From One Realm to Another: Definitive Sanctification and a Theological Reading of Leviticus

The language of being clean or unclean throughout the Scriptures has beget a myriad of theological enquiries throughout the ages. What does it mean to be unclean? Is this a moral indictment or merely a positional one? And as the discipline of systematic theology has grown and evolved over recent centuries, and interacted with texts like those found in Leviticus, these kinds of questions have been brought into the realm and verbiage of soteriology. Are declarations of a person’s cleanliness amidst the wilderness tabernacle a matter of justification or sanctification? To be more pointed, by promoting a definitive sanctification, or the theological idea that one is declared to be positionally holy by virtue of his or her union with Christ, are theologians and exegetes “muddying the waters” of either systematic theology, as is the claim of John Fesko, or of what’s being described throughout Israel’s cultic system? It is the argument of this paper that a biblical-theological exploration of Scripture’s use of clean and unclean, as well as holy and profane, provides theological warrant and precedent for the concept of definitive sanctification. This will be demonstrated by giving a theological reading of Leviticus’s use of clean and unclean language that coheres with broader canonical speech regarding what it means to be set apart for God. From the heart of the Pentateuch to the sermonic declarations of the letter to the Hebrews, the authors of Scripture, divine and human, are teaching in thoroughly theological register. Those seemingly foreign Levitical proclamations of one’s cultic cleanliness or uncleanliness are revelations of a much broader reality than merely one’s physical allowance into the domain of God’s earthly tabernacle. Rather, these declarations of cleanness and uncleanness throughout the typological covenants of the Old Testament are testifying to the greater realities of one’s sanctification, or one’s being set apart by God’s Spirit, within the new and better covenant that has come in and through the great High Priest Jesus. To put it more succinctly, the divine author providentially utilized Levitical types and shadows in order to give a soteriological lesson on sanctification for the people of God.