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Nothing about God’s being is derived or caused to be. There is nothing behind Him or outside Him that could increase, alter, or augment His infinite fullness of being and felicity.
That which has no beginning cannot begin to be in any respect.
Classical theists insist that God is being, not becoming.
Since the first mover is necessarily unmoved by another, and since all movement comes from some mover in act, that first mover must be pure act (actus purus). That is to say, God, as the first cause of all things, must be a being who is not susceptible to further actualization because He possesses fullness of being in and of Himself.
God alone hath all being in him. Hence he gives himself the name, “I AM,” Exod. iii.14.
God is not voluntarily subjecting Himself to being moved by His human covenantal counterparts when He makes certain promises or sets down certain conditions and stipulations.
One reason that change in God, no matter how small, is theologically devastating is that it would signify some alteration in His being or life and thus, to the extent that such change occur, destabilize human confidence in His covenant promises.
It is by rejecting or ignoring the revelation of God’s aseity, pure actuality, immutability, simplicity, and so forth that one goes wrong in interpreting the Bible’s portrayals of change in God as indicating real changes in His being.
How can we have an authentic, personal relationship with Him, and He with us, if there is no give-and-take? Reciprocity and self-giving are the keys to all significant relationships, are they not? If God only gives to us but does not receive from us, then He seems to be missing out on a crucial component of the relationship.
Does He care for the world in such a way that He allows or ordains creatures to move Him, which would be to allow Himself to be changed in some way (since all movement is change)? Do creatures contribute to God’s being or blessedness?
the traditional notion of divine aseity is captured well when Arthur W. Pink states that God “gives to all and is enriched by none.”
Divine Simplicity The principal claim of divine simplicity is that God is not composed of parts.
Because God cannot depend on what is not God in order to be God, theologians traditionally insist that all that is in God is God.
God does not merely instantiate divinity as a particular concrete instance of it. Rather, He is divinity itself. No man is humanity as such, but God is divinity as such.
But if God is simple, there can be no real distinction between His essence (or substantial form) and attributes. The
It further follows from God’s non-compositeness that in Him all His attributes are really identical with each other. For many, this implication is the hardest to accept.
all that is in God must be God.
The doctrine of divine simplicity is meant to correct any proclivity we might have toward conceiving God’s being as dependent on principles or sources of being more basic than His own divinity.
God is most absolute in existence and so cannot depend upon that which is not God for any actuality of His being—the
all that is in God is God.
All these things are nothing but God and do not exist in Him as principles or determinations of His being.
But herein lies the difficulty: a simple God is not composed of parts; thus, His being cannot be directly mapped onto any multipart statements we make about Him.
If the manner of our God-talk is not a direct map of the manner of God’s being, the thinking goes, then what hope is there of knowing Him as He truly is? Knowing Him as we know other persons? For many theologians, the price of confessing a simple God is too steep to pay.
Yet the consistent maintenance of divine absoluteness will elude every theological approach that refuses to uphold God’s absolute simplicity.
All that remained of causality after mechanism took over the field of natural philosophy was a mechanical or physicalist understanding of efficient and material causation. Efficient
The aim of divine simplicity is to deny all relativity in God and to show that God’s being is ontologically irreducible in every respect.
There is nothing deeper or more fundamental in being than divinity, nothing more absolute.
For Hume, a belief in causal necessity is simply a psychological response to the uniformity of our experience.
After Hume and Kant’s attack on the perennial Aristotelian philosophy, many a Christian theologian opted to abandon, rather than defend, the metaphysical structure (regarding being, becoming, and causation) in terms of which simplicity had been so meticulously developed.
Second, and more briefly, the accusation that divine simplicity renders God an abstract property has it exactly backward. Rather than saying that God is a property, what simplicity really entails is that His so-called properties do not inhere in Him as properties. Rather, they are in fact nothing but the concrete, personal God Himself.
On this scheme, something other than divinity makes divinity to be. When Frame says that God is His essence, he means that God is identical to the summative set of really distinct properties which collectively comprise His essence.
The reasoning is that if God is identical with His own act of being, then He cannot depend on a multitude of really distinct causes of that being.
But in God there is no such distinction inasmuch as that by virtue of which He is wise is simply His divinity and that by virtue of which He is powerful is the selfsame divinity—and so on for all His other attributes. There can be no real composition or aggregation of virtues if all are just one and the same reality—namely, divinity itself.
Accordingly, what is a simple unity in God is presented to the human knower under the form of creaturely multiplicity. But this refraction of His simple glory into so many beams of finite perfection does not mean these multifarious beams speak no truth about His simple nature.
It must not be overlooked that we have no knowledge of God other than from his revelation in the creaturely world…. Of God we have no direct but only an indirect kind of knowledge, a concept derived from the creaturely world.
God is the King eternal (1 Tim. 1:17), the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 1:8), the One whose years have no end (Ps. 102:27), who is from everlasting to everlasting (Ps. 90:2). He exists exalted above all time (2 Tim. 1:9; Titus 1:2) as Creator and Lord and does not have His life or existence computed and measured out to Him in increments of succession.
We come to know Him and speak of Him as He reveals Himself through His mighty deeds and words, one after another in succession.
Indeed, as with our talk about all God’s attributes, there is an acute nonsymmetry between the temporally shaped terms and concepts we use to describe His eternity and the ontological reality of that eternity in Him.
It seems that we at least know how not to characterize eternity—to wit, our God-talk must eschew any notion of change in God. Whatever we are to say of God’s work in the world—creation, judgment, redemption, consummation—we must insist that this work produces no change in Him.
This inevitably brings the classical doctrine of divine eternity into conflict with the basic demands of theistic mutualism. Theistic mutualists reason that if God is to be really related to the world in a give-and-take fashion—which seems to be required in order for God to be genuinely personal—then He must exist in such a way that allows Him to experience the passage of time.
If creation is not eternal, then it would seem obvious that God is not eternally Creator of heaven and earth. Therefore, God must have become Creator after previously having not been such.
The basic claim of the classical doctrine of eternity is that God does not experience successive states of being and thus has no future and no past.
Boethius, a philosopher and theologian in the sixth century, memorably describes God’s eternity as “the whole, simultaneous and perfect possession of boundless life.”8 A bounded life, by contrast, is one that comes into one’s possession little by little and that which is also liable to pass out of one’s possession.
True eternity has been defined by the Scholastics to be “the interminable possession of life—complete, perfect, and at once.”
Hence philosophers have well said that neither the future nor the past (he will be or was), but only the present (he is) can properly be applied to him. For the eternal duration of God embraces indeed all time—the past, present and future; but nothing in him can be past or future because his life remains always the same and immutable.9
That which is perfect and indivisible in being cannot be subject to change, mutation, or movement.
Successive duration, or time, is the measure of a thing’s movement from state of being A to a different state of being B.
One challenge facing the traditional understanding of God’s eternity as timelessness is that the biblical references to eternity do not in themselves make it clear whether eternity is atemporal or merely an unending succession of moments.
These things are more enduring and stable than other temporal things and thus seem to imitate more closely the unchanging eternity of God. Eternity is a comparative term in these instances, denoting those temporal things that are more permanent than others.
Second, while Scripture uses eternalist language to describe temporal things, it also employs temporalist imagery to speak of God’s eternity. He is called the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9, 22). It is said that His years have no end (Ps. 102:27). His eternity is said to be “from the day” (Isa. 43:13). He is before the created world, from everlasting to everlasting (Ps. 90:2).
