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; God is pure before he wills purity. 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. He is law. 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 not rule intellect, but only express what intellect is.”
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's unchangeableness, but in God's unchangingness. 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.