What do you think of when someone calls God holy? What does it mean when we, following the Bible, affirm that God is holy?

It is perhaps easiest for us to think of God’s holiness primarily in moral terms. This is understandable, for conscience is real, and when Scripture speaks of God’s holiness it certainly includes —among other things—his total moral purity.

To appreciate the significance of God’s purity, it may be helpful to consider the contrast between moral and therapeutic ways of interpreting human life.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic

In recent decades there has been a noticeable cultural shift from moral to therapeutic categories – a change observed by thinkers as diverse as Philip Rieff, Karl Menninger, Alasdair MacIntyre, David Wells, and Carl Trueman.¹ Increasingly, contemporary discussion interprets identity, behaviour, and relationships through therapeutic rather or more than moral frameworks. This tendency is especially evident in self-help culture and popular psychology, but it is also reflected at times in Christian preaching and pastoral language.

These two frameworks are not necessarily incompatible; they need not exclude one another. Yet they evaluate and interpret human desires, feelings, choices, behaviour, and experiences in significantly different ways.

Therapeutic categories tend to interpret feelings and actions primarily in terms of mental health, psychological well-being, and emotional fulfilment. The focus falls largely on inner pain and the process of healing it.

Beyond the Therapeutic

Within a therapeutic framework, choices and behaviour are typically explained by upbringing, trauma, or unmet emotional needs – and the moral question is quietly set aside. The goal becomes self-acceptance, feeling better about oneself, personal well-being, and self-actualization. Rather than describing a thought or action as morally objectionable, wrong, or sinful, the therapeutic framework is more likely to call it unhealthy and interpret it as a coping mechanism.

Excessive anger, for instance, may be explained not as a moral fault but as the result of unprocessed trauma. Moral conflict becomes a stage in personal growth; wrongdoing become brokenness. The goal subtly shifts from goodness to well-being, and the dominant vocabulary moves from sin, justice, righteousness, and virtue to pain, trauma, growth, and healing.

A moral question asks: Is this right or wrong? A religious question asks: Is this godly or ungodly? A therapeutic question asks: How do I feel about this? Why am I hurting or happy?

Moral categories, by contrast, interpret human choices and actions in terms of right and wrong, purity and impurity, good and evil, duty and neglect, obedience and disobedience. Within a Christian framework, the therapeutic concern is not simply dismissed — for both immoral and moral actions carry consequences – bad or good. Lying is not merely unhealthy but corrupt; truthfulness is not simply admirable but virtuous. Human attitudes and behaviour are measured against objective moral laws and standards.

It is precisely here that the purity and holiness of God confronts us. Scripture does not speak of God primarily as the guarantor of our psychological well-being, but as the Holy One – the one whose purity exposes the moral reality of human motivation and life.  Before his pure majesty, our problem is not simply woundedness but defilement; not merely pain but impurity. To address the moral deficiencies that lie at the root of our condition is to offer genuine redress for the psychological as well. Guilt that is truly forgiven, not merely reframed, brings peace; a will redirected toward goodness, not merely a self reconciled to its own desires, produces lasting change. And why that is so rests on the deep foundation of God’s own holiness and purity.

The Seriousness of Feelings

The prominence given to the moral must not, however, be misunderstood. There is a tendency opposite to the therapeutic: a downplaying of feeling through an overemphasis on moral categories. Feelings are fundamental to human experience and well-being, and Christian faith, life, and ministry can err in two opposite directions – by giving too little attention to emotion or by giving it too much authority.²

When we consider the purity of God, moreover, the question of our emotional life becomes especially serious. Our desires, impulses, and affections are not morally neutral; they belong to the inner life that God calls to holiness. To underestimate the power and importance of emotion is a mistake. But to make emotion determinative—allowing it to function as the arbiter of truth, right, and wrong—is equally dangerous. For, as Professor Bray puts it:

‘In a world that has fallen into the grip of evil forces to which even human beings are subject, God stands out as someone who is not only completely different but whose demands on us run counter to what have now become our “natural” inclinations.’³

Feeling is both essential and inevitable. It may be constructive or destructive, healthy or distorted. For this reason, Christian teaching and discipleship must engage seriously with the emotional life if they are to be effective and enduring. Scripture repeatedly warns against sinful desires—lust, greed, and other disordered passions—yet it also testifies abundantly to the power and promise of rightly ordered emotion. The Psalms give voice to the full range of human feeling before God, and the New Testament speaks of the fruit of the Spirit as including love, joy, and peace (Gal 5:22–24). The kingdom of God, indeed, is not a matter of outward forms but of the heart: ‘righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit’ (Rom 14:17).

Yet the purity-holiness of God calls us beyond the language of therapeutic healing alone. It summons us to reckon with the deeper moral reality of our lives and to recognize that what we most need is not only comfort but cleansing. Feelings themselves may be good or ill; they must therefore be governed and disciplined with Christ’s help. Faith, hope, and love form the foundation of godly emotion, and there are practical ways in which they may be cultivated. The classic ‘habits of grace’—Scripture, prayer, fellowship, and other means of spiritual formation—provide the vision, intention, and practices through which the heart is shaped in godliness. ‘We must train ourselves to set the character of God in the framework that he gave us rather than in the framework we so often use in understanding our lives today.’⁴ In this way the emotional life becomes part of the believer’s sanctification: the purification of the heart by which God’s holiness and purity are progressively reflected in our thoughts, desires, and affections.

1. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Chicago University Press, 1966); Karl Menninger, Whatever Became of Sin? (E. P. Dutton, 1973); Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3^rd ed. (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007); David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Eerdmans, 1993); idem,God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Eerdmans, 1994); idem,God in the Whirlwind; idem, ‘Losing Our Religion: The Impact of Secularization on the Understanding of Sin,’ in David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson eds., Ruined Sinners to Reclaim (Crossway, 2024), 823-820; Carl R. Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2020); idem, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022). ↩︎
2. ‘The Seriousness of Feelings’ is from Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart (IVP, 2002), 106. ↩︎
3. Gerald Bray, God is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology (Crossway, 2012), 160. ↩︎
4. Wells, God in the Whirlwind, 102. A valuable discussion of the Christian transformation of sensation and emotion is Willard, Renovation of the Heart, 83-107. See also David Mathis, Habits of Grace (Crossway, 2016). A great classic is Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith(Yale University Press, 1959) [The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 2]; available at http://edwards.yale.edu/research/browse. ↩︎