Occasionally in grad studies, you get fixated on a frustrating question that takes you down a productive little rabbit trail. I recently made my way down one while hunting out the original form of a nearly ubiquitous comment on the Trisagion in Isaiah 6:3, (“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty; the whole earth is filled with his glory”). J.A. Motyer gives one version of the formula, “Holiness is God’s hidden glory: glory is God’s all-present holiness,” (The Prophecy of Isaiah, 77).

It’s a striking formulation that wonderfully highlights a regular identification, or link between the concept of holiness and glory in Scripture (cf. Lev. 10:3). It’s also theologically pregnant, because glory is something of a summary attribute—the outward expression of the fullness of his majesty and totality of the divine nature.

Like I said, when you begin to read around Isaiah 6:3, you see it pop up a lot. Otto Kaiser gives us a version, but he does by way of citing Volkmer Herntrich’s earlier comment, “holiness is his concealed glory…but his glory is his holiness revealed” (Isaiah 1-12, 79). At the same time, Kaiser notes that Herntrich himself is following the Wurtenberger divines Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782) and Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752).

H.U. Von Balthasar also quotes Herntrich and the trail of crumbs leading back to Oetinger and Bengel (The Glory of the Lord Vol 6, 64). Brevard S. Childs simply writes, “His glory is his disclosed holiness; his holiness is his inner glory (Oetinger, Bengel)” (Isaiah, 56). Sadly, I have been unable to get my hands on Herntrich’s commentary, but I decided to jump further back and found that even before Herntrich, at least Keil and Delitzch were making the link, “His glory, as Oetinger and Bengel have formulated it, is His disclosed holiness as His holiness is His veiled or hidden glory.”

While it seems everybody agrees with Oetinger and Bengel’s insight, for the last 100 years nobody has seen the need to cite where they actually happened to be deriving this formula. So, I decided to do a little digging.

Initially, I had to overcome my historical ignorance by realizing that even though everybody just kept lumping them together, they weren’t citing some shared source I couldn’t find.

Fred Sanders pointed me to Oetinger’s Biblisches Wörterbuch and that proved immediately fruitful. (Yes, that’s a “personal correspondence” bragglebrag.) If you turn right over “heiligkeit” and related terms, you get a few nice pages of discussion of holiness through the Scriptures, despite some of Oetinger’s weirdo, semi-Swedenborgian theosophy poking out the edges. For our purposes, though, you get a hit on our formula on 247, “Holiness is hidden glory, and glory is holiness revealed.” So there you go.

That said, despite everybody placing Oetinger first in the pair in the commentaries, Bengel was born a good 15 years before him and was actually the senior of the two. In which case, I figure the odds are good that he’s the source of the insight and the more original of the pair.

But where to look? The most obvious place to go digging is in his classic, multi-volume commentary Gnomon of the New Testament. And again, the obvious first place to look yields fruit quickly.

First, I was able to find a direct hit on the formula through some handy dandy search term work (God bless Google books). Commenting on Paul’s description of Christ’s work of sanctifying his bride, the Church Ephesians 5:26, Bengel explains that this sanctification renders her glorious because, “often holiness and glory are synonymous.” Indeed, that is because “holiness is internal glory: glory is holiness shining forth” (Vol 4, 107). So there you have it.

Even more interesting, though, in the “Sketch” of his life and writings at the beginning of volume 5, A.R. Fausset informs the reader that from 1711 to 1713 he served a curacy at Stuttgart, and that during:

…this period he composed a Latin treatise, “Syntagma de Sanctitate Dei,” in which he shows, by parallel passages of Scripture, that all the attributes of God are implied in the Hebrew with holy, rendered qadosh: or hagios in the LXX: in fact, that the Divine holiness comprehends all His supreme excellence.” (viii)

Johann Christian F. Burk confirms this in his A Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Albert Bengel, (pg. 7) , but sadly reports that the treatise was never published in its original form. Apparently, it was not only a lexical study but a theological, philosophical, and historical one that also “adduced quotations from the most eminent divines of every period, to show that it was no new opinion.” Needless to say, I was greatly disappointed as that might have proved a goldmine.

Still, Burk consoles us with the news that the substance of his views popped up in later works. Fausset also manages to produce a wonderfully enticing quote to tease us:

Godhead and Divinity have not the same meaning: Godhead signifies the Divine essence; Divinity, the glory and dignity belonging to it. The word ‘holy’ means separated or set apart: when applied to God, it denotes his incommunicable essence: His holiness is therefore synonymous with His majesty. When holiness and glory are joined together, then the former expresses God’s hidden and unsearchable excellence; the latter, the revelation of His holiness to His rational creatures. (xxiv)

Unfortunately, Fausset doesn’t tell us where Bengel’s works he makes this comment and a search of the 5 volumes didn’t yield it either. All the same, cruising around in the Gnomon, you can find a condensed version of the same comment on Romans 1:4 when discussing the “Spirit of holiness”:

The word qadosh, hagios, holy, when the subject under discussion refers to God, not only denotes that blameless rectitude in acting, which distinguishes Him, but the Godhead itself, or, to speak with greater propriety, the divinity, or the excellence of the Divine nature.

Burk points us to the jackpot, though, in Bengel’s massive, commentary on Revelation (Erklarte Offenbarung Johannis und viel meher Jesus Christi. (Apparently Bengel could have given Hal Lindsey a run for his money in this mammoth, in which he predicted the Millennium was going begin in 1836). In any case, in his comment on the song of the living creatures in 4:8, (“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come,”), Bengel explicitly refers to his earlier study and then briefly unpacks his view of the holiness and majesty of God (310-113).

First, he first notes that in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and German, the base meaning is “separated.” And so when God is named as holy, it indicates “his own very special excellence,” the “glimmering from his divine qualities, shining forth from all his works.”

God is separated from everything because, “he is and works of himself, out of himself, in himself, for himself and for his own sake. That is why he is the first and the last…infinite and unchanging, omnipotent, omniscient, wise and true, righteous and faithful, gracious and merciful.” For that reason, the terms, “holy and holiness name as much as God and deity.” This is why God can swear by his life and swear by his holiness and have it come to mean the same thing.

And then, he continues on to again make the identification between holiness and glory, seeing within their collocation an argument mystery of the Trinity:

This holiness is often called glory: often holiness and glory are praised at the same time (Isa. 6:3) For holiness is hidden glory; and glory is holiness shining forth. The Scripture talks profusely about the holiness and glory of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and by means of which the mystery of the Holy Trinity is palpably affirmed.

With all this in view, then, we can see that in Bengel this identification between holiness and glory is much thicker than a couple of Scriptural parallelisms. God’s holiness indicates the fullness, the totality, the sum of all his divine qualities—it is a summary attribute that directs us to consider the absoluteness of God’s deity as such. In which case, theologically it forms a correlative with the glory of God insofar as glory, as we said earlier, is that attribute by which we speak of the manifestation of the fullness of God’s deity outwardly or visibly.

One interesting point to note about this little historical dive. Aside from the fact that I think Bengel is on to something here, it’s worth noting when he was on to something. It’s been common for who knows how long to claim that theologians have mostly treated holiness as a moral quality up until the late 19^th, early 20^th century when the Biblical scholars made big breakthroughs through advances in comparative Semitics and the like (Diestl, Roberson Smith, Von Baudissin, etc.). While that’s true in the main, here Bengel argues for the view at least 100 years before we are typically told it arose, without recourse to any of those sorts of studies, and he claims he’s not doing anything new. (I actually think I can prove that too, but let’s save something for the dissertation).

Well, I’ll wrap things up here for now as things have strained beyond the normal reaches of nerdy, theological-history even for this blog. I hope this post either (1) increased your appreciation for the insight of older commentators like Bengel, (2) leads you to pray for me now that you know how I spend my days, or, most importantly, (3) got you thinking even the slightest bit more deeply about the holiness and glory of our Triune God.

Soli Deo Gloria