Be Holy, for I Am Holy
Gift and Summons in Leviticus 11:44–45, 19:2 and 1 Peter 1:15–16
Abstract
The refrain “be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44–45; 19:2; 1 Peter 1:15–16) is heard both as a declaration that God has made, or is making, His people holy because He is holy, and as a summons to pursue holiness because He is holy. This essay tests both readings against the grammar and literary context of the three texts, letting exegesis decide and theology follow. It finds that every finite verb the three sentences predicate of Israel or the church is volitional in form, in sequence or in legal setting (the reflexive hitpael and weqatal chain of Leviticus 11:44–45, the legal yiqtol that heads Leviticus 19, the aorist imperative genēthēte and the imperatival future esesthe of 1 Peter), so that the summons is what the sentences say; and that every summons presupposes the hearers’ belonging (“your God”; “the one who called you”) and is grounded by a causal clause in God’s holiness, in His act of bringing out, separating and possessing Israel and, in the adjacent signature “I am the LORD who sanctifies you”, in His own sanctifying, so that the gift is what they presuppose and assert. Neither reading survives in the form in which the commission phrased it: “you have been made holy” is not the asserted sense of the main clause, since it cannot be extracted from a θη-aorist of ginomai, and “strive towards holiness” is not the sense of its verbs, since it imports a telic vocabulary they do not use; in their defensible forms both survive, (A) as what the sentences presuppose and their grounds assert, (B) as what the main clause says. Within Leviticus the people’s presupposed status is “separated” and “mine”, which is holiness in its ontic aspect only on the relational definition the essay adopts; “holy” is first predicated of them as present fact in Deuteronomy, and of the church in the New Testament. Distinguishing four senses of priority, the essay concludes that the indicative is the ground and the imperative is the point, and that God sanctifies His people through the summons He addresses to them, conclusions that hold on both Reformed and Wesleyan accounts of sanctification.
1. Introduction
1.1 The refrain, the question and the commission
Three times the Scriptures place in the mouth of God a sentence that has become the motto of biblical holiness. At the close of the dietary law He says, “Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy”, and again, “You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44–45). At the head of the central chapter of the Holiness Code He says, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Leviticus 19:2). And Peter, opening the exhortations of his first letter, writes, “as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Peter 1:15–16).1
The refrain is heard in two ways in evangelical pulpits, and often in the same sermon: as comfort (because He is holy, He has made His people holy) and as demand (because He is holy, His people are to pursue holiness). Neither hearing is new. Luther, in the sermons on 1 Peter that he published in 1523, said of this verse, “As then God our Master is holy, so are His people holy also, and we are all holy if we walk in faith”; the Sifra glossed the words Peter quotes, qĕdōšîm tihyû, as pĕrûšîm tihyû, “you shall be separate”; and Calvin, within his comment on 1 Peter 1:15, hears “ye are mine” as what the sentence takes for granted, “abstain from the pollutions of the Gentiles” as what it requires, and “I am he who sanctify you” as what God “also adds”.2 The two hearings answer to a real question about the grammar of three sentences and, behind the grammar, about the relation between what God does and what His people do.
The commission
This essay was commissioned with the following brief:
Explore Leviticus 11:44–45, 19:2 and 1 Peter 1:15–16. In particular, focus on the relative merits between the “because I am holy, you have been made (or are being made) holy” interpretation and the “because I am holy, you should strive towards holiness” interpretation. If both interpretations hold up to scrutiny, explain which (if either) should be given priority.
1.2 Method and posture
The method of this essay is to let exegesis go first: the Hebrew and Greek forms, the structure of the clauses and the literary setting of each sentence settle what the sentences say before any dogmatic category is admitted. The essay is written from an orthodox, evangelical Protestant perspective and treats Scripture as the final authority; it engages critical scholarship, including the distinction between the Priestly writing (P) and the Holiness legislation (H), without making the argument hostage to any theory of composition (§4.1). On divine determinism it neither commits itself to the doctrine nor denies it: where the Reformed and Wesleyan accounts of sanctification differ over how God’s sanctifying and the believer’s consecration are related, both are described, and the essay shows from the texts (§7.6; §9.1) that its conclusions do not depend on adjudicating between them. The primary texts are cited from critical editions, whose morphological tags are treated as the editors’ judgements rather than as data.3
1.3 Thesis
The thesis is that both interpretations survive scrutiny, but not in the same way and not in the forms in which the commission phrased them: “you have been made holy” is not the asserted sense of the main clause, and “strive towards holiness” is not the sense of its verbs. Read for what the three sentences say, the refrain is a summons, since every finite verb they predicate of Israel or the church is volitional in form, in sequence or in legal setting; read for what they presuppose and for what their subordinate clauses assert, the refrain is a gift, since each summons takes the hearers’ belonging for granted, is grounded in God’s holiness and His act, and stands beside the signature “I am the LORD who sanctifies you”. The imperative reading therefore has priority in what the sentences say, and the indicative reading has priority as their ground and in the order in which they are to be heard.
2. Terms, the Two Interpretations and the Distinctions that Carry the Argument
2.1 “Holy”: the one holiness never derived, and the verb of sanctifying
Everything turns on an adjective, and the adjective is God’s before it is anyone else’s. Scripture predicates holiness of God absolutely and never grounds it in anything beyond Him. When Aaron’s sons are consumed, the LORD’s word is בִּקְרֹבַי אֶקָּדֵשׁ (biqrōbay ʾeqqādēš, “among those who are near me I will be sanctified”, Leviticus 10:3), a niphal whose subject is God and whose sense is that His holiness is shown, not acquired. Hartley states the consequence in a form this essay adopts as its anchor: only the LORD is intrinsically holy, and persons and things are holy by their relation to Him.4 Every creaturely holiness is therefore derived (§4.3; §6.2). What the adjective means has been contested, between separation (Snaith), consecration or belonging to God (Costecalde, Gentry, Wells) and graded nearness to the divine presence (Jenson), and the essay need not adjudicate; Leviticus 20:26 itself counsels against collapsing holiness into separation (§4.4).5 What it does need, and what every party to the lexical debate grants, is that holiness predicated of persons is one relational concept, being set apart to and corresponding to the Holy One, which has an ontic aspect (whose they are) and an ethical aspect (how they live); when the essay speaks of “status” and “conduct” it means these two aspects of one holiness, not two senses of the word.
More secure than the lexical debate is the distribution of the verbal stems. The adjective קָדוֹשׁ (qādôš) is predicated of God in the clauses introduced by כִּי (kî, “for”, “because”) and of Israel in clauses whose verb is הָיָה (hāyâ, “to be”). Within Leviticus, where lay Israel is the object of the verb, the factitive piel has God as its subject: מְקַדִּשְׁכֶם (mĕqaddišĕkem, “the one who sanctifies you”, Leviticus 20:8; 21:8; 22:32; so also Exodus 31:13); human subjects of the piel in Leviticus consecrate things and priests (8:10–30; 16:19; 21:8; 25:10), never the people. Outside Leviticus Moses and Joshua are told to consecrate the people (Exodus 19:10, 14; Joshua 7:13), but in each case the consecration is the preparatory washing and abstention before a theophany or a judgement, the same act that the people’s own hitpael denotes in the same contexts (Exodus 19:22; Joshua 7:13; §3.2), and not the conferral of the holiness that is God’s. The reflexive hitpael has Israel as subject: וְהִתְקַדִּשְׁתֶּם (wĕhitqaddištem, “consecrate yourselves”, 11:44; 20:7). In Leviticus the niphal has God as subject and means “be shown holy” (10:3; 22:32). Within this field divine agency towards the people speaks in the piel, human response in the hitpael, divine self-manifestation in the niphal, and status in the adjective.
The Greek field is simpler. In the Leviticus texts studied here the Septuagint renders the adjective by ἅγιος (hagios) and the verb, in whatever stem, by ἁγιάζω (hagiazō), distinguishing the piel from the hitpael and the niphal by voice alone (active against θη-forms), and the latter two not at all (§3.3). In the New Testament ἁγιάζω with a human object predominantly has God or Christ as agent.6 The narrower point is this: Peter uses ἁγιάζω once, at 3:15, with Christ as object; a θη-imperative of the verb, ἁγιάσθητε (hagiasthēte), was available to him at 1:15, and the Septuagint uses θη-forms of ἁγιάζω to render the hitpael “consecrate yourselves” (Leviticus 11:44; Exodus 19:22; 1 Samuel 16:5), so that the form is open to a reflexive as much as to a passive hearing; at 1:15 he used neither it nor any other form of ἁγιάζω (§5.2).
2.2 Interpretation (A): the indicative and its sub-variants
Interpretation (A) hears the refrain as a declaration: because God is holy, His people have been made holy, or are being made holy. A1 is definitive, “you have been made holy”, holiness as a decisive and completed act of God upon the person: for Murray a real and definitive breach with the dominion of sin in union with Christ, for Peterson God’s taking possession of His people in Christ; its dogmatic homes are the Reformed doctrine of definitive sanctification and, in Wesleyan dogmatics, the “initial sanctification” that accompanies regeneration, and its canonical home is the texts that predicate holiness of the people as accomplished fact (Deuteronomy 7:6; 1 Corinthians 6:11; Hebrews 10:10; 1 Peter 2:9).7 A2 is progressive, “you are being made holy”; its canonical home is the language of transformation and growth (2 Corinthians 3:18; Hebrews 10:14, on one reading of its participle; 1 Peter 2:2, 5). Beneath both lies a neutral third, the agency form, “I am the one who sanctifies you”, God named as agent without a tense assigned to His work; it is what Leviticus itself voices, in an aspectually unmarked participle (§4.4). One caution governs every form of (A): Numbers 16 refuses Korah’s inference from the congregation’s holiness to priestly access (16:3, 5, 7, 10), so that the people’s holiness, where it is granted, is God’s conferral within an order He assigns, and (A) must be stated as “God has made you holy” and never as “you are holy in yourselves”.
2.3 Interpretation (B): the imperative and its sub-variants
Interpretation (B) hears the refrain as a summons: because God is holy, His people are to be holy. B1 is summary, “be holy in all your conduct”, a demand for a whole manner of life in correspondence with the Holy One. B2 is telic, “strive towards holiness”, a demand to make progress towards a goal not yet reached; its canonical home is the verbs of pursuit and completion, “Strive … for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14, diōkete) and “bringing holiness to completion” (2 Corinthians 7:1, epitelountes hagiōsynēn). The commission’s wording, “you should strive towards holiness”, is B2 (§6.2).
2.4 Senses of “priority”, the test of scrutiny, and two distinctions
(a) Which reading should be given priority depends on what “priority” means. Four senses are distinguished, and §8 returns a verdict in each: priority in what the sentences say, their illocutionary force and the immediate response they call for; priority of ground, what must already hold for the sentence to be sayable and its stated reason true; priority of pastoral order, what must be heard first for the other to be heard as gospel rather than as bare law; and priority of end, the final state towards which God’s gift and the people’s conduct together tend. The test of scrutiny is correspondingly simple: a reading holds up if grammar and context require or permit it, and over-reaches when it claims that the sentence says what only its context says.
(b) The first of two further distinctions, between what a sentence asserts and what it presupposes, is the hinge of the argument. The test for the difference is negation: a presupposition survives the denial of the sentence that carries it, as Strawson’s king of France survives the denial that he is bald.8 In the refrain, the clauses introduced by kî and ὅτι (hoti) assert a ground concerning God, while “your God”, “to be your God” and “the one who called you” presuppose the hearers’ belonging to the speaker. Reading (A)’s material therefore lies in what the main clause presupposes and in what the subordinate clause asserts, and reading (B)’s in the main clause itself, which is why “priority” must be relative to a sense.
(c) The second concerns the promise that may be heard inside a command, and two things must be kept apart. The first is a formal ambiguity: a non-imperative form in injunctive use, the Hebrew yiqtol or the Greek future, can carry directive and commissive force at once, “you shall be holy” being heard as demand and as undertaking in one breath. Such a double hearing is licensed only under three conditions: that the speaker can bring about what He commands; that the context contains explicit undertakings of that kind (Leviticus 20:8; Exodus 31:13; 1 Peter 1:5; 5:10; and, in the wider canon, Jeremiah 31:33; 1 Thessalonians 5:23–24); and that the literal directive force is preserved, not replaced. Section 5.4 finds these conditions met for the yiqtol of 19:2 and the future esesthe of 1 Peter 1:16, and finds the double hearing unavailable to genēthēte, which, standing in a chain of general precepts addressed to the readers’ conduct, is a directive and unambiguous in mood; §8.4 draws out the consequence for the shared end. The second is theological rather than grammatical: the “covered promise” that attaches to every divine command, imperatives included, by virtue of God’s undertakings elsewhere and not by virtue of form (§7.5). Genēthēte lacks the first and shares the second; and the difference between it and the futures lies in the forms, not in the speakers (§5.4; §9.3). The essay also borrows from Searle two of the “preparatory conditions” of a directive: that the hearer is able to do what is directed, and that it is not obvious to speaker and hearer that the hearer will do, or already be, what is directed, of his own accord (§5.2; §7.2).9
3. Leviticus 11:44–45
3.1 Setting and structure
The two verses close the dietary law of Leviticus 11. Verse 43 has forbidden the people to make themselves detestable with swarming things, and so to defile themselves with them and become unclean through them (the essay’s rendering of וְנִטְמֵתֶם, wĕniṭmētem); verse 47 states the purpose of the chapter, לְהַבְדִּיל (lĕhabdîl, “to make a distinction”) between the unclean and the clean. Between them stand the verses under examination, whose clause structure, read with the OpenScriptures morphology, is as follows.
Who God is: כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם (kî ʾănî YHWH ʾĕlōhêkem, “for I am the LORD your God”).
Consecrate yourselves, and be holy: וְהִתְקַדִּשְׁתֶּם וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים (wĕhitqaddištem wihyîtem qĕdōšîm; a hitpael weqatal and a qal weqatal, both second person plural).
What God is: כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אָנִי (kî qādôš ʾānî, “for I am holy”).
Do not defile yourselves: וְלֹא תְטַמְּאוּ אֶת־נַפְשֹׁתֵיכֶם (wĕlōʾ tĕṭammĕʾû ʾet-napšōtêkem, a negated piel yiqtol).
What God has done, and to what end: כִּי אֲנִי יְהוָה הַמַּעֲלֶה אֶתְכֶם מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לִהְיֹת לָכֶם לֵאלֹהִים (an articular hiphil participle, hammaʿăleh, with an infinitive of purpose, lihyōt lākem lēʾlōhîm).
Be holy: וִהְיִיתֶם קְדֹשִׁים (a qal weqatal).
What God is: כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אָנִי.
Two observations follow. First, the injunctions addressed to Israel are enclosed on every side by indicatives about God: who He is, what He is, what He has done and to what end. Second, no indicative in the two verses predicates holiness of Israel.
3.2 Wĕhitqaddištem: the reflexive and its limit
The first verb Israel is given is a hitpael, wĕhitqaddištem, in the weqatal form which, resuming the prohibitions of verse 43 across the intervening motive clause, carries the series of commands forward (the independent injunctive weqatal of Priestly legal style). The hitpael is the reflexive counterpart of the factitive piel, so that Israel’s hitqaddēš answers God’s mĕqaddēš, one verb in two stems.10 Its usage is consistent across its roughly two dozen occurrences: it denotes self-preparation for a sacred encounter or service (Exodus 19:22; Numbers 11:18; Joshua 3:5; 7:13; 1 Samuel 16:5; the priests and Levites of 2 Chronicles 29:5, 15; 30:15; 35:6), and once purification from uncleanness (2 Samuel 11:4), never an agent conferring upon himself the holiness that is God’s; even Isaiah 66:17 uses it of pagan self-consecration to a rite. In 11:44 the measure of preparation is spelt out at once: “You shall not defile yourselves with any swarming thing”.
That clause supplies an antonym test which cuts both ways. The form וְלֹא תִטַּמְּאוּ בָּהֶם (wĕlōʾ tiṭṭammĕʾû bāhem) in 11:43 is a hitpael, its prefixed ת assimilated to the ט and marked by the dagesh, so that hitqaddēš in 11:44 answers hiṭṭammēʾ in 11:43 stem for stem, before the piel “do not make yourselves unclean” repeats the prohibition with an object. “Do not make yourselves unclean” names an act indisputably within human power, and the command presupposes that its avoidance is within human power too. The hitpael therefore names a real human act with a performable opposite, honouring, in the modified sense of §7.2, the preparatory condition of a command; this is the strongest grammatical support the verse offers to reading (B). But what the hitpael itself denotes is preparation and the avoidance of defilement; whether the people’s act or God’s produces the holiness that follows, the verse does not say, and the nearest verse that does names God: “I am the LORD who sanctifies you” (20:8).
3.3 Wihyîtem qĕdōšîm: injunction with consequential colour
The second verb, wihyîtem qĕdōšîm, is a qal weqatal continuing the chain; it recurs at 11:45, 20:7, 20:26 (with לִי, “to me”) and Numbers 15:40. On one reading the weqatal is continuative and injunctive, “consecrate yourselves and be holy”, the default after a volitional form and the rendering of the ESV;11 on the other it is consequential, “consecrate yourselves, and so you will be holy”, the construction of 11:43, where wĕniṭmētem bām (“and become unclean through them”) states the consequence of the forbidden act, and of Numbers 15:40, where the same weqatal continues a purpose clause, “and be holy to your God”. The verdict is that the form is injunctive with a consequential colour: the holiness is future and conditional upon the commanded act, and the text does not say who brings it about.
The Septuagint of 11:44 bears on both readings. It renders the hitpael by a future passive, ἁγιασθήσεσθε (hagiasthēsesthe, “you shall be sanctified”), and the weqatal by καὶ ἅγιοι ἔσεσθε. A θη-form of ἁγιάζω is the Septuagint’s regular equivalent of the hitpael of קדשׁ, its tense and mood following the Hebrew (the aorist imperatives ἁγιασθήτωσαν at Exodus 19:22 and ἁγιάσθητε at 1 Samuel 16:5 answer Hebrew imperatives, the future here answers the weqatal), and, like any θη-form without an expressed agent (§5.2), it leaves the agent unstated, so that the sentence can be heard as “you shall be made holy” as well as “you shall consecrate yourselves”; it admits reading (A) in that weak sense. Yet the same verse renders the prohibition by the future οὐ μιανεῖτε, the Greek legal idiom for a command, so that the futures carry no promissory surplus merely by being futures. A control is that elsewhere the Septuagint renders the same hitpael by the aorist middle imperative ἁγνίσασθε εἰς αὔριον (hagnisasthe eis aurion, Numbers 11:18; Joshua 3:5) and by θη-aorist imperatives of ἁγιάζω, ἁγιασθήτωσαν (Exodus 19:22) and ἁγιάσθητε (1 Samuel 16:5), so that the θη-form at 11:44 was the translators’ ordinary equivalent and the middle of ἁγνίζω the one genuine alternative of voice.12 The Greek admits (A) while proving neither divine agency nor promise.
3.4 The motive clauses: what they assert and what they presuppose
Each injunction is grounded, and the grounds are of three kinds. The first, kî ʾănî YHWH ʾĕlōhêkem, is Zimmerli’s formula of self-introduction, in which the speaker discloses His name and with it His claim; its paradigm is Exodus 20:2, and in the Holiness Code it typically closes a law as a signature.13 The second, kî qādôš ʾānî, is a causal kî: Aejmelaeus’s study of the particle confirms that its function in such clauses is to give a reason, and the Hebrew does not say “as I am holy”, which would require כַּאֲשֶׁר or כְּ, but “because I am holy”.14 The third, in 11:45, is the exodus formula with its purpose clause: the participle hammaʿăleh is an aspectually unmarked characterisation, “the one who brings (ESV: brought) you up”, which the Septuagint’s aorist participle ὁ ἀναγαγών and most versions refer to the accomplished exodus, and “to be your God” is one half of the covenant formula, stating the end for which the exodus was accomplished.
Here the distinction of §2.4(b) does its first work. What the clauses assert is that God is holy and that He is the one bringing Israel up out of Egypt. What they presuppose, by “your God” and by the purpose clause, is that the hearers already belong to the speaker; the indicative on which 11:45 rests its injunction is thus God’s possession of Israel, “to be your God”, and not Israel’s achieved holiness. In sum, Leviticus 11:44–45 commands conduct; its asserted grounds are God’s holiness and God’s act, its presupposition is Israel’s belonging to Him, and the agent of the holiness commanded is not named.
4. Leviticus 19:2
4.1 The Holiness Code and chapter 19 at its centre
Leviticus 17–26 has been called the Holiness Code (Heiligkeitsgesetz) since Klostermann proposed the name in 1877. Knohl distinguished a Priestly Torah, which confines holiness to the sanctuary and its rites, from a later Holiness School, which extends holiness to the whole people, fuses cultic with ethical demand, and treats holiness as attained by obedience and forfeited by disobedience; Deuteronomy, by contrast, declares Israel’s holiness as a status grounded in election (7:6; 14:2, 21).15 On this analysis 11:43–45 is itself an insertion of the Holiness School closing a Priestly food law, which is why it speaks as 19:2 speaks. A reader who rejects the division of sources may use the observation without the theory, for the three registers are observable on the canonical surface; and the analysis does not place the Leviticus texts squarely under reading (B), since the signature of the Holiness legislation itself names God as the sanctifier of His people (20:8; 22:32; §4.4).
Chapter 19 stands at the centre of the collection. Unusually, it is addressed “to all the congregation of the people of Israel” (19:2), and the Sifra explains the assembly by saying that most of the essential principles of the Torah depend on this section, while Leviticus Rabbah finds the Decalogue within it. Cult and ethics are interwoven without hierarchy, from parents, Sabbath and idols (19:3–4) to the love of neighbour and of the resident alien (19:18, 33–34), and Gaß has shown how the chapter’s motive clauses make “holy” the term linking the sanctification of God’s name, the fear of God and the love of neighbour. The refrain “I am the LORD (your God)” punctuates the chapter fifteen times after the heading, and the chapter closes, as 11:45 and 22:33 close their units, with the self-introduction expanded by the exodus formula (19:36–37).16
4.2 Qĕdōšîm tihyû: the form of a command, and what the form alone cannot decide
The heading reads קְדֹשִׁים תִּהְיוּ כִּי קָדוֹשׁ אֲנִי יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם (qĕdōšîm tihyû kî qādôš ʾănî YHWH ʾĕlōhêkem). The predicate adjective stands first, as in the cognate clauses of 21:6 and 8, so that the clause names the quality before the verb: “holy is what you shall be”. The verb is a second-person yiqtol without negation, in legal discourse the ordinary vehicle of positive command, “you shall”.17 The decisive evidence is the chapter itself: the commands that follow use the identical form, tîrāʾû and tišmōrû (“you shall revere … you shall keep”, 19:3) and lōʾ taʿăśû (“[you shall not] make”, 19:4). Leviticus 19:2b is formally indistinguishable from the commands it heads, which is the strongest grammatical case for reading (B), and a very strong one.
It is not a case the form can carry alone, because the same form carries promise elsewhere. At Exodus 19:6 the identical verb with a predicate of holiness, וְאַתֶּם תִּהְיוּ־לִי … גוֹי קָדוֹשׁ (wĕʾattem tihyû-lî … gôy qādôš), declares what Israel will be to God, conditional upon the obedience of 19:5 and granted by God; at Exodus 22:31 (MT 22:30) the same verb with a holiness predicate, “men of holiness you shall be to me” (ESV “You shall be consecrated to me”), introduces a food law as Leviticus 11:44–45 concludes one. Context must decide, and the context of 19:2 is a chapter of commands. The Septuagint renders ἅγιοι ἔσεσθε (hagioi esesthe), the Greek legal future that is the command, and 1 Peter 1:15–16 confirms the hearing by placing the future immediately after an aorist imperative (§§5.1, 5.4). Reception is unanimous: the Sifra glossed qĕdōšîm tihyû as pĕrûšîm tihyû, “you shall be separate”, substituting the adjective and keeping the yiqtol with its injunctive force, and Rashi, drawing on it, paraphrased with the bare imperative hĕwû pĕrûšîm, “be separate” from forbidden unions and from sin, so that the earliest Jewish readers heard the form as a command; Nahmanides read a directive to abstain even from what is permitted; the Vulgate rendered sancti estote; and the essay knows of no version, ancient or modern, that renders the clause as a prediction.18
4.3 Kî qādôš ʾănî YHWH ʾĕlōhêkem: ground, standard or source
The motive clause is causal, as in 11:44–45 (§3.4): the Hebrew says “because”, not “as”. Three construals of the causal relation are possible. On the first, God’s holiness is the ground of the command: a holy God cannot have an unholy people near Him, the logic of Jenson’s gradient and of 10:3, “among those who are near me I will be sanctified”, that is, shown holy (§2.1). On the second, it is the standard to be imitated, imitatio Dei. So the Sifra heard the parallel clause at 11:44, reading the motive as a comparison between God’s separateness and Israel’s (as God is separate, so Israel is to be separate), in the form in which Nahmanides quotes the passage on 19:2. So Milgrom reads chapter 19, as spelling out the conduct by which Israel attains the holiness God commands, and so most evangelical commentators gloss the verse.19 On the third, it is the source from which Israel’s holiness is communicated, a construal favoured by the companion indicatives of §4.4 and by §2.1, and permitted (though not proved) by the Septuagint’s passive at 11:44 (§3.3): if God’s holiness alone is underived, any creaturely holiness grounded in it is derived from it.
The rabbis themselves felt the pressure of the second construal and bounded it. Leviticus Rabbah, on “You shall be holy”, asks whether one might suppose “like Me”, and answers from “for I am holy” that God’s holiness is superior to the holiness of His people; and the Sifra, on “for I am holy”, says that God remains in His holiness whether or not Israel sanctifies Him, the earliest Jewish statement that the holiness named in the motive clause does not depend on Israel’s response (§2.1).20 The verdict of this essay is that the particle is causal, so that the first and third construals, which both take “because” at face value, state its sense, while the second is a legitimate inference from the content of 19:3–37 rather than from the particle; and that between ground and source the particle does not choose, the choice being made for the third construal by the companion indicatives (§4.4) and by the theology of §2.1. Indeed the chapter’s explicit comparisons are horizontal, not vertical: the neighbour and the alien are to be loved “as yourself” (19:18, 34) and the alien treated “as the native” (19:34), and God is never the explicit term of a comparison. Applying §2.4(b) once more, the clause asserts God’s holiness and, by the possessive אֱלֹהֵיכֶם, presupposes Israel’s belonging in the same breath. This verdict matters for §8, since a “because” that names a reason makes room, in its canonical setting, for the Sanctifier Himself to be that reason, so that the clause which grounds reading (B) is also the place where the context installs reading (A).
4.4 The companion indicatives, and what Leviticus never says
The refrain does not stand alone in the Holiness Code; it is flanked by indicatives that name God as the sanctifier. The first is 20:7–8: “Consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, for I am the LORD your God. Keep my statutes and do them”, and then, without any connective, אֲנִי יְהוָה מְקַדִּשְׁכֶם (ʾănî YHWH mĕqaddišĕkem), “I am the LORD who sanctifies you”. The participle is aspectually unmarked: it characterises God as the one who sanctifies His people without fixing whether that sanctifying is complete, continuing or habitual (compare hammaʿăleh at 11:45), and the asyndeton leaves unstated whether God’s sanctifying is the ground of the people’s consecrating (“because I sanctify you, keep”) or its mode (“keep, and in that keeping I sanctify you”). Here the Reformed reader hears efficient cause and the Wesleyan gracious enabling (§7.6); the essay stops where the text stops.
The second is 20:26: “You shall be holy to me, for I the LORD am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine.” The kî clause names a state (God is holy) and a completed act with its purpose (wāʾabdil ʾetkem … lihyôt lî), answered by Israel’s own separating at 20:25. The text thus distinguishes what Israel is, separated and God’s own, from what Israel is to be, holy. The third is 21:8, “You shall sanctify him … He shall be holy to you, for I, the LORD, who sanctify you, am holy”, where the singular addressee of וְקִדַּשְׁתּוֹ (wĕqiddaštô) is disputed and the plural mĕqaddišĕkem may embrace the whole people or, as the Septuagint’s ὁ ἁγιάζων αὐτούς takes it, the priests (21:1); on either construal a human agent sanctifies the priest, the priest is to be holy, and God is named as the sanctifier of those He addresses, so that the verse is coherent only on a both/and. The fourth is 22:32–33, “that I may be sanctified (וְנִקְדַּשְׁתִּי, wĕniqdaštî, a niphal, as at 10:3) among the people of Israel. I am the LORD who sanctifies you, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God”: sanctification runs in both directions. Behind all four stands Exodus 31:13, where the Sabbath is kept “that you may know that I, the LORD, sanctify you”. Commentators of every confessional position treat the participle and the hitpael as complementary rather than competing.21
Then comes the negative datum, the exegesis’s most important concession to (B). Leviticus never says “you are holy” of lay Israel in a nominal clause of present fact: the adjective קָדוֹשׁ is predicated of lay Israel only as the complement of הָיָה (11:44, 45; 19:2; 20:7, 26), and of a priest once in a nominal clause (21:7).22 Within Leviticus the status form of (A) must therefore be stated as “separated” and “mine” (20:24, 26); the predicate “holy” is first said of lay Israel as present fact in Deuteronomy, in Moses’ address to the people, “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God” (7:6; 14:2), and of the church in the New Testament (1 Peter 2:9; Hebrews 10:10). Yet Deuteronomy’s indicative rests on election (7:6; 14:2) and is completed by God’s own future act, “The LORD will establish you as a people holy to himself … if you keep the commandments” (28:9), where the verb is God’s (yĕqîmĕkā) and the condition is Israel’s; so it does not convert the Levitical imperative into an achieved status, and 1 Peter 1:15–16 re-issues the command to a people already called “a holy nation” (2:9), which shows that the status does not retire the summons.
5. 1 Peter 1:15–16
5.1 Text and text form
In the opening paraenesis of 1 Peter, Διό (dio, 1:13) draws the inference from the blessing of 1:3–12, verses 13–14 command hope and forbid conformity to the former desires, and verses 15–16 read as follows in the text of Nestle–Aland 27, whose square brackets mark two words that Nestle–Aland 28 omits; the SBL edition prints the first (ὅτι) and omits the second (εἰμι).
ἀλλὰ κατὰ τὸν καλέσαντα ὑμᾶς ἅγιον καὶ αὐτοὶ ἅγιοι ἐν πάσῃ ἀναστροφῇ γενήθητε, διότι γέγραπται [ὅτι] Ἅγιοι ἔσεσθε, ὅτι ἐγὼ ἅγιος [εἰμι].
γενήθητε (genēthēte) is read by every edition, critical, Received and Byzantine. In verse 16 the verb of the quotation is the future ἔσεσθε (esesthe) in the critical editions, the aorist imperative γένεσθε in the Textus Receptus, whence the Authorised Version’s “Be ye holy”, and the present imperative γίνεσθε in the Byzantine text; the closing εἰμι is read by the Received and Byzantine texts, bracketed by Nestle–Aland 27 and omitted by Nestle–Aland 28.23 The imperatives are assimilations to γενήθητε and to the familiar shape of the saying, and εἰμι is a natural supplying of the copula to a verbless clause. The future is the Septuagint’s form and is read by Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, and so by Westcott and Hort and every later critical edition, whereas the imperatives are the Byzantine and Received readings; it is also the reading from which the imperatives are most easily explained, since a scribe who found an imperative would have had little reason to replace it with an indicative, and it is rightly preferred. Of the five occurrences of the refrain in the Greek Leviticus (11:44, 45; 19:2; 20:7, 26) only 19:2 has both the order ἅγιοι ἔσεσθε and the copula-less ἐγὼ ἅγιος, and the critical text of 1:16 reproduces it word for word as far as it goes; the commentators name 19:2, though Peter’s hearers would have recognised a refrain rather than a verse.24
5.2 Genēthēte: morphology, meaning, aspect and why the command is not otiose
The main verb of Peter’s own sentence is γενήθητε, which MorphGNT tags as an aorist passive imperative. The tag records morphology, not meaning. γίνομαι (ginomai), “become”, has no active of which it could be the passive, and ἐγενήθην (egenēthēn) is a Hellenistic by-form of ἐγενόμην with no difference of sense. The letter proves it: at 3:6 the readers ἐγενήθητε τέκνα (egenēthēte tekna), “have become” Sarah’s children, in the same θη-aorist, second person plural, and in Peter’s own words; at 2:7, quoting Psalm 118:22 (117:22 LXX), the rejected stone ἐγενήθη (egenēthē), “has become”, the cornerstone; and at 1:17 ἀναστράφητε (anastraphēte) means “conduct yourselves”, not “be conducted”. The older grammars already treat ἐγενήθην as a by-form of ἐγενόμην, and the recent literature on the Greek middle explains why: in such verbs the θη-morphology marks the subject as affected by a change of state, so that “passive” is a misnomer for the form as such.25
The second point is lexical. Peter writes “become holy”; he does not use ἁγιάζω at all, neither in the θη-imperative ἁγιάσθητε, which Septuagintal usage would have let his hearers take as “consecrate yourselves” (1 Samuel 16:5) or as “be sanctified”, nor in the active ἁγιάσατε ἑαυτούς (hagiasate heautous), “sanctify yourselves” (§2.1). But his adjective-plus-verb construction anticipates the ἅγιοι ἔσεσθε he is about to quote, so his not writing a form of ἁγιάζω is partly dictated by the citation; what is his own is the choice of γίνομαι over εἰμί and the domain ἐν πάσῃ ἀναστροφῇ. With a predicate adjective γίνομαι most naturally denotes entry into, or the showing forth of, a condition, although in Koine the construction often approaches εἰμί, “be” (BDAG, s.v. γίνομαι, on its use as a substitute for εἰμί), which is why most English versions render “be holy”; and the domain is named, “in all your conduct”, which favours reading (B); and verbs of change of state are middle because the subject undergoes the change, so the efficient cause is left unstated: the readers are summoned to a becoming whose author the verb does not name, which is compatible with reading (A) but does not assert it.
Here the second of Searle’s preparatory conditions (§2.4(c)) does its work: a command to be holy addressed to a people God has made His own is not otiose, because a directive presupposes that the hearer is not yet, in the respect named, what he is told to be, and the respect named is conduct, the ethical aspect of the one holiness distinguished in §2.1, which is why 1:15 and the status of 2:9 can both be true of the same people. Nor does the aorist imply a once-for-all act. γενήθητε stands in a string of aorist imperatives that are all general precepts, ἐλπίσατε (elpisate, 1:13), ἀναστράφητε (1:17), ἀγαπήσατε (agapēsate, 1:22), ἐπιποθήσατε (epipothēsate, 2:2), and the students of verbal aspect agree that such an aorist presents the action as a whole without implying a single occurrence,26 so that it neither denotes a single divine act constituting the readers holy nor demands a crisis decision.
5.3 Kata ton kalesanta hymas hagion and en pasē anastrophē
The command is measured by κατὰ τὸν καλέσαντα ὑμᾶς ἅγιον (kata ton kalesanta hymas hagion). The anarthrous ἅγιον stands outside the article–participle group, where an attributive adjective would be articular; it is therefore most naturally predicative, “as he who called you is holy” (ESV). The alternative, “according to the Holy One who called you”, yields the same theology, while bringing out that holiness is a divine name before it is a human programme.27 On either construal kata is the kata of norm, not of cause: Peter supplies the standard himself and reserves the ground for διότι (dioti) and the hoti of the quotation. Where the Hebrew says only “because”, Peter says both “in correspondence with” and “because”, which is consistent with the verdict of §4.3 and shows that where the New Testament wants a standard it supplies one.
The distinction of §2.4(b) applies for the third time. “The one who called you” is a definite description built on an aorist participle, and such descriptions presuppose rather than assert. The call is thus the presupposition of the directive, and it is asserted elsewhere, with the same participle at 2:9 (tou ek skotous hymas kalesantos) and 5:10 (ho kalesas hymas), and with the finite ἐκλήθητε (eklēthēte, “you were called”) at 2:21 and 3:9. Elsewhere the call confers the very predicate in question, “sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (1 Corinthians 1:2; κλητοῖς ἁγίοις, klētois hagiois, literally “called [as] saints”), and the Caller undertakes to complete it (1 Thessalonians 5:24); (A) may fairly press that Peter’s “the one who called you” carries this freight. On the Reformed reading the call is effectual, on the Wesleyan reading it may be resisted; on both it is prior, divine and the ground of the command. The domain is behaviour: ἀναστροφή (anastrophē) is the Petrine keyword for a manner of life (1:15, 18; 2:12; 3:1, 2, 16).
5.4 Hagioi esesthe, hoti egō hagios: the imperatival future, its overtone and whose voice is heard
The verb of the quotation is a future indicative. The grammars describe a future of categorical command, concentrated in Old Testament citations and reflecting the Hebrew yiqtol of legal command: “You therefore must be perfect” (ἔσεσθε, Matthew 5:48), “You shall not murder” (19:18).28 Readers who have just received genēthēte and dioti gegraptai hear a command cited in warrant of a command, and the Byzantine imperative γίνεσθε, inherited in another form by the Received Text, shows that the Byzantine tradition heard it so. Three things nevertheless keep a promissory overtone alive: the form is indicative, and the identical ἔσεσθε is a promise at Luke 6:35, “and you will be sons of the Most High”, one verse before the command of 6:36, so the contexts are not watertight;29 in Leviticus the refrain is flanked by “I am the LORD who sanctifies you” (§4.4); and hoti, like kî, grounds duty and certainty indifferently, so that “for I am holy” can name the norm of what is required or the cause of what is assured.
The licensing conditions of §2.4(c) are met: He who commands is mĕqaddišĕkem (20:8); the context contains explicit undertakings, in Leviticus the signature of 20:8 and 22:32 with Exodus 31:13, and in 1 Peter the readers’ being “guarded through faith” by God’s power (1:5), their being “built up” (2:5) and the promise that God “will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” (5:10), to which the wider canon adds Jeremiah 31:33 and 1 Thessalonians 5:24; and the directive force is preserved. The overtone therefore stands for the yiqtol of 19:2 and the ἔσεσθε of 1:16, non-imperative forms in injunctive use with room for a second hearing, while the formal double hearing is not available to γενήθητε, which in this setting is a directive and nothing more; what it does not lack is the theological covered promise, which attaches to it as to every divine command (§7.5).
One question remains: whose voice is heard in verse 16? In Leviticus the sentence is already the LORD’s first-person speech (19:1–2), and on an evangelical doctrine of Scripture the apostle’s own imperative is no less the word of God (1 Thessalonians 2:13; 2 Timothy 3:16), so the licensing condition that the speaker be God is met for both verses. The formal overtone nevertheless attaches to the quoted future and not to γενήθητε because of their forms and not their speakers: an imperative of this kind is a directive, while a future in injunctive use leaves room for a second hearing. The qualification is needed because the imperative mood is not always a command addressed to the hearer to act: the petition ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου (hagiasthētō to onoma sou, Matthew 6:9) is a θη-imperative of ἁγιάζω whose agent is left unexpressed and disputed, God Himself (Ezekiel 36:23) or His people (Leviticus 22:32), and Christ’s καθαρίσθητι (katharisthēti, Mark 1:41) effects the state it names. What excludes such hearings for γενήθητε is not its mood but its setting: it is the apostle’s paraenesis, one of five aorist imperatives that are all general precepts (1:13–2:2), its domain is the readers’ conduct, and it is warranted by a cited command. Wolterstorff’s category of appropriated discourse describes how, by gegraptai, the apostle re-addresses the LORD’s word without altering whose word it is; and the thesis would survive if the overtone were denied for 1:16 (§9.3). Reading (B) is the sense of verse 16, and reading (A) a licensed overtone, which the covered promise extends to the imperative as well, as Augustine’s da quod iubes et iube quod vis assumes (§7.2; §7.5).30
5.5 The indicative frame of the letter
The command does not stand alone; the letter’s first word about holiness is an indicative. The addressees are “elect … according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood” (1:1–2). ἁγιασμός (hagiasmos) can denote a continuing state (Romans 6:19, 22), but here, between the Father’s electing foreknowledge and a sprinkling that recalls covenant ratification (Exodus 24:8), it names the Spirit’s consecrating act by which election takes effect (cf. 2 Thessalonians 2:13, εἵλατο ὑμᾶς … ἐν ἁγιασμῷ πνεύματος), itself ordered εἰς ὑπακοήν, “for obedience”. Calvin reads the phrase as the Spirit’s work by which election is made effective in calling, naming renewal into obedience and cleansing by the blood of Christ as the two effects, or ends, of the calling; a Wesleyan reader hears the Spirit’s gracious consecration to which obedience freely answers.31
Then comes the chain of indicatives. God “has caused us to be born again” (1:3); the readers “were ransomed” (ἐλυτρώθητε, elytrōthēte, 1:18). At 1:22–23 two perfect participles ground the one imperative ἀγαπήσατε: ἡγνικότες (hēgnikotes), “having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth”, an active with the readers as agents, and ἀναγεγεννημένοι (anagegennēmenoi), “since you have been born again”, a passive with God as agent. At 2:5 those who come to the living stone “are being built up … to be a holy priesthood” (οἰκοδομεῖσθε, oikodomeisthe, ambiguous between indicative and imperative, most reading the indicative): it is the clearest place in 1 Peter where (A) in its process form is arguably present, beside the growth of 2:2. Then come 2:9–10: “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession … now you have received mercy” (ἐλεηθέντες, eleēthentes, an aorist passive), a corporate reception of Exodus 19:5–6 for the church.32
Here is the structural observation that carries §8. Exodus 19:6 in the Septuagint is a future, ὑμεῖς δὲ ἔσεσθέ μοι βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα καὶ ἔθνος ἅγιον, conditional on 19:5; Leviticus 19:2 is a future, ἅγιοι ἔσεσθε. Peter states the first as present fact at 2:9 and cites the second as present command at 1:16: the same Septuagintal form has become, in the gospel, both indicative and imperative, and the hinge in each case is the aorist participle of kaleō (1:15; 2:9). Where the two agencies meet, at 1:22–23, the letter sets ἡγνικότες beside ἀναγεγεννημένοι without ordering them, and so will this essay (§7.6). Every imperative from dio (1:13) to 2:10 rides on a participle or on a ground introduced by hoti, dioti or ei, and 1:15–19 grounds the demand for holiness in the exodus in the very order of 22:32–33. The priority so established is logical, not a priority of emphasis, since the main verbs are imperatives.
6. Assessment: The Merits and Over-reaches of Each Interpretation
The merits of each reading are now before us. For (A): every ground the three sentences assert is a God-ward indicative and the hearers’ belonging is presupposed in every occurrence (§§3.4, 4.3, 5.3); the agency form is the signature of the Holiness legislation itself (20:8; 21:8; 22:32; §4.4); the status form is Deuteronomic and Petrine (§§4.4, 5.5); the kî names a reason, not a comparison, and the companion indicatives identify that reason with the Sanctifier (§§4.3–4.4); and the futures carry a licensed overtone of promise (§5.4). For (B): every finite verb predicated of Israel or the church in the three sentences is volitional (§§3.2–3.3, 4.2, 5.2); the hitpael has a performable opposite (§3.2); the domain of both 19:2 and genēthēte is conduct (§§4.1, 5.3); the cognate formula “be X as God is X”, whose Old Testament background includes this refrain and Deuteronomy 18:13, is command in function wherever the canon employs it (Matthew 5:48; Luke 6:36; cf. Ephesians 5:1); reception has read the texts as commands; and Leviticus never predicates “holy” of lay Israel as present fact (§4.4).
6.1 Where (A) over-reaches
Reading (A) over-reaches, by the test of §2.4(a), wherever it claims that the sentence says what only its context says. (a) “You have been made holy” cannot be extracted from genēthēte: the verb is “become”, its θη-form is not semantically passive, and no form of ἁγιάζω, passive or reflexive, is what Peter wrote (§5.2). (b) The Hebrew forms are injunctive in context, and even the promissory parallels that (A) adduces are conditional on obedience (Exodus 19:5–6; Deuteronomy 28:9) (§4.2). (c) The Septuagint’s futures carry no promissory surplus by being futures (§3.3). (d) Peter cites the text to warrant a command (§5.4). (e) The process form, A2, imports a category the Leviticus texts do not voice: Leviticus names God as the one who sanctifies, in a participle that assigns no tense to His work, but never says “you are being progressively sanctified”; in 1 Peter the process form rests on 2:2 and the ambiguous 2:5; and its strongest New Testament text, tous hagiazomenous at Hebrews 10:14, is contested between “those who are being sanctified” and “those who are sanctified”, in a letter whose governing statement is the perfect hēgiasmenoi esmen, “we have been sanctified” (10:10).33 (f) A reading that neutralises the imperative of 1:15 must explain why it alone, in a string of five aorist imperatives (1:13–2:2), is not a command.
6.2 Where (B) over-reaches
Reading (B) over-reaches in six corresponding ways. (a) “Strive towards holiness” imports verbs of pursuit, rādap and diōkō, into sentences whose verbs are hāyâ and ginomai, “be” and “become”; B2 is canonical (Hebrews 12:14; 2 Corinthians 7:1) but is not the sense of these sentences, as A2 is not (§6.1). (b) Holiness in these texts is not produced by effort alone: the verses that command “be holy” are flanked by “I sanctify you”, and 20:26 grounds the command in a divine separation already completed (§4.4), so that a reading on which the people produce their holiness without the Sanctifier makes the condition into the cause. (c) Detached from its kî clause the command becomes moralism (§§3.4, 4.3). (d) The Pelagian inference from command to unaided ability, “God commands it, therefore we can of ourselves”, is the inference Augustine answered (§7.2). A distinct inference, from command taken with promise to complete attainment in this life, is drawn by the Wesleyan-holiness tradition and denied by the Reformed; it is not Pelagian, since it grounds the ability in grace, and the essay leaves it as a question the three texts do not settle (§§7.5, 9.2). What (B) must not do, on either account, is forget the distance between the Holy One and the holy people (§4.3). (e) The legalist reading mistakes the dietary form of Israel’s holiness for its substance: Peter’s Gentile readers are nowhere told to keep the diet of Leviticus 11, and he transposes the content into anastrophē among the nations (2:12). (f) Treating holiness as primarily a human quality forgets that the adjective is God’s first and Israel’s holiness derived (§2.1).
6.3 Verdict
Both interpretations hold up to scrutiny in the forms just stated, though not in the same way. B1 holds as the sense of the main clause in all three sentences. A1 holds as a reading of what the sentences presuppose and of what their subordinate clauses assert: within Leviticus securely in the agency form that the Holiness legislation itself voices, and in the status form only on the relational definition of §2.1, on which the presupposed belonging is the ontic aspect of the one holiness. Leviticus 20:26 itself distinguishes the belonging already effected from the holiness still commanded, so that the status form proper is first stated in Deuteronomy and 1 Peter 2:9, and holds for the three sentences only when those texts are read with them. A2 and B2 are true of the canon and false as the meaning of these three sentences; both belong to what dogmatics calls progressive sanctification, God’s continuing work in which the believer is active, which is why the two second forms are so readily confused. The commission’s alternative phrase for (A), “are being made holy”, and its phrase for (B), “strive towards holiness”, are both second forms, and both are to be corrected: the first to “God has made you His own and is the one who sanctifies you”, the second to “be, or become, holy in all your conduct”.
7. History of Interpretation and Dogmatic Integration
The tradition, heard after the exegesis rather than before it (§1.2), has not treated the two hearings of the refrain as rivals; the disputes concern only the shape of the dependence of the summons upon the gift.
7.1 Jewish reception
Jewish reception reads both Leviticus texts as commands. The Sifra glosses qĕdōšîm tihyû as pĕrûšîm tihyû, “you shall be separate”, substituting the adjective and keeping the yiqtol with its injunctive force, and Rashi paraphrases the gloss with the bare imperative hĕwû pĕrûšîm; on 11:44 the Sifra reads the motive clause as a comparison between God’s separateness and Israel’s; Leviticus Rabbah bounds the comparison, since God’s holiness is superior to the holiness of His people; Rashi and Nahmanides read 19:2 as commands of abstention. Yet the same tradition blesses God daily as the one “who has sanctified us by His commandments” (ʾăšer qiddĕšānû bĕmiṣwōtāyw), carrying the piel of Leviticus 20:8 into the liturgy in the perfect and naming the commandments as the means: God sanctifies Israel through the commandments, and the imperative is the instrument of the indicative.34
7.2 Augustine, the Reformers and the command as petition
Augustine supplies the first formal account of how a command may be heard as a gift without ceasing to be a command: da quod iubes et iube quod vis, “give what you command, and command what you will”, and, against the Pelagians, “God does not command impossibilities; but in commanding he admonishes you both to do what you can and to ask for what you cannot”.35 Both parties accept, in some form, the preparatory condition of §2.4(c), that a command implies the hearer’s ability to obey; Pelagius reads it as a claim about unaided ability, and Augustine denies not the condition but the hearer’s unaided possession of the ability, so that the ability arrives as gift and the command becomes petition, which is the logic of reading Leviticus 19:2 with 20:8.
The Reformers sharpened Augustine’s reply into a denial of the inference itself. Luther, against Erasmus, held that an imperative never establishes an indicative of ability, and Calvin devoted a chapter to showing that God’s commands do not demonstrate the fallen hearer’s power to obey.36 The essay therefore uses Searle’s condition in a modified form, which both Protestant traditions can accept: not that the hearer possesses the ability, but that the directive is not idle, because its fulfilment is possible for the hearer by the grace of the one who commands and because the hearer can and must ask for it, as Augustine did. Luther’s denial of the inference from imperative to indicative of ability stands against Searle’s own formulation and is not touched by this one. The three sentences are addressed to a people God has made His own (§§3.4, 4.3, 5.3), and the ability they presuppose in this sense is the Sanctifier’s gift, on which both Protestant traditions agree, differing only on how the gift operates (§7.6).
7.3 Luther: commands and promises, and the holiness that is God’s own
Luther’s version is the division of Scripture into commandments and promises: the commandments teach what ought to be done but give no power to do it, and the promises give, through faith, what the commandments demand.37 On 1 Peter 1:15–16 he came as near as any major interpreter to a pure indicative (§1.1): holy “means that which is God’s own … consecrated”, so that “you are merely required to give God His own”; “let God alone rule, live and work within you; then shall ye be holy”. Yet in the same breath he keeps the imperative, “beware that ye do not suffer yourselves to be led back again to worldly lusts”, and forecloses the antinomian inference: “there is no faith where there are no good works.”38 His “beware” shows that even this reading cannot dispense with the directive.
7.4 Calvin: a compact model of the verdict
Calvin’s comment on 1 Peter 1:15 (§1.1) contains, within a few sentences and in order, every element of the verdict this essay reaches. The presupposition is stated first: “Ye have to do with me, ye are mine”. The directive follows: “then abstain from the pollutions of the Gentiles”. The limit is marked: “the proportion is not that of equals; but we ought to advance in this direction as far as our condition will bear”. The progressive shape is named: “we ought daily to strive more and more”. And the companion assertion follows: “we are not only told what our duty is, but … God also adds, ‘I am he who sanctify you.’”39 The Institutes supply the order: holiness is “the bond” of union with God, “not that by the merit of holiness we come into communion with him (we ought rather first to cleave to him, in order that, pervaded with his holiness, we may follow whither he calls)”, and it is “the end of our calling”.40
7.5 Wesley, the confessions and the Reformed–Wesleyan common ground
Wesley states the principle: “every command in holy writ is only a covered promise”, grounded in Jeremiah 31:33 and instanced from this very text, “‘To be holy as He is holy?’ It is enough. He will work in us this very thing.” On Philippians 2:12–13 he gives the relation two sides: “God worketh in you; therefore you can work … God worketh in you; therefore you must work.”41 The covered promise is not a Wesleyan distinctive, though the four idioms are not identical: Augustine turns the command into petition; Luther sets the promise beside the command as a second word that gives what the first demands, and refuses to fuse them; Calvin reads the companion clause “I am he who sanctify you” as what God “also adds”; Wesley alone says that the command is itself a covered promise. What the four share is the claim that God’s command to His people is answered by His own undertaking, which neither cancels the command nor makes the hearers passive.
The confessions say the same from both sides of the divide: Westminster’s sanctification “imperfect in this life” and yet “perfecting holiness in the fear of God”; Heidelberg’s insistence that believers never cease striving, and praying for the Spirit’s grace, to be renewed more and more after God’s image (Q&A 115); the Thirty-Nine Articles’ grace “preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will”.42 The two traditions agree that God alone is the author of holiness, that the believer genuinely acts, and that Philippians 2:12–13 governs the relation; they differ on the causal order of grace and will within the one cooperation, the Reformed account holding that the Spirit’s renewing work infallibly effects the believer’s willing and doing, the Wesleyan that the same work, begun by prevenient grace, enables a willing and doing that may still be refused; and on whether a second, instantaneous “entire sanctification” is promised in this life, which Wesleyan-holiness dogmatics argues from such commands taken with such promises as 1 Thessalonians 5:23–24, and which the Reformed reply, anticipated by Article 15 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, denies.43 The essay adjudicates neither (§9.2).
7.6 Neutrality on determinism, vindicated from the texts
Section 1.2 undertook to show that the argument does not depend on divine determinism. The two accounts share the three agreements of §7.5 and differ on the causal order of grace and will and on entire sanctification; the exegesis never reaches the first difference, because the texts do not. Leviticus 20:7–8 places mĕqaddišĕkem beside hitqaddēš with no connective (§4.4); 1 Peter 1:22–23 places hēgnikotes beside anagegennēmenoi with no ordering (§5.5). A Reformed reader will say that the divine sanctifying is the efficient cause of the human consecrating, a Wesleyan that it enables a consecrating which may still be withheld; the texts say that both occur, and not how the gift produces the task. The priority of ground in §8.2 is therefore logical and not causal-mechanical, and both traditions have signed its formula: Owen’s “be killing sin or it will be killing you” and Wesley’s “therefore you must work” insist alike on the task, and the Larger Catechism’s “work of God’s grace” and Wesley’s “He will work in us this very thing” insist alike on the gift.44
8. The Priority Argument
8.1 Priority in what the sentences say: reading (B)
The first sense of priority is settled by §§3–5. In Leviticus 11:44–45 the verbs predicated of Israel stand in a volitional chain closed by a prohibition Israel can obey; in 19:2 the yiqtol is formally identical with the commands of 19:3–4; in 1 Peter 1:15 genēthēte is an imperative in every edition, and esesthe is cited as its warrant. No honest exegesis can make the primary force of these sentences anything other than a summons, and the point of each is conduct (11:44; 19:3–37; 1 Peter 1:15 with 2:11–12). Reading (B) therefore has priority in what the sentences say and in the immediate response they call for, with the correction of §6.2: the summons is to a whole manner of life, not to an asymptotic programme.
8.2 Priority of ground: reading (A) in its agency and status forms
The second sense belongs to reading (A). No command to be holy is issued in these texts without a prior divine attribute or act as its asserted ground and the hearers’ belonging as its presupposition, and the ground is carried inside the sentences, by kî and hoti and, in 1 Peter, by kata and kalesanta. By the test of §2.4(b) a presupposition is prior to the sentence that carries it, and a ground to what it grounds; the hitpael is a response to a God already theirs, and within Leviticus the only texts that name the one who makes the people holy name God (20:8; 22:32; cf. 21:8, where the human consecration of the priest is itself grounded in God’s). Where Scripture states the people’s holy status as present fact, it characteristically does so as a premiss from which conduct is argued (Deuteronomy 7:6; Colossians 3:12; 1 Peter 2:9–12); where holiness is made consequent upon obedience (Leviticus 11:44; Numbers 15:40; Deuteronomy 28:9) the verb of establishing is God’s or the agent is left unnamed, so that obedience is stated as the condition and is nowhere named as the efficient cause, the only agent Leviticus and Deuteronomy ever name for the people’s holiness being God (20:8; Deuteronomy 28:9; on Exodus 19:10, 14 see §2.1). In Leviticus the ground is stated in the agency form and, as presupposition, as “separated” and “mine”, a belonging which supplies (A) with its status form only on the relational definition of §2.1 (§§4.4, 6.3); in Deuteronomy and 1 Peter it is stated in the status form proper; A2, the progressive form, is a canonical inference and not the ground these sentences state. This is Calvin’s order, “first to cleave to him, in order that, pervaded with his holiness, we may follow”, and Parsons’s: being precedes act.45 It is also the order the modern discussion since Bultmann has called “indicative and imperative”: for Bultmann the two stand in Paul as an antinomy in which the imperative is not added to grace but is grace’s own demand, the new life being realised in obedience; Windisch replied in the same year that the imperative keeps its full force and that the indicative of final salvation is itself, in part, conditional upon it. The essay takes from the debate only what neither party denied, that the indicative of God’s act grounds the imperative, and leaves the conditionality Windisch pressed to the remark above that obedience is stated as condition and never as efficient cause.46
8.3 Priority of pastoral order: reading (A) first, reading (B) last
The third sense asks which must be heard first if the other is to be heard as gospel rather than as bare law. The order of utterance varies, since 19:2 and 22:32–33 state the demand before the ground while 11:44a and 1 Peter 1:3–13 state the ground first; what does not vary is the order of grounding, and where Scripture arranges a whole address to the redeemed the ground comes first: “I bore you on eagles’ wings” (Exodus 19:4) before “if you will indeed obey my voice” (19:5–6); the exodus (20:2) before the first commandment (20:3); 1 Peter 1:3–12 before dio (1:13). Yet every such address ends in the summons. The two pastoral failures each refuse this order: moralism preaches the imperative without the indicative, the legalism the Marrow Men opposed and Ferguson diagnoses as a severing of God’s law from God’s gracious character; quietism preaches the indicative without the imperative, Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace”; and Ferguson has argued that the two are twin fruits of one root. Barth pressed the grounding furthest in the direction of order, “the law is nothing else than the necessary form of the Gospel, whose content is grace”.47 One caveat keeps the essay from following Barth to the point at which, as Elert objected, a law that is only the form of the gospel can no longer accuse: the indicative-first order concerns these texts because they address a people already God’s, and it does not retire the law’s convicting use, which the Heidelberg Catechism keeps alive even for believers, who are to be preached the law strictly so that they may know their sinfulness ever better and seek forgiveness and righteousness in Christ the more eagerly (Q&A 115), and which Calvin places first among the uses of the law.
8.4 The shared end: a third mood over both readings
The fourth sense belongs to neither reading alone. Peter’s distribution of the two Septuagintal futures is the canonical warrant for holding both: Exodus 19:6 becomes fact at 2:9, and Leviticus 19:2 becomes command at 1:16 (§5.5). But the canon also speaks of holiness in a third mood, that of promise: “may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely … He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it” (1 Thessalonians 5:23–24; cf. 1 Peter 5:10; Hebrews 12:10). The state the summons aims to produce, a people who are God’s and live as His (Leviticus 20:26; 1 Peter 2:9), is the very state God undertakes to produce (Leviticus 20:8; Jeremiah 31:33), so that gift and summons converge on one telos. The canonical shape is gift, task and goal; neither reading owns the end, and the end is where they are one.
8.5 The answer to the commission
If the question asks what the sentences say, the answer is (B), stated as B1; if it asks what must be true for the sentences to be said, and what must be heard first, the answer is (A), in its agency and status forms. The two are not rivals, because each sentence contains both. Asked without qualification, therefore, the question has no answer, and the essay declines to give one: neither reading has priority over the other as such, because they are not competing senses of one clause but the asserted sense and the asserted ground of the same clause. If a single rule of use is wanted, it is the pastoral order of §8.3, hear the ground first and end with the summons, which is the order in which Scripture itself arranges its addresses to the redeemed. Two sentences state the verdict: the indicative is the ground and the imperative is the point; and God sanctifies His people through the summons He addresses to them. The instrumental form of the second sentence is not drawn from the synagogue’s benediction, Calvin and Wesley alone (§§7.1, 7.4, 7.5): Exodus 31:13 makes the kept commandment the place where Israel learns that God sanctifies, Leviticus 22:32 makes the people’s not profaning the Name the setting in which God “will be sanctified”, and 1 Peter 1:22–23 makes the word the means of God’s regenerating and obedience to that same word the means of the readers’ purifying; and the Lord’s own prayer, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth” (John 17:17; cf. Ephesians 5:26), names the word as the means of the Father’s sanctifying, which is why the Reformed confessions count the word read and preached among the means by which the Spirit sanctifies (Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 155), and why the summons, which is that word in its directive mood, is itself one of the means by which the Sanctifier works.48 This holds on either account of how God’s sanctifying and the people’s consecrating are related (§7.6).
9. Objections and Replies
9.1 The objection that priority of ground smuggles in monergism
It may be objected that giving (A) priority of ground is a Reformed conclusion in neutral dress. The reply is that priority of ground is logical and not causal-mechanical (§7.6): it states that the gift grounds the task, not how the gift produces it, and a synergist affirms as firmly as a monergist that grace precedes and grounds the response, differing only on whether that response is infallibly effected or may be withheld.
9.2 The objection that the covered promise breaks the neutrality
It may be objected that a Wesleyan hears attainability in the covered promise and a Reformed reader denies it, so that the essay’s neutrality fails at §8.4. The reply is that the essay’s claims, that the gift grounds the task, that the task is real and that the promise stands over both, are shared by both traditions; what divides them is the timing of the promise’s fulfilment and whether it can be forfeited by the one to whom it is made, and neither question is addressed by the three texts: they name no horizon, and they speak to the people as a whole without raising the case of the individual who falls away (1 Peter 1:5, “guarded through faith”, is claimed by both sides). The promise of 1 Thessalonians 5:23 names the parousia as its horizon, which the Reformed read as the time of completion and the Wesleyan as the term of keeping; 1 Peter’s own promise is set “after you have suffered a little while” (5:10). Both traditions, moreover, resist a mechanical inference from command to completed attainment, Calvin by “as far as our condition will bear” and Wesley by the brackets in the Plain Account marking his earliest statements of the degree of perfection as “too strong”, while continuing to hold that entire sanctification, so qualified, is to be expected now.49
9.3 The objection from the text and the speaker of 1 Peter 1:16
It may be objected that the text-critical uncertainty in verse 16, and the question of whose voice is heard in the quotation, undermine the argument from 1 Peter. The reply is that genēthēte is read by every edition, and that under ἔσεσθε, γένεσθε or γίνεσθε verse 16 is a command cited in warrant of a command; only the promissory overtone depends on the future form, and the speaker question does no work, since both verses are God’s word and the formal overtone is withheld from genēthēte by its form and setting (§5.4). The argument of §8 survives if the overtone is denied for 1:16; the third mood of §8.4 would then rest on 1 Thessalonians 5:23–24 and 1 Peter 5:10 alone.
9.4 The objection that priority of sense invites moralism and perfectionism
It may be objected, finally, that to give (B) priority in what the sentences say invites the very moralism and perfectionism that §6.2 condemned. The reply is that B1 is a summons which carries its own ground in its kî clause and its own presupposition in “your God”; moralism is the detachment of the main clause from both (§6.2), the Pelagian reading of the preparatory condition locates the ability in nature rather than in grace (§7.2), and the essay forecloses both. And the demand remains a demand: “the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14) is not softened by being grounded in grace; it is made possible by it. It is the necessity of the way and the fruit, not of the ground, as Calvin’s “not that by the merit of holiness we come into communion with him” (§7.4) insists: the holiness commanded is neither the ground nor the instrument of the believer’s justification, which rests on Christ’s righteousness received by faith alone, but the shape of the life of those whom God has justified and made His own, and the fruit by which that life is known.
10. Conclusion
This essay asked whether “be holy, for I am holy” declares that God has made, or is making, His people holy, or summons them to holiness, and which hearing should be given priority. Both survive scrutiny, but not in the forms in which the commission phrased them, since “you have been made holy” is not the asserted sense of the main clause and “strive towards holiness” is not the sense of its verbs, and not in the same sense of priority. Read for what they say, the three sentences are summonses; read for what they presuppose and for what their subordinate clauses assert, they are gifts, each grounded by a causal “for” in God’s holiness and His act, and each standing beside the signature “I am the LORD who sanctifies you”. “Strive towards holiness” must therefore become “be, or become, holy in all your conduct”, and “you have been made holy” is not the sense of the sentences but their presupposition and their ground.
In what the sentences say, the imperative reading has priority; as ground, the indicative reading, in its agency and status forms; in pastoral order, the indicative is to be heard first and the imperative last; as end, neither, for the holiness commanded is the holiness promised. In one sentence: the indicative is the ground and the imperative is the point, and God sanctifies His people through the summons He addresses to them. A Reformed and a Wesleyan reader can each sign that sentence, because it states that the gift grounds the task and not how the gift produces it, which is as far as the texts go. The posture in which the command is rightly received is the one Augustine found when he turned it into a prayer: da quod iubes et iube quod vis, give what you command, and command what you will.
A Note on Authorship
This essay was commissioned by Warwick Allen in October 2026 and written by an AI agent, Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 (model identifier claude-fable-5-1), operating within Claude Code in a cloud session at the “ultracode” effort setting. In that setting a coordinating instance of the model orchestrated a multi-agent workflow of further instances of the same model, which acted as researchers working through five lenses (the Hebrew of Leviticus, the Greek of 1 Peter, the history of interpretation and dogmatics, canonical biblical theology, and the strongest case for each reading), as outline architects and judges, as drafters, and as adversarial reviewers of the exegesis, the bibliography, the theology and the style, over several rounds of review. The commission specified an orthodox, evangelical Protestant perspective, required that the essay neither commit to nor deny divine determinism, and asked for formal British English. The primary texts were consulted in machine-readable editions: the Westminster Leningrad Codex with OpenScriptures morphology, the SBL Greek New Testament with MorphGNT parsing, Rahlfs’s Septuagint, and the STEPBible Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament collation for the textual variants of 1 Peter 1:15–16. The secondary literature was cited from the model’s training knowledge, with bibliographic details checked by web search where possible. The argument, the exegesis and the citations are the agent’s own. The essay was published at the commissioner’s direction, and readers should verify its quotations and references before relying on them.
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Moulton, James Hope. A Grammar of New Testament Greek. Vol. 1, Prolegomena. 3rd ed. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1908.
Murray, John. “Definitive Sanctification.” Calvin Theological Journal 2, no. 1 (1967). Reprinted in Collected Writings of John Murray, vol. 2, 277–284, with the companion essay “The Agency in Definitive Sanctification”, 285–293. Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1977.
Nahmanides (Ramban). Commentary on the Torah. Translated by Charles B. Chavel. 5 vols. New York: Shilo, 1971–76. Vol. 3, Leviticus.
Naselli, Andrew David. No Quick Fix: Where Higher Life Theology Came From, What It Is, and Why It’s Harmful. Bellingham: Lexham, 2017.
New American Standard Bible. La Habra, CA: Lockman Foundation, 1995.
Ngien, Dennis. Paragon of Excellence: Luther’s Sermons on I Peter. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023.
Nihan, Christophe. From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study in the Composition of the Book of Leviticus. Forschungen zum Alten Testament II/25. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007.
Novum Testamentum Graece. 27th ed. Edited by Barbara Aland et al. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993. 28th ed., 2012.
Novum Testamentum Graecum: Editio Critica Maior. Vol. IV, Catholic Letters. Edited by Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland, Gerd Mink, Holger Strutwolf and Klaus Wachtel. 2nd rev. ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2013.
Owen, John. Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656). In The Works of John Owen, edited by William H. Goold, vol. 6. Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–53.
Packer, J. I. Keep in Step with the Spirit. Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1984.
Packer, J. I. “‘Keswick’ and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification.” Evangelical Quarterly 27 (1955): 153–167.
Pang, Francis G. H. “Aspect, Aktionsart, and Abduction: Future Tense in the New Testament.” Filología Neotestamentaria 23 (2010): 129–159.
Parsons, Michael. “Being Precedes Act: Indicative and Imperative in Paul’s Writing.” Evangelical Quarterly 60, no. 2 (1988): 99–127.
Pelikan, Jaroslav, and Valerie Hotchkiss, eds. Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. 3 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Pennington, Jonathan T. “Setting Aside ‘Deponency’: Rediscovering the Greek Middle Voice in New Testament Studies.” In The Linguist as Pedagogue: Trends in the Teaching and Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament, edited by Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, 181–203. New Testament Monographs 11. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009.
Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth and Rashi’s Commentary. Translated by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann. 5 vols. London: Shapiro, Vallentine, 1929–34.
Peterson, David G. Hebrews and Perfection: An Examination of the Concept of Perfection in the “Epistle to the Hebrews”. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Published under the name David Peterson.
Peterson, David G. Possessed by God: A New Testament Theology of Sanctification and Holiness. New Studies in Biblical Theology 1. Leicester: Apollos, 1995.
Porter, Stanley E. Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood. Studies in Biblical Greek 1. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
Rahlfs, Alfred, ed. Septuaginta: Id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interpretes. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935.
Rendtorff, Rolf. The Covenant Formula: An Exegetical and Theological Investigation. Translated by Margaret Kohl. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998.
Rhyder, Julia. Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 134. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019.
Robertson, A. T. A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research. 4th ed. Nashville: Broadman, 1934.
Robinson, Maurice A., and William G. Pierpont, eds. The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2005. Southborough, MA: Chilton Book Publishing, 2005. Consulted also in its electronic edition (byztxt), with collation notes recording the Nestle–Aland 27 and 28 readings.
Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting.” Mind 14 (1905): 479–493.
Ryle, J. C. Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots. London: William Hunt, 1877. Enlarged ed., 1879.
Schreiner, Thomas R. 1, 2 Peter, Jude. New American Commentary 37. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003.
Schreiner, Thomas R. 1 & 2 Peter and Jude. Christian Standard Commentary. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020.
Schwartz, Baruch J. “Israel’s Holiness: The Torah Traditions.” In Purity and Holiness: The Heritage of Leviticus, edited by Marcel J. H. M. Poorthuis and Joshua Schwartz, 47–59. Jewish and Christian Perspectives 2. Leiden: Brill, 2000.
Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Selwyn, Edward Gordon. The First Epistle of St. Peter: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes and Essays. London: Macmillan, 1946.
Sifra: An Analytical Translation. Translated by Jacob Neusner. 3 vols. Brown Judaic Studies 138–140. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.
Sifra de-Ve Rav. With the commentary Ha-Torah ve-ha-Mitzvah of Meir Leibush Malbim. Bucharest, 1860.
Sifra de-Ve Rav. Edited by Isaac Hirsch Weiss. Vienna, 1862.
Sklar, Jay. Leviticus: The Lord’s Holy People Living Out His Holy Character. Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2023.
Snaith, Norman H. The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament. London: Epworth, 1944.
Stackert, Jeffrey. Rewriting the Torah: Literary Revision in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Legislation. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 52. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007.
STEPBible. Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament (TAGNT). Cambridge: Tyndale House. Licensed CC BY 4.0. https://github.com/STEPBible/STEPBible-Data. Accessed October 2026.
Strawson, P. F. “On Referring.” Mind 59 (1950): 320–344.
Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563/1571). In Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.
Vulgate. Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam versionem. Edited by Robert Weber and Roger Gryson. 5th ed. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007.
Wallace, Daniel B. Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996.
Waltke, Bruce K., and M. O’Connor. An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990.
Warfield, Benjamin B. Perfectionism. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1931–32.
Wells, Jo Bailey. God’s Holy People: A Theme in Biblical Theology. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 305. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000.
Wenham, Gordon J. The Book of Leviticus. New International Commentary on the Old Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979.
Wesley, John. Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament. London, 1755.
Wesley, John. A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766; rev. 1777). In The Works of John Wesley, edited by Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed., vol. 11, 366–446. London, 1872.
Wesley, John. Sermon 25, “Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse V” (1748). In The Works of John Wesley, edited by Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed., vol. 5. London, 1872.
Wesley, John. Sermon 85, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation” (1785). In The Works of John Wesley, edited by Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed., vol. 6. London, 1872.
Westcott, Brooke Foss, and Fenton John Anthony Hort. The New Testament in the Original Greek. Cambridge and London: Macmillan, 1881.
Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). In Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Westminster Larger Catechism (1648). In Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Valerie Hotchkiss, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
Westminster Leningrad Codex. With the OpenScriptures Hebrew Bible morphological annotation (morphhb).
Wevers, John William, ed. Leviticus. Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum II/2. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986.
Wiley, H. Orton. Christian Theology. 3 vols. Kansas City: Beacon Hill, 1940–1943.
Williams, Travis B., and David G. Horrell. 1 Peter: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary. 2 vols. International Critical Commentary. London: T&T Clark, 2023.
Windisch, Hans. “Das Problem des paulinischen Imperativs.” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 23 (1924): 265–281.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Wright, David P. “Holiness in Leviticus and Beyond: Differing Perspectives.” Interpretation 53, no. 4 (1999): 341–350.
Zerwick, Maximilian. Biblical Greek Illustrated by Examples. Translated by Joseph Smith. Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1963.
Zimmerli, Walther. I Am Yahweh. Edited by Walter Brueggemann. Translated by Douglas W. Stott. Atlanta: John Knox, 1982.
Zimmerli, Walther. “Ich bin Jahwe.” In Geschichte und Altes Testament: Festschrift Albrecht Alt, 179–209. Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 16. Tübingen: Mohr, 1953.
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Biblical quotations follow the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise indicated, and retain its spelling. Hebrew and Greek are given in italic transliteration according to general academic conventions, with the original script supplied where a grammatical point depends on the form itself; the divine name is written YHWH in transliteration and “the LORD” in English quotations. In the transliteration of Hebrew the circumflex marks a vowel written with a vowel letter (plene) and the macron one written without it (defectively), so that לִהְיֹת at 11:45 appears as lihyōt and לִהְיוֹת at 20:26 and 22:33 as lihyôt. ↩
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Martin Luther, The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained, trans. E. H. Gillett (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1859), on 1 Peter 1:15–16; the sermons were published in 1523 and are also available as Luther’s Works, vol. 30, The Catholic Epistles (St Louis: Concordia, 1967). Sifra, Qedoshim, parashah 1, on Leviticus 19:2, glossing qĕdōšîm tihyû with pĕrûšîm tihyû, “you shall be separate”, as quoted by Nahmanides ad loc. and printed in the Malbim edition. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Catholic Epistles, trans. and ed. John Owen (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1855), on 1 Peter 1:15–16. ↩
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The Hebrew text is the Westminster Leningrad Codex with the OpenScriptures Hebrew Bible morphology. The Septuagint is cited from Alfred Rahlfs, ed., Septuaginta (Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935). The Greek New Testament is cited from The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition, ed. Michael W. Holmes (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature; Bellingham: Logos, 2010), with MorphGNT parsing; the readings of Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), of the Textus Receptus and of Maurice A. Robinson and William G. Pierpont, eds., The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2005 (Southborough, MA: Chilton Book Publishing, 2005), are noted where they differ, as collated in the STEPBible Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament. ↩
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John E. Hartley, Leviticus, Word Biblical Commentary 4 (Dallas: Word Books, 1992), introduction, on holiness (paraphrased). ↩
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Norman H. Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament (London: Epworth, 1944), the chapter “The Holiness of God”; Claude-Bernard Costecalde, Aux origines du sacré biblique (Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1986); Peter J. Gentry, “The Meaning of ‘Holy’ in the Old Testament”, Bibliotheca Sacra 170 (2013): 400–417, and Peter J. Gentry and Stephen J. Wellum, Kingdom through Covenant: A Biblical-Theological Understanding of the Covenants, 2nd ed. (Wheaton: Crossway, 2018), on the meaning of qdš; Jo Bailey Wells, God’s Holy People: A Theme in Biblical Theology, JSOTSup 305 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000); Philip Peter Jenson, Graded Holiness: A Key to the Priestly Conception of the World, JSOTSup 106 (Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1992). ↩
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So 1 Corinthians 6:11; 1 Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 10:10; 13:12. The exceptions are 1 Corinthians 7:14, where the unbelieving spouse is sanctified “in” the believing one, whether as agent, means or sphere; the agentless passive imperative ἁγιασθήτω (hagiasthētō) of Revelation 22:11; Hebrews 9:13, where ritual blood and ashes are the agent; and the petition ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου (Matthew 6:9; Luke 11:2), a θη-imperative whose unexpressed agent is disputed between God Himself (compare Ezekiel 36:23; Leviticus 10:3) and His people (compare Leviticus 22:32); John 17:19, where Christ sanctifies Himself, is a special case, and 1 Timothy 4:5 concerns food, not persons. For the lexical entry see Walter Bauer, Frederick W. Danker, William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000; hereafter BDAG), s.v. ἁγιάζω. ↩
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John Murray, “Definitive Sanctification”, Calvin Theological Journal 2, no. 1 (1967), reprinted in Collected Writings of John Murray, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1977), 277–284, with the companion essay “The Agency in Definitive Sanctification”, 285–293, who argued that the New Testament’s characteristic uses of hagiazō refer to a once-for-all act rather than to a process, while retaining progressive sanctification as a distinct reality; David G. Peterson, Possessed by God: A New Testament Theology of Sanctification and Holiness, New Studies in Biblical Theology 1 (Leicester: Apollos, 1995), who argued that the common equation of sanctification with progressive moral growth distorts the New Testament’s own emphasis. For the Wesleyan doctrine see H. Orton Wiley, Christian Theology, 3 vols (Kansas City: Beacon Hill, 1940–1943), vol. 2, on initial sanctification. The mainstream Reformed synthesis grounds the believer’s active self-consecration in God’s prior renewal: Anthony A. Hoekema, Saved by Grace (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), the chapter on sanctification, and “The Reformed Perspective”, in Five Views on Sanctification, ed. Stanley N. Gundry, Counterpoints (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987) (the definition is paraphrased); Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 4, Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), the chapter “Sanctification and Perseverance”, subsection “Passive and Active Sanctification”; G. C. Berkouwer, Faith and Sanctification, Studies in Dogmatics, trans. John Vriend (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1952), who adds that sanctification continually feeds on justification, so that growth which leaves justification behind becomes moralism (paraphrased). ↩
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P. F. Strawson, “On Referring”, Mind 59 (1950): 320–344, whose own example is “the king of France is wise”; the bald king is Bertrand Russell’s, “On Denoting”, Mind 14 (1905): 479–493. For the hermeneutical use of such categories see Richard S. Briggs, Words in Action: Speech Act Theory and Biblical Interpretation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001); Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text? The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998); Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ↩
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John R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), ch. 3, on the preparatory conditions of a directive. ↩
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Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, ed. E. Kautzsch, trans. A. E. Cowley, 2nd English ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910; hereafter GKC), §54; Bruce K. Waltke and M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1990), §26.2, including the estimative-declarative nuance “to show oneself X”, which, if live here, would yield the gloss “show yourselves holy”; Francis Brown, S. R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), s.v. קדשׁ, hitpael. Every occurrence of the hitpael of קדשׁ, and not only those listed in the text, was checked against the Westminster Leningrad Codex, which also attests the hitpael with God as subject, “I will show my holiness”, at Ezekiel 38:23. The OpenScriptures morphology tags תְטַמְּאוּ as a jussive, but with לֹא it is a yiqtol of standing prohibition, and in this stem and person the two forms are identical. ↩
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GKC §112; Waltke and O’Connor, Introduction, ch. 32; Paul Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, Subsidia Biblica 27 (Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press, 2006), §119. The ESV’s “Consecrate yourselves therefore” adds an inferential particle the Hebrew leaves implicit; no argument here rests on it. ↩
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Rahlfs, Septuaginta, ad locc. The renderings at Numbers 11:18, Joshua 3:5, Exodus 19:22 and 1 Samuel 16:5, and the absence of any rendering of the hitpael at Leviticus 20:7, were checked in Rahlfs’s text, so that the Greek Leviticus says “you shall be holy” five times and “consecrate yourselves” once, in the θη-future. Of the alternatives, the middle ἁγνίσασθε differs from ἁγιασθήσεσθε in lexeme and in voice, while ἁγιασθήτωσαν and ἁγιάσθητε are the same θη-voice in another mood. The critical edition is John William Wevers, ed., Leviticus, Septuaginta: Vetus Testamentum Graecum II/2 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), which should be consulted for the manuscript evidence at 20:7. ↩
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Walther Zimmerli, “Ich bin Jahwe”, in Geschichte und Altes Testament: Festschrift Albrecht Alt, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 16 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1953), 179–209; English translation in Walther Zimmerli, I Am Yahweh, ed. Walter Brueggemann, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982). ↩
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Anneli Aejmelaeus, “Function and Interpretation of כי in Biblical Hebrew”, Journal of Biblical Literature 105 (1986): 193–209; GKC §158; Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar, §170. On the covenant formula see Rolf Rendtorff, The Covenant Formula: An Exegetical and Theological Investigation, trans. Margaret Kohl (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998). ↩
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August Klostermann’s designation, first proposed in 1877, is cited from his collected studies, Der Pentateuch: Beiträge zu seinem Verständnis und seiner Entstehungsgeschichte (Leipzig: Deichert, 1893); Israel Knohl, The Sanctuary of Silence: The Priestly Torah and the Holiness School (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16, Anchor Bible 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), on 11:43–45, and Leviticus 17–22, Anchor Bible 3A (New York: Doubleday, 2000), introduction to chapters 17–22, for the characterisation of H’s holiness as “dynamic” (paraphrased); Baruch J. Schwartz, “Israel’s Holiness: The Torah Traditions”, in Purity and Holiness: The Heritage of Leviticus, ed. Marcel J. H. M. Poorthuis and Joshua Schwartz, Jewish and Christian Perspectives 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 47–59, who distinguishes P, which does not speak of lay Israel’s holiness, H, which commands it as a goal, and D, which declares it as a status; David P. Wright, “Holiness in Leviticus and Beyond: Differing Perspectives”, Interpretation 53, no. 4 (1999): 341–350. On H as inner-biblical exegesis revising and complementing both P and Deuteronomy see Christophe Nihan, From Priestly Torah to Pentateuch: A Study in the Composition of the Book of Leviticus, FAT II/25 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); Jeffrey Stackert, Rewriting the Torah: Literary Revision in Deuteronomy and the Holiness Legislation, FAT 52 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); Julia Rhyder, Centralizing the Cult: The Holiness Legislation in Leviticus 17–26, FAT 134 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019). ↩
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Sifra, Qedoshim, parashah 1, on 19:2 (quoted by Rashi ad loc.); Leviticus Rabbah 24:5 (paraphrased); Erasmus Gaß, “‘Heilige sollt ihr werden. Denn heilig bin ich, Jahwe, euer Gott’: Zur Begründungsstruktur in Lev 19”, Münchener Theologische Zeitschrift 64, no. 3 (2013): 214–231; Thomas Hieke, “‘Ihr sollt heilig sein’ (Lev 19,2): Konzepte von Heiligkeit im Alten Testament”, Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift 167, no. 4 (2019): 349–356; Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), on the place of chapter 19 in the book’s ring composition. The refrain was counted on the Westminster Leningrad Codex: it stands at 19:3, 4, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36 and 37, and a sixteenth occurrence stands inside the motive clause of 19:2 itself. ↩
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GKC §107; Waltke and O’Connor, Introduction, ch. 31; Joüon and Muraoka, Grammar, §113. For plural forms of a III-he verb the jussive and the long yiqtol coincide, so that the OpenScriptures tag “imperfect” on תִּהְיוּ is a judgement rather than a datum; nothing in the argument rests on it. ↩
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Sifra, Qedoshim, parashah 1, on 19:2, as quoted by Nahmanides ad loc. and printed in the Malbim edition (as at n. 2); Rashi and Nahmanides (Ramban) on 19:2; Vulgate, Leviticus 19:2, sancti estote, quia ego sanctus sum, Dominus Deus vester. ↩
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Sifra, Shemini, on Leviticus 11:44, as quoted by Nahmanides on 19:2 (paraphrased); Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, on 19:2 and the Comment on holiness; Jenson, Graded Holiness, on the spatial and personal dimensions of the holiness spectrum. ↩
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Leviticus Rabbah 24:9 (paraphrased); Sifra, Qedoshim, parashah 1, on “for I am holy” (paraphrased). ↩
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Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), on 19:2 and 20:7–8; Hartley, Leviticus, on 20:8; Milgrom, Leviticus 17–22, on 20:8; Jay Sklar, Leviticus: The Lord’s Holy People Living Out His Holy Character, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2023), on 20:7–8; Nobuyoshi Kiuchi, Leviticus, Apollos Old Testament Commentary 3 (Nottingham: Apollos; Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2007), ad loc. (positions paraphrased). ↩
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The statement rests on a check of every occurrence of the adjective קָדוֹשׁ in Leviticus in the Westminster Leningrad Codex. The adjective is predicated of lay Israel only as the complement of הָיָה (11:44, 45; 19:2; 20:7, 26); of the priests with יִהְיוּ and יִהְיֶה (21:6, 8) and, of the individual priest, in the nominal clause קָדֹשׁ הוּא לֵאלֹהָיו (21:7); elsewhere it qualifies “place” (6:9, 19, 20 [ET 6:16, 26, 27]; 7:6; 10:13; 16:24; 24:9). ↩
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The collation is that of the STEPBible Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament, which records the Nestle–Aland 27 and 28 readings beside those of the Textus Receptus and of Robinson and Pierpont, Byzantine Textform 2005, cross-checked against the electronic Robinson–Pierpont Byzantine Textform (the byztxt edition), whose collation notes record the Nestle–Aland 27 and 28 readings. A third variant, a ὅτι introducing the quotation after γέγραπται, is bracketed by Nestle–Aland 27, printed by the SBL edition and Westcott and Hort, and omitted by the rest; nothing turns on it. For the manuscript attestation of ἔσεσθε and of the imperatives see the apparatus of Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993) and 28th ed. (2012), ad loc. The Nestle–Aland 28 text of the Catholic Letters adopts that of the Editio Critica Maior, Catholic Letters, 2nd rev. ed. (2013), the first portion of the New Testament text established with the Coherence-Based Genealogical Method, which Nestle–Aland 28 incorporated ahead of its publication; the text-critical discussion of Travis B. Williams and David G. Horrell, 1 Peter: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary, 2 vols, International Critical Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2023), written after the Editio Critica Maior, should be consulted on these three variants. ↩
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That Peter’s quotations keep close to the Septuagint is shown by Karen H. Jobes, “The Septuagint Textual Tradition in 1 Peter”, in Septuagint Research: Issues and Challenges in the Study of the Greek Jewish Scriptures, ed. Wolfgang Kraus and R. Glenn Wooden, Septuagint and Cognate Studies 53 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006), 311–333; see also Karen H. Jobes, 1 Peter, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005; 2nd ed. 2022), on 1:16. Leviticus 19:2 is named as the source by, among others, Paul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter: A Commentary on First Peter, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); John H. Elliott, 1 Peter: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 37B (New York: Doubleday, 2000); and Thomas R. Schreiner, 1, 2 Peter, Jude, New American Commentary 37 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2003), and 1 & 2 Peter and Jude, Christian Standard Commentary (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2020), all on 1:16. ↩
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A. T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research, 4th ed. (Nashville: Broadman, 1934), 333–334; F. Blass, A. Debrunner and Robert W. Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961; hereafter BDF), §78; BDAG, s.v. γίνομαι, which records ἐγενήθην as a Doric and Hellenistic form and classes the construction with a predicate adjective under the sense “become something”; Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), in the discussion of deponency. For the middle voice: Jonathan T. Pennington, “Setting Aside ‘Deponency’: Rediscovering the Greek Middle Voice in New Testament Studies”, in The Linguist as Pedagogue, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Matthew Brook O’Donnell, New Testament Monographs 11 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 181–203; Rutger J. Allan, The Middle Voice in Ancient Greek: A Study in Polysemy, Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology 11 (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 2003); Rachel Aubrey, “Motivated Categories, Middle Voice, and Passive Morphology”, in The Greek Verb Revisited: A Fresh Approach for Biblical Exegesis, ed. Steven E. Runge and Christopher J. Fresch (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016). Stratton L. Ladewig, “Ancient Witnesses on Deponency in Greek”, Filología Neotestamentaria 25 (2012): 3–20, defends the antiquity of the category of deponency; the point relied on here, that the θη-form of γίνομαι is not passive in sense, is not in dispute between the two sides of that debate. ↩
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Buist M. Fanning, Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), the chapter on the aspects in commands and prohibitions, who holds that general precepts normally take the present imperative and specific commands the aorist, but notes among the exceptions the strings of aorist imperatives in epistolary paraenesis, 1 Peter being a conspicuous case (an observation that goes back to J. H. Moulton, A Grammar of New Testament Greek, vol. 1, Prolegomena, 3rd ed. [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1908], on the aorist imperative), in which aorist imperatives carry general precepts with a summary or urgent cast; Stanley E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament, with Reference to Tense and Mood, Studies in Biblical Greek 1 (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Constantine R. Campbell, Verbal Aspect and Non-Indicative Verbs: Further Soundings in the Greek of the New Testament, Studies in Biblical Greek 15 (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), and Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008); Douglas S. Huffman, Verbal Aspect Theory and the Prohibitions in the Greek New Testament, Studies in Biblical Greek 16 (New York: Peter Lang, 2014); Joseph D. Fantin, The Greek Imperative Mood in the New Testament: A Cognitive and Communicative Approach, Studies in Biblical Greek 12 (New York: Peter Lang, 2010). The Byzantine γίνεσθε of verse 16 would have added an imperfective nuance, viewing the becoming from within; the critical text does not have it. ↩
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For the predicative construal, so the ESV and NIV and most commentators (e.g. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, on 1:15); for “in accordance with the Holy One who called you”, so the NASB and e.g. J. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter, Word Biblical Commentary 49 (Waco: Word, 1988), on 1:15, who takes ἅγιον of the Holy One. The options are set out in Mark Dubis, 1 Peter: A Handbook on the Greek Text, Baylor Handbook on the Greek New Testament (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2010), and Greg W. Forbes, 1 Peter, Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2014), on 1:15. For κατά of norm see BDAG, s.v. κατά, B.5. ↩
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BDF §362; Maximilian Zerwick, Biblical Greek Illustrated by Examples, trans. Joseph Smith (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1963), on the future used for the imperative; Wallace, Greek Grammar, 569–570; Francis G. H. Pang, “Aspect, Aktionsart, and Abduction: Future Tense in the New Testament”, Filología Neotestamentaria 23 (2010): 129–159, on the aspectual debate about the future. ↩
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W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew, vol. 1, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), on 5:48; Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1–7: A Commentary, rev. ed., trans. James E. Crouch, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), on 5:48; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, Anchor Bible 28 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981), on 6:35–36; François Bovon, Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1–9:50, trans. Christine M. Thomas, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), on 6:35–36. ↩
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Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse, on appropriated discourse, the mode in which a speaker makes another’s words his own; Augustine, Confessions 10.29.40. ↩
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Calvin, Catholic Epistles, on 1 Peter 1:2; cf. e.g. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, on 1:2. ↩
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John H. Elliott, The Elect and the Holy: An Exegetical Examination of 1 Peter 2:4–10 and the Phrase basileion hierateuma, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 12 (Leiden: Brill, 1966); Elliott, 1 Peter, on 2:4–10; Wells, God’s Holy People, ch. “Belonging to God”, on 1 Peter. Philip Carrington, The Primitive Christian Catechism: A Study in the Epistles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), argued that 1 Peter preserves a common baptismal catechesis, and Edward Gordon Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter: The Greek Text with Introduction, Notes and Essays (London: Macmillan, 1946), Essay II, reconstructed behind it a “Christian holiness code” patterned on Leviticus 17–19. οἰκοδομεῖσθε is taken as indicative by most commentators (e.g. Achtemeier, 1 Peter, on 2:5). ↩
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The characterising reading of Hebrews 10:14 is defended in David G. Peterson, Hebrews and Perfection: An Examination of the Concept of Perfection in the “Epistle to the Hebrews”, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series 47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and underlies Peterson, Possessed by God (§2.2); the progressive reading is that of the ESV and the NIV. A substantival present participle regularly designates a class without asserting progression, so both readings are grammatically available, and nothing here rests on the participle alone. ↩
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Sifra, Qedoshim, parashah 1, on Leviticus 19:2 (as at n. 2), and Shemini, on Leviticus 11:44, as quoted by Nahmanides on 19:2 (paraphrased); Leviticus Rabbah 24:5 and 24:9; b. Sotah 14a and b. Shabbat 133b (Abba Saul) for the imitation of God in conduct; Rashi and Nahmanides on Leviticus 19:2. The benediction is the standard birkat ha-mitzvot of the daily liturgy; see, for example, The Koren Siddur, trans. Jonathan Sacks (Jerusalem: Koren, 2009). On the rabbinic holding-together of Israel’s given status and demanded conduct, and on the commandments as the means of Israel’s sanctification, see Hannah K. Harrington, Holiness: Rabbinic Judaism and the Graeco-Roman World, Religion in the First Christian Centuries (London: Routledge, 2001), ch. “The Holy People”. ↩
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Augustine, Confessions 10.29.40; De natura et gratia 43.50; and De spiritu et littera 19.34, “the law was given that grace might be sought; grace was given that the law might be fulfilled”. ↩
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Martin Luther, The Bondage of the Will (De servo arbitrio, 1525; WA 18:600–787), in Luther’s Works, vol. 33, Career of the Reformer III, ed. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), on the imperatives of the law; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), 2.5.6–11. The maxim of De natura et gratia 43.50 is restated almost verbatim by the Council of Trent, Session VI (1547), Decree on Justification, ch. 11, so that it was received on both sides of the later confessional divide; the Protestant reading locates the ability it promises in grace received by faith rather than in an infused habit. ↩
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Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), in Luther’s Works, vol. 31, Career of the Reformer I, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1957), 327–377; the commandment-and-promise structure is stated in the opening pages of the treatise and is here paraphrased. On promissio as the performative word in Luther see Oswald Bayer, Martin Luther’s Theology: A Contemporary Interpretation, trans. Thomas H. Trapp (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008). ↩
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Luther, Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude, trans. Gillett, on 1 Peter 1:15–17; Dennis Ngien, Paragon of Excellence: Luther’s Sermons on I Peter (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), ch. 1, “God’s Word as Performative: Christian Obedience and Holiness as Passive”, 19–44, whose title names the ground Luther hears, not a denial of the task. ↩
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Calvin, Catholic Epistles, on 1 Peter 1:15–16. ↩
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John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), 3.6.2; cf. 3.3.9 (renewal “not accomplished in a moment, a day, or a year”) and, in the translation of Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, Library of Christian Classics 20–21 (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 3.11.1 on the duplex gratia. Calvin’s comment on Leviticus 19:2 reads the verse as an exhortation to measure worship by God’s own nature and to begin by labouring at holiness: Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses Arranged in the Form of a Harmony, trans. Charles William Bingham, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1852–55), ad loc., under the exposition of the law (paraphrased). ↩
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John Wesley, Sermon 25, “Upon our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, Discourse V” (1748), §II, and Sermon 85, “On Working Out Our Own Salvation” (1785), §III.2–3, in The Works of John Wesley, ed. Thomas Jackson, 3rd ed. (London, 1872). A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766; rev. 1777), in Works, ed. Jackson, vol. 11, 366–446, carries the same logic as a question: “Has God anywhere in Scripture commanded us more than he has promised to us?” Wesley’s Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755) pass over 1 Peter 1:15 in silence and gloss verse 16 only with “Lev. xi, 44.” (as the text stands in the edition consulted; editions vary slightly). ↩
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Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), 13.2–3 and 16.3; Westminster Larger Catechism (1648), Q. 75; Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Q&A 86, 114 and 115; Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563/1571), Articles 10 and 12; Formula of Concord (1577), Epitome and Solid Declaration, Article VI, “Of the Third Use of the Law”. ↩
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For the Wesleyan-holiness position: Wiley, Christian Theology, vol. 2, on entire sanctification; H. Ray Dunning, Grace, Faith and Holiness: A Wesleyan Systematic Theology (Kansas City: Beacon Hill, 1988); Kenneth J. Collins, The Theology of John Wesley: Holy Love and the Shape of Grace (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007). For the reply: Calvin, Catholic Epistles, on 1 Peter 1:15–16 (“the proportion is not that of equals; but we ought to advance in this direction as far as our condition will bear. And as even the most perfect are always very far from coming up to the mark, we ought daily to strive more and more”); Thirty-Nine Articles, Article 15, “Of Christ alone without Sin”; Westminster Confession 13.2; Benjamin B. Warfield, Perfectionism, 2 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931–32); J. C. Ryle, Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots (London: William Hunt, 1877; enlarged ed. 1879); J. I. Packer, “‘Keswick’ and the Reformed Doctrine of Sanctification”, Evangelical Quarterly 27 (1955): 153–167, and Keep in Step with the Spirit (Old Tappan: Revell, 1984). ↩
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John Owen, Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers (1656), in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, vol. 6 (Edinburgh: Johnstone and Hunter, 1850–53), ch. 2; Wesley, Sermon 85, §III.2–3; Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 75; Thirty-Nine Articles, Article 10, as at n. 42. ↩
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Calvin, Institutes, 3.6.2; Michael Parsons, “Being Precedes Act: Indicative and Imperative in Paul’s Writing”, Evangelical Quarterly 60, no. 2 (1988): 99–127. ↩
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Rudolf Bultmann, “Das Problem der Ethik bei Paulus”, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 23 (1924): 123–140; Hans Windisch, “Das Problem des paulinischen Imperativs”, Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 23 (1924): 265–281. ↩
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Edward Fisher, The Marrow of Modern Divinity (1645/1648), with the notes of Thomas Boston (1726); Sinclair B. Ferguson, The Whole Christ: Legalism, Antinomianism, and Gospel Assurance—Why the Marrow Controversy Still Matters (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, ed. Geffrey B. Kelly and John D. Godsey, trans. Barbara Green and Reinhard Krauss, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works 4 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), ch. 1, “Costly Grace”; on the quietism of the Higher Life teaching, Andrew David Naselli, No Quick Fix: Where Higher Life Theology Came From, What It Is, and Why It’s Harmful (Bellingham: Lexham, 2017). Karl Barth, “Gospel and Law” (1935), in Community, State, and Church: Three Essays, intro. Will Herberg (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1960); Werner Elert, Law and Gospel, trans. Edward H. Schroeder, Facet Books (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1967; German original 1948). Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 115, as at n. 42; Calvin, Institutes, 2.7.6–9. ↩
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Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 155, on how the word is made effectual to salvation, with Westminster Confession 14.1; cf. Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 65, as at n. 42. ↩
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Wesley, Plain Account, in Works, ed. Jackson, vol. 11, where the bracketed retractions (“This is too strong”; “far too strong”) stand in Wesley’s own text. ↩