None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

by Matthew Barrett

Sin against an infinite God cannot be atoned for by a Savior who has emptied himself of his divine attributes. No, it is his divine attributes that qualify him to make atonement in the first place. Sin against an infinite God can be met only by a Savior who is himself deity—and all the perfections identical with that deity—in infinite measure.

It is God’s work alone, for only he has the infinite power capable of raising spiritually dead souls.

May we not imagine God in our own image, but bow to the ground, like Moses before the burning bush, as finite creatures before the supremacy of the perfectly infinite God.

creeds have confessed, God is one in essence, three in person. These three are to be identified in eternity by certain eternal relations of origin or personal modes of subsisting: paternity, filiation, and spiration.

Should the Father not be life in himself, and should he not grant the Son to have life in himself, then the Son would have no life to give to those he came to redeem, which is basic to his entire mission (John 3:16, 36; 4:14; 5:24; 6:40, 47, 54). Yet Jesus dismantles such a possibility when he says that an

Since God owns the whole earth, he is able to hand over Abraham’s enemies, protecting his original promise to one day give Abraham a land and make him into a great nation (12:1–2).

If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine.

As the gospel is proclaimed to all people, it is paramount that those hearing this good news understand who exactly this saving God is to begin with.

Keep in mind, included among those listening are Stoic philosophers, philosophers who believe that nature is divine, that everything in nature (humans included!) has a spark of divinity within.

God is not in need of anything.

At the end of the book, after a very long silence, God answers Job, explaining that he owes an explanation, apology, and debt to no one.

Everything they have was first given to them. So when children give or share, they are giving or sharing that which was first given to or shared with them.

“Let me get something straight, okay? Your mother and I are rich. You have nothing. You can tell your friends and your enemies that, okay?” Cliff smiles.

The same applies to his justice; he is self-justifying. As Isaiah asks rhetorically, “Whom did he consult, and who made him understand? Who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?” (40:14). To echo Anselm, God not only is just, but he is just through himself.

If each of God’s attributes is characterized by such supremacy, then Anselm is right: God is something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Inevitably, “all being is contained in him.” He is “a boundless ocean of being.”

This is not a god who saves but a god you must save.

“We might pray for this God, but definitely not to him.”

The perfections of God are not like a pie, as if we sliced up the pie into different pieces, love being 10 percent, holiness 15 percent, omnipotence 7 percent, and so on. Unfortunately, this is how many Christians talk about God today, as if love, holiness, and omnipotence were all different parts of God, God being evenly divided among his various attributes. Some even go further,

Not only does this approach divide up the essence of God, but it potentially risks setting one part of God against another

By tweaking our language, we are protecting the unity of God’s essence. To do so is to guard the “simplicity” of God.

But here is what is so unique about God: he is without parts. And as a God without parts, he has no composer. The world, on the other hand, does have parts and must be composed.

short, it is because God has no composer that he can be the composer of the natural symphony we see around us. It is, miraculous as this may be, the only symphony whose composer is without composition.

Ask yourself that question that often entertained the brightest minds of the late medieval era: Is something good because God wills it to be good, or does God will something because it is good?

On the other hand, if God wills something because it is good, then is God not subservient to whatever is good? A standard of goodness exists external to God himself.

The paradox is far less problematic if we take into consideration divine simplicity.

“He is Goodness Itself, and all else that is good is good in imitat...

God is truthfulness itself. All truth is truth because it mimics the very nature of God, who is truth.

Such refraction does not eliminate the possibility of the creature knowing the Creator, but it eliminates the possibility of knowing him in his infinite simplicity.

That not being the case, a plurality of names is essential.

God is not a composite, made up of many good things, but is “one good thing” that is “signified by many names,” says Anselm.

Thus the words we use for the perfections we attribute to God, though they signify what is one, are not synonymous, for they signify it from many different points of view.”

“Just as a child cannot picture the worth of a coin of great value but only gains some sense of it when it is counted out in a number of smaller coins, so we too cannot possibly form a picture of the infinite fullness of God’s essence unless it is displayed to us now in one relationship, then in another, and now from one angle, then from another.”

Actually, simplicity is not only compatible with the Trinity, but it is essential to the Trinity, having even assisted Christians of the past in avoiding certain trinitarian heresies.

And since God’s essence and attributes are identical (God is his attributes), each person wholly shares every attribute.

The denial of simplicity is serious. So serious that Hart says it is “tantamount to atheism.”50 That sounds extreme. Yet Hart reminds us that up until the nineteenth century, most would have agreed.

“For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed”

However, we should never jump to the faulty conclusion that God is tempting us to sin. “God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one” (1:13). Rather, we are being enticed by our own sinful desires.

“Father of lights . . . there is no variation or shadow due to change”

God is not a God who is becoming, but remains the same, then he is not a God who has potential.

By contrast, God is “perfect not because he has perfected all his potential, but . . . he is perfection itself.”

a phrase meant to convey that God is not acted on but is the one who acts on others.

If God is not acted on, then it is right to call him, as Aquinas does, the first and only unmoved mover.

Everything in our world is mutable, and so it is moved by something else.

Notice, the first mover must be unmoved himself. He must be immutable, the only one who is not put in motion by another.

Stephen Charnock calls immutability the “glory” that belongs to “all the attributes of God” because it is the “centre wherein they all unite.”

A needy God cannot be an immutable God, for such a God must change to become complete.

God’s justice is immutable, then so is his knowledge, for an immutable justice demands that God never forget the sins of the wicked (Hos. 7:2).

To sum up, immutability is the enamel of all that is in God. “Those who predicate any change whatsoever of God,” warns Bavinck, “whether with respect to his essence, knowledge, or will, diminish all his attributes: independence, simplicity, eternity, omniscience, and omnipotence. This robs God of his divine nature, and religion of its firm foundation and assured comfort.”

Does God Change His Mind?

Context! Context!” He knew that unless we learned to read any single verse within its wider context, we would carelessly misunderstand its meaning. That is never truer than when we deal with passages like these.