Morality = Holiness?

One of the many books I’m currently working my way through is Walter Brueggemann’s Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile. After blogging recently about Christianity vs. Morality, Brueggemann’s caution against reducing God’s Holiness to mere moral categories caught my attention.

The Holiness of God

Ezekiel’s portrayal of Jerusalem is a tale of God’s holiness. The question I raise is how holiness is a ground for hope. We should not rush to hope, however. Ezekiel is not preoccupied with hope but with holiness. Perhaps hope will follow when holiness is rightly discerned.

The holiness of God, as Ezekiel understands it, may be considered in two dimensions and then in two stages. The two dimensions of holiness are important to distinguish. First, it is possible, and attractive to us, to take God’s holiness as a cognate of righteousness, that is, as a category of ethical concern. This is not remote from Ezekiel, as in chapter 18. God’s holiness requires obedience to the commandments. Where there is disobedience, there will surely be punishment. But if the holiness of God is experienced only in disobedience, it is not a force for hope. Then holiness only permits the newness that is wrought by obedience, and the obedience available in Judah is not an adequate obedience. It is important that God’s holiness yield hope not measured by Judah’s obedience.

More elementally, holiness is not an ethical but a theological category. It concerns not God’s will but God’s person. Or, if one may put it so, it concerns God’s Godness. Under this rubric one is more likely to speak about God’s unutterableness, God’s massiveness, rather than God’s fidelity. We are so preoccupied with God’s relatedness, God being for us, that we do not attend enough to God’s hiddenness, God’s weighty concern for God’s self, God’s own way in heaven and on earth. As pathos is Jeremiah’s critical insight into God, it is holiness which marks the God of Ezekiel. That, of course, is why Ezekiel is less congenial to us, because this God attends only to God’s own way in creation and is not noticeable for us. We must take care not to reduce and translate God’s holiness solely into moral categories, because that draws God too closely into the orbit of good and evil, which in the first instance does not really touch God. [emphasis added]

This passage came to mind again today while reading Kurt W. Peterson’s excellent article at The Christian Century titled American idol: David Barton’s dream of a Christian nation. Toward the end of his article, he addresses this subject of Christianity = Morality.

Examining Barton’s misunderstanding of the relation between Christianity and public life might help us develop a sounder conception of Christian citizenship.

To begin with, Barton reduces Christianity to individual morality. Absent from his historical and theological writings is a full notion of God’s justice. For Barton, a righteous God is primarily concerned with abortion, divorce, public displays of the Ten Commandments and homosexual sex—not with poverty, racial oppression, environmental degradation or global hunger. Any notion of Christian citizenship must have a fuller concept than his of God’s dominion over all things and God’s desire to redeem all of creation.

Read the full article here.