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Bible Dictionaries
Purification
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or (ἁγνισμός, Acts 21:26; καθαρισμός, Hebrews 1:3; 2 Peter 1:9)
Purification is an old-world idea and ideal. It arose out of the mystery of God and the misery of man. The signification of ἁγνισμός is that we must approach God carefully, of καθαρισμός that we are unable to do so without the help of some mediator who cleanses. Men instinctively felt that those mysterious presences which surround man were dangerous forces, and that both in approaching and leaving them a wise ritual of restrictions was necessary. Outside the Bible these restrictions are called ‘tabus.’ Aaron, for instance, washed both before and after the act of atonement (Leviticus 16:4; Leviticus 16:23-24; W. R. Smith, RS_2, 1894, p. 152 ff., and additional note B). Man’s misery had taught him the need of being made fit, and so there lurked at the heart of tabu the idea of an act of moral cleansing. It was to be such as both to annul man’s guilt and to appease God. Thus after child-birth, bringing with it the mystery of Divine forces, the mother kept days of purification. Whenever man sighted the Unseen Powers-when with the dead, e.g., or in war-he was under tabu. The Nazirite vow (Numbers 6, Acts 21:26) was a continuous tabu, an active hourly recognition of the Unseen. St. Paul was Jew enough to respond to these forms, and Christian enough to extract value out of them (Acts 18:18)-to make them ‘days of separation’ (Numbers 6:4, Hebrews 7:26) in the religious life.
The Jewish sacrificial system is the specially Divine one among the primitive systems of sacrifice and tabu. It puts into dogmatic form the vague God-ward instincts of the primeval heart. One instinct was the community of blood between the god, man, and the animal world, so that, if the blood of a human or an animal victim was shed, it was an offering of their common life, and, if the flesh was eaten, they became one in a mysterious sacrament (W. R. Smith, op. cit. p. 312 ff.; J. G. Frazer, GB_2 [1900] ii. 318). So the sin-offering was eaten (Leviticus 6:26), embodying man’s guilty feelings towards God and God’s appeased feelings towards man. The final act of this mystery is when ‘God made Jesus Christ to be sin,’ a sin-offering, a setting forth of man’s guilt and God’s purification. He made ‘purification of sins’ (Hebrews 1:3). How?
There are three answers. (a) Psychological.-He fulfils the vague cravings for a guilt-offering from the beginning. That which we cannot put into words, but which has written itself in history, in language, in religion, in instinctive humanity, He is and does. (b) Ethical.-An exhibition on a great scale of an act of justice purges a people. Aristotle made this one of the uses of tragedy, to purify the passions by pity and terror (cf. S. A. Brooke, Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, new ed., 1868, Letters 86, 87). Christ’s death was such an exhibition. (c) Spiritual (‘cleansing their hearts by faith’).-Personal identification with His suffering cleanses (J. R. Seeley, Ecce Homo11, 1873, p. 7; Romans 6:4-7; Sanday-Headlam, ICC_, ‘Romans’5, 1902, p. 162). It is the absence of such identification which in 2 Peter 1:9 is deplored.
Literature.-B. F. Westcott, Hebrews, 1889, pp. 283, 293, The Epistles of St. John, 1883, p. 34; A. Edersheim, The Temple; its Ministry and Service, 1874, ch. 18; J. Scott Lidgett, The Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, 1897; J. M‘Leod Campbell, The Nature of the Atonement6, 1895.
Sherwin Smith.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Purification'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/p/purification.html. 1906-1918.
