The traditional view of man is a carnal one. It portrays him as a biological organism that inhabits a three-dimensional world where space is delimited by boundaries of ownership or jurisdiction apart from which the space has no intrinsic meaning. In reality, however, man is a cosmic being, connected to the universal and eternal by way of the sacred. In their book The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, Mircea Eliade and Willard R. Trask assert that there are two kinds of space, two kinds of time, and two kinds of objects-the sacred and the profane. Of these two types, it is only the sacred that is valuable; the profane is irrelevant. This paper is predicated upon that insight, and it will examine the issue of the sacredness of time, space, and objects in the light of Biblical clues that can explain why Eliade's and Trask's assertion is valid.
Eliade and Trask describe the concept of sacred space by citing the scripture where the Lord tells Moses, "Draw not hither. Put off thy shoes from thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground" (Exodus 3:5, KJV). They assert that "There is, then a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency, amorphous" (Eliade & Trask 20). They point out that for religious man, there is a "spatial nonhomogeneity" that "finds expression between space that is sacred-the only real and real-ly existing space-and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it" (Eliade & Trask 20). Their suggestion is that, paradoxically, it is not the space that they can see that is real but rather the sacred space wherein sacredness is invisible to the human eye. In actuality, it is not the physical space that matters but the spiritual content of that space. The authors contend that "For profane experience...space is homogeneous and neutral: no break qualitatively differentiates t...