BOOK REVIEW:
Notes on the Holiness of God. By David Willis. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002. viii + 179 pp. ISBN 0802849873.

David Willis, Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, contends that the “church’s doctrine of God develops when a relatively neglected or misunderstood divine perfection is clarified, redefined, and given greater prominence.” Crucial to such development today is “clarifying the meaning of the holiness of God and giving it a prominence which reorders the way the divine perfections are treated (p. 4).

Engaging a wide variety of theologians from Calvin to Moltmann, Willis, while disputing that there is any single Reformed doctrine of God, poses holiness as a most instructive way of understanding God and God’s relationship to humanity. Not claiming his treatment is exhaustive, Willis presents his book as “notes” on holiness, whereby he recasts the framework of discussion, defines God’s holiness in terms of “eternal” and “purifying” love and provides several illustrations of how God’s creatures enjoy the benefits of God’s purifying love.

Every “sane doctrine” concerning “the holiness of God must begin with the cross,” Willis asserts (p.9). Much of the muddle regarding holiness comes from the tendency to separate God’s transcendence from God’s immanence and identifying holiness almost entirely with God’s transcendence. Alternatively, by grounding its understanding of holiness in Jesus Christ, suffered, crucified, and risen, the church can prevent speculation and provide a corrective to the proliferation of “genitive” theologies and romantic notions of suffering or self-sacrificial love in general.

Following Barth, Willis sees God’s holiness as a perfection of God’s love, not God’s freedom. Concerned that many Reformed theologians tend to neglect the relationship between the Holy One and the holy many, he stresses that God’s transcending presence is also within God’s creation. Holiness is “not the opposite of creatureliness but is the right use of creatureliness” (p. 48). There is not only the holy God; there are holy people, in community, “forgiven sinners growing in grace” (p.49). The heart of the book intends to show how they are related.

A key goal of the essay is to develop precise language regarding holiness. To say the triune, eternally related God is holy is to say God is eternally love, pure love. Willis reaffirms the Reformed conviction that “who God is precedes knowing who God is and who we are” (p. 57) and rejects inadequate understandings of the holiness of God, including placing it under the locus of the absolute will of God, or defining it as a privation of iniquity, rather than the perfection of love.

The last half of the book asks the question “whether there is really such a thing as creaturely holiness” (p. 83), and while answering that affirmatively Willis warms to his subject in ways that are engaging and instructive. Building on the biblical declaration that God’s people are “holy,” the essay suggests that God alone “is holy in that utterly unique holiness which wills and make room for that derivative, subordinate, and declarative holiness of creatures” (p. 87). God’s pure love is the fountain of purifying love, that is the presence of God to another than God.

Willis offers two examples of the ways creatures enjoy the benefits of the purifying love of God: delight in the beauty of God’s holiness and confidence in the hope of holiness. Here Willis provides some of his most illuminating and creative scriptural exegesis. Particularly engaging is his contribution to theological aesthetics in the chapter on the holiness of beauty (ch. 5). Responding to the pernicious perception that delight and holiness are only theoretically compatible and that the cultivation of one entails the suppression of the other, Willis declares that “holiness and beauty are in actual practice mutually defining.” Doing the beautiful is a form of holiness which gives new substance to the third use of the law. Indeed he reminds us that Christ declared that the woman who acknowledged him as the holy one by anointing him with oil had done a beautiful thing. Drawing heavily on Calvin, he identifies beauty with integrity, that is congruence between something and someone and that for which it was created.

Notes on the Holiness of God provides a life-affirming and delight-centered corrective to popular perspectives on holiness. Willis offers an intriguing footnote in which he reminds us that America’s pre-eminent theologian Jonathan Edwards had “the experience, upon his conversion, of the restoration of delight to all his senses” (p. 125). I would like to have had him to consider how Edwards developed that approach to the sanctified Christian life more fully in The Nature of True Virtue.

This treatise is not intended to be new teaching. Rather, as Willis states explicitly, it is a matter of a “proportionately different emphasis” on the holiness of God as it relates to other divine attributes (p. 90). This is not a book for the faint hearted. It is a nuanced, sophisticated, historically well informed essay which is tough going for the non-technical theologian. But as a working pastor, I found it stimulated fresh thinking about one of the central attributes of the doctrine of God and thus was well worth the effort.

Richard W. Reifsnyder
Pastor, 1^st Presbyterian Church
Winchester, VA

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING 2006, VOL. 6, #1.