Tag Archives: Webster

Sanctification Rests on a Divine Act

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John Webster:

Sanctification rests on the divine act of salvation accomplished in the death and resurrection of the Son and pronounced in the gospel promulgation of acquittal. Consequently, the agent of the Christian holiness is not the Christian but God. In effect, the rooting of sanctification in justification prohibits any conversion of sanctification into ethical self-improvement, as if justification were merely an initial infusion of capacities which are then activated through moral or spiritual exertion.

Holiness, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 81.

Holiness and Relation are the Selfsame Reality

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John Webster writes:

Holiness is a mode of God’s activity; talk of God’s holiness identifies the manner of his relation to us. For if the word ‘holy’ is a shorthand term for a pattern of activity, if it indicates—as von Rad put it—’a relationship more than a quality’, then the holy God is precisely God manifest to humankind in his gracious turning.

‘God’s holiness’, wrote Bavinck, ‘is revealed in his entire revelation to his people, in election, in the covenant, in his special revelation, in his dwelling among them.’

What, then, we may ask, is the force of faith’s language of God’s holiness? What particular aspect of the unified identity of the triune God’s being, works and ways is indicated by this language? We may answer thus: Talk of God’s holiness denotes the majesty and singular purity which the triune God is in himself and with which he acts towards and in the lives of his creatures, opposing that which is itself opposed to his purpose as creator, reconciler and perfecter, and bringing that purpose to its completion in the fellowship of the saints.

Holiness, because it is the holiness of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ now present in the Spirit’s power, is pure majesty in relation. God’s holy majesty, even in its unapproachableness, is not characterized by a sanctity which is abstract difference or otherness, a counter-reality to the profane; it is majesty known in turning, enacted and manifest in the works of God. Majesty and relation are not opposed moments in God’s holiness; they are simply different articulations of the selfsame reality

For if God’s relation to us were merely subordinate to his primary majesty, then God’s essence would remain utterly beyond us, forever hidden; and if God’s relation to us were not majestic, then that relation would no longer be one in which we encountered God.

(Holiness, 41-42, paragraphing mine)

Reading as an Episode in the History of Salvation

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What is the setting of biblical interpretation?

The setting is best described by use of soteriological, ecclesiological and pneumatological teaching: the Christian interpreter is ‘reconciled to God, drawn into the fellowship of the saints and illumined by the Holy Spirit’. Of the soteriological and ecclesiological aspects, much has already been said: the Christian interpreter is one who has been extracted from the darkness of sin by the judgement and mercy of God, and set in the sphere of the church, the chosen race, the royal priesthood, the holy nation which is what it is by virtue of the divine call out of darkness into light.

Christian interpretation of Holy Scripture is determined by this setting; the ‘hermeneutical situation’ (that is, the constitutive elements of the business of scriptural interpretation, God, text and readers, and the field of their interactions) is not an instance of something more basic but an episode in the history of salvation. At every point it is defined by the fact that it involves this God (the one who is light and who in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is luminously present), this text (Holy Scripture as the assistant to that presence), and therefore this reader (the faithful hearer of this God in and through this text).

John Webster, “Biblical Theology and the Clarity of Scripture,” Out of Egypt, italics and paragraphing mine

“…an episode in the history of salvation.” This is how we should think about what it means to read the Bible. Before dawn, over midmorning coffee, during your lunch break, at 2:30 in the afternoon, at the dinner table, before you go to bed at night–whenever your time is. Whenever it is that you open the Holy Scripture and read, at that moment, something miraculous is happening. You are reading because God has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Your reading is not separate from his saving activity but is in the same stream. The energy of your reading flows from the electing grace of the Father before the foundations of the world, demonstrated in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the fullness of time, being perfected now by the work of indwelling Holy Spirit. Your reading is another scene is the grand story of God’s saving fellowship. Your reading is miraculous.

Seeing Holy Scripture in the Economy of Salvation

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The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is ‘the Father of glory’, the resplendent one who gives the Spirit in order to endow those whom the Son has reconciled with wisdom, revelation and knowledge. These benefits which flow from the Spirit’s work are summed up as ‘the enlightenment of the eyes of the heart.’ Knowledge of the scope of God’s luminous presence and activity (that is, of ‘the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints’) originates not on the creaturely side of fellowship but on the side of the illumining person of the Spirit. ‘That you may know’ is strictly subordinate to and dependent upon the giving of the Spirit and his enlightening of the eyes. Seeing God’s glory is God’s work.

This reconciling and revelatory presence of the triune God gives the frame for theological talk of the clarity of Holy Scripture. The economy of God’s communication of himself by scattering the darkness of sin, reconciling lost creatures, overcoming ignorance and establishing the knowledge and love of himself, is the dogmatic location of the notion of claritas scripturae. Scripture is clear as the instrument of the reconciling clarity of God, whose light is radiantly present in Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Establishing this dogmatic setting is a task of first rank in the doctrine of Scripture, and, once established, it must not simply be assumed or left to one side: it must be operative at every point, and rendered explicit. Unless this is done, and bibliology is tied explicitly to reconciliation and revelation, disorder threatens. This disorder, which readily afflicts any theology of Scripture and its properties, results from the extraction of Holy Scripture from divine economy. Once detached from operative language about the self-disclosure of God in the course of seeking and maintaining fellowship, the theology of Scripture becomes an isolated piece of teaching.

John Webster, “Biblical Theology and the Clarity of Scripture” in Out of Egypt, 361

Love and the Destiny-Fulfilling Obligation to my Neighbor

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Love involves my acknowledgement that I am obliged by my neighbor as a reality given to me by God, a reality which I would often like to evade but which encounters me with a transcendent imperative force. Why is this ‘transcendent’ ground for works of human fellowship theologically decisive? Because thereby my neighbour, the one with whom I stand in relation, is given to me, forming part of my destiny in the company of the saints. My neighbour is a summons to fellowship, because in him or her I find a claim on me that is not causal or fortuitous (and thereby dispensable) but rather precedes my will and requires that I act in my neighbour’s regard. Without a sense that fellowship is (God-) given, my neighbour would not present a sufficiently strong claim to disturb me out of complacency and indifference into active, initiative-taking regard… My neighbour obliges me because he or she is the presence to me of the appointment and vocation of the holy God. Without givenness, without fellowship as more than a contingent fact, without the neighbour as a divine call, there is only my will. But, if fellowship is a condition and not merely one possibility for my ironic self to entertain, then in building common life– in culture, politics and ethics– I resist the relationlessness of sin into which I may drift, and, sanctified by Christ and Spirit, I realize my nature as one created for holiness.

John Webster, Holiness, 97

This is one of the best paragraphs that has ever been written in the history of mankind.

‘To Be a Sinner’ to ‘To Be a Saint’

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Christian holiness is holy fellowship; it is the renewal of the relation to God which is the heart of holiness. To be a creature is to have one’s being in relation to God, for ‘to be’ is ‘to be in relation’ to the creator, and only so to have life and to act. To be a sinner is to repudiate this relation, and so absolutely to imperil one’s life by seeking to transcend creatureliness and become one’s own origin and one’s own end. This wicked refusal to be a creature cannot overturn the objectivity of the creator’s determination to be God with us, for such is the creator’s mercy that what he has resolved from all eternity stands fast. But the sinner’s failure to live in acknowledgment of the creator’s gift of life means that the creature chooses to torment and damage his being to the point of ruin, precisely by struggling out of the ordered relation to God in which alone the creature can be. To be a reconciled sinner is to be one in whom God’s mercy has put an end to self-destruction, one whose enmity has been authoritatively and irrevocably overruled, and one therefore restored to life in relation to God. And, therefore, to be a saint is to be a reconciled sinner, re-established in fellowship and so liberated and empowered for the works of holiness.

John Webster, Holiness, 85

GOD and LOVE and ME

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Sanctification is the Father’s work of election. To say this is to say that the active life of holy fellowship does not originate in any human decision or determination, but rests on a divine determination of utter gratuity and sovereign freedom.

John Webster, Holiness, 79

God has decided before the foundations of the world that I realize he loves me. He loves me. No self-esteem booster here… as if God’s love for me has anything to do with me. I know me, still not as much as he knows me. And that God loves me. Me. He loves me. I didn’t earn it. I can’t lose it. He has determined. He has chosen. He has said so. Done. Set. Forever. He loves me.

These words are ferocious. They are triumphant. No smiley-faced buttons. No bear cartoons. Do you know what he has done to love me?  “Utter gratuity and sovereign freedom.” He was not compelled.  He has freely poured out his covenant love in the crucified Son. He has freely called me his own…

Cheap smiles are strangers when we’re stunned to bewilderment.

Day 14: Holiness as God With Us

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It is difficult to overstress the importance of this relational character for grasping the nature of God’s holiness. It is fatally easy to think of God’s holiness simply as a mode of God’s sheer otherness and transcendence–that is, as the opposite of relational; as concerned, not with God with us, but with God apart from us. But to follow that path is radically to misunderstand the biblical testimony. The holiness of God is not to be identified simply as that which distances God from us; rather, God is holy precisely as the one who in majesty and freedom and sovereign power bends down to us in mercy. God is the Holy One. But he is the Holy One ‘in your midst,’ as Hosea puts it (Hos. 11.9); or as Isaiah puts it: ‘great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel’ (Isa. 12.6).

John Webster, Holiness, 45

Aseity and Action: Created Intelligence Remains Bewildered

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God is in himself replete, unoriginate love, the reciprocal fellowship and delight of the three and the utter repose and satisfaction of their love. God requires nothing other than himself. Yet his unoriginate love also originates. Why this should be so, we are incapable of telling, for though with much concentration we can begin to grasp that it is fitting that God should so act, created intelligence remains bewildered by the fact that God has indeed done so. What our intelligence cannot get behind or reduce any further is the outward movement of God’s love, God’s love under its special aspect of absolute creativity. God’s creative love is not the recognition, alteration or ennoblement of an antecedent object beside itself, but the bringing of an object into being, ex nihilo generosity by which life is given. (14)

The act of creation is a voluntary (not, again, a ‘physical’) act — a point at which some uses of the language of ‘emanation’ stumble. Delicacy is required: the notion of the divine will has to be stripped of connotations of arbitrariness, so that we do not think of creation as a mere spasmodic exercise of God’s power not anchored in the divine ethos. But “will” need not mean this; properly speaking, it signifies determination to act according to nature, and so to act with supreme generosity in accord with and on the basis of God’s eternal love of himself in the procession of Son and Spirit from the Father. (15)

John Webster, Trinity and Creation, IJST, Vol 12.1 (Jan 2010)

Day 13: The Church At Every Moment…

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The holy people of God is a form of common life which owes it origin to a decision and act beyond itself, utterly gratuitous, excluding from consideration ‘everything which men have of themselves.’ Neither in its origin nor in its continuation is the sanctified community an autonomous gathering; it is–at every moment of its existence–a creature of grace.

John Webster, Holiness, 40.