The Christian Doctrine of the Divine Attributes

Cremer, Price

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498201247
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Cremer's short, energetic treatise on the divine attributes was admired by both Karl Barth and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Cremer chastises the speculative flights of traditional doctrines of the divine attributes and issues a resounding summons to a more exegetically, economically, and christologically grounded account. Known primarily as a biblical scholar for his Biblico-Theological Lexicon of New Testament Greek, precursor to the monumental TDNT, Cremer shows himself here also an able systematician, with a pastor's eye for the role played by doctrine in the life of congregational and individual faith.

1

The Concept of the Divine Attributes

Christian faith will always find it bizarre to learn of the lengths to which the Greek fathers went, under the influence of Platonism, simply to determine whether or not God has attributes. The Scholastics took this question no less seriously, but their grand solutions have never in fact served to deepen Christian proclamation or make it more effective. One feels as if a curse has been lifted when one finally arrives at the first edition of Melanchthon’s Loci, in which this entire question is boldly throttled and thrown overboard. But only too soon it climbs aboard again. In the subsequent editions of the Loci Melanchthon takes up this problem again and returns to the old questions. One can hardly claim that Melanchthon did so because his interests grew less religious and more formal and academic over time, or because he felt some need to keep his theology in dialog with philosophy. Bewildered, one begins to wonder whether it really is such a problem to ascribe attributes to God. Was not Quenstedt forced to admit that the attributes of God are “nothing other than inadequate concepts of the divine essence”? Did not Schleiermacher suggest that the attributes do not actually refer to anything particular in God, but only to particular modulations in our feeling of absolute dependence? If the claim that God has attributes creates such great difficulties, what is an academically minded theologian to do except make a reservatio mentalis every time Christian devotion and proclamation insist on speaking about God’s attributes? One obviously cannot preach about a God who has no attributes.

Since the time of the Greek fathers, the concept of Pure Being, the Absolute, as applied to God, has made it seem impossible to ascribe attributes to God. Beyond this world of contingent and therefore definite and limited being, there lies Pure Being, the Absolute, the “really real,” what Aristotle designated the Unmoved First Mover. Viewing God in this way is an attempt both to distinguish him from the world and also to interpret the world. We start by considering the world, we then remove all limitations from our thoughts about the world, and we think thereby to obtain a description of God. But the very attributes by which we then describe God lend him once again a definiteness and thereby a limitation that places him back among contingent and therefore limited beings. As a worldly being, God is once again limited in his capacity to act. In such a God one cannot believe. From such a God one cannot expect all things. Only an absolutely unlimited God can be believed in. And this was the religious interest of the fathers in the otherwise irreligious notion of Pure Being or the Absolute. This is why they either excluded or only partially accepted the idea that God has attributes. But they overlooked the fact that it is simply impossible to believe in the Absolute. It was only the fact that they identified this Absolute with the living God, the God revealed in Christ and recognized as free and powerful over all things—it was this identification that salvaged a concept that had never advanced the human spirit’s quest for God but only thwarted it. Pure Being was the final thought of philosophy. The bridge from there to the world collapsed again and again every time it was dialectically reconstructed. The builders beheld in the gospel of Christ the mighty God of all things. He it was whom humanity had sought. It seemed to them as though God gave reality to the idea of Pure Being, which should after all be the cause of all things. But none of them asked whether it was right to preserve this concept of the Being of God alongside knowledge of the actual, living God. They treated both quantities as equivalents of the Aristotelian ideas of the Prime Mover and Pure Act. Mesmerized by this circle of thought, they were afraid to lose God again by attaching attributes to him, even though they could not help talking about righteousness, mercy, patience, etc.—divine attributes! But such talk, they reassured themselves, was only popular parlance.

Later theologians were concerned by a different issue. Speaking of God’s attributes seems to require ascribing to him conflicting attributes, such as righteousness and mercy, as these are perceived and trusted in his action toward and self-manifestation to the world. As a result of this action, God’s essence seems to acquire a new attribute, as a person acquires a new character or gifting in becoming a Christian. But faith relies on the essential immutability of God. On the other hand, it seems just as essential to maintain God’s freedom to have acted otherwise. But if God’s attributes are proper to his essence and not something in addition to it, the possibility of his having acted otherwise certainly seems excluded. And yet faith is inseparable from the confession that God can treat us differently than he does. He is not forced to act by some irresistible necessity, even if such necessity lay in himself. If God acted by necessity, there would be no sense in praying to him. In other words, the good must be good because God wills it; God does not will it because it is good. Still another concern appears in the Reformation and post-Reformation theologians. The attributes, says Quenstedt, do correspond to something real in God, but “our finite intellect cannot grasp, in a single concept, the infinite and most simple essence of God.” Hence we use various individual forms of representation for the divine essence, but these forms appear to exist only improperly alongside each other.

Thus we find everywhere religious concerns for admitting into theology the philosophical denial that God has attributes, in both a strict and a limited sense. But this denial will always remain foreign to faith. We must therefore ask ourselves seriously whether academic theology ought to renounce the divine attributes, or more properly whether we theologians, for the sake of the divine attributes made known to us in revelation, ought to renounce our academic rights.

The faith that trusts in the grace of God, and praises the hallowed name of God, and hopes in the righteousness of God—such a faith can never renounce the divine attributes. But academic theology not only does not need the attributes; it cannot admit them at all. Academic theology need only recognize that, as with faith itself, so with the divine attributes it is dealing with an entirely different riddle than the one whose solution the old philosophy sought by thinking away the limitations of this world. Theology is not obliged to solve the riddles of contingent being or of nature. It was the attempt to do so that infinitely corrupted the theology of older and more recent times. Such riddles will actually solve themselves once we find a solution to that other and infinitely greater riddle, the actual riddle of the world: the riddle of history. If this greater riddle remains unsolved, the solution to every other riddle will be of no use. The ancient world had no interest in the riddle of history. Or, as far as it had any, it sought the solution via philosophical speculation, as if it were a riddle of nature—yet with none of the salutary awareness of its limitations that marks the natural sciences of today. Israel alone confronted the riddle of the world and gave it literary expression so profound as to tower over Greek tragedy itself. One need only recall Psalms 68 and 73 and the Book of Job.

The riddle of history does not consist in the conjunction of Spirit and Nature. It will not be solved either by discovering how Spirit stands out from Nature, or by finding a way for Spirit to maintain its independence from Nature. This way of phrasing the question only presents another form of the riddle of nature. But the riddle of history is this. How can there exist a world that in itself should perish? It should perish not because of its finitude and transience, but because of the law of sin and death ruling in it and thus the system of history that dominates it. This is the question that must torment not only the scholar and thinker but also the common person, who suffers under the law of sin and death and under that system of history determined by this law. This is the burning question for everyone, a question driven in the first instance not by a certain measure of education, but simply by a conscience whose voice has not been silenced. The riddle of history will not be solved by appeal to “reason in history,” whose traces will at the very least not be perceived by everyone. The solution to this riddle must be intelligible to everyone if it is really going to be a solution. The same certainly cannot be said of the formulation of the riddle of nature and its answer—at least, not if Du Bois-Reymond is right to claim, “We do not know and we never will.” The solution to the riddle of history, if it satisfies conscience and therefore reasoning, will also identify the purpose and goal of history and answer still further questions as well.

The hope of finding the solution to this riddle is the messianic hope of Israel. It is the Messiah’s office to bring this solution. This is why both John the Baptist and Jesus proclaim, “The kingdom of God is near.” That Jesus is the Messiah—this is the solution! This is redemption. Because Jesus is the Messiah, his community can wait patiently and with all confidence for the day when he will fully manifest himself to them. Until then, the community must be content with the firstfruits (Rom 8:23) and pledge of the Spirit (2 Cor 1:22). In this faith the messianic community awaits the Parousia and confesses of the one seated on the right hand of God the Father Almighty: “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” In the mission of Jesus the Messiah we have the self-manifestation of God to a world that is perishing in itself. In Christ we have the revelation of God that solves the riddle of the world, the riddle of history, not through explanation and instruction but through the self-manifestation of the essence, will, and power of God. The reality of God, in which he presents himself to faith, is a qualitatively different reality than that of Pure Being in its distinction from contingent being. It is the task of academic theology to recognize this difference, one that is far greater than that between nature and history. Theology cannot not let its task be set for it by the final thought of philosophy. Its task is not to explain the reality of God in terms of Pure Being or the Absolute or the world stripped of its limits, and certainly not to expand and modify this final thought so as to apply it to God. When the early apologists confronted the riddle of the world, they ought to have insisted on the right framing of the question and simultaneously provided its answer. But instead of pursuing so bold a tactic, they were content simply to identify that long-sought, final thought of philosophy with the God of revelation. This was fatal for theology. This is why “the oldest dogma in Christendom,” the intensely cherished hope in the Parousia, which actually contains the solution to the riddle of the world, still exerted no influence on the apologists’ negotiations with the cultured classes or on their academic presentation of the Christian knowledge of God. Had the dogmas of philosophy not exerted so dominant an influence, the hope in Messiah’s return, to which the gospel directs our faith, would never have remained without influence on these tasks. As it was, the revelation of the reality of God was instead prostituted for the satisfaction of ancient intellectual desire. It was not until Augustine that the times grew wretched enough to require a new framing of the question. But when Augustine took up this question in City of God, the first work of the patristic era to address the actual riddle of the world, he had another aim and achieved another effect than a reconstruction of the doctrine of God. For centuries afterward, the leading lights in the history of western culture never fully sensed the ultimate incompatibility between the practical interest of faith in the revelation of God in Christ and the academic formulation of the doctrine of God. This realization was reserved for the era of the Reformation—admittedly, as we have seen, without achieving a decisive, sustained influence on theology.

Today we have no excuse to continue in these old ruts. We cannot do so once we have seen how great is the difference between the question that philosophy asks but can never answer and the question that revelation simply answers. We are directed to revelation, not as a last resort to obtain information that reason cannot find elsewhere, but because in revelation we have the reality of God. This reality shows us the right way to frame the question and at the same time gives us the answer. Revelation frees us from the compulsion of the futile ways of philosophy. In his revelation God acts. In revelation we come to know not the mere fact of God’s existence—something acknowledged far too infrequently as it is. Rather, the self-manifestation of God, in which he is known as God, finally answers, or rather makes superfluous, the question whether he really exists. What we actually come to know in revelation is who God is and what kind of God he is. This is of a piece with the purpose of revelation: the accomplishment of redemption. Not the accomplishment of knowledge, but the accomplishment of salvation is the purpose of revelation. Concerning the purpose of revelation there still prevails a consensus among theologians, particularly since Karl Ludwig Nitzsch (1751–1831) and Karl Immanuel Nitzsch (1787–1868), even if opinions diverge widely about what revelation actually is. Revelation certainly results in knowledge, since God’s revelatory action must obviously be known by those who encounter it. But this knowledge is only a means to the goal of redemption. God’s revelatory action has a definite purpose: to manifest himself to our faith. But if God reveals himself without any attributes that can be known, without specific determinations of his will and power, then he cannot be believed in or even thought of at all. A God who cannot manifest himself to the world is not the living God. He is not God at all. The God who acts, who has purposes and accomplishes them, can no more do without attributes than his acts can. It is proper to God to manifest himself and to be his own redeeming manifestation, to distinguish himself as God, as the one to whose will, power, and action the world is absolutely bound. But if this is the case, then the attributes of his will and power made known in revelation are also the attributes of his essence. If in revelation God makes known how he exists and thus how he differs from all else that exists, it follows that his attributes indicate him uniquely, in such a way as to belong to him alone. These attributes do not limit him, they reveal him. They are thus attributes in the sense that their subject cannot exist at all without them. They are the predicates proper to God. None can be missing. Attributes that could be missing, or could be other than they are—attributes in the mere sense of attributa accidentalia—such attributes could not indicate God. Such attributes could only indicate how an individual is distinguished from its category, in the way that the natural sciences, for example, describe the objects of their attention.

We will only arrive at a more precise understanding of the attributes of God if we fix our eyes on the essence of God as it is made known in Christ. The essence of God is what makes God who he is for us: the Lord of all things, the source of life, our sole and everlasting support. Who God is for us—this alone, and not philosophical speculation about whether God exists, gives us knowledge of the essence of God. We thus draw a distinction between the concept of God and the essence of God. The concept of God, on the one hand, takes the term “God” not as a name but as a predicate. The subject who fits this predicate is understood to be the power that utterly transcends the world, to whose will and work the world is bound. In revelation, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ designates himself as this power, the one to whom the world is absolutely, completely, and forever bound, the one who truly is God alone. Revelation does not tell us, however, how God exercises this power. Revelation does not identify the various conceivable possibilities of the exercise of this power, one of which ultimately, by the will of God, becomes reality. By revelation we know that it can be precisely and only this exercise of power through which he binds the world to himself. This alone is the highest exercise of power, not the highest that can be thought, but one that “our scanty thought surpasses far,” one that we would not even expect, let alone be able logically to develop, if it were not actual reality. It is through this exercise of God’s power that we first learn what it means for him to be God, in the rich and amazing meaning of this concept. The essence of God, on the other hand, is what must belong to God in order for him to be God. The essence of God is that through which he acts upon us and relates to us. We have no idea how it comes about that he exists. What we do know is that he is God. And so we also know how it comes about that we are bound to him and what this means for us.

Thus the essence of God corresponds to the reality of God made known in revelation, and it enables us to understand the characteristics of God’s behavior and action. It is not enough, therefore, merely to claim with Nitzsch that God is “the eternal, personal Being of the Good,” or with Herr­mann that God is “the personal Will of the Good.” While neither formula contains anything incorrect, each states only a partial truth, not the whole, and not even the really essential thing in God’s revelation in Christ, namely, that it is precisely as he reveals himself in Christ that God is the reality of the Good. These formulas do not make clear that the Good is precisely and only what appears to us in Christ. We must therefore bind what we say about the essence of God firmly to his revelation in Christ. In revelation God appears and acts as the one who is entirely love, not merely one who has and feels love, but one who is love. He is and desires to be for us everything that he is, and he desires to have us for himself. He is the one who in love wholly opens himself to fellowship with us. He wants this. This is God’s essence, the innermost being that fills him. It is as the loving God that he determines our being and our life. We know him and have him in no other way than in his love, in his active will to be ours, to belong to us as one person belongs to another. He does not want to be without us. That is the only reason we exist. That is why he has redeemed us. And that is why his action belongs to his essence, and why the determination of his action by his essence yields his attributes. In his attributes there appears the difference between God and us, upon whom he acts, in all of the connections posited by the fact of this relation. God’s attributes are therefore his difference from us in all of the connections which his relationship with us brings, manifested for us and to us. They are the determination of his appearance in his action by his essence. The action and essence of God belong together in such a way that his action is the perfect operation of his essence. But if this is the case, then the attributes of God simply are the attributes of his essence. There is thus no basis, not even the possibility, for categorizing the attributes as either absolute or relative, internal or external, ontological or economic, transcendent or immanent. Such distinctions, even if merely conceptual, neither exalt nor deepen our knowledge of God. They are in fact more likely to obscure it. They make it practically impossible to maintain that it is the essence of God, indeed,...

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Preface
• Chapter 1: The Concept of the Divine Attributes
• Chapter 2: The Derivation and Classification of the Attributes
• Chapter 3: First Series
• Chapter 4: Second Series
• Chapter 5: The Unity of the Divine Attributes, or the Glory of God