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…. Majesty and relation are not opposed moments in God’s holiness; they are simply different articulations of the selfsame reality.
John Webster, Holiness, 41.
Though the institutional arrangements of theology in modernity have often made it hard for us to see this point, theology is not a transcendent moment, some activity of the mind standing above the merely domestic life of the Christian community and submitting it to an ironic, critical gaze. Holy reason is ecclesiastical science–a knowing and inquiring which takes place within ‘the commonwealth gathered, founded, and ordered by the Word of God’, and participating in the calling and promise which God issues to that commonwealth.
John Webster, Holiness, 26
“…because Holy Scripture is the authoritative canon, holy reason finds there its norm. To say that Holy Scripture is the authoritative canon is to say that this determinate collection of writings, received and read as a unified God-given prophetic and apostolic testimony, legitimately claims the acknowledgement, assent and obedience of the Church and its theology. The authority of Scripture for holy reason is Scripture’s Spirit-bestowed capacity to quicken theology to truthful thought and speech. Truthful thought and speech follow the given order of reality. … the authority of Scripture is a matter for the Churh’s acknowledgement, not its ascription. Authority cannot be conferred on Scripture by the Church or by its theology, but only greeted as that which legitimately commands the activity of reason. As such, Scripture’s authority is not at all abstract or merely formal; it is a servant of the living voice of God as truth that enables the Church to live from and in the truth.
John Webster, Holiness, 19ff.
Reason is holy because God acts upon reason, arresting its plunge into error and freeing it from its bondage to our corrupt wills and our hostility to God. And to describe theological work as a work of holy reason is to say that, without talk of this God and his acts of judgment and renewal, we cannot depict what happens when we take it upon ourselves to venture the work of the theologian.
John Webster, Holiness, 25.
… it is imperative that we keep in mind two basic requirements for thinking Christainly about God’s holiness. The first is that we need to understand that theological thinking about holiness is itself an exercise of holiness. Theology is an aspect of the sanctification of reason, that is, of the process in which reason is put to death and made alive by the terrifying and merciful presence of the holy God.
John Webster, Holiness, 8
A Christian dogmatics of holiness is not metaphysics, because the holy God, reaching out in the world in Son and Spirit, is the sanctifier; not is it mysticism (or moralism), because human reality is holy only in dependence upon the Spirit of the Son who makes holy. Thus, as Barth puts it, a trinitarian dogmatics of holiness ‘cannot seek to have merely one centre, one subject’ precisely because ‘its subject is God’–God known as holy in the incarnate Word and life-giving Spirit.
John Webster, Holiness, 7
Dogmatics attempts a ‘reading’ of the gospel which in its turn assists the Church’s reading. Developing such a ‘reading’ of the gospel entails, of course, the development (or annexation) of conceptual vocabularies and forms of argument whose range and sophistication may seem distant from the more immediate, urgent idioms of Scripture. But though technical sophistication is not without its attendant perils, it is only vicious when allowed to drift free from the proper end of theology, which is the saints’ edification.
John Webster, Holiness, 4
Theology is not free speech but holy speech. It is set apart for and bound to its object–that is, the gospel–and to the fellowship of the saints in which the gospel is heard as divine judgment and consolation–that is, the Church. Only as it does its work under the tutelage, authority and protection of the Church is theology free.
John Webster, Holiness, 2
Theology is an office in the Church of Jesus Christ. It is properly undertaken in the sphere of the Church, that is, in the region of human fellowship which is brought into being and sustained by the saving activity and presence of God. Theology is one of the effects of that saving presence; it is one of the activities of reason transfigured by the renewal of human life and history which the holy God effects in his works and makes manifest in his word. The divine works of renewal culminate in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, his exaltation over all things, and his bestowal of new life in the Spirit’s power. Through the Spirit, Jesus Christ the exalted one generates a new mode of common human life, the life of the Church. To participate in that common human life, hearing the gospel in fellowship under the word of God and living together under the signs of baptism and the Lord’s supper, is to exist in a sphere in which God’s limitless power is unleashed and extends into the entirety of human life: moral, political, cultural, affective, intellectual. Reason, like everything else, is remade in the sphere of the Church; and theological reason is an activity of the regenerate mind turned towards the gospel of Jesus Christ, which constitutes the Church’s origin and vocation.
John Webster, Holiness, 1ff.
Reading is not my hobby. Hobby makes me think more of wiffle ball or Nerf sword-fighting or the St. Louis Cardinals. Reading is hard work. It is an effort to decode symbols that make up words and convey an author’s meaning. I should wear wrist bands for that and keep a water bottle close at hand.
Be that as it may, I love to read and God by His grace has put some really good books into my hands. Over the inter-semestermental era I got to open up the book Holiness by John Webster. Being very intentional with my words here, it is my favorite book apart from the Bible. It is only 105 pages and I’ve considered memorizing it. The read was less like a book and more like an encounter. I have been intensely edified and my love for the triune God has been deepened. I’ve never seen a book so small and yet so weighty. Not a sentence is wasted. I am thankful to the LORD for the help that it has been.
I want you to be helped, too. So for the next 20 days I plan to feature a quote from the book for each day. “20 Days of Webster.” I don’t like that title because I want you to think more about the content than the man. And the name “Webster” doesn’t make English-speakers immediately think about theology. But there it is anyway. “20 Days of Webster.”
I pray that you be helped and that perhaps you’ll go read the whole book. More than all of that, may the LORD be pleased to draw near in grace for His glory and your everlasting joy in Him.
