Perspectives on Love & Holiness in OT

Rev’d Dr James Robson gave his excellent Tyndale House paper on ‘Forgotten Dimensions of Holiness’ in the Oak Hill Masters Seminar this week. He argued that it can be shown from the text of the Bible that love is a dimension of or is linked to God’s holiness in the Old Testament, though some texts might not make it seem so. Yahweh’s holiness and love are shown through his self-disclosure, his saving activity (including his hearing of prayer) and his presence. This rightly takes account of narrative and contexts as well as including word studies and depending on explicit statements.

All this seemed impressive and true, and fits in with a few systematic perspectives. For example, by the time one has said that God is simple and that all things are related, it is unsurprising to say that love and holiness are related or even that they are perspectives on one another. Interesting that the Old Testament should make this so obvious. The question is exactly how they are related. There is some danger in saying everything in that one will end up saying nothing. God’s holiness needs to be sharply defined if it is to be distinguished from other aspects of his character (and likewise with love). If holiness is simply seen as the Godness of God or that which makes God unique and separate then not much has been said.

In other words, the systematican will want to ask both how are we to distinguish God’s holiness and his love and how we are to relate them.

A few random vaguely relevant thoughts:

All the attributes of God are strictly incommunicable. No one is powerful as God is powerful, for example.

All talk about God is analogical. Love is not the same in God as it is in the rest of experience.

I think James suggested that interestingly in the economy of revelation there is a sequence that we know God’s holiness first and other things are holy since they are declared so by God or are somehow related to him. With Fatherhood, human fathers play a much greater part in the order of our knowing. Perhaps. God is always the prototype and standard. I reckon if you took holiness to mean specialness or set apartness, or even purity / cleanness, this would be much less obvious since we can think of human or creaturely analogues which we could and often do know before knowing much of God or having a Word from him.

Having said that, James rightly argued that we must first of all be attentive to the language and narrative in which God has chosen to reveal himself. Systematic questions of how we might categorise and integrate or summarise all this in various ways are secondary, even if necessary, and indeed influencing our first reading of the Bible. The old virtuous hermeneutical spiral agaisn.

The systematician can be encouraged that the Bible seems to speak in a way which is wonderfully appropriate to the simplicity of God and perspectivalism. The attributes and actions of God are not hermetically sealed by flow from his nature and though each has a “core” they flow into one another. The picture is clear at the centre but the colours at the edges are beautifully run into each other. Indeed, that’s something like how words (including the language of Scripture) work, having a semantic range and being defined by usage and difference from other words.

No single attribute of God is to be totalised or used to exclude others. Even God’s wrath is loving and his love is wrathful. One might even say that God is wrath with respect to sin but a distinction could be made here since God is not wrath in the inner Trinitarian life considered without respect to creation. Yet creation and therefore wrath is in a way “necessary” given who God is and chooses to be, but that is another story.

It was good to hear a systematically informed biblical scholar using arguments about the immanent Trinity, simplicity and analogical language, and obviously knowing his Hebrew and his Bible a billion times better than I! No surprise there either. Here’s to such conversations at Oak Hill and elsewhere.