None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God

by Matthew Barrett

The parable of the unclean spirits applies: when bad theology is cast out by one generation but not replaced with a substitute by the next, the home of Christian theology is left empty. When that bad spirit of theology returns and finds the home empty, it brings with it seven more unclean theologies. The last state is worse than the first (Matt. 12:45). Such is our heritage.

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

I am a strong believer in divine simplicity, so the attribute discussed in one chapter is always related to the attributes in every other chapter.

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

he is his attributes

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

God is, Augustine observes, “perfection of both beauty and strength.”

Anselm had a way of getting at this concept of perfection by asking whether God is someone than whom none greater can be conceived.

But with the help of Augustine and Anselm, that approach now seemed dangerous, always flirting with the possibility of creating a God in our own image, always defining God’s attributes according to our own limitations.

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).

This book is different. 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.

I hope you will be too by the end of this book—that the God of classical theism is simply the God of the Bible.

As Paul Helm says, “In the Christian theological tradition metaphysics”—the study of God’s being or essence—“is but a prelude to worship.”

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. From this fundamental difference—what theologians have called the Creator-creature distinction—every other difference follows.

There is no one like this God. He is, as Isaiah 40:28 says, “unsearchable.” That word “unsearchable” is key. It’s not only true that God is incomparable, but he is also incomprehensible. His power, his knowledge, his presence, and his wisdom are inexhaustible and unfathomable. No one ever has known, and no one ever will know, the depths of his essence, the scope of his might, or the height of his glory. He is, in a word, infinite. That we cannot say of anyone else. “I am God, and there is none like me” (Isa. 46:9). “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (55:8–9).

If God were not incomprehensible, would anything be compromised? And what would have to be true for God to be comprehensible? The short answer is that if he were not incomprehensible, God himself would change for the worse for a variety of reasons. To begin with, we, the creature, would have to be God to comprehend God in all his glory.3 But of course, if we were to become divine to comprehend him who alone is divinity, then God himself would cease to be divine. Listen to Augustine’s wisdom: “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.”4

“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.”

Thomas Aquinas says something similar: “No created mind can attain the perfect sort of understanding of God’s essence that is intrinsically possible.” Aquinas then makes a statement that will be echoed by all theologians after him: “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.”5

“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.”

A 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.”

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.

Augustine once wrote that whenever we think about God, “we are aware that our thoughts are quite inadequate to their object, and incapable of grasping him as he is.” Yet Scripture commands us to “think about the Lord our God always,” though we “can never think about him as he deserves.” How, then, should we approach him? “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.”25 That may be one of my favorite passages Augustine ever wrote. Every time he sat down to write about God, he put down his pen, got on his knees, and prayed. He knew he would never exhaust the mystery of the one who is incomprehensible. Augustine also knew that his finite attempt to describe him who is incomprehensible was tainted by Augustine’s own weakness. To describe God, Augustine desperately needed God’s own help.

If we know anything about God, it is because he has chosen to make it known; revelation is a gift. In that light, our task cannot be speculation. Our response to his revelation concerning himself is not to demand knowledge of that which he has chosen to conceal.

Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, Almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise.28

After forming humankind in his image, God then spoke. That’s right, the infinite, transcendent, incomprehensible God used words, and these words revealed not only who he is but what duty God requires of humans. His words established a covenantal relationship between God and his people.

Theologians have a word for this: “accommodation.” The church father Origen, for instance, liked to compare God to a parent talking to his two-year-old, speaking “inarticulately because of the child” since it is impossible for the parent to be understood by the child apart from “condescending to their mode of speech.”2 John Calvin compared God to a nurse caring for an infant. The nurse bends low to speak a language that the infant can understand. Calvin called this “lisping.”3 If you are the proud parents of a newborn, you know what Calvin means. I’ve been in hospitals and seen men the size of linebackers, with hands as hard as a sledgehammer, cradle their newborn and speak baby talk. The moment is unforgettable, as that six-pound curly head looks up and cries to be embraced. If that is how far we accommodate ourselves to our own children, how much more so our heavenly Father? Such lisping does “not so much express clearly what God is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity.”4

It may be impossible to comprehend God in his essence, in all his glory and radiance, but that does not preclude us from knowing God as he has made himself known to us. God “cannot be comprehended,” but he “can be apprehended.”5 We may not have “absolute knowledge” of God, which no finite creature could possibly have of an infinite being, but we can have “relative knowledge” of an “absolute Being”—that is, knowledge that knows in part something true about an infinite being.6

What kind of knowledge do we possess? As long as we are the creature and he is the Creator, as long as we are finite and he is infinite, there must be a basic distinction between our knowledge and his. 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. It is an imitation of his knowledge, which is what one would expect since we are made in his image.

The man wrote as he breathed, penning around nine million words before his death. There was no reason to question Aquinas’s spiritual devotion either. When Aquinas first decided he would join the Dominican order, his family went ballistic. To dissuade him, his family locked him in his room with a nude prostitute! Thomas raged with anger, chasing the prostitute away with a red-hot brand plucked from the fire. Slamming the brand on the door, Thomas left the sign of the cross forever burned into the wood. Thomas is respected not only for his unflinching, Joseph-like commitment to holiness but for his brilliant theological mind.

Modern treatments so often jettison classical attributes (simplicity, immutability, eternity, etc.), but Aquinas demonstrates that such attributes are essential to a perfect, infinite being. For that reason, he will be one of our greatest allies in this book.

Theology has a word that keeps us from such idolatry. It’s the word “supereminent.”17 That’s right, super-eminent. If something in God is supereminent, then it must be “more eminent” than that which is in us: “In him [God] all that we are is possessed in a higher, fuller, purer, and limitless way.” God is the one who “donates everything that we are to us out of his infinite plenitude of being, consciousness, and bliss.”18 Take the attribute of wisdom, for example. We may be wise, even reflecting the wisdom of God. There is a correlation between divine and human wisdom (see Proverbs). Such continuity is what classifies wisdom as a communicable attribute of God (one that is reflected in us in some way), as opposed to an incommunicable attribute of God (one that is not in us in any sense). Nevertheless, we would be mistaken to think that we are wise in the same way God is wise.

represent it.”21 In the history of God-talk, there are what are referred to as cataphatic theology and apophatic theology. Cataphatic theology is affirmative by design, occurring whenever we assert what God is. Nevertheless, as long as God-talk remains analogical, our cataphatic excitement must be tamed by the wisdom of its older sister, apophatic theology, which describes God by what he is not (God is not x, y, and z). This approach is sometimes referred to as the via negativa or via negationis, the way of negation, because it is asserting something true about God by denying something false about him.22 So when we want to say that God is not mutable or that he does not change, we simply say he is immutable. Essentially, we are identifying all that is creaturely and therefore cannot be in God.

As those who read with modern eyes, we struggle to understand how anything but that which is absolutely literal could be appropriate. We expect the Bible to read like an automotive textbook. Yet the metaphorical communicates truth just as much as the literal, sometimes more so. The point is, we “ascribe to God in an absolute sense all the perfections we observe in creatures.”32 As we do so, however, we must keep in mind that there can be no perfection in the creature in the exact same way that it is in 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.”34

In the introduction I quoted A. W. Tozer: “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”35 Right as Tozer may be, it is a dangerous thing to assume that the conception of God in our minds pictures God just as he is in all his infinite incomprehensibility. Added to Tozer’s statement should be that of Stephen Charnock, who advises us that if we think about God, we should say to ourselves: “This is not God; God is more than this: if I could conceive him, he were not God; for God is incomprehensibly above whatsoever I can say, whatsoever I can think and conceive of him.”36 Only then, with such humility, will we begin to truly know God as he has revealed himself to us.

In the eyes of a child, the world is a magical place: a snowflake falling from the sky onto one’s nose, a baby chick overcoming its shell to embrace the sun for the first time, the insatiable joy of tasting a fresh blueberry on a hot July day. There is a reason the Pevensie children could see the world C. S. Lewis called Narnia, while the adults in the world around them could not. It is not because they were gullible; it is because they believed there was wonder in the universe. As much as children ask why, when it comes to the wonder of the world around them, they do not ask why because they are skeptics, but rather they ask because they believe and thirst to know the world’s secrets. The miraculous is everywhere, and children embrace it.

only God can be infinite in his essence. The creation, by contrast, may be large, but even if it were unlimited in size, it still would not compare to God, who defies the concept of size altogether. He is a different species entirely.

God has no form. Could it not be more evident that God is not merely above us but different from us?

“The truest beginning of piety is to think as highly of God as possible; and doing so means that one must believe that he is omnipotent, and not changeable in the smallest respect; that he is the creator of all good things, but is himself more excellent than all of them; that he is the supremely just ruler of everything that he created; and that he was not aided in creating by any other being, as if he were not sufficiently powerful by himself.”

A finite being is, by definition, limited. An infinite being is, by definition, unlimited. To be infinite is to be unbounded, unlimited, and unrestricted. Put positively, to be infinite means God is his attributes in an absolute sense, since he is the fullness of being.

God’s power is an infinite power, which is why we call him omnipotent (all-powerful). God’s knowledge is an infinite knowledge, which explains why we title him omniscient (all-knowing). God’s wisdom is an infinite wisdom, which justifies praising him as omnisapient (all-wise). God’s presence is an infinite presence, which urges us to acknowledge that he is omnipresent (everywhere present).

Not only does Paul say that God’s power is infinite, but he assumes, even prays, that the believer can and will know, experience, and live a life defined by God’s infinite nature. That may seem impossible. After all, how can we know the immeasurable greatness of the Almighty? But Paul is confident we can, if only in part, because Christ is risen.

Understanding we have sinned against the one who is infinite in his perfections is not only scary but can lead us to total despair. For it is painfully obvious there is no one who can make atonement. Such a person would have to be infinite himself to atone for a sin against an infinite God, to pay sins that deserve a penalty that has no end. In our finite, fallen world, clearly there is no one like this to be found. It’s at that moment—a moment of utter despair—that the gospel shines in all its brilliance.

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.

God? “Supremacy” captures the perfection of God’s infinite nature. Listen to our friend Anselm: “And clearly any good thing that the supreme nature is, it is that thing supremely. It is, therefore, supreme essence, supreme life, supreme reason, supreme health, supreme justice, supreme wisdom, supreme truth, supreme goodness, supreme greatness, supreme beauty, supreme immortality, supreme incorruptibility, supreme immutability, supreme happiness, supreme eternity, supreme power, supreme unity.”21 Each and every attribute deserves to be called “supreme”; for that reason alone our God is one who deserves our worship.

We need not digress into all the nuances of what that life means for each person of the Trinity, but we should say, at the very least, that the implications for the Christian life are not insignificant.8 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

Today, worldviews like pantheism (God is the world, and the world is God) and panentheism (the world is within God) share similarities to this Stoic outlook. God and the world are mutually dependent. Such worldviews, however, imprison God’s freedom, making the world necessary, and compromise his essence, making his existence dependent on the world.10

with, if God is self-sufficient, then so also is he self-divine, for a God who is self-existent cannot receive his deity from anything or anyone outside himself. If God is self-sufficient, then he is also self-wise, for if others could inform God of what is wise or what wise choices he should make, then he would be less than perfect in his wisdom, growing in the wisdom he receives from others. Moreover, if God is self-sufficient, then he must be self-virtuous, for if he received his virtue from another, then he could not be perfectly moral; he who increases in virtue cannot be the very standard of morality.

If God is the perfect being, then he must have life in and of himself. If he were dependent on someone/something else, he would forfeit his perfection, giving it to another. As Anselm reminds us, “For anything that is great through something else is less than that through which it is great.” God’s perfection must be an independent perfection. His excellency must be self-excellent. His

“Not only does he sustain this universe (as he once founded it) by his boundless might, regulate it by his wisdom, preserve it by his goodness, and especially rule mankind by his righteousness and judgment, bear with it in his mercy, watch over it by his protection,” observes John Calvin, but “no drop will be found either of wisdom and light, or of righteousness or power or rectitude, or of genuine truth, which does not flow from him, and of which he is not the cause.”16