Chapter I: The Attributes Of God (3)

Borden P. Bowne, Atonement: “Something like this work of grace was
a moral necessity with God. It was an awful responsibility that
was taken when our human race was launched with its fearful
possibilities of good and evil. God thereby put himself under
infinite obligation to care for his human family; and reflections
on his position as Creator and Ruler, instead of removing, only
make more manifest this obligation. So long as we conceive God as
sitting apart in supreme ease and self-satisfaction, he is not
_love_ at all, but only a reflection of our selfishness and
vulgarity. So long as we conceive him as bestowing blessing upon
us out of his infinite fulness, but at no real cost to himself, he
sinks below the moral heroes of our race. There is ever a higher
thought possible, until we see God taking the world upon his
heart, entering into the fellowship of our sorrow, and becoming
the supreme burden bearer and leader in self-sacrifice. Then only
are the possibilities of grace and condescension and love and
moral heroism filled up, so that nothing higher remains. And the
work of Christ, so far as it was a historical event, must be
viewed not merely as a piece of history, but also as a
manifestation of that cross which was hidden in the divine love
from the foundation of the world, and which is involved in the
existence of the human world at all.”

Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 264—“The eternal resolution
that, if the world _will_ be tragic, it _shall_ still, in Satan’s
despite, be spiritual, is the very essence of the eternal joy of
that World-Spirit of whose wisdom ours is but a fragmentary
reflection.... When you suffer, your sufferings are God’s
sufferings,—not his external work nor his external penalty, nor
the fruit of his neglect, but identically his own personal woe. In
you God himself suffers, precisely as you do, and has all your
reason for overcoming this grief.” Henry N. Dodge, Christus
Victor: “O Thou, that from eternity Upon thy wounded heart hast
borne Each pang and cry of misery Wherewith our human hearts are
torn, Thy love upon the grievous cross Doth glow, the beacon-light
of time, Forever sharing pain and loss With every man in every
clime. How vast, how vast Thy sacrifice, As ages come and ages go,
Still waiting till it shall suffice To draw the last cold heart
and slow!”

On the question, Is God passible? see Bennett Tyler, Sufferings of
Christ; A Layman, Sufferings of Christ; Woods, Works, 1:299-317;
Bib. Sac., 11:744; 17:422-424; Emmons, Works, 4:201-208;
Fairbairn, Place of Christ, 483-487; Bushnell, Vic. Sacrifice,
59-93; Kedney, Christ. Doctrine Harmonized, 1:185-245; Edward
Beecher, Concord of Ages, 81-204; Young, Life and Light of Men,
20-43, 147-150; Schaff, Hist. Christ. Church, 2:191; Crawford,
Fatherhood of God, 43, 44; Anselm, Proslogion, cap. 8; Upton,
Hibbert Lectures, 268; John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
2:117, 118, 137-142. _Per __ contra_, see Shedd, Essays and
Addresses, 277, 279 note; Woods, in Lit. and Theol. Rev.,
1834:43-61; Harris, God the Creator and Lord of All, 1:201. On the
Biblical conception of Love in general, see article by James Orr,
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 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 in _Lev. 11:44—_“be ye holy;
for I am holy.” When Jesus turned from the young ruler (_Mark
10:23_) he illustrated the first; _John 8:29_ illustrates 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 simply _demands_ in law, but
_imparts_ in the Holy Spirit; see Pfleiderer, Grundriss,
79—_versus_ Ritschl’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.

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 not _love_ at 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 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.

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. In _Mat. 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 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 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 no _a priori_ good before
the willing of it, and he also holds that will without direction
is not will; the good is good for God, not _before_, but _in_, 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
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 as _Job 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.

VI. Relative or Transitive Attributes.

First Division.—Attributes having relation to Time and Space.

1. Eternity.

By this we mean that God’s nature (_a_) is without beginning or end; (_b_) is free from all succession of time; and (_c_) contains in itself the cause of time.

_Deut. 32:40—_“For I lift up my hand to heaven, And say, As I live
forever....”; _Ps. 90:2—_“Before the mountains ... from
everlasting ... thou art God”; _102:27—_“thy years shall have no
end”; _Is. 41:4—_“I Jehovah, the first, and with the last”; _1
Cor. 2:7_—πρὸ τῶν αἰώνων—“before the worlds” or “ages” = πρὸ
καταβολῆς κόσμου—“before the foundation of the world”_ (Eph.
1:4)_. _1 Tim. 1:17_—Βασιλεῖ τῶν αἰώνων—“King of the ages” (so
also _Rev. 15:8_). _1 Tim. 6:16—_“who only hath immortality.”
_Rev. 1:8—_“the Alpha and the Omega.” Dorner: “We must not make
Kronos (time) and Uranos (space) earlier divinities before God.”
They are among the “all things” that were “made by him ”_ (John
1:3)_. Yet time and space are not _substances_; neither are they
_attributes_ (qualities of substance); they are rather _relations_
of finite existence. (Porter, Human Intellect, 568, prefers to
call time and space “_correlates_ to beings and events.”) With
finite existence they come into being; they are not mere
regulative conceptions of our minds; they exist objectively,
whether we perceive them or not. Ladd: “Time is the mental
presupposition of the duration of events and of objects. Time is
not an entity, or it would be necessary to suppose some other time
in which it endures. We think of space and time as unconditional,
because they furnish the conditions of our knowledge. The age of a
son is conditioned on the age of his father. The conditions
themselves cannot be conditioned. Space and time are mental forms,
but not only that. There is an extra-mental something in the case
of space and time, as in the case of sound.”

_Ex. 3:14—_“I am”—involves eternity. _Ps. 102:12-14—_“But thou, O
Jehovah, wilt abide forever.... Thou wilt arise, and have mercy
upon Zion; for it is time to have pity upon her.... For thy
servants ... have pity upon her dust” = because God is eternal, he
will have compassion upon Zion: he will do this, for even we, her
children, love her very dust. _Jude 25—_“glory, majesty, dominion
and power, before all time, and now, and for evermore.”
Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:165—“God is ‘King of the æons’_ (1
Tim. 1:17)_, because he distinguishes, in his thinking, his
eternal inner essence from his changeable working in the world. He
is not merged in the process.” Edwards the younger describes
timelessness as “the immediate and invariable possession of the
whole unlimited life together and at once.” Tyler, Greek Poets,
148—“The heathen gods had only existence without end. The Greeks
seem never to have conceived of existence without beginning.” On
precognition as connected with the so-called future already
existing, and on apparent time progression as a subjective human
sensation and not inherent in the universe as it exists in an
infinite Mind, see Myers, Human Personality, 2:262 _sq._ Tennyson,
Life, 1:322—“For was and is and will be are but is: And all
creation is one act at once, The birth of light; but we that are
not all, As parts, can see but parts, now this, now that, And live
perforce from thought to thought, and make The act a phantom of
succession: there Our weakness somehow shapes the shadow, Time.”

Augustine: “Mundus non in tempore, sed cum tempore, factus est.”
There is no meaning to the question: Why did creation take place
when it did rather than earlier? or the question: What was God
doing before creation? These questions presuppose an independent
time in which God created—a time before time. On the other hand,
creation did not take place at any time, but God gave both the
world and time their existence. Royce, World and Individual,
2:111-115—“Time is the form of the will, as space is the form of
the intellect (_cf._ 124, 133). Time runs only in one direction
(unlike space), toward fulfilment of striving or expectation. In
pursuing its goals, the self lives in time. Every _now_ is also a
succession, as is illustrated in any melody. To God the universe
is ‘totum simul’, as to us any succession is one whole. 233—Death
is a change in the time-span—the minimum of time in which a
succession can appear as a completed whole. To God ‘a thousand
years’ are ‘as one day’_ (2 Pet. 3:8)_. 419—God, In his totality
as the Absolute Being, is conscious not, _in_ time, but _of_ time,
and of all that infinite time contains. In time there follow, in
their sequence, the chords of his endless symphony. For him is
this whole symphony of life at once.... You unite present, past
and future in a single consciousness whenever you hear any three
successive words, for one is past, another is present, at the same
time that a third is future. So God unites in timeless perception
the whole succession of finite events.... The single notes are not
lost in the melody. You are in God, but you are not lost in God.”
Mozart, quoted in Wm. James, Principles of Psychology, 1:255—“All
the inventing and making goes on in me as in a beautiful strong
dream. But the best of all is _the hearing of it all at once_.”

Eternity is infinity in its relation to time. It implies that God’s nature is not subject to the law of time. God is not in time. It is more correct to say that time is in God. Although there is logical succession in God’s thoughts, there is no chronological succession.

Time is duration measured by successions. Duration without
succession would still be duration, though it would be
immeasurable. Reid, Intellectual Powers, essay 3, chap. 5—“We may
measure duration by the succession of thoughts in the mind, as we
measure length by inches or feet, but the notion or idea of
duration must be antecedent to the mensuration of it, as the
notion of length is antecedent to its being measured.” God is not
under the law of time. Solly, The Will, 254—“God looks through
time as we look through space.” Murphy, Scientific Bases,
90—“Eternity is not, as men believe, Before and after us, an
endless line. No, ’tis a circle. Infinitely great—All the
circumference with creations thronged: God at the centre dwells,
beholding all. And as we move in this eternal round, The finite
portion which alone we see Behind us, is the past; what lies
before We call the future. But to him who dwells Far at the
centre, equally remote From every point of the circumference, Both
are alike, the future and the past.” Vaughan (1655): “I saw
Eternity the other night. Like a great ring of pure and endless
light. And calm as it was bright; and round beneath it Time in
hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow
moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.”

We cannot have derived from experience our idea of eternal
duration in the past, for experience gives us only duration that
has had beginning. The idea of duration as without beginning must
therefore be given us by intuition. Case, Physical Realism, 379,
380—“Time is the continuance, or continual duration, of the
universe.” Bradley, Appearance and Reality, 39—Consider time as a
stream—under a spatial form: “If you take time as a relation
between units without duration, then the whole time has no
duration, and is not time at all. But if you give duration to the
whole time, then at once the units themselves are found to possess
it, and they cease to be units.” The _now_ is not time, unless it
turns past into future, and this is a process. The now then
consists of nows, and these nows are undiscoverable. The unit is
nothing but its own relation to something beyond, something not
discoverable. Time therefore is not real, but is appearance.

John Caird, Fund. Ideas, 1:185—“That which grasps and correlates
objects in space cannot itself be one of the things of space; that
which apprehends and connects events as succeeding each other in
time must itself stand above the succession or stream of events.
In being able to measure them, it cannot be flowing with them.
There could not be for self-consciousness any such thing as time,
if it were not, in one aspect of it, above time, if it did not
belong to an order which is or has in it an element which is
eternal.... As taken up into thought, succession is not
successive.” A. H. Strong, Historical Discourse, May 9, 1900—“God
is above space and time, and we are in God. We mark the passage of
time, and we write our histories. But we can do this, only because
in our highest being we do not belong to space and time, but have
in us a bit of eternity. John Caird tells us that we could not
perceive the flowing of the stream if we were ourselves a part of
the current; only as we have our feet planted on solid rock, can
we observe that the water rushes by. We belong to God; we are akin
to God; and while the world passes away and the lust thereof, he
that doeth the will of God abideth forever.” J. Estlin Carpenter
and P. H. Wicksteed, Studies in Theology, 10—“Dante speaks of God
as him in whom ‘every _where_ and every _when_ are focused in a
point’, that is, to whom every season is _now_ and every place is
_here_.”

Amiel’s Journal: “Time is the supreme illusion. It is the inner
prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode by which we
perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.... Time is the
successive dispersion of being, just as speech is the successive
analysis of an intuition, or of an act of the will. In itself it
is relative and negative, and it disappears within the absolute
Being.... Time and space are fragments of the Infinite for the use
of finite creatures. God permits them that he may not be alone.
They are the mode under which creatures are possible and
conceivable.... If the universe subsists, it is because the
eternal Mind loves to perceive its own content, in all its wealth
and expression, especially in its stages of preparation.... The
radiations of our mind are imperfect reflections from the great
show of fireworks set in motion by Brahma, and great art is great
only because of its conformities with the divine order—with that
which is.”

Yet we are far from saying that time, now that it exists, has no objective reality to God. To him, past, present, and future are “one eternal now,” not in the sense that there is no distinction between them, but only in the sense that he sees past and future as vividly as he sees the present. With creation time began, and since the successions of history are veritable successions, he who sees according to truth must recognize them.

Thomas Carlyle calls God “the Eternal Now.” Mason, Faith of the
Gospel, 30—“God is not contemptuous of time.... One day is with
the Lord as a thousand years. He values the infinitesimal in time,
even as he does in space. Hence the patience, the long-suffering,
the expectation, of God.” We are reminded of the inscription on
the sun-dial, in which it is said of the hours: “Pereunt et
imputantur”—“They pass by, and they are charged to our account.” A
certain preacher remarked on the wisdom of God which has so
arranged that the moments of time come successively and not
simultaneously, and thus prevent infinite confusion! Shedd, Dogm.
Theol., 1:344, illustrates God’s eternity by the two ways in which
a person may see a procession: first from a doorway in the street
through which the procession is passing; and secondly, from the
top of a steeple which commands a view of the whole procession at
the same instant.

S. E. Meze, quoted in Royce, Conception of God, 40—“As if all of
us were cylinders, with their ends removed, moving through the
waters of some placid lake. To the cylinders the waters seem to
move. What has passed is a memory, what is to come is doubtful.
But the lake knows that all the water is equally real, and that it
is quiet, immovable, unruffled. Speaking technically, time is no
reality. Things _seem_ past and future, and, in a sense,
non-existent to us, but, in fact, they are just as genuinely real
as the present is.” Yet even here there is an order. You cannot
play a symphony backward and have music. This qualification at
least must be put upon the words of Berkeley; “A succession of
ideas I take to _constitute_ time, and not to be only the sensible
measure thereof, as Mr. Locke and others think.”

Finney, quoted in Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:722—“Eternity to us means
all past, present and future duration. But to God it means only
now. Duration and space, as they respect his existence, mean
infinitely different things from what they do when they respect
our existence. God’s existence and his acts, as they respect
finite existence, have relation to time and space. But as they
respect his own existence, everything is _here_ and _now_. With
respect to all finite existences, God can say: I was, I am, I
shall be, I will do; but with respect to his own existence, all
that he can say is: I am, I do.”