By justice and righteousness we mean the transitive holiness of God, in virtue of which his treatment of his creatures conforms to the purity of his nature,—righteousness demanding from all moral beings conformity to the moral perfection of God, and justice visiting non-conformity to that perfection with penal loss or suffering.
Gen. 18:25—“shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Deut. 32:4—“All his ways are justice; A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”; Ps. 5:5—“Thou hatest all workers of iniquity”; 7:9-12—“the righteous God trieth the hearts ... saveth the upright ... is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”; 18:24-26—“Jehovah recompensed me according to my righteousness.... With the merciful, thou wilt show thyself merciful ... with the perverse thou wilt show thyself froward”; Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; Rom. 2:6—“will render to every man according to his works”; 1 Pet. 1:16—“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy.” These passages show that God loves the same persons whom he hates. It is not true that he hates the sin, but loves the sinner; he both hates and loves the sinner himself, hates him as he is a living and wilful antagonist of truth and holiness, loves him as he is a creature capable of good and ruined by his transgression.
There is no abstract sin that can be hated apart from the persons in whom that sin is represented and embodied. Thomas Fuller found it difficult to starve the profaneness but to feed the person of the impudent beggar who applied to him for food. Mr. [pg 291]Finney declared that he would kill the slave-catcher, but would love him with all his heart. In our civil war Dr. Kirk said: “God knows that we love the rebels, but God also knows that we will kill them if they do not lay down their arms.” The complex nature of God not only permits but necessitates this same double treatment of the sinner, and the earthly father experiences the same conflict of emotions when his heart yearns over the corrupt son whom he is compelled to banish from the household. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 7—“It is the sinner who is punished, not the sin.”
(a) Since justice and righteousness are simply transitive holiness—righteousness designating this holiness chiefly in its mandatory, justice chiefly in its punitive, aspect,—they are not mere manifestations of benevolence, or of God's disposition to secure the highest happiness of his creatures, nor are they grounded in the nature of things as something apart from or above God.
Cremer, N. T. Lexicon: δίκαιος = “the perfect coincidence existing between God's nature, which is the standard for all, and his acts.” Justice and righteousness are simply holiness exercised toward creatures. The same holiness which exists in God in eternity past manifests itself as justice and righteousness, so soon as intelligent creatures come into being. Much that was said under Holiness as an immanent attribute of God is equally applicable here. The modern tendency to confound holiness with love shows itself in the merging of justice and righteousness in mere benevolence. Instances of this tendency are the following: Ritschl, Unterricht, § 16—“The righteousness of God denotes the manner in which God carries out his loving will in the redemption alike of humanity as a whole and of individual men; hence his righteousness is indistinguishable from his grace”; see also Ritschl, Rechtf. und Versöhnung, 2:113; 3:296. Prof. George M. Forbes: “Only right makes love moral; only love makes right moral.” Jones, Robert Browning, 70—“Is it not beneficence that places death at the heart of sin? Carlyle forgot this. God is not simply a great taskmaster. The power that imposes law is not an alien power.” D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 237-240—“How can self-realization be the realization of others? Why must the true good be always the common good? Why is the end of each the end of all?... We need a concrete universal which will unify all persons.”
So also, Harris, Kingdom of Christ on Earth, 39-42; God the Creator, 287, 290, 302—“Love, as required and regulated by reason, may be called righteousness. Love is universal good will or benevolence, regulated in its exercise by righteousness. Love is the choice of God and man as the objects of trust and service. This choice involves the determination of the will to seek universal well-being, and in this aspect it is benevolence. It also involves the consent of the will to the reason, and the determination to regulate all action in seeking well-being by its truths, laws, and ideals; and in this aspect it is righteousness.... Justice is the consent of the will to the law of love, in its authority, its requirements, and its sanctions. God's wrath is the necessary reaction of this law of love in the constitution and order of the universe against the wilful violator of it, and Christ's sufferings atone for sin by asserting and maintaining the authority, universality, and inviolability of God's law of love in his redemption of men and his forgiveness of their sins.... Righteousness cannot be the whole of love, for this would shut us up to the merely formal principle of the law without telling us what the law requires. Benevolence cannot be the whole of love, for this would shut us up to hedonism, in the form of utilitarianism, excluding righteousness from the character of God and man.”
Newman Smyth also, in his Christian Ethics, 227-231, tells us that “love, as self-affirming, is righteousness; as self-imparting, is benevolence; as self-finding in others, is sympathy. Righteousness, as subjective regard for our own moral being, is holiness; as objective regard for the persons of others, is justice. Holiness is involved in love as its essential respect to itself; the heavenly Father is the holy Father (John 17:11). Love contains in its unity a trinity of virtue. Love affirms its own worthiness, imparts to others its good, and finds its life again in the well-being of others. The ethical limit of self-impartation is found in self-affirmation. Love in self-bestowal cannot become suicidal. The benevolence of love has its moral bounds in the holiness of love. True love in God maintains its transcendence, and excludes pantheism.”
The above doctrine, quoted for substance from Newman Smyth, seems to us unwarrantably to include in love what properly belongs to holiness. It virtually denies that holiness has any independent existence as an attribute of God. To make holiness a manifestation of love seems to us as irrational as to say that self-affirmation is a form of self-impartation. The concession that holiness regulates and limits love shows that holiness cannot itself be love, but must be an independent and superior attribute. Right furnishes the rule and law for love, but it is not true that love furnishes the rule and law for right. There is no such double sovereignty as this theory would imply. The one attribute that is independent and supreme is holiness, and love is simply the impulse to communicate this holiness.
William Ashmore: “Dr. Clarke lays great emphasis on the character of ‘a good God.’... But he is more than a merely good God; he is a just God, and a righteous God, and a holy God—a God who is ‘angry with the wicked,’ even while ready to forgive them, if they are willing to repent in his way, and not in their own. He is the God who brought in a flood upon the world of the ungodly; who rained down fire and brimstone from heaven; and who is to come in ‘flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God’ and obey not the gospel of his son.... Paul reasoned about both the ‘goodness’ and the ‘severity’ of God.”
(b) Transitive holiness, as righteousness, imposes law in conscience and Scripture, and may be called legislative holiness. As justice, it executes the penalties of law, and may be called distributive or judicial holiness. In righteousness God reveals chiefly his love of holiness; in justice, chiefly his hatred of sin.