The holy love of God
The holy love of God
What has this to do with the atonement? Just that the way God chooses to forgive sinners and reconcile them to himself must, first and foremost, be fully consistent with his own character. It is not only that he must overthrow and disarm the devil in order to rescue his captives. It is not even only that he must satisfy his law, his honour, his justice or the moral order: it is that he must satisfy himself. Those other formulations rightly insist that at least one expression of himself must be satisfied, either his law or honour or justice or moral order; the merit of this further formulation is that it insists on the satisfaction of God himself in every aspect of his being, including both his justice and his love.
But when we thus distinguish between the attributes of God, and set one over against another, and even refer to a divine ‘problem’ or ‘dilemma’ on account of this conflict, are we not in danger of going beyond Scripture? Was P. T. Forsyth correct in writing that ‘there is nothing in the Bible about the strife of attributes’?37 I do not think he was. To be sure, talk about ‘strife’ or ‘conflict’ in God is very anthropomorphic language. But then the Bible is not afraid of anthropomorphisms. All parents know the costliness of love, and what it means to be ‘torn apart’ by conflicting emotions, especially when there is a need to punish the children. Perhaps the boldest of all human models of God in Scripture is the pain of parenthood which is attributed to him in Hosea, chapter 11. He refers to Israel as his ‘child’, his ‘son’ (v. 1), whom he had taught to walk, taking him in his arms (v. 3) and bending down to feed him (v. 4). Yet his son proved wayward and did not recognize his Father’s tender love. Israel was determined to turn from him in rebellion (vv. 5–7). He therefore deserved to be punished. But can his own father bring himself to punish him? So Yahweh soliloquizes:
How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I treat you like Admah?
How can I make you like Zeboiim?
My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.
I will not carry out my fierce anger,
nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim.
For I am God, and not man –
the Holy One among you.
I will not come in wrath.
(Hos. 11:8–9)
Here surely is a conflict of emotions, a strife of attributes, within God. The four questions beginning with the words ‘how can I...?’ bear witness to a struggle between what Yahweh ought to do because of his righteousness and what he cannot do because of his love. And what is the ‘change of heart’ within him but an inner tension between his ‘compassion’ and his ‘fierce anger’?
The Bible includes a number of other phrases which in different ways express this ‘duality’ within God. He is ‘the compassionate and gracious God....Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished’; in him ‘love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other’; he announces himself as ‘a righteous God and a Saviour’, besides whom there is no other; and in wrath he remembers mercy. John describes the Word made flesh, the Father’s one and only Son, as ‘full of grace and truth’; and Paul, contemplating God’s dealings with both Jews and Gentiles, invites us to consider ‘the kindness and sternness of God’. In relation to the cross and to salvation Paul also writes of God demonstrating his justice ‘so as to be just and the one who justifies the man who has faith in Jesus’, and he finds nothing anomalous about juxtaposing references to God’s ‘wrath’ and God’s ‘love’, while John assures us that, if we confess our sins, God will be ‘faithful and just’ to forgive us.38 Here are nine couplets, in each of which two complementary truths about God are brought together, as if to remind us that we must beware of speaking of one aspect of God’s character without remembering its counterpart.
Emil Brunner in The Mediator did not hesitate to write of God’s ‘dual nature’ as ‘the central mystery of the Christian revelation’ (p.519). For ‘God is not simply Love. The nature of God cannot be exhaustively stated in one single word’ (pp.281–282). Indeed, modern opposition to forensic language in relation to the cross is mainly ‘due to the fact that the idea of the Divine Holiness has been swallowed up in that of the Divine love; this means that the biblical idea of God, in which the decisive element is this twofold nature of holiness and love, is being replaced by the modern, unilateral, monistic idea of God’ (p.467). Yet ‘the dualism of holiness and love,...of mercy and wrath cannot be dissolved, changed into one synthetic conception, without at the same time destroying the seriousness of the biblical knowledge of God, the reality and the mystery of revelation and atonement....Here arises the “dialectic” of all genuine Christian theology, which simply aims at expressing in terms of thought the indissoluble nature of this dualism’ (p.519, footnote). So then, the cross of Christ ‘is the event in which God makes known his holiness and his love simultaneously, in one event, in an absolute manner’ (p.450). ‘The cross is the only place where the loving, forgiving merciful God is revealed in such a way that we perceive that his holiness and his love are equally infinite’ (p.470). In fact, ‘the objective aspect of the atonement...may be summed up thus: it consists in the combination of inflexible righteousness, with its penalties, and transcendent love’ (p.520).
At the same time, we must never think of this duality within God’s being as irreconcilable. For God is not at odds with himself, however much it may appear to us that he is. He is ‘the God of peace’, of inner tranquillity not turmoil. True, we find it difficult to hold in our minds simultaneously the images of God as the Judge who must punish evil-doers and of the Lover who must find a way to forgive them. Yet he is both, and at the same time. In the words of G. C. Berkouwer, ‘in the cross of Christ God’s justice and love are simultaneously revealed’,39 while Calvin, echoing Augustine, was even bolder. He wrote of God that ‘in a marvellous and divine way he loved us even when he hated us’.40 Indeed, the two are more than simultaneous, they are identical, or at least alternative expressions of the same reality. For ‘the wrath of God is the love of God’, Brunner wrote in a daring sentence, ‘in the form in which the man who has turned away from God and turned against God experiences it’.41
One theologian who has struggled with this tension is P. T. Forsyth, who coined – or at least popularized – the expression ‘the holy love of God’.
Christianity (he wrote) is concerned with God’s holiness before all else, which issues to man as love....This starting-point of the supreme holiness of God’s love, rather than its pity, sympathy or affection, is the watershed between the Gospel and...theological liberalism....My point of departure is that Christ’s first concern and revelation was not simply the forgiving love of God, but the holiness of such love.
Again,
If we spoke less about God’s love and more about his holiness, more about his judgment, we should say much more when we did speak of his love.42
Yet again,
Without a holy God there would be no problem of atonement. It is the holiness of God’s love that necessitates the atoning cross....43
This vision of God’s holy love will deliver us from caricatures of him. We must picture him neither as an indulgent God who compromises his holiness in order to spare and spoil us, nor as a harsh, vindictive God who suppresses his love in order to crush and destroy us. How then can God express his holiness without consuming us, and his love without condoning our sins? How can God satisfy his holy love? How can he save us and satisfy himself simultaneously? We reply at this point only that, in order to satisfy himself, he sacrificed – indeed substituted – himself for us. What that meant will be our concern in the next chapter to understand.
Beneath the cross of Jesus
I fain would take my stand –
The shadow of a mighty rock
Within a weary land....
O safe and happy shelter!
O refuge tried and sweet!
O trysting-place, where heaven’s love
And heaven’s justice meet!