Over the past two decades, the Christian philosopher Mark Murphy has written a number of works on God's relationship to morality and the implications this relationship might have for how God deals with humans. Murphy's most recent book on this theme, Divine Holiness and Divine Action, aims to provide an account of God's holiness and to infer from this account what God must be like and what sorts of actions God would or would not perform. The result of Murphy's efforts is to deliver what is plausibly the most significant work on divine holiness, both in terms of its argumentative depth and scope of vision, since Rudolf Otto's landmark study The Idea of the Holy.
Divine Holiness and Divine Action is comprised of two main parts. The burden of the first part is to articulate a manner of understanding God's holiness and to draw out from this understanding what we can know about God's nature. With respect to the former, Murphy follows, in its broadest contours and with important modifications, Otto's basic account. After critiquing a number of alternative conceptions of holiness, Murphy contends that a holy being is one that objectively merits a dual response from another: to desire to be united to that (holy) individual while also being unfit for such union. Further, the God of scripture ought to be conceived of as absolutely holy in the sense that it is impossible for there to be a rational creature for whom intimate union with God would not be supremely worthwhile, yet there is some level of intimate union with God for which the creature is unfit. And to be absolutely holy in this sense, Murphy argues, God must be maximally perfect – that is, the absolutely greatest being that could possibly exist. Within the closing chapter of this first part, Murphy explains how mere creatures (e.g. angels, humans, icons and water) can be derivatively holy by standing in certain relations to the uniquely holy God.
In part two of the book, Murphy endeavours to show how God's absolute holiness ought to inform our understanding of divine action. To do so, Murphy turns to three frameworks for characterising the necessary motivational structure of God.
The first of these is what he terms the Morality Framework. According to it, God is supposed necessarily to abide perfectly by some set of moral norms. Murphy rejects this framework by offering a number of objections to the idea that God would be subject to moral norms. Most of these objections centre on the idea that standard ways of making sense of moral norms do not plausibly apply to God, especially when we affirm that God is free and that creatures derive whatever value they have from God.
Next, Murphy objects to what he calls the Love Framework. On this framework, God is thought to exhibit maximal love towards creation, or least rational creatures, necessarily. But this framework has the shortcoming of implying an implausible view about the way in which reasons for divine action are related to God's love. In short, the thought is that if the Love Framework is to avoid collapsing into the Morality Framework and the problems affiliated therewith, God's love itself (rather than, say, the good of some human) must give God decisive reasons for acting in characteristically loving ways. But Murphy argues that love must, so to speak, look outside itself and be motivated by the actual or potential goods to which it responds. Additionally, the Love Framework falsely assumes that God's love for some creature could reasonably be thought to have an intrinsic maximum – that is, an upper limit that entails that it is impossible for God to love some creature in a more valuable manner. To see why Murphy rejects such a maximum, suppose (if only for the purposes of illustration) that God's love for humans just is benevolence. If so, it seems that God could always will some human an even greater good than he has, and, for any number of humans God chooses to create, he could always create more humans with lives worth living. Thus, there is no way in which God's love for creation could reach the required intrinsic maximum.
The failures of these two frameworks pave the way for Murphy's preferred option: a Holiness Framework. This framework indicates that God has requiring reasons to respond to his own perfection by refraining from entering into various kinds of relationship with limited beings (i.e. creatures). The greater the limitations of the beings at issue and the more intimate the candidate relationship might be, the stronger God's requiring reasons are for refraining from entering into the relevant kind of relationship. On this paradigm, requiring reasons are to be distinguished from (merely) justifying reasons. Roughly, a requiring reason is one such that, if an agent refuses to act on it, then either he is acting irrationally or else he also possesses additional adequate reasons to do something else. By contrast, the agent that has only a justifying reason to perform some act has adequate reason to perform it so long as he does not also possess adequate reasons to the contrary. Since God is absolutely holy, God has requiring reasons, we might say, to keep his distance and only justifying reasons to enter into various kinds of intimate union with us. Murphy contends that his Holiness Framework is supported by scripture and common-sensical considerations having to do with God's status, among other considerations.
Murphy examines various ways in which the Holiness Framework turns standard characterisations of theological problems on their head. Whereas the Morality and Love Frameworks tend towards a kind of necessitarianism about creation and generate the usual problems of evil and divine hiddenness, the expectations on the Holiness Framework are reversed. God has requiring reasons not to create, to act within our world to shield us from suffering, and not to make himself known. That God does all of these things is gracious acts of love that go against his default setting. Beyond that, the Holiness Framework is utilised by Murphy to underscore the wonder of the incarnation (since in taking flesh God acts against what he has good reason not to do), why God assumed and in Christ preserved a sinless human nature, why the atonement requires a core ‘objectivist’ component and why some might reside in hell forever. The book concludes with perhaps the best treatment of divine humility among present-day writings.
Murphy's book is packed with rich and deep argumentation of both the philosophical and theological variety. But, as admirable as these features are, what makes Murphy's book truly helpful is the vision of the God it presents: a holy and mysterious God who has his reasons for remaining supremely fixed on himself and the maximal love that is shared among the persons of the Trinity, and yet who, despite this, deigns to create, reveal, redeem and even share the divine life with limited and sinful creatures. This is not to say that Murphy has convinced me of this vision. While I find his account of divine holiness compelling, I think it is likely that proponents of the Morality Framework, especially when refracted through a kind of agapist prism, have the resources to resist Murphy's counter-arguments. But even when one is not entirely convinced of Murphy's arguments, it is rarely easy to spot where they go wrong. Regardless, Murphy has done us a favour by presenting a contemporary way of understanding the holy God which many will recognise as in keeping with various significant strands of the Christian tradition. No theologian or philosopher who is working on conceptions of God and divine action can afford to overlook this book. On the contrary, Murphy's book should feature prominently in related discussions for the foreseeable future.
