Holiness

Book 1 reverberates with the spiritual drama St Paul describes. Holiness is not a virtue as normally understood, a quality of the good man achieved by obeying a set of moral laws. All human activity has to be placed in the context of the Fall, the consequent corruption of man's nature and the expulsion from Eden. In the Protestant view this corruption is indelible and all-pervasive; man by his own efforts cannot save himself, cannot achieve that state of being given over to God which is the essence of holiness. The New Testament displays a paradoxical attitude to holiness. On the one hand it is something which through Christ the Christian has already been given, on the other it is a goal still to be reached. The paradox is perhaps best summed up by St Paul when he writes, to quote the New English Bible for its clarity: ‘I have not yet reached perfection, but I press on, hoping to take hold of that for which Christ once took hold of me’ (Philippians 3.12).

In sixteenth-century Protestantism the dramatic process by which the individual pressed on to take hold of that which he had already been given was a subject of thorough analysis.