Doctrine of God
Dr Alison Walker, with additions
- 6 minutes read - 1183 wordsAims
To compare and contrast classical and modern intuitions about the being of God.
To become aware of the unique relationship between God and human language.
To gain a basic familiarity with certain issues surrounding talk of divine ‘attributes.’
To instil an impulse of humility and prayer when attempting to speak about God.
God is…
love
almighty?
dead!?
known [revealed] through Jesus?
All merely facets of God, who is unknowable.
Trying to form an idea in our minds of the God we know by faith.
Augustine of Hippo (c.354-430)
‘What we are asking…is from what likeness or comparison of things known to us we are able to believe, so that we may love the as yet unknown God.’
De Trinitate VIII 8
Ideas are 'Thinking in order to love'. Commonly found in worship:
“Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!”
“My God how beautiful thou art, thy majesty how bright”
“God is love, let heaven adore him”
“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy”
“Immortal invisible, God only wise”
Classical intuitions about God
Tend to emphasise the difference between creator and creature.
Infinite [unbounded] qualitative distinction [not just bigger than us, completely 'other']
God is not a 'thing'
‘For God is good—or rather the source of goodness—and the good has no envy for anything. Thus, because he envies nothing its existence, he made everything from nothing through his own Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.’
De Incarnation § 3 (4^th^ century)
‘Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process. Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this source of all unity, this supra‐existent Being. Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name. It is and it is as no other being is. Cause of all existence, and therefore itself transcending existence, it alone could give an authoritative account of what it really is.’
The Divine Names §1 (5^th^/6^th^ century
‘Now we believe that You are something than which none greater can be thought…’
Proslogion
Firm view that God is unsuffering and unchangeable nature
How then interpret passages when God changes his mind
example: Abraham pleads for Sodom, Genesis 18:23-33
example: Moses pleads for Israel, Exodus 32:11-14
Perhaps: immutabilty is not like eternally frozen but rather eternally consistent in his moral perfection
God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent
Modern intuitions about God
Pushing back against the ancient view
The 'Hellenisation Thesis' - influenced more by Greek philosophy than Bible
Starting with Luther there’s a feeling that we should instead start with Christ on the cross
19thC Aldolph von Harnack
Late 20th C: Moltmann
‘If [the classical concept of God] is applied to Christ’s death on the cross, the cross must be evacuated of deity, for by definition God cannot suffer and die. He is pure causality. But Christian theology must think of God’s being in suffering and dying and finally in the death of Jesus, if it is not to surrender itself and lose its identity.’
The Crucified God
‘The Lord God Almighty clothed his Son with flesh that he might draw us [away] from contemplating his own majesty to a consideration of the flesh, and especially of our weakness.’
Loci Communes p21
Modern doctrine books may not even have a Doctrine of God, preferring instead The Triune God.
Kevin Vanhoozer and ‘the new orthodoxy’:
God is conceived not as a singular subject, but as a being‐in‐relation.
God’s being is not separate from, but somehow bound up with the world.
God’s suffering is a necessary consequence of his love for the world.
‘What God is as God, the divine individuality and characteristics, the essentia or “essence” of God, is something we shall encounter either at the place where God deals with us as Lord and Saviour, or not at all.’
CD II/1, p261
Similar to: > No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him. — Luke 10:22
Theological language
Thomas Aquinas:
Univocal: A word means the same thing when applied to God as it does to a creature. — 'God is good'; 'Good dog'
Equivocal: A word means something completely different…
He concludes: ‘This name God…is taken neither univocally nor equivocally, but analogically.’ In other words there is something about ‘goodness’ as we know it which points to something about God.
Non-western views, such as liberation theology, start from the perspective that God stands alongside the oppressed. Example: James Cone might say 'God is black'.
Attributes of God
The words we use to describe God’s being. From Aquinas:
the way of eminencei (via eminentiæi): removal of limits, ergo omni-*
The Way of Negation (via negationis): – absence of defect; think of some kind of bad thing, and then say that God is untouched by this problem; e.g., the world is chaotic, God is at rest; the world is unjust, God is just; the world is imperfect and mutable, God is perfect and immutable, etc.
The main idea is that we talk about God by talking about what he is not.
The Way of Causation (via causalitatis)
we look at the things that God has caused, and reason back to what he must be like in order to have caused that thing;
so, if the world is ‘finite,’ then God must be ‘infinite,’ because infinitude cannot be explained in terms of finitude.
God’s uniqueness
This led theologians to posit the idea that God is simple, i.e., he is not a unique collection of attributes that we might otherwise find distributed elsewhere – he just is who he is. God is God
But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.”
Is it even valid to describe God in term of attributes? The argument is that if you remove one you have diminshed God and take them all away and He’s gone!
‘All attributes which we ascribe to God are to be taken as denoting not something particular in God, but only something particular in the manner in which [we are] related to him.’
The Christian Faith, §50
Or… incommunicable vs communicable
Incommunicable: attributes in which creation does not participate
Communicable: attributes in which creation can participate
Barth—characteristically—tries to unify both sides
‘As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognise both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.’
The Word of God and the Word of Man, p186
Katharine Sondeigger takes a very prayerful approach