3. Holiness.Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively, that holiness is not(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.B. Positively, that holiness is(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
3. Holiness.Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively, that holiness is not(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.B. Positively, that holiness is(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
3. Holiness.Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively, that holiness is not(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.B. Positively, that holiness is(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
3. Holiness.Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively, that holiness is not(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.B. Positively, that holiness is(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
3. Holiness.Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively, that holiness is not(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.B. Positively, that holiness is(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
3. Holiness.Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively, that holiness is not(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.B. Positively, that holiness is(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
3. Holiness.Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.In further explanation we remark:A. Negatively, that holiness is not(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.B. Positively, that holiness is(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Holiness is self-affirming purity. In virtue of this attribute of his nature, God eternally wills and maintains his own moral excellence. In this definition are contained three elements: first, purity; secondly, purity willing; thirdly, purity willing itself.
Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.
Ex. 15:11—“glorious in holiness”;19:10-16—the people of Israel must purify themselves before they come into the presence of God;Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”—notice the contrast with the unclean lips, that must be purged with a coal from the altar (verses 5-7);2 Cor, 7:1—“cleanse ourselves from all defilement of flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God”;1 Thess. 3:13—“unblamable in holiness”;4:7—“God called us not for uncleanness, but in sanctification”;Heb. 12:29—“our God is a consuming fire”—to all iniquity. These passages show that holiness is the opposite to impurity, that it is itself purity. The development of the conception of holiness in Hebrew history was doubtless a gradual one. At first it may have included little more than the idea of separation from all that is common, small and mean. Physical cleanliness and hatred of moral evil were additional elements which in time became dominant. We must remember however that the proper meaning of a term is to be determined not by the earliest but by the latest usage. Human nature is ethical from the start, and seeks to express the thought of a rule or standard of obligation, and of a righteous Being who imposes that rule or standard. With the very first conceptions of majesty and separation which attach to the apprehension of divinity in the childhood of the race there mingles at least some sense of the contrast between God's purity and human sin. The least developed man has a conscience which condemns some forms of wrong doing, and causes a feeling of separation from the power or powers above. Physical defilement becomes the natural symbol of moral evil. Places and vessels and rites are invested with dignity as associated with or consecrated to the Deity.
That the conception of holiness clears itself of extraneous and unessential elements only gradually, and receives its full expression only in the New Testament revelation and especially in the life and work of Christ, should not blind us to the fact that the germs of the idea lie far back in the very beginnings of man's existence upon earth. Even then the sense of wrong within had for its correlate a dimly recognized righteousness without. So soon as man knows himself as a sinner he knows something of the holiness of that God whom he has offended. We must take exception therefore to the remark of Schurman, Belief in God, 231—“The first gods were probably non-moral beings,”for Schurman himself had just said:“A God without moral character is no God at all.”Dillmann, in his O. T. Theology, very properly makes the fundamental thought of O. T. religion, not the unity or the majesty of God, but his holiness. This alone forms the ethical basis for freedom and law. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology—“The one aim of Christianity is personal holiness. But personal holiness will be the one absorbing and attainable aim of man, only as he recognizes it to be the one preëminent attribute of God. Hence everything divine is holy—the temple, the Scriptures, the Spirit.”See articles on Holiness in O. T., by J. Skinner, and on Holiness in N. T., by G. B. Stevens, in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
The development of the idea of holiness as well as the idea of love was prepared for before the advent of man. A. H. Strong, Education and Optimism:“There was a time when the past history of life upon the planet seemed one of heartless and cruel slaughter. The survival of the fittest had for its obverse side the destruction of myriads. Nature was‘red in tooth and claw with ravine.’But further thought has shown that this gloomy view results from a partial induction of facts. Paleontological life was marked not only by a struggle for life, but by a struggle for the life of others. The beginnings of altruism are to be seen in the instinct of reproduction, and in the care of offspring. In every lion's den and tiger's lair, in every mother eagle's feeding of her young, there is a self-sacrifice which faintly shadows forth man's subordination of personal interests to the interests of others. But in the ages before man can be found incipient justice as well as incipient love. The struggle for one's own life has its moral side as well as the struggle for the life of others. The instinct of self-preservation is the beginning of right, righteousness, justice, and law, on earth. Every creature owes[pg 269]it to God to preserve its own being. So we can find an adumbration of morality even in the predatory and internecine warfare of the geologic ages. The immanent God was even then preparing the way for the rights, the dignity, the freedom of humanity.”And, we may add, was preparing the way for the understanding by men of his own fundamental attribute of holiness. See Henry Drummond, Ascent of Man; Griffith-Jones, Ascent through Christ.
In further explanation we remark:
A. Negatively, that holiness is not
(a) Justice, or purity demanding purity from creatures. Justice, the relative or transitive attribute, is indeed the manifestation and expression of the immanent attribute of holiness, but it is not to be confounded with it.
Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.
Quenstedt, Theol., 8:1:34, defines holiness as“summa omnisque labis expers to Deo puritas, puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis”—a definition of transitive holiness, or justice, rather than of the immanent attribute.Is. 5:16—“Jehovah of hosts is exalted in justice, and God the Holy One is sanctified in righteousness”—Justice is simply God's holiness in its judicial activity. Though holiness is commonly a term of separation and expresses the inherent opposition of God to all that is sinful, it is also used as a term of union, as inLev. 11:44—“be ye holy; for I am holy.”When Jesus turned from the young ruler (Mark 10:23) he illustrated the first;John 8:29illustrates the second:“he that sent me is with me.”Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 51-57—“‘God is light’(1 John 1:5)indicates the character of God, moral purity as revealed, as producing joy and life, as contrasted with doing ill, walking in darkness, being in a state of perdition.”
Universal human conscience is itself a revelation of the holiness of God, and the joining everywhere of suffering with sin is the revelation of God's justice. The wrath, anger, jealousy of God show that this reaction of God's nature is necessary. God's nature is itself holy, just, and good. Holiness is not replaced by love, as Ritschl holds, since there is no self-impartation without self-affirmation. Holiness not simplydemandsin law, butimpartsin the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss, 79—versusRitschl's doctrine that holiness is God's exaltation, and that it includes love; see also Pfleiderer, Die Ritschlische Theologie, 53-63. Santayana, Sense of Beauty, 69—“If perfection is the ultimate justification of being, we may understand the ground of the moral dignity of beauty. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of the good.”We would regard nature however as merely the symbol and expression of God, and so would regard beauty as a ground of faith in his supremacy. What Santayana says of beauty is even more true of holiness. Wherever we see it, we recognize in it a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and God, and consequently a ground of faith in the supremacy of God.
(b) Holiness is not a complex term designating the aggregate of the divine perfections. On the other hand, the notion of holiness is, both in Scripture and in Christian experience, perfectly simple, and perfectly distinct from that of other attributes.
Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.[pg 270]A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”
Dick, Theol., 1:275—Holiness = venerableness,i. e.,“no particular attribute, but the general character of God as resulting from his moral attributes.”Wardlaw calls holiness the union of all the attributes, as pure white light is the union of all the colored rays of the spectrum (Theology, 1:618-634). So Nitzsch, System of Christ. Doct., 166; H. W. Beecher:“Holiness = wholeness.”Approaching this conception is the definition of W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 83—“Holiness is the glorious fulness of the goodness of God, consistently held as the principle of his own action, and the standard for his creatures.”This implies, according to Dr. Clarke, 1. An inward character of perfect goodness; 2. That character as the consistent principle of his own action; 3. The goodness which is the principle of his own action is also the standard for theirs. In other words, holiness is 1. character; 2. self-consistency; 3. requirement. We object to this definition that it fails to define. We are not told what is essential to this character; the definition includes in holiness that which properly belongs to love; it omits all mention of the most important elements in holiness, namely purity and right.
A similar lack of clear definition appears in the statement of Mark Hopkins, Law of Love, 105—“It is this double aspect of love, revealing the whole moral nature, and turning every way like the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life, that is termed holiness.”As has been shown above, holiness is contrasted in Scripture, not with mere finiteness or littleness or misfortune or poverty or even unreality, but only with uncleanness and sinfulness. E. G. Robinson, Christ. Theology, 80—“Holiness in man is the image of God's. But it is clear that holiness in man is not in proportion to the other perfections of his being—to his power, his knowledge, his wisdom, though it is in proportion to his rectitude of will—and therefore cannot be the sum of all perfections.... To identify holiness with the sum of all perfections is to make it mean mere completeness of character.”
(c) Holiness is not God's self-love, in the sense of supreme regard for his own interest and happiness. There is no utilitarian element in holiness.
Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.
Buddeus, Theol. Dogmat., 2:1:36, defines holiness as God's self-love. But God loves and affirms self, not as self, but as the holiest. There is no self-seeking in God. Not the seeking of God's interests, but love for God as holy, is the principle and source of holiness in man. To call holiness God's self-love is to say that God is holy because of what he can make by it,i. e., to deny that holiness has any independent existence. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:155.
We would not deny, but would rather maintain, that there is a proper self-love which is not selfishness. This proper self-love, however, is not love at all. It is rather self-respect, self-preservation, self-vindication, and it constitutes an important characteristic of holiness. But to define holiness as merely God's love for himself, is to leave out of the definition the reason for this love in the purity and righteousness of the divine nature. God's self-respect implies that God respects himself for something in his own being. What is that something? Is holiness God's“moral excellence”(Hopkins), or God's“perfect goodness”(Clarke)? But what is this moral excellence or perfect goodness? We have here the method and the end described, but not the motive and ground. God does not love himself for his love, but he loves himself for his holiness. Those who maintain that love is self-affirming as well as self-communicating, and therefore that holiness is God's love for himself, must still admit that this self-affirming love which is holiness conditions and furnishes the standard for the self-communicating love which is benevolence.
G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 364, tells us that“God's righteousness is the self-respect of perfect love.”Miller, Evolution of Love, 53—“Self-love is that kind of action which in a perfect being actualizes, in a finite being seeks to actualize, a perfect or ideal self.”In other words, love is self-affirmation. But we object that self-love is notloveat all, because there is in it no self-communicating. If holiness is in any sense a form or manifestation of love—a question which we have yet to consider—it is certainly not a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, which would be identical with selfishness, but rather an affection which implies trinitarian otherness and the maintenance of self as an ideal object. This appears to be the meaning of Jonathan Edwards, in his Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 79—“All love respects another that is the beloved. By love the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.”Yet we shall see that while Jonathan Edwards denies holiness to be a unitarian and utilitarian self-love, he regards its very essence to be God's trinitarian love for himself as a being of perfect moral excellence.
Ritschl's lack of trinitarian conviction makes it impossible for him to furnish any proper ground for either love or holiness in the nature of God. Ritschl holds that Christ as a person is an end in himself; he realized his own ideal; he developed his own personality; he reached his own perfection in his work for man; he is not merely a means toward the end of man's salvation. But when Ritschl comes to his doctrine of God, he is strangely inconsistent with all this, for he fails to represent God as having any end in himself, and deals with him simply as a means toward the kingdom of God as an end. Garvie, Ritschlian Theology, 256, 278, 279, well points out that personality means self-possession as well as self-communication, distinction from others as well as union with others. Ritschl does not see that God's love is primarily directed towards[pg 271]his Son, and only secondarily directed toward the Christian community. So he ignores the immanent Trinity. Before self-communication there must be self-maintenance. Otherwise God gives up his independence and makes created existence necessary.
(d) Holiness is not identical with, or a manifestation of, love. Since self-maintenance must precede self-impartation, and since benevolence has its object, motive, standard and limit in righteousness, holiness the self-affirming attribute can in no way be resolved into love the self-communicating.
That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.[pg 272]That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.
That holiness is a form of love is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (ed. Fisher), 97—“'Tis in God's infinite love to himself that his holiness consists. As all creature holiness is to be resolved into love, as the Scripture teaches us, so doth the holiness of God himself consist in infinite love to himself. God's holiness is the infinite beauty and excellence of his nature, and God's excellency consists in his love to himself.”In his treatise on The Nature of Virtue, Jonathan Edwards defines virtue as regard for being in general. He considers that God's love is first of all directed toward himself as having the greatest quantity of being, and only secondarily directed towards his creatures whose quantity of being is infinitesimal as compared with his. God therefore finds his chief end in himself, and God's self-love is his holiness. This principle has permeated and dominated subsequent New England theology, from Samuel Hopkins, Works, 2:9-66, who maintains that holiness = love of being in general, to Horace Bushnell, Vicarious Sacrifice, who declares:“Righteousness, transferred into a word of the affections, is love; and love, translated back into a word of the conscience, is righteousness; the eternal law of right is only another conception of the law of love; the two principles, right and love, appear exactly to measure each other.”So Park, Discourses, 155-180.
Similar doctrine is taught by Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, 93, 184—“Love unites existence for self with existence for others, self-assertion and self-impartation.... Self-love in God is not selfishness, because he is the original and necessary seat of good in general, universal good. God guards his honor even in giving himself to others.... Love is the power and desire to be one's self while in another, and while one's self to be in another who is taken into the heart as an end.... I am to love my neighbor only as myself.... Virtue however requires not only good will, but the willing of the right thing.”So Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, holds that 1. Love is self-affirmation. Hence he maintains that holiness or self-respect is involved in love. Righteousness is not an independent excellence to be contrasted with or put in opposition to benevolence; it is an essential part of love. 2. Love is self-impartation. The only limit is ethical. Here is an ever deepening immanence, yet always some transcendence of God, for God cannot deny himself. 3. Love is self-finding in another. Vicariousness belongs to love. We reply to both Dorner and Smyth that their acknowledgment that love has its condition, limit, motive, object and standard, shows that there is a principle higher than love, and which regulates love. This principle is recognized as ethical. It is identical with the right. God cannot deny himself because he is fundamentally the right. This self-affirmation is holiness, and holiness cannot be a part of love, or a form of love, because it conditions and dominates love. To call it benevolence is to ignore its majestic distinctness and to imperil its legitimate supremacy.
God must first maintain his own being before he can give to another, and this self-maintenance must have its reason and motive in the worth of that which is maintained. Holiness cannot be love, because love is irrational and capricious except as it has a standard by which it is regulated, and this standard cannot be itself love, but must be holiness. We agree with Clarke, Christian Theology, 92, that“love is the desire to impart holiness.”Love is a means to holiness, and holiness is therefore the supreme good and something higher than mere love. It is not true,vice versa, that holiness is the desire to impart love, or that holiness is a means to love. Instead then of saying, with Clarke, that“holiness is central in God, but love is central in holiness,”we should prefer to say:“Love is central in God, but holiness is central in love,”though in this case we should use the term love as including self-love. It is still better not to use the word love at all as referring to God's regard for himself. In ordinary usage, love means only regard for another and self-communication to that other. To embrace in it God's self-affirmation is to misinterpret holiness and to regard it as a means to an end, instead of making it what it really is, the superior object, and the regulative principle, of love.
That which lays down the norm or standard for love must be the superior of love. When we forget that“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”(Ps. 97:2), we lose one of the chief landmarks of Christian doctrine and involve ourselves in a mist of error.Rev. 4:3—“there was a rainbow round about the throne”= in the midst of the rainbow of pardon and peace there is a throne of holiness and judgment. InMat. 6:9, 10,“Thy kingdom come”is not the first petition, but rather,“Hallowed be thy name.”It is a false idea of the divine simplicity which would reduce the attributes to one. Self-assertion is not a form of self-impartation. Not sentiency, a state of the sensibility, even though it be the purest benevolence, is the fundamental thing, but rather activity of will and a right direction of that will. Hodge, Essays, 133-136, 262-273, shows well that holy love is a love controlled by holiness. Holiness is not a mere means to happiness. To be happy is not the ultimate reason for being holy. Right and wrong are not matters of profit and loss. To be told that God is only benevolence, and that he punishes only when the happiness of the universe requires it, destroys our whole allegiance to God and does violence to the constitution of our nature.
That God is only love has been called“the doctrine of the papahood of God.”God is“a summer ocean of kindliness, never agitated by storms”(Dale, Ephesians, 59). But Jesus gives us the best idea of God, and in him we find, not only pity, but at times moral indignation.John 17:11—“Holy Father”= more than love. Love can be exercised by God only when it is right love. Holiness is the track on which the engine of love must run. The track cannot be the engine. If either includes the other, then it is holiness that includes love, since holiness is the maintenance of God's perfection, and perfection involves love. He that is holy affirms himself also as the perfect love. If love were fundamental, there would be nothing to give, and so love would be vain and worthless. There can be no giving of self, without a previous self-affirming. God is not holy because he loves, but he loves because he is holy. Love cannot direct itself; it is under bonds to holiness. Justice is not dependent on love for its right to be. Stephen G. Barnes:“Mere good will is not the sole content of the law; it is insufficient in times of fiery trial; it is inadequate as a basis for retribution. Love needs justice, and justice needs love; both are commanded in God's law and are perfectly revealed in God's character.”
There may be a friction between a man's two hands, and there may be a conflict between a man's conscience and his will, between his intellect and his affection. Force is God's energy under resistance, the resistance as well as the energy being his. So, upon occasion of man's sin, holiness and love in God become opposite poles or forces. The first and most serious effect of sin is not its effect upon man, but its effect upon God. Holiness necessarily requires suffering, and love endures it. This eternal suffering of God on account of sin is the atonement, and the incarnate Christ only shows what has been in the heart of God from the beginning. To make holiness a form of love is really to deny its existence, and with this to deny that any atonement is necessary for man's salvation. If holiness is the same as love, how is it that the classic world, that knew of God's holiness, did not also know of his love? The ethics here reminds one of Abraham Lincoln's meat broth that was made of the shadow of a pigeon that died of starvation. Holiness that is only good will is not holiness at all, for it lacks the essential elements of purity and righteousness.
At the railway switching grounds east of Rochester, there is a man whose duty it is to move a bar of iron two or three inches to the left or to the right. So he determines whether a train shall go toward New York or toward Washington, toward New Orleans or San Francisco. Our conclusion at this point in our theology will similarly determine what our future system will be. The principle that holiness is a manifestation of love, or a form of benevolence, leads to the conclusions that happiness is the only good, and the only end; that law is a mere expedient for the securing of happiness; that penalty is simply deterrent or reformatory in its aim; that no atonement needs to be offered to God for human sin; that eternal retribution cannot be vindicated, since there is no hope of reform. This view ignores the testimony of conscience and of Scripture that sin is intrinsically ill-deserving, and must be punished on that account, not because punishment will work good to the universe,—indeed, it could not work good to the universe, unless it were just and right in itself. It ignores the fact that mercy is optional with God, while holiness is invariable; that punishment is many times traced to God's holiness, but never to God's love; that God is not simply love but light—moral light—and therefore is“a consuming fire”(Heb. 12:29)to all iniquity. Love chastens (Heb. 12:6), but only holiness punishes (Jer. 10:24—“correct me, but in measure; not in thine anger”;Ez. 28:22—“I shall have executed judgments in her, and shall be sanctified in her”;36:21, 22—in[pg 273]judgment“I do not this for your sake, but for my holy name”;1 John 1:5—“God is light, and in him is no darkness”—moral darkness;Rev. 15:1, 4—“the wrath of God ... thou only art holy ... thy righteous acts have been made manifest”;16:5—“righteous art thou ... because thou didst thus judge”;19:2—“true and righteous are his judgments; for he hath judged the great harlot”).See Hovey, God with Us, 187-221; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:80-82; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 154, 155, 346-353; Lange, Pos. Dogmatik, 203.
B. Positively, that holiness is
(a) Purity of substance.—In God's moral nature, as necessarily acting, there are indeed the two elements of willing and being. But the passive logically precedes the active; being comes before willing; Godispure before hewillspurity. Since purity, however, in ordinary usage is a negative term and means only freedom from stain or wrong, we must include in it also the positive idea of moral rightness. God is holy in that he is the source and standard of the right.
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”
E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 80—“Holiness is moral purity, not only in the sense of absence of all moral stain, but of complacency in all moral good.”Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:362—“Holiness in God is conformity to his own perfect nature. The only rule for the divine will is the divine reason; and the divine reason prescribes everything that is befitting an infinite Being to do. God is not under law, nor above law. Heislaw. He is righteous by nature and necessity.... God is the source and author of law for all moral beings.”We may better Shedd's definition by saying that holiness is that attribute in virtue of which God's being and God's will eternally conform to each other. In thus maintaining that holy being logically precedes holy willing, we differ from the view of Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 139—“Such will of God no more follows from his nature as secondary to it, or precedes it as primary to it than, in motion, direction can be antecedent or subsequent to velocity.”Bowne, Philos. of Theism, 16—“God's nature = a fixed law of activity or mode of manifestation.... But laws of thought are no limitation, because they are simply modes of thought-activity. They do notruleintellect, but only express what intellectis.”
In spite of these utterances of Lotze and of Bowne, we must maintain that, as truth of being logically precedes truth of knowing, and as a loving nature precedes loving emotions, so purity of substance precedes purity of will. The opposite doctrine leads to such utterances as that of Whedon (On the Will, 316):“God is holy, in that he freely chooses to make his own happiness in eternal right. Whether he could not make himself equally happy in wrong is more than we can say.... Infinite wisdom and infinite holiness consist in, and result from, God's volitions eternally.”Whedon therefore believes, not in God'sunchangeableness, but in God'sunchangingness. He cannot say whether motives may not at some time prove strongest for divine apostasy to evil. The essential holiness of God affords no basis for certainty. Here we have to rely on our faith, more than on the object of faith; see H. B. Smith, Review of Whedon, in Faith and Philosophy, 355-399. As we said with regard to truth, so here we say with regard to holiness, that to make holiness a matter of mere will, instead of regarding it as a characteristic of God's being, is to deny that anything is holy in itself. If God can make impurity to be purity, then God in himself is indifferent to purity or impurity, and he ceases therefore to be God. Robert Browning, A Soul's Tragedy, 223—“I trust in God—the Right shall be the Right And other than the Wrong, while He endures.”P. S. Moxom:“Revelation is a disclosure of the divine righteousness. We do not add to the thought when we say that it is also a disclosure of the divine love, for love is a manifestation or realization of that rightness of relations which righteousness is.”H. B. Smith, System, 223-231—“Virtue = love for both happiness and holiness, yet holiness as ultimate,—love to the highest Person and to his ends and objects.”
(b) Energy of will.—This purity is not simply a passive and dead quality; it is the attribute of a personal being; it is penetrated and pervaded by will. Holiness is the free moral movement of the Godhead.
As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”
As there is a higher Mind than our mind, and a greater Heart than our heart, so there is a grander Will than our will. Holiness contains this element of will, although it is a will which expresses nature, instead of causing nature. It is not a still and moveless purity, like the whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless blue of the summer[pg 274]sky. It is the most tremendous of energies, in unsleeping movement. It is“a glassy sea”(Rev. 15:2), but“a glassy sea mingled with fire.”A. J. Gordon:“Holiness is not a dead-white purity, the perfection of the faultless marble statue. Life, as well as purity, enters into the idea of holiness. They who are‘without fault before the throne’are they who‘follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth’—holy activity attending and expressing their holy state.”Martensen, Christian Ethics, 62, 63—“God is the perfect unity of the ethically necessary and the ethically free”;“God cannot do otherwise than will his own essential nature.”See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 141; and on the Holiness of Christ, see Godet, Defence of the Christian Faith, 203-241.
The centre of personality is will. Knowing has its end in feeling, and feeling has its end in willing. Hence I must make feeling subordinate to willing, and happiness to righteousness. I must will with God and for God, and must use all my influence over others to make them like God in holiness. William James, Will to Believe, 123—“Mind must first get its impression from the object; then define what that object is and what active measures its presence demands; and finally react.... All faiths and philosophies, moods and systems, subserve and pass into a third stage, the stage of action.”What is true of man is even more true of God. All the wills of men combined, aye, even the whole moving energy of humanity in all climes and ages, is as nothing compared with the extent and intensity of God's willing. The whole momentum of God's being is behind moral law. That law is his self-expression. His beneficent yet also his terrible arm is ever defending and enforcing it. God must maintain his holiness, for this is his very Godhead. If he did not maintain it, love would have nothing to give away, or to make others partakers of.
Does God will the good because it is the good, or is the good good because God wills it? In the former case, there would seem to be a good above God; in the latter case, good is something arbitrary and changeable. Kaftan, Dogmatik, 186, 187, says that neither of these is true; he holds that there is noa priorigood before the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction is not will; the good is good for God, notbefore, butin, his self-determination. Dorner, System Doctrine, 1:432, holds on the contrary that both these are true, because God has no mere simple form of being, whether necessary or free, but rather a manifoldly diverse being, absolutely correlated however, and reciprocally conditioning itself,—that is, a trinitarian being, both necessary and free. We side with Dorner here, and claim that the belief that God's will is the executive of God's being is necessary to a correct ethics and to a correct theology. Celsus justified polytheism by holding that whatever is a part of God reveals God, serves God, and therefore may rationally be worshiped. Christianity he excepted from this wide toleration, because it worshiped a jealous God who was not content to be one of many. But this jealousy really signifies that God is a Being to whom moral distinctions are real. The God of Celsus, the God of pantheism, is not jealous, because he is not the Holy One, but simply the Absolute. The category of the ethical is merged in the category of being; see Bruce, Apologetics, 16. The great lack of modern theology is precisely this ethical lack; holiness is merged in benevolence; there is no proper recognition of God's righteousness.John 17:25—“O righteous Father, the world knew thee not”—is a text as true to-day as in Jesus' time. See Issel, Begriff der Heiligkeit in N. T., 41, 84, who defines holiness in God as“the ethical perfection of God in its exaltation above all that is sinful,”and holiness in men as“the condition corresponding to that of God, in which man keeps himself pure from sin.”
(c) Self-affirmation.—Holiness is God's self-willing. His own purity is the supreme object of his regard and maintenance. God is holy, in that his infinite moral excellence affirms and asserts itself as the highest possible motive and end. Like truth and love, this attribute can be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.
Holiness is purity willing itself. We have an analogy in man's duty of self-preservation, self-respect, self-assertion. Virtue is bound to maintain and defend itself, as in the case of Job. In his best moments, the Christian feels that purity is not simply the negation of sin, but the affirmation of an inward and divine principle of righteousness. Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137—“Holiness is the perfect agreement of the divine willing with the divine being; for as the personal creature is holy when it wills and determines itself as God wills, so is God the holy one because he wills himself as what he is (or, to be what he is). In virtue of this attribute, God excludes from himself everything that contradicts his nature, and affirms himself in his absolutely[pg 275]good being—his being like himself.”Tholuck on Romans, 5th ed., 151—“The term holiness should be used to indicate a relation of God to himself. That is holy which, undisturbed from without, is wholly like itself.”Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:456—“It is the part of goodness to protect goodness.”We shall see, when we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, that that doctrine has close relations to the doctrine of the immanent attributes. It is in the Son that God has a perfect object of will, as well as of knowledge and love.
The object of God's willing in eternity past can be nothing outside of himself. It must be the highest of all things. We see what it must be, only when we remember that the right is the unconditional imperative of our moral nature. Since we are made in his image we must conclude that God eternally wills righteousness. Not all God's acts are acts of love, but all are acts of holiness. The self-respect, self-preservation, self-affirmation, self-assertion, self-vindication, which we call God's holiness, is only faintly reflected in such utterances asJob 27:5, 6—“Till I die I will not put away mine integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go”;31:37—“I would declare unto him the number of my steps; as a prince would I go near unto him.”The fact that the Spirit of God is denominated the Holy Spirit should teach us what is God's essential nature, and the requisition that we should be holy as he is holy should teach us what is the true standard of human duty and object of human ambition. God's holiness moreover, since it is self-affirmation, furnishes the guarantee that God's love will not fail to secure its end, and that all things will serve his purpose.Rom. 11:36—“For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To him be the glory for ever. Amen.”On the whole subject of Holiness, as an attribute of God, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 188-200, and Christ in Creation, 388-405; Delitzsch, art. Heiligkeit, in Herzog, Realencyclop.; Baudissin, Begriff der Heiligkeit im A. T.,—synopsis in Studien und Kritiken, 1880:169; Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 224-234; E. B. Coe, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:42-47; and articles on Holiness in O. T., and Holiness in N. T., in Hastings' Bible Dictionary.