The Lord Is Good

Seeking the God of the Psalter

Christopher R. J. Holmes

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830888504
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

God is good."Taste and see that the Lord is good, " the Psalmist writes (Ps 34: 8). And to those who called him good, Jesus said, "No one is good—except God alone" (Mk 10: 18).In this Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture volume, Christopher R. J. Holmes explores the divine attribute of God's goodness through a theological interpretation of the Psalter that engages with the church's rich tradition, including Augustine and Barth, but especially Aquinas. He contends that in the very depths of God's being, God is goodness itself and that goodness is preeminent among the divine attributes.Leading us in this journey through the Psalms and the church's tradition, Holmes helps us to understand what it means to make that simple affirmation: God is good.Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture, edited by Daniel J. Treier and Kevin J. Vanhoozer, promotes evangelical contributions to systematic theology, seeking fresh understanding of Christian doctrine through creatively faithful engagement with Scripture in dialogue with church.

Simplicity

ON THE BASIS OF THE PSALTER’S TESTIMONY, it is fitting to describe God as a simple good. One might ask, “Why begin here?” We begin with simplicity to align ourselves with the biblical testimony to God as one whose existence is utterly complete, whose attributes are one with his essence, who depends on nothing outside himself to be the one he has always been and will be.

These are truths that we speak of in a positive sense only by speaking of what notions they exclude. Thus we begin with simplicity not insofar as it is an attribute of God, but rather as an extrabiblical concept that, at its best, honors biblical patterns of speech. The Scriptures ascribe many attributes to God, and teaching on simplicity enables us to see how the many attributes of God are one with God himself.

COMPLETE EXISTENCE

Simplicity means that nothing is accidental to God; “his existing,” says Thomas, “is at once whole.”1 There are good biblical reasons for thinking this. Consider, for example, David’s utter delight in the law of God, as expressed in Psalm 19:7-10. “The law of the LORD is perfect, reviving the soul” (Ps 19:7). Thomas elucidates this text by highlighting the superiority of spiritual delights. Spiritual delights “are not in motion,” he writes, as they “consist in loving and understanding the good that is not in motion.” God is not in motion “because the whole is possessed at once.”2 To talk in terms of God’s simplicity is to talk about how God is perfect, having no future and past, because he possesses himself entirely. Put somewhat differently, God is not in motion, so as to become something he was not before. God is simple and as such possesses himself entirely, having no need of improvement. God is utterly incapable of renovation because he is entire, complete, and, as we will see, the pure act of being itself. What is said of the law in terms of, for example, its being “perfect,” “sure,” “right,” “clear,” “pure,” “true,” and “righteous altogether,” is said of God, who is all these things at one and the same time.

Accordingly, goodness is not at arm’s length from God; goodness has no reality per se. Indeed, God does not participate in something called goodness as if goodness were some thing existing outside God, of which God was a part. Rather, goodness is God himself. Goodness is indicative of God’s “perfect existing.”3 In a statement of supreme clarity, Thomas says, “But God is whatever He has in Himself.”4 God has goodness and other “things” such as greatness in himself. These are the same in God. Goodness does not refer to one part, as it were, of God, greatness another; rather, they are identical. In this chapter I unfold something of this sublime truth: “God is whatever He has in Himself,” showing how such a claim aligns nicely with the Psalter’s portrait of God.

If we begin with Psalm 118:1-5—“O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good; his steadfast love endures forever!” (Ps 118:1)—we see, following Augustine, the biblical fittingness of simplicity discourse and discover one of the two fundamental truths regarding God’s simplicity. Augustine writes, “I can think of nothing nobler than this terse statement [‘because he is good’] of the reason for praising him. Goodness is so essentially the character of God that the Son of God himself, when addressed as Good teacher, replied, Why do you ask me about what is good? None is good except one, God alone. (Mt 19:16-17; Mk 10:18).”5 When we talk about God’s simplicity, we speak of the deep truth that the goodness the Psalter ascribes to God “is so essentially the character of God” that it may be said to be one with God. Goodness is what God has in himself, and is himself.

This is true not only of goodness. “All the perfections in God are really one thing.”6 Although holiness and goodness, for example, mean different things to us, they are one in God; more radically, they are God himself. Scripture talks in generous terms about the fact that God is, about God’s actual existence—that is, his attributes. Talk about God’s attributes is talk about what is essential to God, not accidental: “subsistent, not accidental.”7 As the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit are subsistent—that is, internal to and identical with the essence of God—so too are the attributes of God identical to God. The language of simplicity is in the service of unfolding the truth that God’s attributes are one with his undivided and complete essence.

If such is the case, then, at the beginning of our journey into understanding something of what God is as goodness itself, we affirm this fundamental notion of simplicity: goodness is proper to God, belongs to God, and is identical with the one, perfect, and undivided being of God.

WHAT ABOUT THE MANY?

The previous discussion raises several questions, one of which is whether goodness specifies exactly the same thing in God as, for example, love, given that they are distinguished for us by Scripture itself. The first thing to say is that all the attributes of God have the same subject. The attributes refer to one and the same God and are the same thing in God. “But God is whatever He has in Himself. Therefore no accident is in God. . . . God is whatever he has.”8 God is esse subsistens, meaning that God is unlike anyone or anything else, “one being whose essence is to exist.”9 Because existence and essence are one for God, God’s being is said to be convertible with his goodness, God’s attributes as identical to his being God.

To say that God is good and that God is, for example, wonderful, both of which are true, is to say things that have different nuances of meaning. They draw us to different dimensions of the Psalter’s testimony to the one God. The language of “wonderful,” for example, bespeaks the exuberant, extroverted love of the God whose decrees direct his people’s paths. The register in the case of “wonderful” is, you might say, more temporal, and not so much essential; “wonderful” is a temporal name, assuming a “relation to creatures.”10 The register of goodness, however, is essential and thus from eternity: it is said of God in se and of God in relationship with us. The many names of God that Scripture supplies us with are one and one with God himself, though not in the same way.

This is a key point. Some names have a more temporal rather than an essential register. Goodness has a greater density than some other names, such as wonderful, also because, as we shall see, goodness is identical with the procession of the will in God, which Thomas identifies with the Holy Spirit. This is not the case with a name like wonderful. Such a name arises in the Psalms in response to particular acts, for example, the exodus and the giving of the law. You might say that God does wonderful things because he is good.

Essential attributes or names like that of goodness are also to be distinguished from personal names of God such as Word, Love, and Gift. Love is a personal name of the Spirit, following John 17:26, and Word is a personal name of the Son, following John 1:1-18. A personal name is different from an essential name is that it refers to another: the Holy Spirit, for example, refers to the Father as his primary cause and the Son as secondary cause, whereas essential attributes are common to the three by dint of their essence and yet held by each in a manner appropriate to their person.11 The Holy Spirit has goodness as God the Spirit. This basic distinction is important. When we are discussing simplicity, we are reflecting on what is essential to God and thus true of the three.

NEGATIVE AND POSITIVE KNOWLEDGE

How do we know what is essential to God, given that “the divine essence by its immensity surpasses every form to which our intellect reaches; and thus we cannot apprehend it by knowing what it is”?12 Are we mistaken in rejoicing with the psalmist in the Lord’s enduring love and goodness? Though our finite intellects cannot know and grasp a God who is all that he is, we are not to despair, for “we have some knowledge therefore by knowing what it is not: and we shall approach all the nearer to the knowledge thereof according as we shall be enabled to remove by our intellect a greater number of things therefrom.”13 We approach something of God’s goodness by removing what it is not, which is how we grant space to a positive knowing of his great goodness.

Further to the point, we must remain silent about “how different God is” from us.14 Augustine reminds us that “we can more easily state what he is not than what he is. . . . What is he? I have not been able to say; all I could say is what he is not.”15 Thomas deepens this insight, putting it this way:

But we have some knowledge thereof by knowing what it [God] is not: and we shall approach all the nearer to knowledge thereof according as we shall be enabled to remove by our intellect a great number of things therefrom. For the more completely we see how a thing [i.e. God] differs from others, the more perfectly we know it: since each thing has in itself its own being distinct from all other things.16

As we have seen, God has his perfect being not only in se but per se. Accordingly, Thomas continues, “we shall not know what He is in Himself.”17 This is, of course, not a counsel to despair. Rather, it is one of epistemological humility and of right understanding of the distinction between God and what is not God. We can know something of “what He is not, and the relations of other things to Him,” but we cannot know “what God is.”18 We cannot know one whose “simple being possesses all manner of perfections.”19 But we know in a positive way by speaking of the difference between God and creature, removing from our intellects ways of describing God that are more appropriate to the creature than to God. Stated differently, Augustine, and Thomas following him, is not arguing that all human talk of God, insofar as it is disciplined by the scriptural testimony, remains negative. Rather, discourse on God will happily admit that there is one question that it cannot answer, the question of “What is he?” If we respond to the question with “goodness itself,” our response is not false, but it is inadequate, for we cannot conceive of an uncreated goodness—“you alone are God” (Ps 86:10). If so, then, we speak positively of God by speaking of what God is not. To use a Thomistic idiom, we cannot conceive of an unparticipated goodness without the help of created goodnesses. The latter are the grounds for articulating how different is the sole great goodness of God. We cannot conceive of one whose goodness is without limits, utterly independent of us, beyond all attribution and negation, composition and division, without the assistance provided by created things.

Consider Psalm 14:1, “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’ ” The fool does not think that God exists. Such thought is strange, however, says Thomas, “for the concept of God is naturally implanted in all of us.” The fool goes against nature, denying that God is, for it is inconceivable to conceive of God as not existing. And yet, the fool does. Here we see two kinds of knowing (and speaking) at work. The fool, comments Thomas, does not know God “according to himself.” If the fool were to know God according to himself, he would no longer be a fool, for God “cannot be conceived of as not existing.” The fool is spiritually blind, meaning that although he or she may see, he does not truly see. For example, the witness of “sensible things” to “things divine” escapes him.20

Put differently, existence “is included in the definition of the subject.” To know God “according to himself” is to speak “of being itself.” The fool’s foolishness is that of misconceiving God; the fool conceives of God “as not existing.” Such a judgment is against nature. The fool thinks there is no God because of the state of the world. God, he avers, is strikingly absent in the world, given the way the world is. How does the fool learn to see that the seeming absence of good in the world is not a sign of the nonexistence of God? Following Romans 1, indeterminate and rather vague knowledge of God’s existence is naturally implanted in all. But, and this is the key, such knowing is “not the same thing as knowing what God is, since tha...