biblical social theory. This has been their dilemma for over three centuries. On the decline of Protestant casuistry -- the application of general principles to concrete judicial cases in history -- since the late seventeenth century, see Thomas Wood, English Casuistical Divinity During the Seventeenth Century (London: S.P.C.K., 1952), pp. 32-36. Roman Catholic casuistry began to fall into disfavor in the same era: Albert R. Johnson and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), Pt. V.

113. North, Millennialism and Social Theory, pp. 227-29.

114. No theological or eschatological school denies that there can be prolonged set-backs in this manifestation of Christ's rule. Conversely, none would totally deny progress. I know of no one who would argue, for example, that the creeds of the church prior to the fourth century were more rigorous or more accurate theologically than those that came later.

115. This is why amillennialism drifts so easily into Barthianism: the history of mankind for the amillennialist has no visible connection with the ascension of Jesus Christ. Progressive sanctification in this view is limited to the personal and ecclesiastical; it is never cultural or civic. The ascension of Christ has no transforming implications for society in amillennial theology. The ascension was both historical and publicly visible; its implications supposedly are not. The Barthian is simply more consistent than the amillennialist: he denies the historicity of both Jesus' ascension and His subsequent grace to society. Christ's ascension, like His grace, is relegated to the trans-historical. See North, Millennialism and Social Theory, pp. 111-13.

116. Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., He Shall Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Eschatology (Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1992), chaps. 12, 13.

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