If God is Who/What He Is, as I posted about last week (and the Bible speaks clearly about in Exodus 3), then we need to think in categories that are defined by Him. And, therefore, most of the typical categories we have for God don’t exactly work.
I almost wrote “traditional” categories instead of “typical” in that last sentence. But that’s not actually true. The great tradition of Christian thought had these great categories in Theology, but tragically, the modern church has largely lost them.
Thankfully, there’s a movement of retrieving classical theism happening. Check the footnotes for some good books in that stream. But that’s not what this post is all about.
All I want to do today (and next week) is try to bring some of the great categories back this week – categories that let God be God rather than trying to squish Him into our boxes.
God’s Unknowability
You’ve never had a thought about God, and you can never have a thought about God, that’s actually worthy of God and fully captures – knows – what He is. Because those “raw materials” you use to build your thoughts about God are created things. We all use things that are not God to build a picture of God. And so, by necessity, your thoughts are going to fall short of God. [1] That’s what I mean when I say God is unknowable.
I’m not saying we can’t know God or know about Him – but we need to realize that we can never know Him fully or exhaustively. He is God and we are not.
When theologians start describing the nature of God, we tend to say what He’s not rather than what He is. You’ll see this in our categories as we go on. He is in-finite, im-mutable, or this one, in-comprehensible. We deny things about God in order to try scrape off the creatureliness of our thoughts. We want our view of God to be as big as possible. So we cut those ropes that might hold Him down in our minds.
All the while knowing that in order to have exhaustive knowledge of God, we ourselves would need to be God. [2]
So, I think it’s important to affirm in this first point, I’m quoting Bavinck here, “Just as no intellect is able properly to conceive of God, so no definition is able properly to define or describe him.”[3]
Because God is who He is, there’s a level of unknowability with God.
God’s Fundamental Difference
Our modern impulse is to speak to the similarities between God and us. As if the difference is one of degree, not kind. [4] We think God is fundamentally like us, but better. He’s the man upstairs. Of course, he’s greater than us, but the same categories apply.
The Bible has no thoughts that casual about God. God presents Himself in scripture as fundamentally different than man.
Places like Isaiah 40 make this crystal clear. Isaiah 40:25, for example (though you should go read the entire chapter)
To whom then will you compare me, that I should be like him? says the Holy One.
God isn’t just better than us, He is completely different.[6] There’s nothing or no one to compare Him to. He doesn’t give Moses a frame of reference to compare Him to. He is only like Himself. He’s fundamentally different.
God’s Aseity
When I say “Aseity,” think “Independence.” He is of Himself. There is no source but Himself. He needs nothing outside of Himself.
Moses was intrigued by the bushfire because the fire was on the tree, but the tree didn’t fuel the fire. The tree was not consumed. The fire didn’t need anything to burn; it burned of itself.
God is not dependent on anything outside of Himself. Like a fire, but that doesn’t actually need a tree for fuel.
A.W. Tozer says, “The word necessary is wholly foreign to God.”[7]. Nothing is necessary for God. Because He Himself is everything He needs. God submits to no one and nothing, not even our categories – His is completely self-sufficient.
I’ll show you what this looks like with a concrete image. In John 10:17–1, Jesus says,
For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge I have received from my Father.”
Who raises a dead Jesus to life? That same dead Jesus. Jesus doesn’t need any resources outside of Himself to bring Himself back to life. He is life and produces life for Himself. He is fully independent, absolutely absolute. [8]
God is fully independent and self-reliant in Himself. “Whatever God is, and all that God is, He is in Himself.”[9]
God’s Simplicity
Not that He is easy to understand, but not made of parts. Like a simple machine vs a complex machine. You know, Pulleys and Wedges and inclined planes. Not made up of parts.
Here’s the explanation.
God cannot be made up of things that are not-God. That was the problem with our thoughts when we were talking about unknowability. Something less-than-God can’t be what makes God God.[10]
A Lego man requires a Lego head and a Lego torso and Lego claws and Lego legs to become a Lego man. At the Lego factory, those parts are rolling off the conveyor belt. And when you put them together, you make a Lego man, and everything is awesome.
A Lego man is made up of parts, he is dependent on things that are less than Lego-man to make up Lego-man. If the Lego-torso machine stops working, no more making Lego-men. He’s dependent on his parts.
But God is not dependent on anything (aseity). He’s not dependent on parts to be God. Parts come before the whole (Whether we’re talking just logically or chronologically). And there’s nothing that comes before God. [11]
In other words, God is what He Is. He can’t be divided.
Where this gets confusing is that God’s essence and our experience of Him are not the same. We say “God is Love” and “God is Just” as if those are different things. Parts of God. But since God doesn’t have parts, really, we’re describing the same thing, just from different perspectives.
This is difficult to wrap our minds around. Some have described it as a stained-glass window.
Puritan George Swinnock, for example, says God’s attributes "are all one and the same; as when the sunbeams shine through a yellow glass they are yellow, a green glass they are green, a red glass they are red, and yet all the while the beams are the same."
Or a millennia before that, Augustine used terms like God’s "simple multiplicity" and "manifold simplicity.”[12]
But, for this lesson, all I’m trying to show you is that God is Who He Is, and thus is not dependent on or the sum of his parts.
Ok, those are some heady concepts that may take a little bit of thought. I’ll do some easier ones next week.
Until then,
Dan
[1] A. W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (Shippensburg, PA: Sea Harp Press, 2022), 24.
[2] Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics Volume 2: God and Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend, vol. 2, Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic, 2003), 36.
[3] Bavinck, 2:37.
[4] Gerald Lewis Bray, The Attributes of God: An Introduction, Short Studies in Systematic Theology (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2021), 16.
Why is there no footnote 5? Who knows
[6] Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2019), 21.
[7] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 67.
[8] Vern S. Poythress, The Mystery of the Trinity: A Trinitarian Approach to the Attributes of God (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing Company, 2020), 30.
[9] Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 65.
[10] This is from a series of lectures that James Dolezal gave at a conference in 2015. It’s the kind of stuff I listen to while mowing my lawn, if you must know. https://scarbc.org/pastors-conference-audio/
[11] Bray, The Attributes of God, 226–27.
[12] Barrett, None Greater, 81.