The Attributes of God

An Introduction

Gerald Bray, Graham A. Cole, Oren R. Martin, Graham A. Cole, Oren R. Martin

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781433561177
• eBook ISBN: 9781433561207
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

How can we (created beings) know God (the Creator)?

Throughout history, the church has recognized the importance of studying and understanding God's attributes. As the Creator of all things, God is unique and cannot be compared to any of his creatures, so to know him, believers turn to the pages of Scripture. In The Attributes of God, renowned theologian Gerald Bray leads us on an exploration of God's being, his essential attributes, his relational attributes, and the relevance of his attributes to our thinking, lives, and worship. As we better understand God's attributes, we will learn to delight in who God is and how he has made himself known to us in Scripture.

1

The Being of God and His Attributes

Defining Our Terms

Few people doubt that God is a being. Jews and Christians both agree that God has revealed his name to us—YHWH (usually pronounced “Yahweh”), which is connected with the Hebrew verb to be and is usually translated as “he who is” or as “I am” (Ex. 3:14).1 God thus identifies himself as a “being,” but says nothing about his nature or attributes. Whenever the subject is mentioned in the Bible, the emphasis is on God’s distinctiveness—he is completely different from anything we experience in the world. This is because he is the Creator and everything else has been made by him. There may be resemblances between him and some of his creatures, particularly human beings who have been created in his image and likeness (Gen. 1:26–27), but ultimately these are relative and not absolute. God has a mind and has given us minds as well, but his thoughts are so far above and beyond ours that it is hard to say that the two are the same (Isa. 55:8–9).

The difference between us is not merely one of degree but one of kind. As our Creator, God is an absolute and unique being, who cannot be compared with any of his creatures. For example, the eternal life of God has no beginning or end, whereas the eternal life of a Christian is a gift from him that has a beginning and is therefore relatively, and not absolutely, eternal.

Our notions of being are derived from ancient Greek philosophy, which thought of it as a substance that could be defined and analyzed. The early Christians sought to explain the God of the Bible by using originally pagan concepts, and we have inherited that tradition. Most of them realized that their idea of being was limited by finite perceptions of reality, and that God does not fit into them. They therefore concluded that God is above and beyond definable being, and that nothing we say can truly describe him. Christopher Stead (1913–2008) pointed out that the only real justification for retaining the word “being” or “substance” (ousia in Greek) in relation to God is to remind ourselves of his objective existence:

What is the point of stating that God is an ousia in the categorical sense, a substance? The statement is general enough; it leaves a number of options open. Its principal function, as I see it, is to claim that God is not limited or prescribed by our experience of him, but exists in his own right; in this respect . . . he is analogous to an unknown physical object, say an undiscovered star. A star does not come into being by being discovered; and God is not brought into being by our human consciousness or metaphysical demands.2

If we call God a “being,” we are using the word in a different sense from the way it is used to define his creatures, and so its attributes must be interpreted accordingly. They often have to be expressed as negatives (“immortal,” “invisible,” etc.) because our finite minds are unable to grasp infinity. Many of God’s attributes are logical deductions based on his actions as they are recorded in the Bible. Thus we say that he is “omnipresent,” “omnipotent,” and “omniscient” because, otherwise, he could not act in the way he does. These words are not used in the Scriptures, but the concepts they represent are everywhere present in them.

God communicates with human beings by means of a shared personhood. This personhood is not an attribute of either the human or the divine nature, partly because those natures are incompatible and partly because personhood transcends them. Human beings can lose their material (“perishable”) nature and acquire a spiritual (“imperishable”) one without becoming different persons (1 Cor. 15:42–49). The attributes of personhood can be applied to both God and human beings, but the fundamental differences between us must be respected. The first of these is rooted in our creatureliness and may be described as the difference between the infinite and the finite. What in God is absolute is (and can only ever be) relative in us. The second difference is caused by human sinfulness, which is not inherent in our created nature but is the result of our disobedience to the will of God. The practical effect of this is that our understanding of God’s attributes, made possible by the fact that we have been created in his image and likeness, is never more than an imperfect and inadequate expression of the divine reality.

The God of the Bible

The Bible does not explain why God made the world, except that he is worthy of all glory, honor, and praise because he created all things by his will (Rev. 4:11). He was not forced to do it by any inner necessity, nor did he produce it out of his own being. If that had been the case, there would presumably have been no problem in trying to understand God’s attributes, since they would be the same as those of the so-called creation. But a moment’s thought will show that to be a logical impossibility. How could a visible world be the extension of an invisible being? The biblical God is pictured as being present in a fire or a cloud, but these images were intended to emphasize his inaccessibility—human beings cannot touch fire without being consumed by it, and they lose their bearings when they are enveloped in a cloud (Ex. 13:21). There is no suggestion that God is a fiery cloud by nature. The two images are mutually incompatible, the cloud guiding the people of Israel during the day and the fire guiding them by night. God adopted such forms when he revealed himself, but he was not bound by them, nor do they define his being.

In the Bible’s descriptions of God, the emphasis is on how different he is from us or from anything else. He cannot be seen, nor can he be contained or limited. When compared with the gods of other nations, he is powerful and they are not. Did the Israelites consciously believe that God is immortal, invisible, all-powerful, and so on? Were they monotheists in the modern sense, or did they accept that other gods might have existed but were inferior to the God of Israel? Different answers can be (and have been) given to questions like these. The Hebrew Bible does not speak in philosophical terms, so words like “immortal” do not appear in it. Only in the later epistles of the New Testament, addressed to a Greek or at least to a Hellenized audience, do we find such abstractions, and even then only in passing—there is no extended discussion of what they mean.

At the same time, it is hard to read the scriptural texts and conclude that what was later expressed in philosophical language was not implied all along. Is there any evidence that the Israelites thought that God was a mortal being? Or that he was in some way inadequate to meet their needs? If they had thought that, the pressure to adopt some form of polytheism would have been irresistible, because it would then have been necessary to make up for his inadequacies by appealing to other gods who could supply what was missing in him. But the Israelites never did that. The logic of worshiping only one God is that he is sufficient for all our needs, which in turn makes us think of him in a more comprehensive way. The details of this may not be expressed as such in the Old Testament, but the implications are there. The New Testament does not hesitate to build on them and express the attributes of the God of Israel in terms that we still use today.

Our analysis of God’s being and attributes is derived from his self-revelation to us in the Bible and confirmed by our experience of its truth. It is a genuine reflection of our personal relationship with him, but it is not comprehensive or exhaustive. There is much about God that we do not (and cannot) know. The theology of God’s attributes is therefore both a confident expression of faith and a humble admission of ignorance in line with the nature and content of God’s self-disclosure to us.

It is a paradox of God’s self-revelation that although his attributes are fundamental to it, they are seldom mentioned specifically. God’s invisibility, for example, is implied from the creation narrative in Genesis onward, yet it is hardly ever mentioned by name in the Bible. That does not mean that it can be ignored though, or (still less) denied. The prohibition against making “a carved image, or any likeness of anything” is the second of the Ten Commandments, which makes it clear that visible things are not to be worshiped, because they are not—and cannot be—God (Ex. 20:4; Deut. 5:8). The substance of the doctrine of divine invisibility is there, but there is no word used to describe it. Neither is there any systematic analysis of the concept comparing it to other divine attributes, like immortality, or even to other manifestations of his being, like his omnipresence. These things are not denied, but they are assumed rather than stated. When the need arose for them, they were picked up and used to reassure the Israelites that the God who was with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was with them still, and prese...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Newsletter Signup
• Endorsements
• Other Crossway Books
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Preface
• Preface
• 1 The Being of God and His Attributes
• 2 God’s Essential Attributes
• 3 God’s Relational Attributes
• 4 The Relevance of God’s Attributes Today
• Appendix God’s Attributes in Christian Tradition
• Further Reading
• General Index
• Scripture Index