The Position of Holiness

Why rule-following without a root of devotion produces brittle, compliance based Christians.

Holiness has more to do with what you do than what you don't do, because holiness defines even what you don't do by what you do. The popular conception treats holiness as apophatic—a list of absences, things withheld, a negative epistemology. But this makes holiness reactive, defined by negation rather than dedication. Purity is defined by what we take out, but holiness is a different concept; holiness is cause, purity is effect.

The refusals follow from the positive dedication that holiness is. They are not the substance—they are the silhouette cast by the substance. Two people can refuse the same thing for entirely different reasons, only one of which may be holy. The refusal looks identical from the outside. The holiness, if present, lives entirely in the positive dedication that generates it.

Holiness is not a fence. It's a field defined by a fence.

This state also exposes why moralism fails as a formation strategy for holiness: training people in absences without cultivating dedication produces rule-followers with no inner compass—people who comply only when watched.

The Circular Error

Refusing temptation to sin out of a desire to be holy is circular reasoning—it makes holiness the object of desire rather than the shape devotion to something else takes. That person is still looking at a reflection of themselves. This is not a purer form of being; it is, rather, a form of spiritual narcissism.

Refusing temptation only becomes genuinely holy when generated by positive dedication—to another person, to a covenant, to God as author of the covenant. Holiness is a byproduct of outward binding, not a goal pursued inward. The integrated person doesn't need to actively refuse because the alternative has become structurally unavailable to their will—not through suppression but through reorientation.

The command is not to manufacture holiness, but to take and keep the sub-position. Holiness is what follows.

Holiness pursued directly is a misdirection. Scripture commands "be holy" (1 Peter 1:16), which is relationally superior to “do holy things”

The Thanksgiving Parallel

Holiness works precisely like Thanksgiving. Both have been reduced, by postmodernism, to private attitudes—but both are by definition transitive acts requiring at least two persons.

We cannot be holy to holiness.

Gratitude detached from its recipient doesn't become purer thanksgiving—it becomes a different thing from thanksgiving entirely. A feeling. A mood. A holiday. An aesthetic disposition toward existence. Having an attitude of gratitude without ever actually thanking anyone is also a misdirection. It gives the self-congratulatory narcissist high without the necessary cost of any humility whatsoever.

This is far more than a category error—it is a moral error. The person with merely an attitude of gratitude retains something that belongs to another. The thanks accrues to them as a character quality instead of being discharged toward its proper recipient. It is a form of embezzlement: holding the feeling, pocketing the virtue, while the actual person who warranted the thanks receives nothing.

Similarly, God cannot find you in a holy state ready for him—because without him holiness is structurally nonsensical, not merely incomplete.

Both words—holy and thankful—are grammatically incomplete without an object. They require the dative case: holy to, thankful to. Remove the "to" and the word quietly changes species in a backward devolution.

This points to a broader principle: many key words of Christian formation are relational transitives that modernity has systematically converted into private intransitives—faith, hope, LOVE, holiness, thanksgiving—each requiring a "to" or "for" that has been silently dropped, and then wondered why the practices feel hollow. LOVE—spelled in all-caps to denote Agape—is all verb, and not just verb, transitive verb. John 3:16 does not say that God LOVED the world so much that he got warm fuzzies all over, but that he LOVED the world so much that He gave His only son for it.

Holiness describes a relationship.

Holiness as Relational Position

Gratitude is a relative position—the second of a two-part harmony requiring at least two persons. “Never before,” said Churchill of the brave airmen of the Battle of Britain, “have so many owed so much to so few.” Thanksgiving can only be located in the space between them. Remove either one and the position dissolves.

Holiness is a sub-position—the second position of a two-part harmony, but with a vertical asymmetry built into the structure. The Other doesn't merely occupy the second voice; they occupy a superposition, a higher register, or the key of the song they’re singing. The sub-position is our orientation to that human-divine asymmetry. We don't produce the key; we find our harmony in a song already being sung from above.

This means holiness isn't just relational—it's hierarchically relational. The sub-position is holy, the superposition is Sanctifier—active, relational, and asymmetrical. None of us can sanctify ourselves; the word grammatically requires an external agent. The Sanctifier doesn't merely occupy a higher register but generates the field in which the sub-position—holy—becomes possible. Remove the Sanctifier and the sub-position has nowhere to be.

Holiness is a hierarchy of harmony, or a hierarchy of humility. 

The full positional structure:

Sanctifier → Holiness → Sanctified

Superposition → Sub-position → the field between them.

The Trinitarian Ground

The Father and the Son are in a state of mutual holiness—and the Holy Spirit is the co-eternal person in whom that mutual holiness has its personal subsistence.

This requires careful statement to avoid theological error. The Spirit is not produced by or emergent from the relationship of Father and Son—as though holiness were prior to personhood and generated the third person as its result. The Holy Spirit proceeds but is not produced; is co-equal and co-eternal, not a relational derivative of. The Spirit is not what holiness becomes—rather, the Spirit is the person in whom the mutual holiness of Father and Son is personally and eternally wrought. Holiness is the character of the relation, not its generative mechanism.

With that precision in place, the Trinitarian witness to holiness is remarkable:

• Psalm 138:2: The Father lifts His Word above His name—the superposition voluntarily orienting itself in devotion to what it has spoken. This is the Father's holiness toward the Son. It’s worth noting that only the KJV gets this right. The Hebrew preposition al (עַל) carries the "above/over" sense—God’s Word is in a superposition. The Septuagint confirms the “above” designation, including “every name” not just God’s name.
• 1 Corinthians 15:27-28: The Son subjects himself finally and fully to the Father, delivering everything back, that God may be all in all. This is the Son's holiness toward the Father. It’s not The Father, alone, who is “all in all”.
• John 17: "Just as you and I are one"—the mutual holiness of the Trinity is the template being extended to creatures.

CS Lewis put it this way in Mere Christianity, Book IV: “God is love, and that love works through men—especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and the Son.” Which runs the risk of invoking the derivative implication I am being careful to avoid. But it is, nonetheless, a helpful way of thinking abut the trinity. One could do the same with the Son—the Word of God—The Father is so holy to His Word that His Word is (not becomes, but is) the second person of the Godhead.

What is mutual between Father and Son is not an alternating hierarchy but directional LOVE within fixed order. The Father is always Father; the Son is always Son—their volition is stable and asymmetrical. What moves in both directions is the disposition of each toward the other: the Father exalting the Word above His name, the Son returning everything to the Father. It’s not that they’re switching roles but rather a mutual self-giving within irreversible order. The Father is never “made subject” to the son (1 Cor 15:27) and yet He lifts His Word above His name (Psalm 138:2)!

The Spirit then extends this internal Trinitarian circulation outward toward creatures—which is why holiness in us is always participatory rather than self-generated. We are drawn into an existing movement, not invited to produce a new one. And so we can obey the command: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy" (Leviticus 19:2). The second surprise is the greater one: The first surprise is that we, mortal humans, can be holy. The second, greater, surprise is that God is holy. We ought to ask to what God could possibly be holy? At face value it looks like an attack against Anselm; but, as we can see, it is not. God’s holiness is intrinsically eternal—it aways is, and always was and will be—perfectly expressed within divine relationship, it’s not a product of divine relationship.

The Trinity is what holiness looks like when it goes all the way down and comes from all the way up.

Holiness, Eden, and the Fall

Holiness is ontological and existential—not epistemic in the sense of acquisition, like knowing good from evil.

Adam in his pre-sin state may have had the capacity to recognize good from evil, not through an epistemic framework but through ontological holiness—being positioned within the good rather than standing outside it as an evaluating knower. He was inside the field. No map was needed because he was in the territory.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil offers precisely an epistemic alternative which turns out to be far less valuable than the salesman purported: It is a categorizing, acquiring, systematizing cognition that places the knower above the categories, able to evaluate and define them independently. The serpent's offer is "you will be like God, knowing..."—the promise of autonomous epistemic authority. It is much like Stephen Hawking’s “then we shall know the mind of God.” in his book A Brief History of Time. The mind of God is knowable ontologically, but not epistemically. Indeed if one were to know God’s mind epistemically one would be in a greater existential position than God. Was Hawking reaching for Babel’s tower, for Isaiah 14:13-14’s ascension? I think he was, foolishly. Foolishly because “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down) 7 “or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). 8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (Ro 10:6–8). There is no need for epistemic ascension and descension, He is ontologically near.

Adam didn't need that apparatus because he was positioned—inhabiting the sub-position, inside the circulation. The fall is therefore not primarily moral failure—though it is emphatically that also. The fall is ontological dislocation from the sanctifier superposition, and it is simultaneously an act of rebellion. The dislocation was not merely suffered; it was chosen. Which makes it both displacement and defection—metaphysical and moral at once, neither dimension reducible to the other. Scripture is unambiguous that the fall involves guilt, disobedience, and judgment—not merely a change of position, but we have focused on the rebellion and ignored the dislocation.

The ontological framing deepens the moral account rather than replacing it: the rebellion was precisely the act of vacating the position that made moral coherence possible. Adam didn't just do wrong. He dismantled the holy ground on which his relationship with God stood.

The knowledge gained is immediately confirmed by its first products—shame and confusion. He now knows nakedness is a problem and he knows fear. Before, ontological holiness rendered the evaluative category irrelevant. He was so fully in the right position that no framework was needed. Now he needs one—and it doesn't help. Before he might have said “that is wrong but I don’t know why.” Now he says, “I am wrong, I know why, but I don’t know precisely what or what to do about it.”

Autonomous epistemic “holiness” is the fall dressed in religious clothing. It is clothing, but it is not holiness at all.

This also explains why moralism consistently fails as a redemptive strategy. You cannot behave your way back into a position you were displaced from by an act of will. The dislocation is prior to the behavior. Trying to fix the behavior without addressing the dislocation is like treating a dislocated shoulder with painkillers—symptom management but the joint remains out of socket.

Redemption Reframed

If sin is ontological dislocation, salvation cannot primarily be forgiveness—though forgiveness is essential and must not be minimized. Salvation must also be relocation—re-insertion into the sanctifier superposition. Sin must be forgiven, paid for, and reversed. Forgiveness addresses the guilt of the defection; relocation addresses the dislocation. Both are necessary; neither is sufficient alone.

The incarnation achieves precisely this: the Word re-enters the field from the superposition, establishes the sub-position perfectly as a human being—"not my will but yours"—and opens the circulation again from within creaturely existence. Atonement is ontological relocation.

Sanctification is the progress of the stabilization of that relocation—learning to hold the sub-position without chronic drift back toward epistemic self-sufficiency—knowing good from evil. The command be holy (1 Peter 1:16) is real and binding. But the means of obeying it is not the direct manufacture of holiness—it is the taking and keeping of the sub-position. Holiness follows from position as fruit follows from root.

The command is not “do holy things”, it is “be holy”. Holy people do holy things by definition.

Holiness isn't achieved. It's inhabited.

Election Reoriented

This framework reorients the doctrine of election entirely. Election is ontological, existential, and empirical—it is not a mechanism of selection from a raw material state.

• Ontological: it concerns your positioning in relation to the Sanctifier superposition. Not a status conferred externally but a location inhabited actually.
• Existential: it is lived, not merely decreed. You know it the way Adam knew the good before the dislocation—not as information about your state but as the state itself.
• Empirical: the relocation produces observable and replicable reality. Romans 8:16—the Spirit witnesses with our spirit. That is an empirical event, not a logical deduction.

Election is not a list. It is a field. The Calvinist/Arminian deadlock argues about the mechanism of selection—who chooses, when, on what basis. But if election is ontological rather than epistemic, both sides are debating the wrong category. The question is not selection from a pool but participation in a circulation.

The question shifts from "am I one of the elect?"—an epistemic anxiety about designation—to the ontological question: am I oriented toward the Sanctifier? Am I in the sub-position?

This is a more navigable and more merciful question—but it must be pastorally handled with care. Doubt is not automatically evidence of dislocation. Many sincere believers struggle with assurance not because they are outside the position but because they are disoriented and yet within it—by suffering, trauma, circumstance, spiritual attack, or temperament. The question to ask in seasons of doubt is not "do I have the correct designation?" but "what is my orientation?"—which is answerable, actionable, and does not crush those whose faith is real but whose perception is clouded.

Assurance is the natural fruit of inhabiting the sub-position—not a guaranteed automatic perception of it. The absence of felt assurance does not equal absence from the field.

For those outside the field the whole question of the Lordship of Christ is nonsensical—foolishness and stumbling blocks (1 Cor 1:23). Which is also not an indication of an eternal state of dislocation.

Assurance isn't a doctrine to be believed. It's a position to be inhabited—and a position can be occupied even when it cannot be felt.

So what?

In John 8 we have the record of Jesus dealing with the woman caught in adultery. I want to focus on his words right at the end of the discourse. He says to her, “go and sin no more.” (John 8:11). It’s a command that speaks to the heart of this article. Does Jesus mean “do holy things”, or does he mean “be holy”?

He is not issuing a summons to self-generated holiness—do holy things—but a command of relocation—be holy. The force of “go” is not mere dismissal; it is a call to continue on a new course, away from the old pattern of dislocation and into a life newly ordered by His mercy. It is an ontological command. The command is not “manufacture holiness,” but “remain on my path,” the word is “go” but the implication is “come”. It is a gracious relocation: leave the old path of lonely dislocation and continue in the direction you were made for, no longer alone but with the One whose road you have just stepped onto. 

The command “be holy” lands as an invitation to stay on the path you were made to travel, to continue without turning back, and to remain with Him who will travel with you. Holiness is a state of being rather than a crushing performance demand.