Holiness of God

— Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!

Isaiah 6:3

Holiness is God’s own moral perfection: the purity to which all sin is repugnant to him (Hab. 1:13) and the pattern all created good only ever reflects. Scripture’s word for it, the Hebrew qodesh, carries a second sense as well, separation, so that God’s holiness is also his transcendent otherness, the way he stands apart in kind, not only in degree, from every creature (Isa. 6:3).¹ Neither sense is God’s alone among his perfections; both together mark him out as a category unto himself, “glorious in holiness” above every rival (Exod. 15:11).

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to holiness on its own; the term appears inside the confession’s general description of God’s nature. God is “every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute… hating all sin,” alongside his other perfections, in one sentence describing his nature generally, rather than in a chapter of its own.² The wider Reformed confessional family, including the Westminster Confession, follows the same pattern: holiness sits inside the opening description of God rather than receiving its own chapter.

Biblical Basis

Leviticus grounds Israel’s own call to holiness directly in God’s: “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2). The clearest text for God’s holiness as transcendent otherness is Isaiah’s vision of the throne room, where the seraphim cry “Holy, holy, holy” and cover their own eyes and feet in his presence (Isa. 6:1-3), driving Isaiah to confess his own uncleanness before ever being told his guilt is taken away (Isa. 6:5-7). John’s vision of the same throne repeats the same cry (Rev. 4:8), and Moses’ song after the exodus asks who among the gods can compare to the LORD, “glorious in holiness” (Exod. 15:11). Peter grounds the moral sense directly in Leviticus’s own command, applying it to the church: “as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, since it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy’” (1 Pet. 1:15-16).

Historical Development

Reformed scholastic theologians distinguished holiness from righteousness as two separate species of God’s moral goodness. Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706), writing under the heading “The Holiness of God” in his Theoretical-Practical Theology, drew the line precisely: righteousness is “a relative goodness, by which God acts according to eternal right, as if according to his own rule,” while holiness is “an absolute goodness, by which God is inclined to all moral purity and recoils from all impurity of sin.”¹ He traced the Hebrew root qodesh to a verb meaning “he has been separated from common use,” and read the doctrine on two levels at once: God is holy in the sense of being “separated from whatever is common and profane,” and holy in the sense of being “pure, and most absolutely contrary to everything evil, iniquitous, and base that he proscribes in his own law.”³

Stephen Charnock (1628-1680) devoted a full discourse of The Existence and Attributes of God, published posthumously in 1682, to the same doctrine, opening from Moses’ song after the exodus: “Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee, glorious in holiness” (Exod. 15:11).⁴ For Charnock, no other attribute makes God more evidently incomparable, since it is precisely holiness, not power or wisdom alone, that no false god can even pretend to share.

Two centuries later, Archibald Alexander Hodge (1823-1886) treated the doctrine as a direct question in his Outlines of Theology: “What is meant by the holiness of God?” His answer resists ranking holiness alongside God’s other attributes at all, calling it instead “a general term representing the conception of his consummate perfection and total glory… his infinite moral perfection crowning his infinite intelligence and power.”⁵ He named the same two biblical senses Mastricht had distinguished a century and a half earlier: Scripture’s word for holiness represents, “first, moral purity… second, his transcendently august and venerable majesty,” citing Isaiah’s Trisagion for the second sense.⁵

Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) traced the doctrine’s Old Testament shape through its covenantal use before its New Testament fulfillment: God’s holiness first marks off persons, places, and objects set apart for his service, then becomes the ground of Israel’s own charge to holiness, of both her chastisement and her restoration, until it is “finally supremely manifest in Christ,” with the Spirit becoming the New Testament’s own “principle of the sanctification of the church.”⁶

Objections and Responses

If God decreed that sin would enter the world, how can he still be called holy? Reformed theology answers that God ordains that a sinful act occurs without ordaining the sin in it, since the sinfulness belongs to the creature’s own will and not to God’s; the full case for this distinction, and for how God can be genuinely active in every event without becoming sin’s author, belongs to concurrence and the decree of God rather than to holiness as such. Bavinck writes: “the good does not need evil, nor does holiness need sin… human sin and evil sometimes serve to bring the good to fuller disclosure and to glorify God’s attributes.”⁷ God’s holiness is not compromised by sin’s existence because his holiness never required sin to exist; it only overrules sin’s existence for his own ends once it does. How the different Christian traditions account for evil’s place under a holy and sovereign God is treated more fully at the problem of evil.

Related Doctrines

References

Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 19, “The Holiness of God,” 448: “holiness expresses an absolute goodness, by which God is inclined to all moral purity and recoils from all impurity of sin.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Mastricht, 2:451. ↩
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XI: On the Holiness of God,” 108. ↩
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” Q. 80, 163. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God,” sec. “Holiness.” ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 12, “The Fallen World”: “the good does not need evil, nor does holiness need sin, nor truth falsehood, nor God Satan.” ↩