None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

by Matthew Barrett

That is the shock that Barrett’s book captures: Meeting the God you thought you knew, and being shocked by his sheer godness.

We are easily lulled into a style of theology that starts from ourselves and imagines some ways in which God must be like that, but bigger and better.

What matters is to join the company of those who are permanently shocked by the sheer godness of the God we thought we knew.

There is none greater than this God, not because he is merely a greater version of ourselves but because he is nothing like ourselves.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. . . . “Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

and how she was wrestling with the big questions surrounding the Christian faith, like the mystery between divine sovereignty and free will and the problem of evil. My curiosity was sparked.

“Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God’s majesty.”

but he never partitions one attribute from another, believing each to illuminate the other.

“perfection of both beauty and strength.” It’s the word “perfection” that especially haunted me. What did it mean? And why would Augustine use it to refer to God’s many attributes?

What was so different about the God of Augustine and Anselm was that they first thought of God as one who is not like us. They started from the top (God) and then worked their way down (to humanity). They moved from the Creator to the creature. And this approach seemed far more aligned with the way the biblical authors approached God. As David says, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light” (Ps. 36:9).

Not only do I believe each and every attribute is key to each and every other attribute in God, but I am convinced that we can only understand God’s attributes in all their glory if such attributes originate from one core conviction: God is someone than whom none greater can be conceived.

Many of the great-making perfections mentioned by Augustine above are terribly unpopular in our own day.

They will be introduced along the way, but I like to call them the A-team: Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas.

Puritans like Stephen Charnock, and Dutch theologians like Herman Bavinck.

W. Tozer once said, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”8 If Tozer is right, then knowing God, as he has made himself

who alone has immortality,

Truly I do not see this light since it is too much for me; and yet whatever I see I see through it, just as an eye that is weak sees what it sees by the light of the sun which it cannot look at in the sun itself.

perhaps I can make atonement for your sin” (32:30).

God still promises to drive out Israel’s enemies in the land. But there is a catch: no longer will God go with Israel, due to her sin.

but I will not go up among you, lest I consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people”

The proper way to experience the sun is through its effects. Its rays

The language is protective, guarding Moses from God’s glory and God’s glory from Moses.

Israel, however, does not fear the Lord as Moses does.

“They lift it to their shoulders, they carry it, they set it in its place, and it stands there; it cannot move from its place” (46:7a).

What is abundantly evident from Isaiah 40 is that this God is not just a greater being than us, as if he were merely different in degree, a type of superman. No, this God is different in kind. He is a different type of being altogether. He is the Creator, not the created.

To begin with, we, the creature, would have to be God to comprehend God in all his glory.

“We are speaking of God. Is it any wonder if you do not comprehend? For if you comprehend, it is not God you comprehend. Let it be a pious confession of ignorance rather than a rash profession of knowledge. To attain some slight knowledge of God is a great blessing; to comprehend him, however, is totally impossible.”

“The infinite cannot be contained in the finite. God exists infinitely and nothing finite can grasp him infinitely.” Aquinas concludes, “It is impossible for a created mind to understand God infinitely; it is impossible, therefore, to comprehend him.”

are not meant to reveal the divine essence in all its fullness.6 They certainly do reveal God truly, just never exhaustively.

much better approach couples the quest for knowledge with humility, a humility that looks to God’s revelation of himself for understanding. It is the approach of faith seeking understanding. As Anselm prays, “For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand.”

God may be incomprehensible, but he is not unknowable. Any doubt is removed the moment God opens his mouth.

“Since at all times we should be praising him and blessing him, and yet no words of ours are capable of expressing him, I begin by asking him to help me understand and explain what I have in mind and to pardon any blunders I may make. For I am as keenly aware of my weakness as of my willingness.”

Calvin called this “lisping.”

Since he is the Creator, his knowledge is original, the archetype.

Our knowledge, by contrast, is the ectype, meaning it is derivative and a copy, only a likeness of the original.

“Univocal” refers to something having the same meaning as something else.

“Analogical” means something shares similarities with something else but is not identical with it.

Analogical knowledge is why we keep returning to God’s self-revelation in the Scriptures; we are striving to think God’s thoughts after him. To reverse this order is criminal in God’s eyes.

“all language about things other than physical objects is necessarily metaphorical,”

This is why Scripture is saturated with anthropomorphic descriptions of God.

33 It is “palpably absurd of you,” says the church father Tertullian, “to be placing human characteristics in God rather than divine ones in man, and clothing God in the likeness of man, instead of man in the image of God.”

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

Rather than looking to the supernatural God of the Bible, who defies the finite realm, they prefer what Brian Davies calls “theistic personalism,” or what David Bentley Hart labels “monopolytheism.”

However true it may be to say that God is bigger than even the tallest redwood, it would be a mistake to think that is all God is, merely bigger.

If we can think of anything that would limit God, then it cannot be true of God.

If God is made up of parts, as opposed to being simple, then he cannot be infinite. Why?

Paul prays that they might have their “hearts enlightened” so that they might know the “immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe” (Eph. 1:19).

Fifty thousand pieces of silver was their worth, or by today’s monetary value six million dollars.

More fundamentally, they have no category for who they have sinned against: an infinite God.

They have spit in the face of a God whose holiness is inestimable, whose glory is unfathomable, and whose perfection is of infinite measure.