page 143 note 1 Cf. Brunner, The Mediator, 551: “He wishes to make Himself known as love, as far as this is possible; but He must also make Himself known as the holy righteous Judge when this is inevitable.” Brunner never really succeeds in holding together the holiness and the love of God. Cf: “ God is not simply Love. He defines Himself as Love. Love is His Will, not His Nature, although it is His eternal Will. As His Nature, however, even in Christ we must worship His sovereign majesty and His holiness” (ib. 282); and: “ This is not to be understood as if in the final analysis lordship or the holiness of God could be reduced to His love, so that it would suffice to speak about God's love. Not without reason the Bible time and time again speaks of both as of two very different things” (The Divine-Human Encounter, 43–4). Admittedly the identification of the two took place only gradually, but the O.T. surely leaves no doubt as to the direction of the movement (cf. especially Hosea). In the N.T. the gap is closed. God's “sovereign majesty and holiness” reveals itself as none other than the love of Him who “took a towel and girded Himself”: “Ye call me, Master, and, Lord, and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet …” (John 13.13–14). The Divine will to power and lordship appears as the omnipotence of dying love (John 12.32–33).
In his latest book Brunner admits that “in Christ” the holiness and the love of God are identical (Dogmatik, 1, 367); but, apart from Christ, no. By this he does not mean merely that a man who has rejected Christ does not experience them as identical, in other words, that he cannot perceive the love in the wrath. Rather, outside Christ they really are not identical, either for man or for God. He actually rests part of his trinitarian doctrine (1, 244–250) on this “non-identity” of Father and Son. God in Christ is love and light and life—but the Father Himself, apart from Christ, is a God of terrible majesty and holiness, whose visage for sinful man is wrath and darkness and death. It is true it is human sin that forces His holiness to appear as wrath and that acts of judgment and condemnation are His “strange” work. But it remains that there is a part of God (if we may so speak) that is perfectly satisfied with the death of a sinner, a justice that is not geared to His overall purpose of love but which automatically comes into operation whenever a man by his own decision falls outside that purpose. This is his interpretation of John 3.36: “He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life; but he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on him.” But such a wrath of the Father which has no saving purpose and which stands outside the plan of God in Christ—that certainly does not belong to “the witness of the whole New Testament” (1, 246). The final judgment of its pages is rather that “God hath shut up all unto disobedience that He might have mercy upon all” (Rom. 11.32).
It would seem from two works of Brunner's which have appeared in England since the body of this article was written that he has begun to modify his opinion. While stating that “love, the absolute will to self-surrender, is first of all in contradiction to holiness, to the will of absolute self-affirmation”, he goes on to say that the paradox of Christianity lies in their identification in God: “The Lord God is the One who loves; His sovereign will is His will for communion” (Revelation and Reason, 46). In his Gifford Lectures he goes so far as to say: “God is Love in Himself; He is not justice in Himself. Love is His own essence; justice, however, is His will as it refers to the order of His created world” (Christianity and Civilisation, 1, 116). This is in flat contradiction to the passage cited above from The Mediator, 282, but still contains a most dangerous distinction between the Being and the Will of God.
