Holiness

"God save yer holiness."

From The Project Gutenberg EBook of Irish Wonders

"In the Bible holiness always includes the public, social dimension, which is connected inextricably to the personality of the individual. Not only the human heart must be holy, but also the living conditions, social structures and the forms of the environment in which people live and which they continually construct. In all probability, reified, ritual holiness in the Old Testament and in Judaism always intended this. We must be extremely careful about reducing the requirement of holiness to the purely moral. In no case may the social dimension be lost.

The New Testament obviously knew why it referred to the believers of a church as "the saints," why it spoke of the "holy people" and why it called the church a "holy temple." In all these expressions "holy" always connotes "separated." Not separated in a ghetto, in religious self-satisfaction or in cultural or intellectual isolation, but separated to a different style of life and to new forms of life which realize what God wants society to be, in contrast to the structures of a sick society that is far from God."

From Jesus and Community by Gerhard Lohfink, p. 135