C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 84 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course turns from the attributes no creature can share to the ones stamped into the image of God: knowledge, power, rulership, goodness, righteousness, love, and grace. The heart of the session is sovereignty, where the teachers lay out three frameworks and stake out the middle. Then comes the openness of God debate, presented charitably and answered firmly. Listen for the two wills of God; without that distinction, two verses of Paul collide head on.
The session marks a turning point: from the largely philosophical work of the incommunicable attributes to attributes derived directly from Scripture, and from the God known logically to the God known personally. The communicable attributes are those expressed below the arch and communicated to creatures, and they answer the question of what the imago Dei, the image of God, includes: we do not receive omniscience, but we receive knowledge; not omnipotence, but power; not absolute sovereignty, but real degrees of rulership; and goodness, righteousness, love, and grace in creaturely measure. The list, as before, is representative rather than exhaustive.
Omniscience means God knows all things, actual and potential, past, present, and future, and since God is simple, his knowledge cannot be separated from his character: it is infinite because he is. The scriptural portrait deepens step by step. In Genesis 20 God tells Abimelech that he knew the integrity of his heart, God knows hearts, which in Hebrew idiom means minds and intentions. Proverbs 16 says all a man’s ways are clean in his own eyes, but the Lord weighs the motives: God knows us better than we know ourselves, seeing the true intentions that escape even our own self-examination. Psalm 139 goes further: he knows our sitting and rising, understands our thoughts from afar, and knows the word before it reaches the tongue, knowledge the psalmist calls too wonderful to attain. Psalm 147 lifts the scale: he counts the stars and names them all, in a universe whose vastness makes the mind reel. And 1 Samuel 16, at David’s anointing, states the principle: man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart, the lesson Israel learned the hard way after choosing its first king for his height.
In Exodus 11 God tells Moses exactly what the last plague will accomplish: Pharaoh will not merely release Israel but drive them out completely. God’s knowledge of the future is not probability or shrewd prediction; and the course’s framework explains how such knowledge is possible: God does not peer ahead into a future that has not happened. From the eternal now above the arch, he sees all things at once; what is future to us is present to him. Only One above the arch can speak of tomorrow the way the rest of us speak of today.
Omnipotence means all-powerful: God is able to accomplish all things possible and actual, but, the definition deliberately continues, he is not able to do things inconsistent with his character. The positive case is easy: he names himself God Almighty to a ninety-nine-year-old Abram about to father a son, asks rhetorically in Genesis 18 whether anything is too difficult for the Lord, and declares through the angel in Luke 1 that nothing will be impossible with God, while Job ends his trials confessing that God can do all things and no purpose of his can be thwarted. The qualifications are just as biblical. Titus 1 says God cannot lie, and not merely that he never has: an immutable being cannot become unrighteous. He cannot sin, cannot change, cannot be tempted by evil, as James 1 says, cannot deny himself, as 2 Timothy 2 warns in a context of judgment, and cannot cease to be God. The old puzzle about a stone too large for God to lift is not a limitation but a nonsense sentence, asking whether omnipotence can deny omnipotence. And one line lands with full weight: the cross is about immutability, for if God could simply have denied his righteousness, no atonement would ever have been necessary.
Sovereignty is the exercise, or the right to exercise, supreme power: God is the supreme ruler of the universe who brings about all things according to his desire. Ownership comes first: to the Lord belong heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all it contains, as Deuteronomy 10 and Psalm 24 declare. Then Daniel 4, in the mouth of a king freshly restored from seven years of madness: God’s dominion is everlasting, the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing, he does according to his will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, and no one can ward off his hand or say to him, what have you done? God took the most absolute earthly sovereign alive, the king of Babylon, and made him graze like an animal until he learned who rules. And Ephesians 1 completes it: God works all things, all, not most, after the counsel of his will. There is not a maverick molecule in the universe.
How does that sovereignty operate? The teachers set out a spectrum. Meticulous sovereignty makes God the direct first cause of everything that happens, including every sin, held for his own purposes without his bearing responsibility; press it too far and it slides toward fatalism, and, the teachers judge, toward making God the author of evil. General oversight makes God a providential caretaker who never intervenes to violate free will; press it too far and it slides toward deism and a God reduced to a divine cheerleader, hands tied by his own commitment to human freedom, which cannot be right if Romans 3 is true that no one seeks God on his own, for then God must intervene in the will or no one would ever be saved. The course commends the middle: providential sovereignty, in which everything that happens happens either because God caused it or because he allowed it, God sometimes acting as first cause and sometimes working through secondary causes, so that Judas’s betrayal was truly Judas’s will and truly inside God’s plan. The teachers apply the framework honestly to September 11, where pulpits swung to both extremes, God did not know, and God directly caused it as judgment, and to their own family suffering, where only a God both fully sovereign and fully good is worth praying to. Lose either doctrine, sovereignty or love, and everything unravels; a famous book about why bad things happen kept God’s goodness by surrendering his control, and the price was a God too weak to trust.
Then a genuine textual puzzle. Ephesians 1 says God works all things after the counsel of his will; 1 Timothy 2 says God desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth, and in Greek the operative word is the same. If God wills all to be saved and accomplishes all he wills, universalism follows, which Scripture forbids. The Reformers’ answer, drawn from wrestling with exactly these texts: Scripture speaks of two wills in God, the will of decree, which he infallibly brings to pass, and the will of desire, what he wishes, which creatures resist. Did God will Judas’s betrayal and Pilate’s crucifixion of Christ? In the will of desire, no, he does not desire sin; in the will of decree, yes, for Acts 4 says they did what his plan had predestined to occur. The same distinction illuminates Pharaoh, whose heart God hardened while summoning him to let the people go. The teachers admit the residue of mystery without embarrassment: why the sovereign God brings about some of his desires and not others, why he desires all to be saved and saves some, is a question the course will carry into soteriology. The Westminster Confession states the balance the teachers commend: God freely and unchangeably ordains whatsoever comes to pass, yet in such a way that he is not the author of sin, no violence is done to the will of his creatures, and the liberty of second causes is not taken away but established.
Righteousness means God always acts in accordance with what is right and just, the courtroom being Scripture’s own analogy. Psalm 111 says his righteousness endures forever; Psalm 119 calls it an everlasting righteousness. The whole book of Romans can be read as a defense of the righteousness of God, and Romans 3 announces that this righteousness has now been manifested apart from the law, through faith in Jesus Christ. The doctrine has teeth: the atonement was not optional. A righteous God could not simply decline to punish sin; the cross is the judicial sentence carried out, the public display of his righteousness. Goodness follows briefly: God is the standard of all goodness and moral excellence, and the psalms sing it, for the Lord is good, and his lovingkindness is everlasting.
Love is part of God’s eternal, unchanging character in which he is always giving of himself to others: self-sacrificing, not mere warmth of affection, and most like a parent’s love, given not because the child deserves it but because the parent has chosen to give themselves over to the child. Scripture shows God loving all creation, for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son; his love awakening ours, for we love because he first loved us; and his love displayed supremely in the sending of his Son, at the very cross where his righteousness is also displayed, so that neither can be had without the other there. This love was eternally shared among the persons of the Trinity, which is why aseity stands: God did not create out of loneliness or need. And it rejoices. Isaiah 62 says that as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so God rejoices over his people, the marriage picture that runs from Israel as wife, through Hosea’s wounded charge of harlotry, to Christ the bridegroom and the church his bride at the marriage supper of the Lamb. God’s love is both the settled self-giving the Greek calls agape and the felt gladness of a God genuinely delighted in the salvation of his creatures.
Grace is an outcome of the love of God: the unmerited favor he extends to people. The course distinguishes two kinds. Common grace is extended to all people: the rain falling on the righteous and the unrighteous, the sun shining on both, God’s sustaining presence holding the world together, and his patience toward all, as 2 Peter 3 says. Saving grace, also called particular grace, is his saving mercy extended to the elect alone, a category the course names now and will examine when it reaches election. Different graces, as there are different expressions of the one love.
The session pauses over a striking pattern in Exodus. At the burning bush, God gives Moses his name in the vocabulary of the incommunicable attributes: I AM WHO I AM, the being one, the One above the arch. But later, when Moses begs to see his glory and God passes by, he proclaims himself in the vocabulary of the communicable attributes: the Lord, the Lord, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness and faithfulness, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and by no means leaving the guilty unpunished. The God who is defines himself first by what makes him God, and then, drawing near in intimacy, by the character in which his people will know him. Both introductions are his.
The session closes with the debate that did not exist a decade earlier: open theism, advanced by evangelical theologians, some of them writers the teachers read and enjoy, who challenge the traditional doctrine of God by redefining eternality, omniscience, omnipotence, and sovereignty. Their case, stated fairly: timeless eternality is a Greek philosophical import, never pictured in a Bible that always shows God interacting in history; a timeless God is beyond relationship; so God is everlasting through time rather than above it. His knowledge is limited to what can be known, either because the future does not yet exist to be known or because God has freely limited his foreknowledge to make relationship real. His power is self-limited, the power of an all-wise chess player who can counter any move and guarantee his prophecies by strength rather than foresight, ready with plan B when plan A fails, reading Jonah as exactly such a story of divine improvisation. And his sovereignty never violates a creature’s free will. The teachers insist these are not enemies of the faith but believers wrestling honestly with prayer and above all with the problem of evil: if God foreknew a child’s murder and could have prevented it, the openness theologian relieves God by saying he did not know and could not override the perpetrator’s will.
The answer begins with the texts open theism leans on. When God says at Moriah, now I know that you fear God, the face-value reading proves too much, for the same reading of where are you, Adam, in the garden would strip God of knowledge of the present as well as the future; Scripture uses relational rhetoric, God speaking within the relationship he is testing and building, just as prayer really changes things because God has ordained prayer as a secondary cause within his plan. But the decisive answer is the course’s whole architecture: every openness move pulls God below the arch, and that which is below the arch, however wise, powerful, and adaptable, is by definition not God. A God who improvises, learns, and is surprised is a creature-shaped God, and the problem of evil is not solved by shrinking him; it is answered, however incompletely this side of glory, by the God who ordains all things and works them toward a greater good. The course has spent six sessions building the arch precisely so that, at this moment, the class can see what is at stake.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What do the communicable attributes have to do with the image of God?
2. What does Proverbs 16 add to the doctrine of omniscience?
3. How is God able to know the future?
4. Which of the following belongs on the list of things God cannot do?
5. Why is the stone-too-heavy-to-lift puzzle not a real limitation on God?
6. What does the line the cross is about immutability mean?
7. What did Nebuchadnezzar confess in Daniel 4 after his madness?
8. Why do the teachers reject meticulous sovereignty?
9. Why do the teachers reject general oversight?
10. What is providential sovereignty?
11. What textual puzzle do Ephesians 1 and 1 Timothy 2 create together?
12. How do the will of decree and the will of desire resolve the puzzle?
13. Why was the atonement not optional?
14. What kind of love is God’s love, at its heart?
15. What does Isaiah 62 reveal about God’s love?
16. What is the difference between common grace and saving grace?
17. What is the decisive answer the course gives to open theism?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 6 is complete.
The teachers say the two doctrines they cannot lose are God’s sovereignty and God’s love: lose sovereignty and God becomes a cheerleader; lose love and sovereignty becomes terror. In your seasons of suffering, which of the two have you been most tempted to let go, and what happened when you did?
Walk through the two wills of God with the hardest case you know, your own unanswered prayer, a tragedy in the news, the betrayal of Christ. Where does the distinction genuinely help, and where do you have to say with the teachers, it is a mystery?
Open theism is presented as believers trying to relieve the problem of evil by shrinking what God knows and controls. Why is a smaller God no comfort in the face of evil, and what does the God of Daniel 4 and Ephesians 1 offer that an improvising God cannot?
God’s own proclamation as he passed by Moses, from Exodus 34: the Lord, the Lord, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in lovingkindness and faithfulness, keeping lovingkindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means leaving the guilty unpunished.
The lecture’s own directions for the week: meet with others over the group discussion questions, since theology is done in community and not alone; hold the two wills of God next to your own hardest texts and hardest providences until the distinction is yours; and note the openness authors named in the session, whose writings the teachers read seriously even while answering them, as the debate the course will keep in view. The course turns next to the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity.