Mark C. Murphy. Divine Holiness and Divine Action

Abstract

In philosophical and theological reflection on the nature of God in the analytic tradition over the last 50 years, topics such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, God’s relationship to time, divine simplicity, and others have received a good bit of attention. But divine holiness hasn’t. Mark Murphy thinks that’s a serious lacuna; he argues in Divine Holiness and Divine Action that holiness is “central to knowing and properly responding to God” (1) and that thinking about divine motivation in terms of holiness provides insight into what God would or could do, impacting our thinking about evil, hiddenness, incarnation, atonement, and other key theological concepts. I won’t try to summarize all the content of the book. Instead, I will summarize Murphy’s account of divine holiness and his defense of the holiness framework as superior to the morality and love frameworks for understanding divine motivation (I take these sections to be the heart of the book). Then I will briefly summarize his application of the holiness framework of divine action to the problem of evil and the problem of divine hiddenness. I will end by raising a couple of concerns I have with Murphy’s project.