09. Is Holiness or Love God's Fundamental Attribute?

Is Holiness or Love God’s Fundamental Attribute? This permits us to move on to the next necessary step, which is the obvious truth that there must be in God a moral something, at once both primary and final, in which all His moral attributes will find their root, and of which they must be the necessary expression. What does the nature of things demand that this moral something should be?

It is common knowledge to all who are familiar with the writings of great and good men on the nature and attributes of God, that no consensus of belief as to what is the moral fundamental in His nature, so convincing as to amount to a conclusion commanding general acceptance, seems yet to have been arrived at.

Some have argued with convincing logic that holiness is that moral attribute in God which is fundamental to all else, while others have set forth love as that fundamental with equally convincing reasoning. But this only leaves us still undecided in our own minds, and so compels us to make a choice which does not seem final. We long instead to come to rest in our understanding of that in the nature of God which is the ultimate moral fundamental in His Being. This situation leaves the way open, to say the least, if it does not even invite us, to continue the search for such a moral fundamental, if haply we might be able to find some further line of thinking that might bring us nearer to what we seek. May it not be possible that neither holiness nor love is the final moral fundamental in God, but that there may be something in His Being that is the root, so to speak, of both of them? And if this thought is worthy of pursuit, is there any good reason why life might not be such a fundamental? Not simply being, of course, nor self-conscious existence, nor eternity of existence, but a type of life which is essentially moral in its nature, and necessarily, therefore, with holiness and love as the two dominant attributes of the life, and as the two co-equal and eternally harmonious expressions of the perfect moral character of God. In other words, life of such a quality that without that quality He might have eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence—attributes inhering simply in an infinite personality, and yet might conceivably be malevolent; while with that quality only benevolence, sympathy, kindness could be conceived of as necessarily inherent in the life.

It is obvious that in seeking for the moral fundamental in God, we cannot start back of life, for then we would start with nothing and arrive nowhere. And it would seem equally obvious that we cannot start with any of the attributes or qualities of life and start at the beginning. If this is accepted, then does not this conclusion set life between nothing and the qualities of life? For must not life itself lie back of its own attributes? For it is the type of life in a sentient being which determines the type or nature of the attributes by which it will express itself.