Lecture 4: The Incommunicable Attributes of God, Part 1: Simplicity and Eternality

The lecture, section by section

1. What is an attribute?

   The session asks what makes God God, what makes up godness. An attribute is a quality or characteristic inherent in its subject: Lewis Sperry Chafer called it a property intrinsic to its subject, and Millard Erickson called the attributes those qualities of God that constitute what he is, the very characteristics of his nature. With respect to God, attributes are inherent, immutable, and eternal. A stool makes the idea concrete: a seat and stability are necessary attributes, take them away and it is no longer a stool, while its color and its padding are non-necessary, change them and the stoolness remains. So with God: some attributes are necessary to godness itself, and to take one away is to take away God, however the remainder is labeled.

2. Attributes are not functions

   Attributes must be distinguished from functions. An attribute is possessed by the entire Trinity, eternal and essential; a function belongs to the working of particular persons. The Son took human form as the Father did not; the Spirit is the one said to indwell and to seal believers in a way the Father is not; the Father sends, the Son is sent and also sends the Spirit, and the Spirit is always the sent one who never sends the Father or the Son. These distinctions of function do not divide the essence, and they are not what this session means by attributes.

3. Communicable and incommunicable

   Theologies sort the attributes many ways; the course uses the categories with the richest history. Communicable attributes are those God shares, or communicates, with us, so that some element of them can be found in creatures: love, grace, righteousness, goodness, aspects of power and rule. Incommunicable attributes are those God does not share, and, the teachers add, cannot share; it is not stinginess but impossibility, for no creature can have any aspect of, say, self-existence or omnipresence. The lists are not exhaustive and the categories are not printed in the Bible; they are the church’s working way of talking about what Scripture reveals, and the attributes overlap rather than standing cleanly apart.

4. The attributes and the arch

   The course’s picture sorts the two kinds. The incommunicable attributes belong above the arch: they are what is necessary for being above the arch, the attributes without which God does not fit the definition of godness, exactly as a stool without a seat fails the definition of stoolness. The communicable attributes are expressed below the arch, communicated into time to creatures. The teachers press a startling philosophical point: to be God, strictly speaking, a being need only be above the arch; love, righteousness, and grace are the free character of the God who actually is, gloriously true of the God of the Bible, but not part of the bare definition of godness. And had God never created, the communicable attributes would have had no arena of expression at all, apart from the love among the three persons, though they would have been no less his.

5. Simplicity: the forgotten first attribute

   Simplicity means composed of only one part. Applied to God: he is not made up of divisible or distinguishable parts, uncompounded, incomplex, and indivisible, with no composition of any kind, not of physical parts, not of essence plus attributes, not of attributes stacked alongside one another. For most of the church’s history this was the first and foremost attribute, the one that made God God; most modern systematic theologies have quietly dropped it, and some theologians now reject it outright, but the course teaches it because the program teaches theology as it has developed through history, and this doctrine was held from the beginning until very recent times.

6. Why the uncreated One must be simple

   The argument runs from creation out of nothing. Whatever is above the arch is uncreated and so has no relationship to space, time, or matter, and only space, time, and matter make division possible; therefore that which is above the arch cannot be divided, and God is simple. The contrast is Plato, who imagined God coexisting eternally with matter and forms, shaping pre-existing stuff, a god below the arch rearranging what was always there. Creation ex nihilo forbids that picture: nothing is eternal alongside God, so nothing composes him. Practically, simplicity guards believers from splitting God into a wrathful God of the Old Testament and a loving God of the New. God is constant: totally loving and totally just at the same time, and even in his anger he is not one degree less merciful or gracious. He does not set grace aside to judge, nor judgment aside to show grace.

7. One essence, undivided, and the Trinity ahead

   Simplicity forbids the most common mental pictures of God: not an essence with attributes bolted on, and above all not one essence divided into three parts, a third for the Father, a third for the Son, a third for the Spirit. The Trinity, when the course reaches it, will say three persons who each share the entire one essence: the Son is not more loving than the Father, the Spirit not less just than the Son, and everything that is above the arch is wholly the Father, wholly the Son, wholly the Spirit. Draw the three circles on top of each other and you get one circle, which is why every illustration of the Trinity will finally fail. The Shema stands over the whole doctrine: hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is one, and the Hebrew carries not merely that he is the only God, which other texts like Isaiah 40 declare, but that he is a unity, an undivided one. The most common mistake of ordinary orthodox Christians, the teachers observe, is a practically tritheistic mindset that has never absorbed the oneness of God. Muslims, trained in exactly this philosophy of oneness, hear an undigested trinitarianism as three gods, which is why Christians must be the first to understand what God’s oneness means.

8. Simplicity in Scripture

   The biblical case gathers several texts. In John 4 Jesus tells the woman at the well that God is spirit, not a spirit, a bounded being somewhere, but spirit, non-corporeal, without body or form or place, which is why the argument about the right mountain for worship dissolves. In 1 Kings 8 Solomon, dedicating the very temple, confesses that heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, much less the house he has built: God is uncontainable, beyond space. In 1 Timothy 6 God alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see, an impossibility of sight that fits a being whose essence is above the arch. In Deuteronomy 6 the Shema declares his unity. And in Exodus 3 God gives his name from the burning bush, I AM WHO I AM, rendered by the ancient Greek translators with a participle of being, the existing one, the self-existent, introducing himself first by his incommunicable nature, just as he will later proclaim his communicable character to Moses, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness.

9. Objections, and a monkey wrench

   The objections are met in turn: that spirit in John 4 is being forced into a mold, when the claim is only non-corporeality, as love is real without being a thing you could put in a closet; that a simple being could not act in time, which the doctrine of the eternal now will address; that simplicity is of neoplatonic origin, which is the guilt-by-association fallacy, since all truth is God’s truth wherever it is found; and that the doctrine is unintelligible, which the teachers half grant while denying that difficulty makes anything untrue. Then the monkey wrench: can a simple God become man? If the incarnation pulled a third of God below the arch, God was divided and never simple, and Christianity becomes panentheism. The Reformers answered with a Latin sentence: finitum non capax infiniti, the finite cannot contain the infinite. The body of Christ did not contain all that Christ is; he was fully God on earth while remaining eternally above the arch, undiminished. Whatever breach occurred at the cross was relational, beyond our comprehension, but it cannot have been an ontological breach, for oneness cannot break into pieces. C. S. Lewis judged the incarnation, not the resurrection, the greatest miracle that ever took place, and this doctrine shows why: the most humiliating thing God could do is bind himself to time, space, and a human body, and he did it. Far from flattening the gospel’s simplicity, the doctrine magnifies the humility of the God who stooped.

10. Eternality and the eternal now

    With simplicity in place, most of the remaining incommunicable attributes follow as corollaries, and eternality comes first. Wayne Grudem’s definition: God has no beginning, end, or succession of moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time. Above the arch there is no before and after; God works, sees, and acts out of the eternal now, an ever-present perspective in which creation, the cross, and this evening’s prayers are one eternal act, without temporal sequence even where there is logical order. Below the arch his one act unfolds as a succession of actions in history. Even the phrase before creation strains, since there was no time in which to have a before, yet Scripture itself speaks of before all time, and that is where God is.

11. Eternal, everlasting, and where the creature stays

    A precision worth keeping: God is eternal, no beginning and no end, unbound by time; the redeemed are everlasting, a beginning without an end. The popular idea that at death believers become timeless as God is timeless says, in the course’s grammar, that at death we go above the arch, that is, that we become God, and it cannot be. Whatever the resurrection life is like, embodied creatures will experience some succession of moments forever, and forever grow. The teachers note honestly that respected evangelicals differ here: William Lane Craig holds that God, timeless without creation, freely entered time at creation, a view the teachers respect and decline to follow; and the openness theologians go further, saying God has always been in time, which the course will treat as departing from the orthodox doctrine while not unchristian. The pastoral objection behind these moves is always relationship: how does one pray tonight to a God who acts from the eternal now? The course will keep working at that question rather than surrendering the arch to it.

12. The case for eternality

    Logically, creation by an uncaused cause demands a creator outside time: God created all things, the creator is not part of the creation, and time is part of the creation, so God created time and is beyond it; the only escape is to make time an eternal attribute of God himself, a price the teachers decline to pay. Theologically, simplicity carries eternality with it: a simple being is non-spatial, and since, as Geisler and House note from modern science, space and time are correlative, a non-spatial being is non-temporal. Scripturally, Colossians 1 names Christ the firstborn over all creation, a title of preeminence and inheritance, not chronology, through whom all things visible and invisible were created, who is before all things and in whom all things hold together, and that all things includes time itself. Psalm 90 says a thousand years in God’s sight are like yesterday when it passes, the verse Peter takes up to explain the Lord’s timing, for a day and a thousand years are alike to the One above the arch. And Jude closes with glory to God before all time and now and forever, Scripture’s own acknowledgment that there is a before all time, and that God is there.

1. The teachers say the most common mistake of orthodox Christians is a practically tritheistic mindset that has never absorbed the oneness of God. Where have you caught yourself thinking of the Father, Son, and Spirit as three separable Gods, and how does simplicity correct the picture?

2. Simplicity means God does not set aside grace to judge or judgment to be gracious; he is totally loving and totally just at once. How does that reshape the way you read the hard passages of the Old Testament, and the cross itself?

3. If the incarnation is the greatest miracle, the limitless One binding himself to time, space, and a body, what does that humility ask of you this week, concretely, in how you serve the people around you?