Holiness Past and Present/Holiness

Holiness Past and Present. Edited by Stephen C. Barton, London and New York, T & T Clark, 2003. 511 pp. $36.95.

Holiness. John Webster, Grand Rapids and Cambridge, Eerdmans, 2003. 116 pp. $18.00.

Lately, holiness has been mostly ignored in theological and ethical reflection. Alongside David Willis's Notes on the Holiness of God (2002; reviewed in Theology Today 60 [2004] 606, 608-09), these books are exercises in redress. Barton's volume assembles twenty-three essays spanning a range of inquiry: questions of method and theory (Part 1), biblical perspectives (Part 2), case-studies in the understanding and practice of holiness drawn from various Christian traditions of different eras (Part 3), and the bearing of holiness on contemporary moral and religious practices (Part 4). The contributions are uniformly clear and of high quality. Those same characteristics are abundantly evident in Webster's essay, which defends the necessity of theology itself as "an exercise of holy reason." Mortified and vivified by the Spirit to attend primarily to Scripture-not to comparative religion or phenomenology-reason construes the material of holiness in conversation with God's triune identity and activity as Creator, Reconciler, and Perfecter of the church and the individual Christian. Recurring in Webster's analysis is the deeply personal, not merely transcendent, nature of God's holiness, "a relation between the persons of the Holy Trinity and the creatures whom God summons into holy fellowship with himself." Here we are considerably removed from Rudolf Otto, with whose Das Heilige [The Holy] (1917) Colin Crowder critically reacquaints us in Barton's book. Webster's analysis also collides head-on with modernity's narcissistic attempts at self-construction: an unlacing of reason's sandals before God that this reader can only applaud.

C. Clifton Black, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, NJ

Copyright Theology Today Jan 2005
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