Holiness and Love of God by John Webster

SJT 57(3): 249–268 (2004) Printed in the United Kingdom
C 2004 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd
DOI: 10.1017/S0036930604000250
The holiness and love of God

John Webster
Department of Divinity, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3FX, Scotland
j.webster@abdn.ac.uk
Abstract
Written in honour of the Berlin systematic theologian Wolf Krötke, this paper
gives an exposition of two propositions. (1) ‘A Christian dogmatics of the divine
perfections is a positive science in the church of Jesus Christ whose task is
the rational articulation of the singular identity of God the Holy Trinity, freely
presented in the works of God’s triune being.’ Christian dogmatics is a positive
science concerned, not with deity as maximally perfect, but with the singular
identity of God in his self-presentation as it is confessed in the sphere of the
church. That identity is God’s identity as Father, Son and Spirit, confessed
as immanently complete and as operative in the economy of God’s works.
This is applied to the attributes of holiness and love in a further proposition:
(2) ‘God’s holiness is the majestic incomparability, difference and purity which he
is in himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and which is manifest and operative in
the economy of his works in the love with which he elects, reconciles and perfects
human partners for fellowship with himself.’ God’s holiness is self-consecration to
be the wholly unique being that he is. But as the triune God, his self-consecration
includes his consecration of the creature as he singles out the creature for blessing
in his works of election, reconciliation and sanctification. As such, God’s holiness
is operative as the love which maintains the creature’s cause by eradicating all
that hinders the creature’s consecration to life in fellowship with God.
Among the many significant contributions that Wolf Krötke has made to
the renewal of Christian theology, his work on the doctrine of the divine
attributes is first in rank. Gottes Klarheiten1 is a very fine book, notable above all
for its theological and spiritual concentration, the mature fruit of a lifetime
devoted to the utterly demanding and joyful calling of thought and speech
about God. After Barth, it has not proved easy for evangelical theologians
to write about the perfections of God, simply because Barth’s treatment in
KD 2/1 is such a compelling and creative re-inhabitation of the tradition
that it is difficult to know how else to set about the task. That Krötke has
indeed achieved ‘a new interpretation’ of such cogency and penetration is
a testimony to his remarkable theological gifts. One of the most distinctive
1
W. Krötke, Gottes Klarheiten: Eine Neuinterpretation der Lehre von Gottes “Eigenschaften” (Tübingen:
Mohr, 2001).
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scottish journal of theology
features of Gottes Klarheiten is the way in which it offers a thoroughly trinitarian

account of the attributes – a feature which his work has in common with at
least one other important contemporary study of the topic, that of the late
Colin Gunton, whose Act and Being2 appeared in the year before his untimely
death in 2003. Much may be learned from reading the two books in tandem,
most of all about the way in which, in the light of the Christian confession
of God as Father, Son and Spirit, the doctrine of God’s attributes takes on
a very different appearance. In what follows, I attempt to reflect upon the
same themes (I) in some preliminary considerations concerning the task of
a dogmatic theology of the perfections of God, and (II) in some proposals
concerning the inseparability of the triune God’s holiness and his love.
I
A Christian dogmatics of the divine perfections is a positive science in
the church of Jesus Christ whose task is the rational articulation of the
singular identity of God the Holy Trinity, freely presented in the works
of God’s triune being.
A Christian dogmatics of the divine perfections is a positive science; its
positum is God in the infinitely rich and full singularity of his perfect being.
Dogmatics is positive, first, by virtue of the object by which it is brought into
being, through which it is to be guided in all its operations, and in which
it has its end. This object is given to dogmatic science. It is given, initially,
in the confession of the church, but only in the confession of the church
because it is first of all given to the confession of the church by a majestic
act of mercy on the part of the church’s Lord, as he expounds himself in
his works. The divine self-exposition – revelation – sets dogmatics on its
way. The positum of a dogmatics of the divine perfections is thus not some
inherited ‘topic’ or a set of questions which emerge from the analysis of the
concept of deity: Christian dogmatics is not concerned with deity but with
God. But precisely because this is its given matter, the object of dogmatics
is never something simply to hand, a reality which can in some way be
schematised by theological reason; however much it may give itself as a
reality for knowledge, the positum of dogmatics cannot become an object of
exhaustive theological projection. This is because dogmatics has to do with
a reality which, even in its presence to the mind, remains utterly replete,
immeasurable in its fullness. For what is given to dogmatics is the event
of God’s personal presence, his engagement with humankind as creator,
saviour and perfecter in which he unfolds his being and will for us. That
presence is irreducibly itself; it cannot be converted or broken down or in
2
C. Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (London: SCM, 2002).
250
any way rendered amenable to reason’s comprehension. It is, quite simply,

the presence of the glory of God. It is God’s spiritual presence, free, majestic,
giving itself to be known in its own terms and by its own original act,
claiming reason but not in any way circumscribed by reason’s measure.
Of that claim upon reason, the positive science of dogmatics is one of the
fruits.
Further, dogmatics is positive by virtue of its sphere: it is a positive science
in the church of Jesus Christ. God’s lordly presence creates a creaturely domain for
itself, bringing into being a sphere of human life and fellowship in which
God is known, loved and praised. That domain is the church, which is the
‘spiritual culture’ within which theology fulfils its office. In the church,
common life, thought and speech are being transfigured by the reconciling
and sanctifying work of God, delivered from the ignorance, vanity and
constriction of sin and set free for true knowledge of God in the gospel. The
realm of the church is the realm of dogmatics; like all theology, dogmatics
is ecclesiastical science. Dogmatic science is not a transcendent moment, an
act of the mind which rises above the merely domestic life of the Christian
community and submits that life to critical evaluation. It is, rather, an activity
of the sanctorum communio, and so can fittingly be described as a work of ‘holy’
reason, reason set apart for service of the gospel in the assembly of the saints.
The task of this positive ecclesiastical science is the rational articulation of the
reality of God which is given to the church in the gospel. Rational articulation
of God’s reality is a matter of thought and speech which follow the ‘law of
the object’ by whose commanding presence they are governed. The ‘law’
of the object is the inherent order in which that object presents itself and
which constitutes a claim upon reason. The object is what it is, and not
something other; it presents itself in its own unique and particular act; that
uniqueness and particularity command the works of reason, summoning
them in a particular direction. The intentionality of theological reason – its
movement towards the object – is anticipated or graciously overtaken by
the extentional presence and action of the object itself. The extentionality of
God’s presence and action has imperative force. It claims reason, requiring
of reason that, if it is to be set free from falsehood and to discover truth, it
must exercise itself to follow the object’s instruction. This is ‘following’ the
law of its given reality. Yet such a following is by no means merely passive
or receptive, because the law of the object quickens reason so that reason
may exercise its capacities as it is reconciled to God and made fitting for the
service of the knowledge of him.
Dogmatics is a critical science only because it is a positive science which
does its work under the tutelage of this given reality and its law. It is a critical
science because it inquires into the adequacy of the church’s thought and
251
speech about God in relation to the positum by which the church is claimed. An
uncritical dogmatics would not be Christian dogmatics, precisely because it
would assume the identity between its own representations and the reality of
God – or at least the adequacy of those representations – and would thereby
absolve itself from undertaking any fresh acts of seeking and following the
command of God’s presence. Were that to happen, the law of the object
would become a mere statute, not a quickening imperative. The task of
critical theology is to work against such paralysis. But critical theology is
not authorised to go beyond this: it has no mandate to inquire into the
conditions of possibility of there being a given reality which controls the
dogmatic thinking of the church, or to seek to establish such a possibility
on grounds other than the object’s self-presence, or to treat the law of the
object with ironic distance. Whatever judgements critical theology makes
must emerge from reason’s having been judged, absolved and summoned into
activity by the gift of God’s truth.
Why is all this a necessary preliminary to a dogmatics of the divine
perfections? Because thinking about God’s perfections involves reason’s
conversion by and reordering towards its object, which is the singular
identity of God the Holy Trinity, freely presented in the works of God’s
triune being. How is that identity to be described?
The Christian doctrine of God is concerned with God’s identity. It is charged
with the task of giving an account of the particular character (Eigenart) of the
God who is confessed in the church, the one who is himself as he executes
his own being in his acts as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To inquire into the
attributes of God is thus not to ask about supposed attributes of deity in
general, about what a god must be. It is to ask about the particular perfection
in which God is himself, inquiring into the characteristic and wholly unique
depth of the divine being in which God confirms himself in all his abundance
and grace. It is to ask, not what God is but who God is. And it is to ask with a
measure of confidence that such a question can only (but really!) be answered
out of attention to the movement which is God’s triune being and act. It is
this ‘special divine character’, this ‘special essence of the divine being’, that is
the positum of a Christian doctrine of the divine attributes.3 Two consequences
follow.
First, dogmatics will not invest in the attempt to establish the perfections
of God by first determining the necessary attributes of a maximally perfect
being. Approaches to the doctrine along these lines enjoy some prestige
3
K. Barth, Church Dogmatics 2/1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957), p. 298. Hereafter
referred to as CD.
252
among Anglo-American philosophers of religion,4 who have attempted to

articulate the attributes of God, first, by establishing a set of great-making
properties and then, second, by following the logic of supremacy, envisaging
God as ‘exemplifying necessarily a maximally perfect set of compossible
great-making properties’.5 Such arguments (supposed by their proponents
to be Anselmian in character, but in fact only doubtfully so) are of little
dogmatic utility. Most of all this is because they are pervaded by an abstract
conception of deitas; in effect, they generate a notion of divinity not governed
by the specific contours of God’s being and action, which then serves as the
frame for positive theological teaching. But it proves to be a very constricting
frame. Dominated by the apologetic interests of natural religion and natural
theology as they developed from the mid-seventeenth century, this approach
deploys the doctrine of God’s attributes as part of a larger project of offering a
rationally demonstrable theistic construal of reality. As a result, it tends to give
high profile to the ‘metaphysical’ divine attributes, since those attributes are
conceptually necessary if God is to be presented as the author and governor
of contingent reality. Not only does this mean that the immanent life of the
Trinity plays almost no perceptible role in determining the attributes of God
(since it is supposed that triunity adds nothing to the conception of God as
maximal causal power). It also means that attributes which indicate God’s
personal, historical relations with his creatures (including, of course, holiness
and love) are pushed to the margins. The identity of God is determined by the
function of God as perfect world-cause and world-sustainer.
Second, dogmatics will not attempt to ground what it has to say about
the divine attributes in a phenomenology of, for example, love or holiness.
Whether they derive from philosophical anthropology, the study of religions
or cultural theory, these phenomenologies share a weakness with ‘perfect
being theology’: they determine the essentia dei by first determining the
content of a predicate such as holy or loving, and then applying the result
to God. Even when the predicate is stretched by its application in divinis,
the problem remains that the predicate is not fully shaped by the acting
subject, and the acting subject is therefore rather readily reduced to being
an exemplification of a concept derived in advance from elsewhere. As this
happens, the singularity of God is compromised, for it is not allowed to
4
E.g. J. Hoffman and G. S. Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002);
K. Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); R.
Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); E.
Wierenga, The Nature of God: An Inquiry into the Divine Attributes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1989).
5
T. V. Morris, ‘Jesus and the Attributes of Deity’, in The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 76.
253
emerge in its own free clarity and distinctive form. For dogmatics, on the
other hand, the point of language about the attributes of God is simply to
indicate God’s name. God’s name is his enacted identity, his sheer, irreducible
particularity as this one who is and acts thus. More simply: God’s name is his
uniqueness. As the bearer of this name, God is not indeterminate deity, but
the self-determining one who is beyond the reach of any comparison or
class. ‘I am the Lord, that is my name’ (Isa 42:8). As the incomparable one
who is in every respect a se, God names himself: God speaks the name that he
bears. And so when human speech takes it upon itself to repeat this name, it
does not ascribe but confesses. God receives his name from no-one but himself,
for his identity is altogether self-originating. Dogmatic talk of the divine
attributes is thus not a proposal, the projection of a category onto God. It is
a repetition of the name of God, or, perhaps better, a conceptual expansion
of that name which does not add to it or go beyond it but simply utters it
as it has already been uttered, returning to that name as something which
cannot be enhanced, mastered or resolved into anything other than itself. In
Christian talk of God, the nominal precedes the predicative. All dogmatic talk
of God’s perfections traces God’s own pronouncement of his name; it simply
says, in effect, ‘the Lord, he is God, the Lord, he is God’ (1 Kgs 18:39).
The identity of God of which Christian dogmatics is the rational
articulation is the identity of God the Holy Trinity, freely presented in the works of God’s
triune being. God becomes a matter for human thought and speech because
he makes himself present to his creatures. God is present to himself in the
fullness and inexhaustible sufficiency of his triune being, and in this fullness
he has need of no other and owes nothing to any other being. But the fullness
that is proper to him includes (though it is not exhausted by) the willing,
executing and completing of a repetition of his presence to a reality that
is not himself. The circle of God’s repleteness, the whole and integrated
fellowship that he is as Father, Son and Spirit, is not a closed circle. In its very
completeness, it is a life-giving movement, bestowing, guarding, healing,
restoring and perfecting the life of what is not God, as its lordly creator and
preserver. Thus: ‘God is who He is in His works.’6 But to say this is not in
any way to empty the doctrine of God of reference to everything apart from
the economy of the opera dei ad extra, because these opera are the opera dei, the
works of God’s utterly sufficient being. Thus: ‘In His works He is revealed as
the One He is.’7
The formal consequence of this is that, because God the Holy Trinity is
the agent of his own presence, he does not become a matter for human
6
Barth, CD 2/1, p. 260.
7
Ibid.
254
consideration because the creature makes God present by a speculative

or religious or poetic act. The presence of God is never a function of
the self-presence of the creature, but is always pre-eminent, self-moved,
commanding, absolutely original. Consequently, the attributes of God are
not labels attached to a deity called into the creature’s presence, but are
indicators of the name of the one who summons the creature to account for
itself and its thinking in his presence.
The material consequence is that the doctrine of the Trinity is fundamental
for any account of the perfections of God. God’s being presents itself in his
works; in his works God presents his own most proper being. But God’s
being is his being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is all the difference in
the world between the attributes of deity and the perfections of the God of
the Christian confession; the marker of the difference is the doctrine of the
Trinity. Without an operative doctrine of the being and action of the triune
persons in their unity, a theology of the divine attributes will be incapable
of achieving the right sort of Christian determinacy. It will misconstrue both
the character of God’s immanent life and the manner of his relation to the
world; God’s life in se will most naturally be thought of as causal will, and
his works pro nobis will be reduced to remote providential governance, with
the divine attributes expounded accordingly. A trinitarian account of God’s
being, acts and perfections, on the other hand, will be concerned at every
point to indicate the fellowship which God is in his own limitless majesty
and which he establishes with his creatures. As Father, Son and Spirit God is
and acts out of holy love.
A trinitarian account of the divine perfections will be especially alert to the
need to coordinate the ‘immanent’ and the ‘operative’. ‘Jede Klarheit Gottes
ist als Klarheit des trinitarischen Gottes zu verstehen. Das heißt, sie hat Gott nicht nur
im Verhältnis zur Welt, sondern auch im Verhältnis zu sich selbst auszusagen.’8
Dogmatics must avoid any separation of ‘absolute’ from ‘relative’ attributes
for exactly the same reason that it must avoid any separation of the immanent
from the economic Trinity, namely that only in their full integration can
the specific freedom and movement of God’s being be conceived. God’s
aseity is the plenitude in which he turns to his creation; his turning to his
creation is rooted in the unoriginate perfection and abundance of his life.
Because God relates to and acts upon his creatures as the one he is, too
sharp a distinction must not be drawn between attributa immanentia and attributa
operativa – especially one in which the attributa immanentia are considered to be
‘absolute’ properties whose content can be determined without reference
to the biblical–historical representation of God’s acts. Thus: the holiness
8
Krötke, Gottes Klarheiten, p. 115.
255
which God is in se is active in the election and purification of a people for

himself, and the love of the triune persons abounds as loving mercy towards
ruined creatures. Yet a proper distinction between immanent and operative
ought not to be abandoned and the attributes collapsed without residue into
economic operations. God’s holy love for his creatures would be groundless
if it were not the outworking in time and space of his eternal being as the
holy and loving Father, Son and Spirit. We now turn to a description of that
holy and loving being and of its work in the world.
II
God’s holiness is the majestic incomparability, difference and purity
which he is in himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and which is
manifest and operative in the economy of his works in the love with
which he elects, reconciles and perfects human partners for fellowship
with himself.
‘There is none holy like the Lord, there is none besides thee; there is no
rock like our God’ (1 Sam 2:2). God’s holiness is his majestic incomparability.
‘There is none holy like the Lord’. First and foremost, talk of God as holy
simply betokens his utter uniqueness, his being as himself and not another.
As the one who is holy as no other is holy, God is not to be considered
the most consistent instantiation of some quality called holiness, present
elsewhere in lower degree but finding maximal exemplification in God. Talk
of God’s holiness, because it is nominal before it is predicative, says at its
simplest: ‘Holy is he!’, and says it in such a way that ‘he’ determines the
content of ‘holy’. As with all the attributes of God, so here: language about
holiness makes identifying rather than classificatory reference.
God’s holiness is therefore his sheer difference. ‘There is none besides thee’.
‘Gott ist heilig als der von allem anderen Unterschiedene.’9 The act in
which God fulfils his holy being as Father, Son and Spirit differentiates him
from every other being; as God enacts his majestic identity, he is entirely
himself. Like all God’s acts, this act of personal self-differentiation is wholly
effortless, uncaused and perfect, requiring nothing for its fulfilment beyond
itself. God’s ‘otherness’ is not something that God comes to have in rivalry
between himself and others. The divine being is replete, and is involved in no
agonistics. God’s holiness is thus his transcendence of any possible relation
in which he is merely one factor alongside another, even if it be the supreme
or victorious factor. There is none besides the holy God; he simply is.
9
E. Schlink, Ökumenische Dogmatik: Grundzüge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1983), p. 760.
256
God’s holiness is his incomparable and different majesty. In speaking of

the holiness of God, therefore, we are seeking to listen to the name of the
active personal being of God as it maintains itself in its absolute singularity
and unrivalled difference. God is, however, this singular and unrivalled one
in his thrice-holy being; his uniqueness is not some kind of substratum to
his identity as Father, Son and Spirit, but is identical with his triunity. God is
simple and singular in his threeness. In the completeness of the one divine
essence and in the majesty of the three persons as the mutually determining
subsistences of that one essence; in the consubstantiality and coinherence of
the three persons; in their proper identities and acts as the one who begets,
the one who is begotten and the one who proceeds; in their loving acts
as the world’s creator, the world’s reconciler and the world’s perfecter – in
this unwearied and unbroken act of his triune life, God is the holy one
without beginning and end.
Incomparable and different in his being and act as the three-in-one, God is
pure. God’s holiness is also moral holiness, for he is ‘of purer eyes than to behold
evil’ (Hab 1:13). God’s holiness is pure majesty. It is unsullied by anything that
is opposed to or outside his will; its difference includes its otherness from all
that is polluted; it admits of no compromise or degradation of its perfection.
But – crucially – moral perfection does not exhaust the notion of God’s
holiness, and is properly subordinate to holiness as God’s incomparable
identity. At this point, dogmatics must be particularly scrupulous not to
allow an alien conception of moral purity to infiltrate its account of the
divine attributes and disrupt what it says about God’s uniqueness. God’s
moral purity is his; here, too, ‘there is none holy like the Lord’.
God is not an archetype; his moral holiness is not simply his maximal
possession of a virtue whose application is more general. In his Lectures on the
Philosophical Doctrine of Religion from the first half of the 1780s, Kant remarks that
‘[h]oliness is the absolute or unlimited moral perfection of the will. A holy
being must not be affected with the least inclination contrary to morality.’10
This is because ‘[a] being who is to give objective reality to moral duties must
possess without limit the moral perfections of holiness, benevolence and justice. These
attributes constitute the entire moral concept of God.’11 What is problematic in Kant’s
account (which is a commonplace of a good deal of analytical philosophy of
religion) is not simply that the doctrine of the divine perfections is harnessed
10
I. Kant, Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion, in A. W. Wood and G. di Giovanni
(eds), Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
p. 409.
11
Ibid., p. 408.
257
to a particular use of the doctrine of God as ‘holy legislator’12 to underwrite

a theory of human ethical duty by giving ‘objective reality to moral duties’.
It is also that Kant collapses God’s holiness into moral purity. Detached
from God’s essential holiness and no longer rooted in the distinctive identity
of God, holiness is moralised. And cut adrift in this way from the triune
essence of God, holiness can quickly be transformed into God’s conformity
to an abstract moral law. Divine holiness becomes virtue personified, and
therefore it encounters us simply as moral imperative.
Thinking of God’s holiness in isolation from God’s identity means that a
contradiction is inscribed deep into the doctrine of God: the contradiction
between God’s holiness and his love. This consequence of the moralisation
of God’s holiness becomes especially visible in the theology of atonement,
where divine holiness can be presented as an ethical righteousness which
is at variance with God’s attitude of merciful love towards sinners. The
contradiction between holiness and love often takes the form of an
estrangement of Father and Son in the work of atonement: the Father
is the source of holy wrath against sin, the Son its victim in the place
of sinners. In modern theology, the contradiction is commonly eased by
the eradication of holiness in favour of love. But a dogmatics of divine
holiness must move beyond such abstractions. What is required by way of
alternative is (1) the reintegration of God’s purity into a more comprehensive
conception of holiness as self-maintaining identity and difference, and
(2) an understanding of God’s moral holiness not as merely statutory or
morally legislative but as intrinsic to God’s loving purpose of fellowship
with humankind. Holiness and love, that is, are mutually conditioning and
mutually illuminative terms, which can only be expounded in relation to
each other, and which both serve as conceptual indicators of the being and
ways of the triune God.
God is holy in himself as Father, Son and Spirit. If God’s triunity is not
accidental but essential, if it is identical with the particular being which
God is, then his holiness is also in every respect determined by the fact that
it is the holiness of this one. Furthermore, the difference that is made by
the church’s trinitarian confession of God is visible in God’s relation to his
creatures, for the holiness that God is in himself is manifest and operative in the
economy of his works in the love with which he elects, reconciles and perfects human partners for
fellowship with himself.
In developing this theme, we may begin by completing the sequence of
thought in 1 Sam 2:2. There is none holy like God – that is, God’s holiness is
his incomparability – for there is none besides God – that is, God’s holiness
12
Ibid., p. 409.
258
is his absolute difference from all else that is. Yet, precisely as the God who
is thus incomparable and different, God is holy in being the ‘rock’ of those
who confess him: ‘there is no rock like our God’. The holiness of God in se is
the support and strength of the people of God, the unshakeable foundation
of creaturely being and confidence. How is this to be understood?
To the sovereign act of God’s holiness in which he maintains his own
triune being in its integrity and distinctiveness there corresponds a further
act of holiness in which God extends himself to maintain the being of his
creature. God’s self-consecration – the pure majesty with which he wills and
establishes himself as who he is – includes his consecration of the creature,
willing and establishing the creature as possessed of its own integrity and
distinctiveness in relation to himself, destroying all that opposes his will for
the creature, and so leading the creature to the perfect fulfilment of its being.
The holiness of the triune God is not only the infinity and integral perfection
of his being, but also that infinity and perfection in its turning to the creature.
Holiness is manifest and operative in God’s loving works of relating to the
creature, taking up its cause and sanctifying it for life with himself.
As the holy one, God consecrates creatures for fellowship, so that his
holiness is active in his covenant-creating and covenant-sustaining work as
the creature’s ‘rock’. Isaiah repeatedly puts together the idea of God as the
Holy One and God as Redeemer and Saviour (Isa 41:14; 43:3; 48:17; 49:9):
‘your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel’. God’s holiness is present as the
active love in which he comes to the aid of his people, taking up their cause,
bearing their sin, purifying them and binding them to his own life. The
‘otherness’ of the Holy Trinity may not be thought of as simple segregation.
God does not ‘hallow’ his being – that is, maintain himself in full integrity as
the one he is – by isolating himself; he maintains his holy being in freedom
and sovereign power by fulfilling his will to fellowship. It is in this will to
fellowship, not in utter seclusion, that God’s holiness is operative. God is the
Holy One. But he is ‘the Holy One in your midst’ (Hos 11:9). The self-election
of the holy God includes his election and sanctification of the creature. ‘Der
heilige Gott handelt . . . auch als der Aussonderende, der Ansichziehende, der
Gemeinschaft Stiftende, – als der Heilbringende, sich Schenkende . . . Auf
das stärkste kommt das ganz Andere der göttlichen Heiligkeit darin zum
Ausdruck, daß die Gemeinschaft mit ihm nur dadurch möglich wurde, daß
er von sich aus in freier Liebe sich der versklavten israelitischen Stämme
annahm.’13 Or, as Barth puts it, ‘“holy” . . . clearly means primarily and
fundamentally that which singles out, helps, blesses and restores’.14
13
Schlink, Ökumenische Dogmatik, p. 761.
14
Barth, CD 2/1, p. 361.
259
God is holy as he loves the creature; his love for his creature is holy love.
Once again, everything depends on giving the right sort of specificity to
the conception of holiness, which must not be allowed to become separated
even by a hair’s breadth from attention to the triune God and his loving
ways in the world. Aulén, for example, is quite correct to speak of holiness
as God’s ‘unconditional majesty’;15 but his account remains wedded to an
abstract notion of separation: ‘That God is called the Holy One implies
primarily that there is a definite line of demarcation between the divine and
the merely human, and that God is God and man is man.’16 This stands
in need of correction by consideration of the directedness of God’s triune
holiness towards fellowship. Again, like Aulén, Brunner fails to catch the full
scope of God’s holiness by speaking of a ‘dialectic of Holiness and Love’;17
even Martensen (whose presentation of the divine attributes contains much
that is worthy of praise) assumes that in God’s relation to creatures holiness
indicates separation, whereas love indicates proximity: ‘The holy God testifies
to us in conscience, that love is not an indefinite flowing over of the nature
of man into that of God, but a community of persons, the purity of which
depends upon a strict regard being paid to the limits separating the one
from the other.’18 Many of the same problems arise in a theology of the
divine attributes when holiness is expounded on the basis of a supposed
contrast between clean and unclean, sacred and defiled, unapproachable and
proximate. Thus Tillich:
The unapproachable character of God, or the impossibility of having a

relation with him in the proper sense of the word, is expressed in the word
“holiness”. God is essentially holy, and every relation to him involves the
consciousness that it is paradoxical to be related to that which is holy. God
cannot become an object of knowledge or a partner in action. If we speak,
as we must, of the ego–thou relation between God and man, the thou
embraces the ego and consequently the entire relation . . . Ultimately, it
is an insult to the divine holiness to talk about God as we do of objects
whose existence or non-existence can be discussed. It is an insult to the
divine holiness to treat God as a partner with whom one collaborates or as
a superior power whom one influences by rites and prayers. The holiness
of God makes it impossible to draw him into the context of the ego-world
15
G. Aulén, The Faith of the Christian Church (London: SCM, 1954), p. 123.
16
Ibid., pp. 120f.
17
E. Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 1 (London: Lutterworth, 1949), p. 163.
18
H. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898), p. 100.
260
and the subject–object correlation. He himself is the ground and meaning

of this correlation, not an element within it.19
This protest against the reification of God is, doubtless, justifiable; but it
comes at cost to holiness as a mode of God’s relation. Moreover, even in
stating the relational character of divine holiness, it is of capital importance
that the relation be conceived concretely, that is, historically and personally,
on the basis of the events in which Father, Son and Spirit are at work to
create and preserve fellowship. God’s triune acts of relation are not simply
the outworking of a prior ontology of the ‘true Infinite’ in which holiness
transcends its own antithesis in the profane.20 They are, irreducibly and not
merely nominally, the work of the Father, the Holy One in your midst, of
the Son, the Holy One of Israel, and of the Holy Spirit.
God’s loving holiness is operative in the work of election. ‘Blessed be the
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with
every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him
before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless
before him’ (Eph 1:3f.). Election is an act of God’s holiness because it is an
act which segregates, that is, which marks out a specific creaturely being as
the recipient of a specific blessing. In the act of election, the being of the
creaturely object of election is established, in that it is demarcated from all
that is not and from all other creatures who are not the recipients of this
divine benefit. Election is that operation of the holiness of God in which
God wills that there should be a counterpart to his consecration of himself,
a further reality which is the object of his good pleasure. As God maintains
himself in his self-election (‘I am who I am!’) so also he upholds the being
of the creature in his election of the human correspondent to himself. In
this sense, election is a blessing for which God the Father is to be blessed,
one in which the creature is dignified by appointment to be the specific
being that it is. God’s ‘choosing’ of the creature is, moreover, not simply
the establishment of a static, invariant reality. It is appointment to active
assumption of destiny in relation to God. The purpose of the will of the holy
God is that we should be God’s ‘sons and daughters’ (Eph 1:6); his choosing
has as its telos that we should be ‘holy and blameless before him’ (Eph 1:5).
And because God’s holiness is active in this way, choosing the creature for
participation in a specific destiny in relation to himself, then the work of
holiness is at the very same time and in the very same measure a work of
God’s love. ‘He destined us in love’ (Eph 1:5); and in this act of his there is
19
P. Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),
pp. 271f.
20
W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1991), p. 412.
261
operative the grace that is bestowed on us in ‘the Beloved’ (Eph 1:6). Just as
God’s holiness in se cannot be conceived in isolation from his operations in
consecrating creaturely being for fellowship, so also God’s holiness cannot be
grasped without attending to its loving extension of itself into the creaturely
realm in the works of holiness which establish the creature by setting it apart
for himself.
This loving ‘economic’ holiness is the enactment of the eternal will of ‘the
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Eph 1:3) and so may be appropriated to the
first person of the Trinity. As the Holy Father, God purposes that his holiness
is actual in his loving work. The Father’s will is, of course, indissolubly bound
up with the persons and operations of Son and Spirit: the Father’s purpose
is ‘set forth in Christ’ (Eph 1:9), and it is brought to completion and made
an object of creaturely knowledge through the work of the Holy Spirit (Eph
1:13f., 17). Nevertheless, there is that which is proper to the Father: the
lordly determination of a holy people for himself.
God’s holiness is love because it is actual in the Father’s unshakeable
determination that the creature should be and should be held in life, and
thereby enact its destiny. God’s loving holiness is known in the acts which
mark out the creature for participation in a history with God. The counterpart
to God’s self-consecration is not a mere involuntary and inert quantity but a
living being, destined to be God’s son or daughter. The ‘You shall be holy’
which corresponds to ‘I am holy’ is not simply the indication of a state; it
is a life-giving imperative which bids the creature to inhabit and act out the
role to which the creature has been appointed by the Father’s purpose. God is
holy as the creature’s Lord, and it is in just this way that he loves the creature,
willing that the creature should exist in accordance with its created nature
and so have life. God the Father is the holy one in our midst who establishes
the creature for life and fellowship, and loves what he has made.
This loving holiness, setting the creature apart for the blessing of life, is an
undefeated purposiveness. God will not be turned aside from ‘the purpose of
his will’; his holy love wills to be triumphant. Having singled the creature out,
giving the creature a specific being and form and consecrating the creature
for a particular history in which it will find its fulfilment, God’s holiness
remains at work to ensure that the end of the creature will be attained. As the
holy God elects, so he is lovingly faithful to what he chooses for covenant
with himself. Part of that loving faithfulness is what might be called God’s
‘negative’ holiness (corresponding to the ‘positive’ holiness which wills the
creature into being). This is God’s holiness as opposition to and destruction
of all that is unholy. The unholy is that which lies beyond the will of God. In
particular, it is the absurd history of human defiance in which the creature
tries to be in a way other than that which has been purposed by God. Along
262
this path, precisely by attempting to cease to be a creature and instead to

determine its own destiny, the creature undermines and destroys its own
being. And to this unholiness, the holiness of God is implacably opposed.
But what is meant here by ‘opposition’? Everything hangs on the fact that
this opposition of God to creaturely infidelity and pollution must not be
extracted from the larger scope of God’s loving dealings with his creatures.
God’s holiness figures itself in the will of the Father for the creature which
is embodied in the Son’s work of sin-bearing and reconciliation, and it is
extended into us by the Holy Spirit’s sanctification of the reconciled. Only
within the terms of that wide, inclusive history can God’s ‘negative’ holiness
be understood for what it is – the love of the holy God for the creature, a love
which wills that the creature be held in life and therefore must obliterate all
that thwarts the creature’s entering into life and fellowship.
In its purposiveness as love, therefore, the holiness of the Father includes
jealousy. ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God’ (Exod 20:5). God’s jealousy is
his creative will in its singularity and exclusiveness. But as such it is not mere
self-assertion (what Brunner calls ‘an active self-differentiation, the willed
energy with which God asserts and maintains the fact that He is Wholly
Other against all else’).21 It is the energy of God’s good will with which
he directs himself in all his works and ways towards us. The jealousy of
the triune God is his purposiveness; it is his refusal to negotiate away the
creature’s good by allowing the creature itself to set the terms on which it
will live. The holy God overcomes and destroys all that opposes his will,
and in so doing loves us. Ezekiel puts it thus: ‘I will restore the fortunes of
Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel; and I will be jealous for
my holy name’ (Ezek 39:25). The Holy One in our midst is thus the one
whose holy jealousy is restorative, and whose love is operative in the eradic-
ation of wickedness so that that to which we are destined may come to be.
What we are powerless to destroy – our perverted, self-destructive versions
of ourselves – God himself undertakes to destroy, to the immense dismay
and terror of the sinful creature, and in just this way God fulfils his purpose
by protecting and upholding us. ‘The burning bush . . . cannot be consumed.
But the unconsumed bush must burn. This bush is Israel. And the flame
which burns it but does not consume it is the God of Israel, the holy God.’22
God’s loving holiness is active in the world. It is at work in the history
of holy love in which God consecrates and defends the creature. God’s
holy love stands between the creature and its self-destruction. This history
of holy love, the economy of God’s works, is divine history (and therefore
21
Brunner, Dogmatics, vol. 1, p. 160.
22
Barth, CD 2/1, p. 366.
263
really is holy, really loving, really the creature’s rock of defence) because it is
willed by God the Father, rooted in his eternal act of self-consecration. More-
over, it is a history of comprehensive scope, gathering up all of God’s acts
towards the creature. Yet at the centre of this all-embracing series of divine
acts lies a particular history, the history of Israel, and – as the centre of the
centre, so to speak – the history of Jesus, the Son of God, in whom God’s holy
love overcomes its opposite and in whom, therefore, holiness is perfectly
triumphant.
God’s consecration of the creature for fellowship faces the creature’s
defiance. This refusal of God’s benefit is both an affront to the divine majesty
and a mortal threat to the creature, which can only be what it is called to
be in fellowship with the holy God. In opposing God’s holy purpose, the
creature opposes itself and enacts its own destruction. There can, certainly, be
no possibility that this opposition on the part of the creature will somehow
constitute a genuine threat to the consecrating will of God. God’s will is
wholly antecedent, ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph 1:4) and
cannot be deflected by anything the creature does to elude it. In his love and
holiness God has destined us to be his children, and what God determines
will be. But how will it be? In what ways are the purposes of the Father
brought to bear on the defiant creature?
God’s loving purpose of holy fellowship is accomplished in Jesus Christ.
In him there takes place definitively the consecration, conservation and
glorification of creaturely being that God the Holy Father wills. ‘He destined
us in love to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of
his will, to the praise of his glorious grace which he bestowed on us in the
Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of
our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon
us’ (Eph 1:5–8). ‘In him’ here is a movement; it is his coming to us. The holy
God does not abandon his creature, but comes to us in the person and work
of the incarnate Son. God’s holy will – which we must learn to see as his
will to fellowship, his determination to consecrate the creature as part of
his divine self-consecration – is not set aside or held in abeyance when he
comes to us and enters into the creature’s pollution. Quite the opposite: here
in this history, God’s holy will is accomplished in love. As sin abounds, God’s
determination to single out the creature for blessing abounds all the more.
It abounds in the fact that God the Son takes flesh and dwells among us.
Entering into estrangement and facing hostility, rejected by his own (those
whom he possesses with jealous love), God the Son is the embodiment of
the divine self-declaration: ‘I am the Holy one is your midst’ (Hos 11:9).
In this coming, God’s holiness is at work as consecrating mercy. The Son
of God, the Holy One of God as he is acclaimed in terror by the demons
264
(Mark 1:24), comes to the aid of the sick and sinful and polluted creature.
In its wickedness, the creature can pretend to no claim upon the mercy
of the Holy One, can hope, indeed, for nothing other than judgment and
destruction. Yet the coming of God the Son is the fulfilment of the divine
promise: ‘I will not come to destroy’ (Hos 11:9). His coming as the Holy
One, that is to say, is wholly to the creature’s benefit, an act of fellowship
and therefore of blessing. In what does this blessing consist?
The Holy One takes up our cause. The creature’s rejection of the holy
purpose of God leaves a void: because of sin’s pollution, there is no longer
an active creaturely counterpart to God’s consecrating purpose. All that there
is is the ruined creature, dead in trespasses and sins, incapable of any act by
which fellowship with God might be restored. But in the person of his Son,
the holy God himself undertakes for the creature, acting on the creature’s
behalf and in the creature’s place, both representative and substitute. His
history enfolds our own within itself, consecrating us as it were from within
our accursed existence. He assumes our evil situation in all its squalor and
deprivation, making it his own. ‘For our sake God made him to be sin’ (2 Cor
5:21). The blessing of the creature purposed by the holy Father is effected
precisely in the fact that Jesus Christ, the Holy One who ‘knew no sin’,
becomes the sin-bearer. He carries our sin, and so bears God’s holy wrath
against our pollution. But this pouring out and receiving of divine wrath
by God himself is not simply a destructive act, an eradication. The negative
work of exclusion only has meaning within the creative and loving work of
God’s holiness, which is to confirm the creature in life. In the person of his
Son, the holy God destroys sin in order that what he wills from all eternity –
a people for himself – will come to full fruition.
‘Our great God and Saviour Jesus Christ . . . gave himself for us to redeem
us from all iniquity and to purify for himself a people of his own who are
zealous for good works’ (Tit 2:13f.). That is God’s holiness operative as love.
God the Son ‘gave himself’, entering the situation of human ruin in love and
grace. He did this ‘for us’, in order to bless, restore and bring the creature to
its proper glory in the purpose of God. In so doing ‘he redeemed us from all
iniquity’ and ‘purified’ us, separating us from the world of unrighteousness
and unholiness which we had made for ourselves and which poisoned our
well-being. And acting in this way in holy love, he re-established the divine
purpose, bringing into being a consecrated people, purifying ‘for himself a
people of his own’ who are characterised above all by zeal for holiness of
life.
This, then, is the second moment of God’s holy love: God the Son re-
establishing the creature’s cause, holiness operative in reconciling love. This
is the centre of the centre. Like the Father’s work of election which it effects,
265
the Son’s work of reconciliation is complete in itself, requiring no creaturely

element as a cooperating cause. If it were otherwise, then reconciliation
would not be mercy, for it would require of the creaturely what the creature
simply cannot be and do. Election and reconciliation are both alike perfect.
But in that very perfection they are full of transformative power. Their
perfection – their character as a wholly achieved work of grace – is an
inclusive perfection, a perfection whose glory includes the glorification of the
creature. Election and reconciliation are not a closed circle; they are the acts
of the holy love of God, and so they stretch out towards their goal, which is
the fulfilment of God’s self-consecration by the consecration of creatures for
fellowship with himself. And they do this in the third work of God’s holy
love, the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit completes the trajectory of God’s self-sanctification in the
sanctification of the creature, in that the Spirit is the ‘perfecting cause’ of
creaturely reality. The Spirit, that is, is the agent of those divine acts through
which the creature really does become in full integrity what it is destined to
be. The Spirit gives life, acting in and upon the creature in such a way that
the creature attains its full stature, filling out its history in completion of the
divine purpose. This gift of life is also the gift of holiness, as the Spirit makes
actual and effective in the creature the blessing for which the creature has
been lovingly singled out and reconciled. That blessing is fellowship between
the holy God and his holy people.
No less than the works of election and reconciling grace, the work of the
Spirit is a work of God’s holy majesty. The Spirit is holy because he is intrinsic
to God’s self-consecration, not merely a force in the economy. With Father
and Son, the Spirit is within the sphere of deity; he is Lord, and only as
such is he the lifer-giver. In his work in and upon the creature, the Spirit is
no mere immanent principle, a cause which disappears into that of which
it is the cause. As the Holy Spirit of God he is incomparable; besides him
there is no spirit who is holy. Furthermore, the Spirit’s work is inseparable
from the works of Father and Son. As the work of the Father looks ahead
to reconciliation and sanctification, and as the work of the Son gathers up
election and points to perfection, so also the work of the Spirit completes
what has been willed by the Father and effected by the Son. The sanctifying
work of the Spirit is not a ‘new’ divine work in the sense that might be
thought to complete what has been left unfinished by the Son of God. The
holiness of the church and of the Christian rest on the sufficiency of Christ. It
is the office of the Holy Spirit to extend this sufficiency as the agent through
whom it stretches out in its power. ‘You were washed, you were sanctified,
you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our
God’ (1 Cor 6:11): the ‘and’ there is consequential, the Spirit’s work being
266
the full effectiveness of the ‘name’ (the enacted identity) of Jesus Christ who
in this as in all things is to be acknowledged as Lord. But at the same time this
‘consequence’ is not accidental but utterly necessary; without it, washing,
sanctification, justification – the entire alteration of the creature’s situation
before God – would not be present as determinations of creaturely existence.
That they are so present is to be explained only by confession of this third
work of the holy God.
The Spirit generates a form of human life which corresponds to election
and reconciliation. An adequate dogmatic description of that form of life
would require a full account of ecclesiology and of sanctification, as well as an
ethics of holiness. Here we may only hint that undergirding such an account
of the active common life of the sanctorum communio and of the individual saint
in Christ must be the work of the Spirit in establishing fellowship with God.
Fellowship with God is, crucially, not only status or appointment but history
and task. Those who are ‘sanctified in Christ Jesus’ are in the very same
movement ‘called to be saints’ (1 Cor 1:2). The sanctifying Spirit singles
the creature out and empowers for active holiness, and this active holiness is
‘partnership with God’. This does not, of course, mean that by the Spirit the
saints are made into cooperating or supplementary agents alongside God. To
speak in such terms erodes the proper distinction between the creature and
its Lord in a way which both takes away from the creator’s sovereignty and
robs the creature of its genuine creaturely integrity. Over against this, the
partnership with God which the Holy Spirit bestows is a fellowship in which
the creature is consecrated as creature, called to hallow God’s name by echoing
in its creaturely acts the great divine act of self-consecration. Sanctification
is not a matter of participation in God’s work but rather of the restoration
of creaturely vocation. The Holy Spirit makes creatures holy and therefore
makes them human. And in that is fulfilled the love of God for what he has
made for himself.
With this we complete this sketch of the movement of God’s holy love,
in se and propter nos homines et propter nostram salutem. It is all, doubtless, well
known to the colleague whose Christian courage and theological testimony
we celebrate today. For the inseparability of holiness and love is one of the
many clarifications that his theology offers to church and theology, and for
which we are in his debt.23 When it is in its right mind, theology counts
23
See, for example, Krötke, Gottes Klarheiten, p. 116: ‘Gottes Heiligkeit ist . . . dem Ereignis
seiner δóξα so benachbart, ja immanent, daß sie als ein Charakteristikum der δóξα
selbst in allen ihren Konkretionen zu verstehen ist. Die Klarheiten der Wahrheit, der Liebe,
der Macht und der Ewigkeit können deshalb durchaus im Sinne heiliger Klarheiten
aufgefasst werden. Die christliche Rede von Gott hat das in ihrem Gottesbegriff auch
unhintergehbar verankert, indem sie sich zu Gott als Heiligem Geist bekennt.’
267
among its tasks the service of the worship of the saints. At the centre of that
worship is a cry of praise: sanctus sanctus sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth, a cry which
may form a fitting summary of what has been suggested here. God is the
thrice Holy One, endlessly moving and at perfect rest in full and limitless
glory. And as this one he is the Lord of hosts, the one who has purposed from
all eternity to make the common life of his holy people into his dwelling
place, and who acts as saviour and sanctifier to come to his people’s aid and,
in bringing many to glory, to glorify himself.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God,
The holy habitation of the Most High.
God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved;
God will help her right early.
The nations rage, the kingdoms totter;
He utters his voice, the earth melts.
The Lord of Hosts is with us,
The God of Jacob is our refuge. (Ps 46:4–7)
268

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SJT 57(3): 249–268 (2004) Printed in the United Kingdom

C 2004 Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd

The holiness and love of God

features of Gottes Klarheiten is the way in which it offers a thoroughly trinitarian

any way rendered amenable to reason’s comprehension. It is, quite simply,

among Anglo-American philosophers of religion,4 who have attempted to

consideration because the creature makes God present by a speculative

which God is in se is active in the election and purification of a people for

God’s holiness is his incomparable and different majesty. In speaking of

to a particular use of the doctrine of God as ‘holy legislator’12 to underwrite

The unapproachable character of God, or the impossibility of having a

and the subject–object correlation. He himself is the ground and meaning

this path, precisely by attempting to cease to be a creature and instead to

the Son’s work of reconciliation is complete in itself, requiring no creaturely

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