John Webster on Holiness, Again
C. S. Lewis once wrote, in a letter to a friend, “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
That does make sense. If a book is good enough to make you really enjoy it — not merely to think it’s a “good” book, but to feel a certain way while reading it — then that would be something we’d want to experience again.
Holiness by John Webster is one of those books for me. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it over the last few years, especially the last chapter, “The Holiness of the Christian.” The clarity and precision of his writing, and sometimes the unusualness of how he puts things, is a gust of fresh air. The book has become an encounter for me.
I recently dipped into it again, and, again, I can’t recommend it highly enough. For an idea of what you’ll find in its pages, here are a few of my favorite quotes:
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
“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. ”
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