/ Webster
Friday, August 14
“ In its purposiveness as love, therefore, the holiness of the Father includes jealousy. ‘I the Lord your God am a jealous God’ (Exod. 20.5). God’s jealousy is his creative will in its singularity and exclusiveness. But as such it is not mere self-assertion. It is the energy of God’s good will with which he directs himself in all his works and ways towards us. The jealousy of the triune God is his purposiveness; it is his refusal to negotiate away the creature’s good by allowing the creature itself to set the terms on which it will live. The holy God overcomes and destroys all that opposes his will, and in so doing loves us. Ezekiel puts it thus: ‘I will restore the fortunes of Jacob and have mercy on the whole house of Israel; and I will be jealous for my holy name’ (Ezek. 39.25). The Holy One in our midst is thus the one whose holy jealousy is restorative, and whose love is operative in the eradication of wickedness so that that to which we are destined may come to be. What we are powerless to destroy — our perverted, self-destructive versions of ourselves — God himself undertakes to destroy, to the immense dismay and terror of the sinful creature, and in just this way God fulfills his purpose by protecting and upholding us.
• John Webster, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford, in Confessing God, pp. 124 – 125. Webster is one of the three most interesting and important theologians writing today. The others? Robert Jenson and Webster’s predecessor as Lady Margaret Professor at Oxford, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
