Bray The Attributes of God

An Introduction
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4335-6120-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: Short Studies in Systematic Theology

How can we (created beings) know God (the Creator)? Throughout history, the church has recognized the importance of studying and understanding God's attributes. As the Creator of all things, God is unique and cannot be compared to any of his creatures, so to know him, believers turn to the pages of Scripture. In The Attributes of God, renowned theologian Gerald Bray leads us on an exploration of God's being, his essential attributes, his relational attributes, and the relevance of his attributes to our thinking, lives, and worship. As we better understand God's attributes, we will learn to delight in who God is and how he has made himself known to us in Scripture.

Gerald Bray (DLitt, University of Paris-Sorbonne) is research professor at Beeson Divinity School and director of research for the Latimer Trust. He is a prolific writer and has authored or edited numerous books, including The Doctrine of God; Biblical Interpretation; and God Is Love.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bray, Gerald

Leseproben

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God’s Essential Attributes

God’s Essential Attributes as They Are in Themselves

The early Christians knew that God is not a “being” in the usual sense of the word. They were aware that the Greek philosophers had created terms like ousia (essence) and hypostasis (substance) in an attempt to understand the world around them, but when they described God as three hypostases in one ousia, they were using those words to convey the thought pattern of the Bible, adding dimensions of meaning to them that the ancient Greeks had not known. The writer to the Hebrews had described the Son as the hypostasis of the Father’s character, and so hypostasis seemed to the early Christians to be the right way to express what we would call his “personal” identity (Heb. 1:3).1 As for ousia, it is derived from the verb “to be” and corresponds to God’s self-revelation to Moses as “I am” (Ex. 3:14). In the New Testament, that appears both in a literal translation (ego eimi) and as a present participle (ho on) that does not exist in English except in the multipurpose form being (John 8:58; Rev. 1:8).2 God uses this language of himself because he wants us to understand that he is really there. He is not a figment of our imagination or an abstract idea but a living subject who is active in the universe he has created, even though he is not an integral part of it.

What the early Christians called absolute being is what we would now describe as “transcendence,” the ability (or, in the case of God, the necessity) of going beyond the limits to time and space. We cannot “go up to heaven” as the Bible puts it, but there is nothing to prevent the transcendent God from coming down from heaven and communicating with us.3 Those who claim that human beings are unable to speak about God because the finite cannot contain the infinite are expressing a misleading half-truth. The finite cannot contain the infinite, but the infinite can (and, by its nature, must) penetrate the finite and be present in it. Divine self-revelation in the created order—or “immanence,” to use the technical term for it—is therefore both possible and meaningful. God is the Lord above and apart from us, but he has determined to be with us.

Attributes Describing What God Is

Simplicity.The most fundamental attribute of God’s being is its simplicity.4 God is “simple” in the sense in which the word is used in chemistry—his nature is not compounded of different elements. An analogy with water may help us to understand what this means and why it matters. Water is a compound substance made up of hydrogen and oxygen, and it can be separated into its component parts. God is not a compound. If he were, he could not be the ultimate being. His parts would all be logically prior to him. Presumably there would also have to be some force that produced “god” out of those different parts, and that force would also be a greater being than the resulting “god” is. Such a being does not and cannot exist, and therefore we have to say that God is “simple”—he is what he is, and that is all there is to it.

Divine simplicity means that whatever we say about God applies to the totality of his being. God is not partly invisible or partly immortal. When we meet with God, we meet with him in the fullness of his being, because he cannot be anything less than that. There is much about God that we do not know, but we can be certain that whatever is hidden from our eyes is consistent with what has been revealed to us. Paul told the Corinthians: “Now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully” (1 Cor. 13:12). In other words, we have partial knowledge of the fullness of God, not full knowledge of only a part of him. That knowledge will expand, but as with an image in a mirror, it will come into better focus, not be something completely different from what we already know.

Divine simplicity also means that God’s attributes interpenetrate each other. Theoretical analysis is useful because it allows us to concentrate on different aspects of his being, but we cannot extract one attribute, like invisibility, and treat it as if it had nothing to do with the others. Whether we think of God as immortal, impassible, or eternal, what we say about him is true of everything in him. If God is righteous, then he is immortally and eternally righteous. If he is impassible and invisible, then his righteousness is also impassible and invisible.

Divine simplicity prevents us from calling personality a divine attribute. If it were, there would be only one person in God, not three. Simplicity also makes it impossible to say that God is wrathful by nature. Wrath is the way disobedient people experience God’s justice, but it is not a divine attribute. If it were, God would be angry with everybody all the time. In these and other similar ways, simplicity serves as a check on our analysis of God’s being and helps us to understand what can (and cannot) be classified among his attributes.

God’s simplicity is not explicitly mentioned as such in the Bible, but it is consistent with what James says about the Father of lights, “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). James is speaking primarily about God’s consistency in giving gifts to his people, which will never be diminished or taken away, but he justifies that statement by referring to the nature of God, which is consistent with itself. The doctrine can also claim support from a number of biblical passages that say things like: “Hear O Israel, ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is one’” (Deut. 6:4, quoted by Jesus in Mark 12:29). Isaiah 44:6 goes further and says,

I am the first and I am the last;

besides me there is no god.

And this statement is echoed in Revelation 1:8, where God reveals himself to John as the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. Another important verse is Ephesians 4:6: “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” None of these texts speaks directly of the divine simplicity, but they all bear witness to God’s oneness and exclusiveness—there is no other god besides him. Properly understood, “simplicity” covers both “unity” and “perfection,” terms that have sometimes been used to indicate divine attributes thought to be distinguishable from it. In reality, they go together. If God is who he says he is, then his simplicity ties everything together, and as James put it, there is no variation in him.

Divine simplicity also means that God’s nature cannot be compounded with anything else. When the Son of God became a man, his divinity and his humanity came together, but there were great arguments in the early church about how that had happened. One school of thought, associated with the church at Alexandria in Egypt, believed that there was a merger of the two, which meant that the humanity was absorbed into the divinity, but in AD 451 a church council held at Chalcedon (opposite Constantinople) ruled that the incarnate Christ was one divine person in two natures, neither of which was affected in any way by the other. The Alexandrian church rejected that formula, and the result was what we now call monophysite (or miaphysite) Christianity, which insists that there was only one nature in Christ after the incarnation.5 To the Chalcedonian mind, this could only mean that the divinity of the Son had added humanity to itself, thereby compromising its simplicity. In the sixteenth century the question arose again, this time in the form of a doctrine of ubiquity, which certain Lutheran theologians were advocating. According to them, when Christ ascended into heaven, he not only took his body with him but absorbed it into his divinity, so that wherever he was spiritually present, his body was there too. This was especially true in the Eucharist, where the Lutherans held that Christ’s body was present “in, with, and under” the elements of bread and wine. To other Protestants, this sounded dangerously like a kind of monophysitism, and John Calvin was not slow to condemn it.6 The danger of relapsing into this kind of error has faded, but it has not disappeared, and we must be on guard against any suggestion that Christ’s divine nature has been compromised by the addition of a human element that is foreign to it.

Incorporeality.God is incorporeal, or bodiless. Modern theologians often prefer the term “spirituality,” which may sound better but is actually less suitable. There are spiritual beings who have bodies and who are therefore finite in some way. Paul told the Corinthians that in the resurrection we shall have “spiritual bodies,” and Jesus taught his disciples that they would be like angels, so we conclude from that evidence that angels have spiritual bodies too (Matt. 22:30; 1 Cor. 15:44). We do not know precisely what those bodies are like, except that they appear to be immortal, like God is (though he is eternal). As far as God is concerned, he is spiritual but does not have a body. How he...