Divine Attributes

Knowing the Covenantal God of Scripture

John C. Peckham

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781540961259
• eBook ISBN: 9781493429417
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book offers a clear and constructive account of the nature and attributes of God. It addresses the doctrine of God from exegetical, historical, and constructive-theological perspectives, bringing the biblical portrayal of God in relationship to the world into dialogue with prominent philosophical and theological questions. The book engages questions such as: Does God change? Does God have emotions? Does God know the future? Is God entirely good and loving? How can God be one and three? Chapters correspond to the major metaphysical and moral attributes of God.

One
The God of Scripture and the God of the Philosophers

Holy, holy, holy,

the Lord God the Almighty,

who was and is and is to come.

According to Revelation 4:8, this refrain is sung “day and night without ceasing.” The God of Scripture is the holy one who alone is worthy of worship. Accordingly, much of Scripture highlights God’s unique praiseworthiness as the covenant-making and covenant-keeping God to whom Christians should “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). Yet who is this covenantal God whom Christians worship and to whom Christians pray? Christians generally view God as worthy of worship because he is perfect, the one to whom it makes sense to pray because he is compassionate and responds to prayer (Dan. 9:4, 18). Yet there is quite a bit of diversity—even controversy—among Christian theologians regarding God’s nature and how God relates to creation. Much of the controversy concerns whether the (so-called) God of the philosophers is compatible with the God of Scripture, “whether the so-called God of the philosophers has any real claim to being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, or God, the Father of Jesus, or God, the object of our ultimate concern.”1

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Father of Jesus, is the covenantal God whom many Christians envision when they worship and pray, the God revealed in the story line of Scripture who creates the world, forms Adam and Eve from dust, calls Abraham, meets Moses, loves, covenants, acts, speaks, hears, responds, and saves. Yet William Alston notes a “pervasive tension in Christian thought between ‘the God of the philosophers and the God of the Bible,’ between God as ‘wholly other’ and God as a partner in interpersonal relationships, between God as the absolute, ultimate source of all being and God as the dominant actor on the stage of history.”2

With this tension in mind, this book offers a constructive account of divine attributes, bringing biblical portrayals of God into dialogue with core questions in the contemporary discussion of classical theism, including whether God changes and has emotions, whether he is present in space and time, whether he knows everything (including the future), whether he has all power and always attains what he desires, whether he is entirely good and loving, and how one God can be three persons.3 This chapter introduces the contemporary discussion of the (so-called) God of the philosophers and the approach this book takes to the doctrine of God, an approach to the theological interpretation of Scripture that carefully attends to the biblical portrayals of God, toward affirming what Scripture teaches about God without conceptually reducing God to the way he is portrayed in the economy (i.e., in relation to the world). Accordingly, I seek to limit my conclusions according to the standards of biblical warrant and systematic coherence while recognizing that “we see in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12 NASB) and that God is greater than humans can conceive.

The God of the Philosophers?

Strict Classical Theism

While there are many different philosophical conceptions of God, when Christian theists speak of “the God of the philosophers,” they typically have in mind an understanding of God called classical theism.4 According to a strict form of classical theism, God must possess the following attributes (explained further below): divine perfection, necessity, pure aseity, utter self-sufficiency, strict simplicity, timeless eternity, strict immutability, strict impassibility, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence.5 To differentiate them from others who self-identify as classical theists, I refer to those who subscribe to a strict understanding of these attributes as strict classical theists.6

On this view, divine perfection means that God is the greatest possible being. God exists necessarily and is who he is entirely of himself (a se), without dependence on anything else relative to his existence or otherwise (pure aseity and utter self-sufficiency). God “exists independently of all causal influence from his creatures”; creatures cannot impact God or his actions.7 This is bound up with strict simplicity, which means (among other things) that God is not composed of parts and that there are no genuine distinctions in God.8

This God is timeless. For God, there is no passing of time, no “before” or “after,” no past or future, no temporal succession. Accordingly, God is strictly immutable and strictly impassible. Strict immutability, meaning God cannot change in any way, follows from timelessness because change requires the passing of time—from prior state to later state. This rules out emotional change and suffering. Instead, God is strictly impassible, meaning that God cannot be affected by anything outside himself. Creatures cannot affect God, and thus God cannot become pleased or displeased by anything creatures do.

Finally, God is omnipotent, meaning God is all-powerful. God is omniscient, meaning God knows everything (typically explained in terms of God causing everything to be as it is).9 And God is omnipresent, meaning God’s power is active everywhere, sustaining everything.

Process Theology and Open Theism

Alongside numerous other strong critics of (strict) classical theism, process theology posits an alternative “God of the philosophers,” rooted in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead.10 Characterizing classical theism as (in Charles Hartshorne’s words) “metaphysical snobbery toward relativity, . . . responsiveness or sensitivity” and “worship of mere absoluteness, independence, and one-sided activity or power,” process theology advocates a nearly reverse image of strict classical theism, typically denying what strict classical theism affirms and affirming what it denies.11 Whereas the God of strict classical theism is utterly transcendent, the God of process theology is nearly entirely immanent. A form of panentheism (literally “all in God”), process theology maintains that the world (the physical universe) is in God such that God cannot exist without some world and is always in the process of changing and growing as the world changes.

While process theologians agree that God is a necessary and perfect being, many attributes that strict classical theists consider “perfections” are considered deficiencies by process theologians.12 According to process theology, the necessary and perfect being must be (1) essentially related to some world, not self-sufficient or a se; (2) temporal, not timeless; (3) always changing, not strictly immutable; (4) eminently passible, not impassible; (5) the most powerful being, but not omnipotent in the sense of possessing all power, capable of “acting” only via persuasion (never coercion); and (6) all-knowing relative to the present but not omniscient in terms of possessing exhaustive foreknowledge.

Open theism, another approach that has strongly criticized (strict) classical theism in recent decades, is often confused with process theology but differs in significant respects.13 While agreeing with process theists that God is temporal rather than timeless, neither strictly immutable nor impassible, and all-knowing relative to the present but lacking exhaustive foreknowledge, most open theists reject the vi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The God of Scripture and the God of the Philosophers
• 2. The Unchanging God Who Suffers in Love
• 3. The God of the Past, Present, and Future
• 4. The God Who Knows Everything
• 5. The Almighty Sovereign Who Creates, Sustains, and Covenants
• 6. The Goodness of God and the Problem of Evil
• 7. Trinity of Love
• 8. The God of Covenantal Theism
• Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover