Our campus recently hosted Paul Young, author of the international best seller, The Shack. Young made a comment about God’s holiness that has me thinking…
Young argued that love, not holiness, better describes God’s eternal nature. By “holiness,” he had in mind the notion of God being unsullied by sin.
Young argued that prior to creating the world (assuming creation from nothing), God was loving in Trinity but not holy. No sin existed in Trinity from which God should be distinguished as holy. In other words, holiness is not necessary prior to sin’s emergence.
Of course, there are other ways to define divine holiness. But Young is right that most have defined holiness primarily in terms of God’s opposition to sin. Intratrinitarian relations are not holy, in this sense, because there is no sin in the Trinity and no sin prior to God creating something (worlds, angels, etc).
Another way to define divine holiness, however, is simply to say God is not creation. God is holy, because God is other than creatures. One of the greatest 20th century theologians, Karl Barth, liked to emphasize this sense of God’s holiness as otherness.
If we shift the definition of holiness from being opposed to sin to God being different from creation, Young’s point still stands. God is still not essentially holy in this second sense. After all, prior to creation (ex nihilo) nothing existed against which God would be contrasted. And unless God necessarily creates (which one cannot affirm if one affirms creation from nothing and God’s contingent relation to the word), nothing “other” needs to exist.
So… if God’s essential attributes are those God necessarily and everlastingly expresses, holiness (defined as 1. opposition to sin or 2. being other than creation) is not essential to God.
This conclusion does not apply, however, to those who deny creation from nothing. For those who affirm a creation doctrine that says God is always creating from that which God previously created (my own creation doctrine), affirming essential divine holiness is a possibility.
This alternative creation doctrine means denying creation from nothing. But I have argued in many places why I think creation ex nihilo is less tenable than some alternatives.
In sum: if a person wants to affirm that God at one time existed alone (albeit in Trinity) and not in relation to any creation, this person should not say holiness is an essential attribute for God.
But if a person affirms that God has everlastingly been creating from that which God previously created (ad infinitum), this person can say holiness is an essential attribute for God.
Both people can say love is an essential attribute. They can so long as they either affirm God is everlastingly loving in Trinity (many Open theologians affirm this) or everlastingly loving with some created order (many Process theologians affirm this) or both everlastingly loving in Trinity and with creation (I have proposed this).
Thanks to Paul Young for sparking my thinking on this!