§ 83. By the holiness of God we understand that divine causality through which in all corporate human life conscience is found conjoined with the need of redemption.
-
We use the term ‘conscience’ to express the fact that all modes of activity issuing from our God-consciousness and subject to its prompting confront us as moral demands, not indeed theoretically, but asserting themselves in our self-consciousness in such a way that any deviation of our conduct from them is apprehended as a hindrance of life, and therefore as sin. In thus limiting our attention to the God-consciousness, we are true to the spirit of our theology generally. We may certainly assume as a known fact that conscience is elsewhere explained by a corresponding relation to the idea of the good; here we have but to say in passing that the two explanations are in no real sense different. Thus, if it ever were to occur that under the idea of the good the natural conscience made other demands than in the same community are insisted on by the God-consciousness prevailing there, so that the two were in conflict, we should simply have to attribute the fact to a defect in their development or in their application, just as we do where the natural conscience in any one region or period is not identical with that of another, or where different forms of faith differ in the moral demands they make. In the Evangelical (Protestant) Church, however, we are not troubled with any such conflict, for there it is readily admitted that the modes of action emanating from our God-consciousness are identical with those developed from the idea of the good. Now we need give no proof of the fact that, wherever these demands or a law of this kind is referred to the God-consciousness, conscience also is very markedly traced to divine causality, and, as the voice of God within, is held to be an original revelation of God; it is one of those inward experiences which we may assume to be universal in this sphere. None the less, conscience is not identical with the fact of the God-consciousness in man, as constituting the original perfection of his nature; for apart from the discrepancy between the form of the God-consciousness as understanding and its emergence as will, and indeed apart from this discrepancy as combined with a tendency to agreement, there would be no conscience at all; and similarly apart from conscience, nothing that results from that discrepancy would be sin for us. Thus the divine causality, in virtue of which conscience exists, falls wholly within the sphere of the antinomy in which we now live, and is no less certainly the divine causality through which sin exists, though for us it is owing to conscience alone that a given state, and that as something due only to ourselves, becomes sin.1 And if in addition to this causality, and to the universal co-agency of God we were to postulate another divine causality as the ground of sin, we should have to assume two divine activities antagonistic to each other. It follows, therefore, that the causality we have postulated is the whole and sole divine causality which sin as such implies.
-
Now if our explanation signifies that conscience is present only along with the need of redemption, then while this is certainly the purely Christian account of the matter, it must not be taken to mean that we would assume the presence of conscience only where the need of redemption is recognized; on the contrary, treating here as we do of the divine causality, we start from the assumption that redemption through Christ is ordained for the whole human race, and that all mankind are in the state of needing redemption. If, instead of that state, we were to imagine a gradual development in the power of the God-consciousness, then, while even there we might find the discrepancy above referred to, yet, as progress would in that case approximate very closely to the practice of an art, the laying down of a demand such as conscience makes would be superfluous—just as art of every kind develops without any such demand; indeed, as conscience always entails pain, it would be a piece of cruelty. In point of fact, it is with a view to redemption that men are in common held under the power of conscience, which always involves the sense of their incapacity; and so, too, later, it is because conscience still continues to stimulate the sense of sin within them that they are held steadily to redemption. If, however, we could ever think of the will as being perfectly at one with the God-consciousness, so that nothing was striven after but what was prompted by the latter, then—granted that the still remaining defects of performance were due solely to the mental or bodily organism subserving the will—conscience in its distinctive character would cease to exist. Hence, too—to speak here only incidentally or provisionally—if we think it an adequate description of the inward state of the Redeemer to say that He had at all times a perfectly satisfied conscience, we must take the phrase as meaning a conscience that was always silent, so that He can have had a conscience only in the form of fellow-feeling, and not as something personally His own.
What we have said partly explains why we find the proper sphere of conscience in corporate life. For, granted that a single generation of men were to attain to the consummate strength and purity of will above referred to, it would of necessity influence the succeeding generation by awaking conscience in the adolescent; and the same thing would apply to the greater differences in development within a single generation. On the other hand, a conscience manifesting itself solely in each individual by himself would be too variable to secure the certainty of its judgments and of their being attributable to the divine causality. The true conscience, however, emerging in a society as the same thing in all and for all, is law—primarily moral law, though ever finding outward expression in civil law. Thus the holiness of God is the divine causality that legislates in the corporate life of man, and since the law, especially as traced to its inward source, is always for us the absolutely holy, and the whole historical process is ordained by this divine causality, no exception can well be taken to our regarding that causality as a distinctive divine attribute, or to our designating it exclusively by the name ‘holiness.’
- The customary and popular interpretation of the term as used in the liturgical and homiletical field, however, is that the holiness of God consists in His being well-pleased with what is good and displeased with what is bad. That interpretation may be understood in two ways. Its implication is doubtless that the terms ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are predicates of the actions of free finite beings.2 But as taken so, the interpretation can only be given a place in scientific discourse with great modifications. Pleasure and displeasure in their very antithesis always imply an element of passivity, and unless this is eliminated, the attribute of holiness will involve some disturbance of our feeling of absolute dependence, since a divine state would then be determined by human action, and thus the relation between God and man so far become one of reciprocity. Again, the attribute as so interpreted would be a purely inward and quiescent one—such indeed as our immediate religious consciousness gives us no occasion to postulate. Both points might no doubt be disposed of if, of these human states of pleasure and displeasure, we transferred to God only the active aspect, namely, their outward manifestation in the effort to effect or prevent something. But as we find this twofold aim only in redemption, and as it would be altogether a departure from the usage of the Church to say that redemption is grounded principally in the divine holiness, then, unless we are to surrender the term altogether, we must again come back to the view that the manifestation of the divine displeasure, if detached from the effectuation of the good, is simply the effectuation of this displeasure in the acting subject by means of conscience and law. If, however, the interpretation is taken to mean that God’s pleasure in the good and displeasure with the bad form the basis of His creative activity and determine it,3 it follows that the bad, inasmuch as being the object of displeasure it is opposed to the good, cannot exist, and so cannot be regarded as a thought of God;4 in other words, there is no reality in, nor any divine idea of, the bad. This we may lay down without misgiving, with the necessary consequence that in the same sense finite being cannot from itself generate the bad,5 i.e. that the bad as an actual antithesis to the good has no existence at all, and that therefore that displeasure with the bad which is wrought in us by the divine causality is, strictly speaking, only our own displeasure in the fact that the effective power of the God-consciousness falls short of the clearness of our apprehension. Thus what is tenable in both interpretations, when taken together, corresponds exactly with what we have laid down, and we are in this way able to refer the conception of God’s holiness directly to His omnipotence and omniscience, and regard these as holy. With this, again, agree those other interpretations which ascribe to God’s holiness the function of demanding from His creatures what is perfectly good;6 for that demand is made upon them only in virtue of the law or the moral feeling implanted in them. Some of these interpretations bring into the conception the inward purity of God as the ground of the demand; such of them, however, as confine themselves to that purity, or go back even to God’s perfect self-love,7 while they might be relevant in a speculative or a so-called natural theology, have no place in a systematic statement of Christian doctrine.
← First Aspect, Third Section. The Divine Attributes Relating to the · Contents · God Is Just →
Footnotes
-
Cf. 1 Pet. 1¹⁴⁻¹⁶, where the holiness of God is associated with the demand that we should no longer live according to our lusts in ignorance. ↩
-
Henke, Lineam., p. 66: Deus ab omni labe et vitio purissimus, omnis pravi osor irreconciliabilis, boni rectique amantissimus. ↩
-
As indicated by Mosheim, Th. Dogm. i. p. 292: Sanctitas est immutabile propositum voluntatis Dei perfectionibus suis congruenter agendi; and Ammon, Summa Theol. Chr., p. 92: Consensus voluntatis liberrimae perfectissimus cum legibus intellectus sapientissimi. ↩
-
Cf. § 55, I. ↩
-
Cf. § 67, 2. ↩
-
Quenstedt, Syst. Th. i. p. 420: Sanctitas Dei est summa omnisque omnino labis aut vitii expers in Deo puritas munditiem et puritatem debitam exigens a creaturis. ↩
-
Buddeus, Instit., p. 252: Quando Deus se ipsum amore purissimo amare concipitur ut simul ab omni imperfectione secretus censeatur amor ille vocatur sanctitas.—Something similar was said by Hilary, on Psalm cxliv.; he would take the divine holiness as signifying especially the non-existence of all self-seeking elements in God. ↩