Chapter I. The Attributes Of God.
In contemplating the words and acts of God, as in contemplating the words and acts of individual men, we are compelled to assign uniform and permanent effects to uniform and permanent causes. Holy acts and words, we argue, must have their source in a principle of holiness; truthful acts and words, in a settled proclivity to truth; benevolent acts and words, in a benevolent disposition.
Moreover, these permanent and uniform sources of expression and action to which we have applied the terms principle, proclivity, disposition, since they exist harmoniously in the same person, must themselves inhere, and find their unity, in an underlying spiritual substance or reality of which they are the inseparable characteristics and partial manifestations.
Thus we are led naturally from the works to the attributes, and from the attributes to the essence, of God.
For all practical purposes we may use the words essence, substance, being, nature, as synonymous with each other. So, too, we may speak of attribute, quality, characteristic, principle, proclivity, disposition, as practically one. As, in cognizing matter, we pass from its effects in sensation to the qualities which produce the sensations, and then to the material substance to which the qualities belong; and as, in cognizing mind, we pass from its phenomena in thought and action to the faculties and dispositions which give rise to these phenomena, and then to the mental substance to which these faculties and dispositions belong; so, in cognizing God, we pass from his words and acts to his qualities or attributes, and then to the substance or essence to which these qualities or attributes belong.
The teacher in a Young Ladies' Seminary described substance as a cushion, into which the attributes as pins are stuck. But pins and cushion alike are substance,—neither one is quality. The opposite error is illustrated from the experience of Abraham Lincoln on the Ohio River. “What is this transcendentalism that we hear so much about?”asked Mr. Lincoln. The answer came: “You see those swallows digging holes in yonder bank? Well, take away the bank from around those holes, and what is left is transcendentalism.” Substance is often represented as being thus transcendental. If such representations were correct, metaphysics would indeed be “that, of which those who listen understand nothing, and which he who speaks does not himself understand,”and the metaphysician would be the fox who ran into the hole and then pulled in the hole after him. Substance and attributes are correlates,—neither one is possible without the other. There is no quality that does not qualify something; and there is no thing, either material or spiritual, that can be known or can exist without qualities to differentiate it from other things. In applying the categories of substance and attribute to God, we indulge in no merely curious speculation, but rather yield to the necessities of rational thought and show how we must think of God if we think at all. See Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:240; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:172-188.
I. Definition of the term Attributes.
The attributes of God are those distinguishing characteristics of the divine nature which are inseparable from the idea of God and which constitute the basis and ground for his various manifestations to his creatures.
We call them attributes, because we are compelled to attribute them to God as fundamental qualities or powers of his being, in order to give rational account of certain constant facts in God's self-revelations.
II. Relation of the divine Attributes to the divine Essence.
1. The attributes have an objective existence. They are not mere names for human conceptions of God—conceptions which have their only ground in the imperfection of the finite mind. They are qualities objectively distinguishable from the divine essence and from each other.
The nominalistic notion that God is a being of absolute simplicity, and that in his nature there is no internal distinction of qualities or powers, tends directly to pantheism; denies all reality of the divine perfections; or, if these in any sense still exist, precludes all knowledge of them on the part of finite beings. To say that knowledge and power, eternity and holiness, are identical with the essence of God and with each other, is to deny that we know God at all.
The Scripture declarations of the possibility of knowing God, together with the manifestation of the distinct attributes of his nature, are conclusive against this false notion of the divine simplicity.
Aristotle says well that there is no such thing as a science of the unique, of that which has no analogies or relations. Knowing is distinguishing; what we cannot distinguish from other things we cannot know. Yet a false tendency to regard God as a being of absolute simplicity has come down from mediæval scholasticism, has infected much of the post-reformation theology, and is found even so recently as in Schleiermacher, Rothe, Olshausen, and Ritschl. E. G. Robinson defines the attributes as “our methods of conceiving of God.” But this definition is influenced by the Kantian doctrine of relativity and implies that we cannot know God's essence, that is, the thing-in-itself, God's real being. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 141—“This notion of the divine simplicity reduces God to a rigid and lifeless stare.... The One is manifold without being many.”
The divine simplicity is the starting-point of Philo: God is a being absolutely bare of quality. All quality in finite beings has limitation, and no limitation can be predicated of God who is eternal, unchangeable, simple substance, free, self-sufficient, better than the good and the beautiful. To predicate any quality of God would reduce him to the sphere of finite existence. Of him we can only say that he is, not what he is; see art. by Schürer, in Encyc. Brit., 18:761.
Illustrations of this tendency are found in Scotus Erigena: “Deus nescit se quid est, quia non est quid”; and in Occam: The divine attributes are distinguished neither substantially nor logically from each other or from the divine essence; the only distinction is that of names; so Gerhard and Quenstedt. Charnock, the Puritan writer, identifies both knowledge and will with the simple essence of God. Schleiermacher makes all the attributes to be modifications of power or causality; in his system God and world = the “natura naturans” and “natura naturata” of Spinoza. There is no distinction of attributes and no succession of acts in God, and therefore no real personality or even spiritual being; see Pfleiderer, Prot. Theol. seit Kant, 110. Schleiermacher said: “My God is the Universe.” God is causative force. Eternity, omniscience and holiness are simply aspects of causality. Rothe, on the other hand, makes omniscience to be the all-comprehending principle of the divine nature; and Olshausen, on John 1:1, in a similar manner attempts to prove that the Word of God must have objective and substantial being, by assuming that knowing = willing; whence it would seem to follow that, since God wills all that he knows, he must will moral evil. [pg 245]Bushnell and others identify righteousness in God with benevolence, and therefore cannot see that any atonement needs to be made to God. Ritschl also holds that love is the fundamental divine attribute, and that omnipotence and even personality are simply modifications of love; see Mead, Ritschl's Place in the History of Doctrine, 8. Herbert Spencer only carries the principle further when he concludes God to be simple unknowable force.
But to call God everything is the same as to call him nothing. With Dorner, we say that “definition is no limitation.” As we rise in the scale of creation from the mere jelly-sac to man, the homogeneous becomes the heterogeneous, there is differentiation of functions, complexity increases. We infer that God, the highest of all, instead of being simple force, is infinitely complex, that he has an infinite variety of attributes and powers. Tennyson, Palace of Art (lines omitted in the later editions): “All nature widens upward: evermore The simpler essence lower lies: More complex is more perfect, owning more Discourse, more widely wise.”
Jer. 10:10—God is “the living God”; John 5:26—he “hath life in himself”—unsearchable riches of positive attributes; John 17:23—“thou lovedst me”—manifoldness in unity. This complexity in God is the ground of blessedness for him and of progress for us: 1 Tim. 1:11—“the blessed God”; Jer. 9:23, 24—“let him glory in this, that he knoweth me.” The complex nature of God permits anger at the sinner and compassion for him at the same moment: Ps. 7:11—“a God that hath indignation every day”; John 3:16—“God so loved the world”; Ps. 85:10, 11—“mercy and truth are met together.” See Julius Müller, Doct. Sin, 2:116 sq.; Schweizer, Glaubenslehre, 1:229-235; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:43, 50; Martensen, Dogmatics, 91—“If God were the simple One, τὸ ἁπλῶς ἕν, the mystic abyss in which every form of determination were extinguished, there would be nothing in the Unity to be known.” Hence “nominalism is incompatible with the idea of revelation. We teach, with realism, that the attributes of God are objective determinations in his revelation and as such are rooted in his inmost essence.”
2. The attributes inhere in the divine essence. They are not separate existences. They are attributes of God.
While we oppose the nominalistic view which holds them to be mere names with which, by the necessity of our thinking, we clothe the one simple divine essence, we need equally to avoid the opposite realistic extreme of making them separate parts of a composite God.
We cannot conceive of attributes except as belonging to an underlying essence which furnishes their ground of unity. In representing God as a compound of attributes, realism endangers the living unity of the Godhead.
Notice the analogous necessity of attributing the properties of matter to an underlying substance, and the phenomena of thought to an underlying spiritual essence; else matter is reduced to mere force, and mind, to mere sensation,—in short, all things are swallowed up in a vast idealism. The purely realistic explanation of the attributes tends to low and polytheistic conceptions of God. The mythology of Greece was the result of personifying the divine attributes. The nomina were turned into numina, as Max Müller says; see Taylor, Nature on the Basis of Realism, 293. Instance also Christmas Evans's sermon describing a Council in the Godhead, in which the attributes of Justice, Mercy, Wisdom, and Power argue with one another. Robert Hall called Christmas Evans “the one-eyed orator of Anglesey,” but added that his one eye could “light an army through a wilderness”; see Joseph Cross, Life and Sermons of Christmas Evans, 112-116; David Rhys Stephen, Memoirs of Christmas Evans, 168-176. We must remember that “Realism may so exalt the attributes that no personal subject is left to constitute the ground of unity. Looking upon Personality as anthropomorphism, it falls into a worse personification, that of omnipotence, holiness, benevolence, which are mere blind thoughts, unless there is one who is the Omnipotent, the Holy, the Good.” See Luthardt, Compendium der Dogmatik, 70.
3. The attributes belong to the divine essence as such. They are to be distinguished from those other powers or relations which do not appertain to the divine essence universally.
[pg 246]The personal distinctions (proprietates) in the nature of the one God are not to be denominated attributes; for each of these personal distinctions belongs not to the divine essence as such and universally, but only to the particular person of the Trinity who bears its name, while on the contrary all of the attributes belong to each of the persons.
The relations which God sustains to the world (predicata), moreover, such as creation, preservation, government, are not to be denominated attributes; for these are accidental, not necessary or inseparable from the idea of God. God would be God, if he had never created.
To make creation eternal and necessary is to dethrone God and to enthrone a fatalistic development. It follows that the nature of the attributes is to be illustrated, not alone or chiefly from wisdom and holiness in man, which are not inseparable from man's nature, but rather from intellect and will in man, without which he would cease to be man altogether. Only that is an attribute, of which it can be safely said that he who possesses it would, if deprived of it, cease to be God. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:335—“The attribute is the whole essence acting in a certain way. The centre of unity is not in any one attribute, but in the essence.... The difference between the divine attribute and the divine person is, that the person is a mode of the existence of the essence, while the attribute is a mode either of the relation, or of the operation, of the essence.”
4. The attributes manifest the divine essence. The essence is revealed only through the attributes. Apart from its attributes it is unknown and unknowable.
But though we can know God only as he reveals to us his attributes, we do, notwithstanding, in knowing these attributes, know the being to whom these attributes belong. That this knowledge is partial does not prevent its corresponding, so far as it goes, to objective reality in the nature of God.
All God's revelations are, therefore, revelations of himself in and through his attributes. Our aim must be to determine from God's works and words what qualities, dispositions, determinations, powers of his otherwise unseen and unsearchable essence he has actually made known to us; or in other words, what are the revealed attributes of God.
John 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; 1 Tim. 6:16—“whom no man hath seen, nor can see”; Mat. 5:8—“Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God”; 11:27—“neither doth any man know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” C. A. Strong: “Kant, not content with knowing the reality in the phenomena, was trying to know the reality apart from the phenomena; he was seeking to know, without fulfilling the conditions of knowledge; in short, he wished to know without knowing.” So Agnosticism perversely regards God as concealed by his own manifestation. On the contrary, in knowing the phenomena we know the object itself. J. C. C. Clarke, Self and the Father, 6—“In language, as in nature, there are no verbs without subjects, but we are always hunting for the noun that has no adjective, and the verb that has no subject, and the subject that has no verb. Consciousness is necessarily a consciousness of self. Idealism and monism would like to see all verbs solid with their subjects, and to write ‘I do’ or ‘I feel’ in the mazes of a monogram, but consciousness refuses, and before it says ‘Do’ or ‘Feel’ it finishes saying ‘I.’ ” J. G. Holland's Katrina, to her lover: “God is not worshiped in his attributes. I do not love your attributes, but you. Your attributes all meet me otherwhere, Blended in other personalities, Nor do I love nor do I worship them, Nor those who bear them. E'en the spotted pard Will dare a danger which will make you pale; But shall his courage steal my heart from you? You cheat your conscience, for you know That I may like your attributes. Yet love not you.”
III. Methods of determining the divine Attributes.
We have seen that the existence of God is a first truth. It is presupposed in all human thinking, and is more or less consciously recognized by [pg 247] all men. This intuitive knowledge of God we have seen to be corroborated and explicated by arguments drawn from nature and from mind. Reason leads us to a causative and personal Intelligence upon whom we depend. This Being of indefinite greatness we clothe, by a necessity of our thinking, with all the attributes of perfection. The two great methods of determining what these attributes are, are the Rational and the Biblical.
1. The Rational method. This is threefold:—(a) the via negationis, or the way of negation, which consists in denying to God all imperfections observed in created beings; (b) the via eminentiæ, or the way of climax, which consists in attributing to God in infinite degree all the perfections found in creatures; and (c) the via causalitatis, or the way of causality, which consists in predicating of God those attributes which are required in him to explain the world of nature and of mind.
This rational method explains God's nature from that of his creation, whereas the creation itself can be fully explained only from the nature of God. Though the method is valuable, it has insuperable limitations, and its place is a subordinate one. While we use it continually to confirm and supplement results otherwise obtained, our chief means of determining the divine attributes must be
2. The Biblical method. This is simply the inductive method, applied to the facts with regard to God revealed in the Scriptures. Now that we have proved the Scriptures to be a revelation from God, inspired in every part, we may properly look to them as decisive authority with regard to God's attributes.
The rational method of determining the attributes of God is sometimes said to have been originated by Dionysius the Areopagite, reputed to have been a judge at Athens at the time of Paul and to have died A. D. 95. It is more probably eclectic, combining the results attained by many theologians, and applying the intuitions of perfection and causality which lie at the basis of all religious thinking. It is evident from our previous study of the arguments for God's existence, that from nature we cannot learn either the Trinity or the mercy of God, and that these deficiencies in our rational conclusions with respect to God must be supplied, if at all, by revelation. Spurgeon, Autobiography, 166—“The old saying is 'Go from Nature up to Nature's God.' But it is hard work going up hill. The best thing is to go from Nature's God down to Nature; and, if you once get to Nature's God and believe him and love him, it is surprising how easy it is to hear music in the waves, and songs in the wild whisperings of the winds, and to see God everywhere.” See also Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:181.
IV. Classification of the Attributes.
The attributes may be divided into two great classes: Absolute or Immanent, and Relative or Transitive.
By Absolute or Immanent Attributes, we mean attributes which respect the inner being of God, which are involved in God's relations to himself, and which belong to his nature independently of his connection with the universe.
By Relative or Transitive Attributes, we mean attributes which respect the outward revelation of God's being, which are involved in God's relations to the creation, and which are exercised in consequence of the existence of the universe and its dependence upon him.
[pg 248]Under the head of Absolute or Immanent Attributes, we make a three-fold division into Spirituality, with the attributes therein involved, namely, Life and Personality; Infinity, with the attributes therein involved, namely, Self-existence, Immutability, and Unity; and Perfection, with the attributes therein involved, namely, Truth, Love, and Holiness.
Under the head of Relative or Transitive Attributes, we make a three-fold division, according to the order of their revelation, into Attributes having relation to Time and Space, as Eternity and Immensity; Attributes having relation to Creation, as Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Omnipotence; and Attributes having relation to Moral Beings, as Veracity and Faithfulness, or Transitive Truth; Mercy and Goodness, or Transitive Love; and Justice and Righteousness, or Transitive Holiness.
This classification may be better understood from the following schedule:
It will be observed, upon examination of the preceding schedule, that our classification presents God first as Spirit, then as the infinite Spirit, and finally as the perfect Spirit. This accords with our definition of the term God (see page 52). It also corresponds with the order in which the attributes commonly present themselves to the human mind. Our first thought of God is that of mere Spirit, mysterious and undefined, over against our own spirits. Our next thought is that of God's greatness; the quantitative element suggests itself; his natural attributes rise before us; we recognize him as [pg 249]the infinite One. Finally comes the qualitative element; our moral natures recognize a moral God; over against our error, selfishness and impurity, we perceive his absolute perfection.
It should also be observed that this moral perfection, as it is an immanent attribute, involves relation of God to himself. Truth, love and holiness, as they respectively imply an exercise in God of intellect, affection and will, may be conceived of as God's self-knowing, God's self-loving, and God's self-willing. The significance of this will appear more fully in the discussion of the separate attributes.
Notice the distinction between absolute and relative, between immanent and transitive, attributes. Absolute = existing in no necessary relation to things outside of God. Relative = existing in such relation. Immanent = “remaining within, limited to, God's own nature in their activity and effect, inherent and indwelling, internal and subjective—opposed to emanent or transitive.” Transitive = having an object outside of God himself. We speak of transitive verbs, and we mean verbs that are followed by an object. God's transitive attributes are so called, because they respect and affect things and beings outside of God.
The aim of this classification into Absolute and Relative Attributes is to make plain the divine self-sufficiency. Creation is not a necessity, for there is a πλήρωμα in God (Col. 1:19), even before he makes the world or becomes incarnate. And πλήρωμα is not “the filling material,” nor “the vessel filled,” but “that which is complete in itself,”or, in other words, “plenitude,” “fulness,” “totality,” “abundance.” The whole universe is but a drop of dew upon the fringe of God's garment, or a breath exhaled from his mouth. He could create a universe a hundred times as great. Nature is but the symbol of God. The tides of life that ebb and flow on the far shores of the universe are only faint expressions of his life. The Immanent Attributes show us how completely matters of grace are Creation and Redemption, and how unspeakable is the condescension of him who took our humanity and humbled himself to the death of the Cross. Ps. 8:3, 4—“When I consider thy heavens ... what is man that thou art mindful of him?” 113:5, 6—“Who is like unto Jehovah our God, that hath his seat on high, that humbleth himself?” Phil. 2:6, 7—“Who, existing in the form of God, ... emptied himself, taking the form of a servant.”
Ladd, Theory of Reality, 69—“I know that I am, because, as the basis of all discriminations as to what I am, and as the core of all such self-knowledge, I immediately know myself as will” So as to the non-ego, “that things actually are is a factor in my knowledge of them which springs from the root of an experience with myself as a will, at once active and inhibited, as an agent and yet opposed by another.” The ego and the non-ego as well are fundamentally and essentially will. “Matter must be, per se, Force. But this is ... to be a Will” (439). We know nothing of the atom apart from its force (442). Ladd quotes from G. E. Bailey: “The life-principle, varying only in degree, is omnipresent. There is but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence, and this thrills through every atom of the whole Cosmos” (446). “Science has only made the Substrate of material things more and more completely self-like”(449). Spirit is the true and essential Being of what is called Nature (472). “The ultimate Being of the world is a self-conscious Mind and Will, which is the Ground of all objects made known in human experience” (550).
On classification of attributes, see Luthardt, Compendium, 71; Rothe, Dogmatik, 71; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:162; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:47, 52, 136. On the general subject, see Charnock, Attributes; Bruce, Eigenschaftslehre.