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February 3 - March 7, 2023
If God were not life in and of himself, if he were not independent of us, then he would not be worthy, qualified, or able to save us, let alone worthy to receive worship and praise. If God were not a se, then he would be weak and pathetic, for he would be needy and dependent too. He would need saving, just as we do. He would be a God like us but not a God other than us. He would be a God in our world but not a God distinct from our world. “We might pray for this God, but definitely not to him.”18 To conclude, it is precisely because God is free from creation that he is able to save lost
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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, believing some attributes to be more important than others. This happens most with divine love, which some say is the most important attribute (the biggest piece of the pie).
Simplicity may be a new concept to your theological vocabulary, but it is one that has been affirmed by the majority of our Christian forebears over the past two thousand years of church history, even by some of the earliest church fathers. And for good reason, too. Let’s consult our A-team once again.
God is his attributes. Instead of addition and division, there is absolute unity. His essence is his attributes, and his attributes, his essence. Or as Augustine says, “God has no properties but is pure essence. . . . They neither differ from his essence nor do they differ materially from each other.”
Since God does not have a body (like us), he “is not composed of extended parts,” as if he were composed of “form and matter.” It’s not as if God were something different from “his own nature.” Nor is it the case that his nature is one thing and his existence another thing. We shouldn’t suppose, either, that God is some type of substance, one that has accidents, traits that can be disposed of or cease to exist. “God is in no way composite. Rather, he is entirely simple.”
If Aquinas is right that “every composition” truly “needs some composer,”7 then Anselm, too, must be right when he says that one who is composite “just is not supreme.”8
In one of the greatest definitions of simplicity, Stephen Charnock stresses this very point: “God is the most simple being; for that which is first in nature, having nothing beyond it, cannot by any means be thought to be compounded.” Charnock then tells us why: “For whatsoever is so, depends upon the parts whereof it is compounded, and so is not the first being.” But remember, the being of God is “infinitely simple, hath nothing in himself which is not himself, and therefore cannot will any change in himself, he being his own essence and existence.”
dark: If God is divisible, then he is also destructible.
Moreover, if something is divisible, then it is capable of being corrupted as well. If something can be dismantled, taken apart, whether physically or intellectually, then such parts must be capable of decomposition.18 Breakdown ensues since divine unity itself has disintegrated. In the end, simplicity is essential to a God immune to division and corruption.
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.
each person being fully, wholly God, not partially God, means that God remains indivisible in his essence. The one essence is not split into three things (i.e., tritheism) but wholly and personally subsists in three distinguishable yet inseparable persons.
call eternal relations of origin or personal modes of subsistence: paternity, filiation, and spiration. The Father eternally generates the Son (paternity and filiation), and the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son (spiration). These three relations of origin have allowed the church to distinguish between the three without aborting the unity of the three as one in essence.39 “Simplicity in respect to essence, but Trinity in respect to persons,”
when we refer to the three persons bringing about our redemption, we should always be careful to add that they do so inseparably from one another. This is called “inseparable operations” in theology, made famous by fathers like Gregory of Nyssa.42 One particular person of the Trinity may take on a special or focal role (e.g., the Son becomes incarnate; the Spirit descends at Pentecost). That is called the doctrine of divine “appropriations,” because a specific work or action is appropriated to a particular person of the Trinity.43 Nevertheless, every external work of the Trinity remains
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If God’s essence is his attributes and his attributes are his essence, then when we refer to Father, Son, and Spirit, we do not have in mind merely three impersonal “modes of subsisting” but “personal modes of subsisting.”
Stephen Charnock calls immutability the “glory” that belongs to “all the attributes of God” because it is the “centre wherein they all unite.”
quality. It makes us wonder, as well, whether what has been added is essential to God’s being or merely accidental. If essential, then how did God exist without it? Here is the bottom line: if God is not simple, then he is made up of parts, and to consist of parts is to be divisible, by having those parts subtracted or new parts added. Either way, God’s being changes in the process. Immutability is key to preserving God’s simplicity.
3. It is because God does not change that he is all-knowing and all-wise.
maturity. If God has learned something today he did not know yesterday, then we have little reason to think his decision yesterday was just as good as his decision today.
4. It is because God does not change that he is not restricted by time and space.
5. It is because God does not change that he is omnipotent.
6. It is because God does not change that he remains holy and just.
The marvel of our God is that he can will change in us, though he himself changes not.45 Or as Augustine says, our God is “without any change in himself” as he is “making changeable things,” yet all the while “undergoing nothing.”46
Impassibility also means he is not “the victim of negative and sinful passions as are human beings, such as fear, anxiety, and dread, or greed, lust, and unjust anger.”
we do not really want a God who suffers, despite what our first instinct might say. Such a God may be like us, but he cannot help us, let alone redeem us from the evil of this world.
We need the type of God Augustine prayed to: “You, Lord God, lover of souls, show a compassion far purer and freer of mixed motives than ours; for no suffering injures you.”37
not? “It is certain,” Calvin answers, “that God is not subject to any human passions, yet He is not able sufficiently to manifest either the goodness or the love that He has toward us, except by transfiguring Himself, as if He were a mortal man, saying that He would take pleasure in doing good to us.”47 In other words, God is well aware of our need for accommodation. Yes, he is impassible, but he is communicating to a world that is not. If that communication is to be meaningful, then he must convey truths through passible mediums, imagery emotional in nature. Otherwise, the door of
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“For when You look upon us in our misery,” says Anselm, “it is we who feel the effect of Your mercy, but You do not experience the feeling.”
creature. In the middle of the nineteenth century, however, this language was replaced with the vocabulary of secular psychology: “emotions.”
The eternality of God is just one implication of his infinite nature and ultimately the outcome of a God who is the most supreme, perfect being. Time is fraught with limitations; a being in time is a being bound by all the characteristics of time: change, composition, dependency, and impotence. But a perfect being can have no such limitations because he is, by definition of being perfect, infinite in nature. He is his attributes in all their fullness, to the absolute degree.
First, to be in time is to be restricted by a succession of moments.
Every person sitting in traffic, late for work, wishes he or she could transcend time. But that’s impossible, and we all know it. Time will not speed up or slow down, despite our wishes.
As difficult as it is for time-bound creatures to describe a time-free God, some have said that all time is like an eternal present to God.21 “God possesses being perfectly,” explains Katherin Rogers, “because all of His own life is present to Him, and He knows and causes all things at all times because all of time is immediately present to Him.”
being. “Happiness cannot perish as long as God lives,” says Charnock. “He is the first and the last; the first of all delights, nothing before him; the last of all pleasures, nothing beyond him.” But will our delight in this God grow stale? “The enjoyment of God will be as fresh and glorious after many ages, as it was at first. God is eternal, and eternity knows no change; there will then be the fullest possession without any decay in the object enjoyed.”61
How foolish it is to place our delight in that which is transient, momentarily satisfying, when the greatest pleasure, the supreme delight our souls were made to enjoy, is not only offered to us through Christ but lasts for eternity.
There is reason to believe that Aaron’s sons may have been drunk and, worse yet, have dared to enter into the Most Holy Place (see 16:1–2). A curtain separates the Holy Place from the Most Holy Place, where the presence of God dwells. Who knows whether Nadab and Abihu made it in; they may have been struck dead the moment they touched the curtain!
