Francis Schaeffer offers a concise dialogical treatment of this topic:
"God has a character and his holiness is part of his character. We do not believe, as some modern theologians would have it, that God's holiness only means his being God. Rather, it means that there are some things that conform to his nature and some things that do not. God's holiness, in other words, involves moral content....
"And yet we must immediately respond that we fall off the opposite cliff if we forget that God is love. There is a great emphasis on love today. It is often being viewed as having almost no direction, as being an unmotivated love -- love that is to be equal in all directions. But God's love is not contentless or directionless for the simple reason that God does not 'lack content'. He has a character. The great statements of truth in the Bible, the great doctrines and the law of God -- these lay down the tracks for love. We can, therefore, fall into heresy in two ways. We can forget either God's holiness or his love, and we cannot say which of these is worse....
"Therefore, when we begin to deal in practice with God's holiness, we must always remember that simultaneously there must be the reality of love. And when we begin to deal in practice with God's love, we must remember that simultaneously there must be the reality of his holiness. It is not that we do one and then the other, like keeping a ball in the air with two ping-pong paddles. Both God's holiness and his love must be exhibited simultaneously or we have fallen off one cliff or the other."
-- Francis Schaeffer, The Church Before the Watching World, Inter-Varsity Press (1971).