God is Simple

How do you think about God? In your mind, what is God like? Maybe write down a word or two, or maybe a short sentence. How about some of the people in your life: your friends, family, fellow students, work colleagues—Christian and non-Christian?

Simple probably isn’t one of the words that came to mind—at least not in the way we usually use the word simple. As I was preparing for tonight, I was sitting in my parents’ lounge, reading what Aquinas has to say on the subject. In most of his works it follows a question-and-answer-like format, and I read aloud the question introducing the section I was reading: “Is God absolutely simple?” And my mom, who was sitting on the other side of the room said, “Nooooo.”

This evening we’re talking about divine simplicity—which doesn’t mean simple to understand, as you’ll very well know if you’ve been with us for the past few weeks. Rather, what we mean by divine simplicity is that God is non-composite, or not composed of parts, and absolutely indivisible.

Two things make divine simplicity really difficult to talk about. The first is that you won’t find it anywhere in scripture—which really doesn’t feel like a great place to start. We won’t find spoken about in the Bible; but that doesn’t mean it’s unbiblical. We’ll talk more about how that works itself out, but for now, don’t panic; it’ll all make sense later, and isn’t nearly as scary as it sounds at first.

But it does mean that we’re not going to start with what scripture teaches us about divine simplicity. Systematic theology, we’ve been saying, is combining what we can know from scripture with what we can know from nature, to build a system of thought about God and his creation. For the past two weeks we’ve started on the side of special revelation. But to talk about divine simplicity we need to properly understand what it is that we’re talking about, and to do that we need to start on the side of general revelation.

The second thing that makes divine simplicity really hard to talk about is that it seems really arbitrary. When we talk about what God is like, this really isn’t one of the first things to come to mind. Louis Berkhof notes in his Systematic Theology that “In recent works on theology the simplicity of God is seldom mentioned.” For some theologians this is because they aren’t persuaded by it. John Frame, for instance, in his Systematic Theology considers it briefly in his discussion on the Trinity, considering Aquinas’ view of simplicity. But even before finishing his discussion of Aquinas’ view he seems to have tossed it out (or at the very least has somewhat misunderstood the doctrine), arguing that Aquinas’ arguments “do not rule out all complexity within the divine nature,” and pitts his view of divine simplicity against the Trinity.

But the doctrine of divine simplicity was central in the thinking of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, to name just a few. We find it present in the writings of the early Church Fathers like Irenaeus and Athanasius, assumed by Calvin, and defended by Reformed scholars like Herman Bavinck and Francis Turretin, again to name just a few.

And in our time it’s making a bit of a comeback as Evangelical theologians have reconsidered the arguments of Augustine, Anselm, and especially Aquinas. One such theologian, Peter Sanlon, an Anglican scholar and pastor up in England, writes: “The simplicity of God is the most fundamental doctrinal grammar of divinity.”

Divine simplicity from philosophy

Divine simplicity means that God is non-composite, or not composed of parts, and absolutely indivisible; let’s spend a bit of time thinking a bit more about what that means. Aquinas gives five arguments for divine simplicity in his major work, the Summa Theologiae. In his first argument, Aquinas brings up a whole lot of distinctions that by this point in the Summa Theologiae he’s already discussed. He mentions that God isn’t a body; that God isn’t composed of matter and form; that his nature is his suppositum; that his essence is his existence; that in God there is no composition of genus and differentiation; and in God is no composition of substance and accident. He’s already argued for all these points by this stage. And in his fourth argument he adds actuality and potentiality.

We’ve already spent some time thinking about actuality and potentiality and essence and existence, so we’re just going to focus on those two.

Actuality and potentiality

Potentiality, we said, is something’s capacity to be a certain way. It’s how a thing could be, whereas actuality is how something is in reality. We began by looking at that in terms of change: change is simply the actualisation of a potential. The tea is potentially cold, until the air actualises that potential, and the tea becomes actually cold.

But that’s not the only way we’ve been talking about potentiality and actuality. We don’t only use potentiality and actuality to talk about things moving from one state to another, but also to talk about how things are the way that they are, moment by moment. We don’t only think about potentiality and actuality in terms of becoming, but also being. It would be true enough to say that the tea’s potential to be on the table was actualised by the person who put it there. But we could also say that while ever the tea is on the table, its potential to be there is being actualised by the table moment by moment.

We then spent some time thinking about causal chains, and concluded that the first cause of everything must itself be uncaused (otherwise it wouldn’t be a first cause)—in other words, it must be purely actual. And this we all know to be God.

Divine simplicity from potentiality and actuality

From the fact that God is pure actuality, divine simplicity flows quite naturally.

For something composite to exist, its parts must be assembled. You don’t have a chair until the legs and the seat and whatever are all assembled, arranged in a particular way. You don’t have a laptop until the metal and plastic and logic board and trackpad and whatever are there to make it up. In other words, the parts’ potential to be assembled as a chair being actualised; the metal and plastic and whatever’s potential to be assembled as a laptop being actualised.

We can talk about a composite thing’s unity in terms of change—moving through time, from just having the parts, to putting them together to assemble the whole (in other words to actualise the potential of the parts to be composed in this or that way). But remember, that’s not the only way we can talk about things in terms of actuality and potentiality. We can also talk about a thing’s potential to be a certain way being actualised every moment that it is so—so the composite thing’s potential to be united is continually actualised every moment that it exists as such.

But, as we have said, God has no potentiality, and from that it follows that God can’t have parts—in other words, God is simple.

Essence and existence

The next set of principles we’ve looked at are essence and existence. For anything in reality we can ask two questions: “What is it?” and “Is it?” The answers to these two questions map onto a thing’s essence and its existence. “The essence of a thing is its nature, that whereby it is what it is.” And the existence of a thing is what is added to an essence for there to be a concrete realisation of it in reality. This, we saw, maps onto actuality and potentiality: a “thing’s essence is taken to be a kind of [potentiality], and its existence a kind of actuality.”

For everything in the world around us, those two principles are distinct. We can talk about the essence of a potato without talking about whether the potato exists. And there’s nothing in the essence of a potato—nothing in the essential features of what makes a potato what it is—that entails that it exists. As Aquinas put it: “every essence can be understood without even thinking about its existence, for I can understand what a man or a phoenix is, and not know whether it actually exists in the nature of things.”

What this amounts to is a real distinction between essence and existence. In God, however, there is no such distinction: for God, his essence is his existence. Aquinas offers three arguments to support this; we’ll look at two of them.

The first is that for anything to exist, existence must be added to its essence. He considers two possibilities: 1) it’s caused by its own constituent principles; or 2) existence is added to its essence by some other agent. But neither of these work. We’ve already seen that God is the first cause, so he can’t have been caused by some other agent; and something can’t be the cause of itself—for something to cause itself it would mean it would have to exist before it exists, which is absurd. Therefore, it’s impossible that God’s essence differ from his existence.

The second argument takes what we saw earlier, how essence and existence map onto actuality and potentiality. Essence is to potential as existence is to actuality; so, since God is pure actuality, it follows that his essence and his existence can’t be distinct.

So God’s essence is his existence. Whereas the essence of a man or a phoenix don’t entail that they exist, God’s essence does, since it isn’t distinct from his essence. Or, to put it another way, he is pure being.

Divine simplicity from essence and existence

It’s easy enough for us to accept that God doesn’t have a body, and thus doesn’t have parts in that sense. But that’s only part of the story. It’s not just that he’s not composed of physical parts; he’s also not composed of metaphysical parts, like essence and existence.

Because God’s essence is identical with his existence, it means that whatever is predicated of God is God. As one scholar puts it, “given that essence and [existence] are identical in God and only in God, the perfection attributed to Him does not signify an actuality distinct from His being, thereby modifying it, but signifies the divine being itself”—in other words, all of God’s attributes are identical with his being. But if all his attributes are identical with his being, it follows that God is simple, since his being is one. In other words, everything that makes God God just is God.

Implications for how we understand God

So how does that affect how we understand God? Well, if all of God’s attributes are identical with his being, it means that, properly speaking, God doesn’t have goodness; God is goodness. God doesn’t have wisdom; God is wisdom. God doesn’t have love; God is love. And the same could be said of all his attributes.

Now, this sounds somewhat counterintuitive. If all of God’s attributes are his being, surely then that would imply that God’s love is God’s wisdom, and is God’s power, and so on. Yet when we talk about God, we talk about these as separate features of God, or as separate attributes.

So the next question we need to think about is, how is it that understand God?

The analogy of being

To answer this we must consider what’s called the analogy of being. Basically what it comes down to is that there are three ways in which we use language. When we speak univocally, it means that the way we use a word in one context is exactly the same as the way we use it in another. If I say, for example, I threw a ball, and the cat chased a ball of string, the word “ball” carries the same meaning—in both cases we’re talking about a round object.

When we use a word equivocally, we’re using the word in two totally different, unrelated senses. For example, the cat chased the ball of string; and Hermione went to the Yule Ball with Victor Krum. It’s the same word, but it carries a totally different meaning.

Analogy is the middle road. We use analogies all the time: using something more familiar to talk about something less familiar, noting the ways in which it’s the same, while acknowledging the ways it isn’t. So when we speak analogically, we walk a middle road between univocal and equivocal use of words. For example, the way I use the word “see” when I say: I see the cake on the table, and I see what you mean by “essence” and “existence.” The way I’m using the word “see” in these sentences is different in some ways, but the same in others—an overlap between univocal and equivocal use of terms. We could think of it as following the same pattern, but in a different mode of being. When I see the cake on the table, I perceive it physically; when I see what you mean by “essence” and “existence,” I see it mentally.

The question, then, is which of these three is most suited to the way that we talk about God? The easy one to eliminate is equivocal use of terms. If we could only speak of God equivocally, it would mean that we could say nothing meaningful about God at all, since everything we say about him would have a totally different meaning. But God has revealed himself to us, so we can safely throw this one out.

So it’s a toss-up between univocal and analogical language. Univocal knowledge would imply that when we ascribe wisdom to someone, and when we ascribe wisdom to God, wisdom means the same in both cases. Or when we ascribe goodness to God, and when we ascribe goodness to Roland, goodness means the same in both cases. But this can’t be the case in God. Remember, analogical knowledge is using the word in the same way, but for different modes of being. But God isn’t in the same mode of being as us—God’s essence is his existence. Therefore, while there is a point of contact, there is nevertheless some distance between the way we understand God, and God as he is. So what we’re left with is analogy.

Coming back to simplicity, then, we should expect the way we understand God’s attributes to be the whole story of how God is in himself, because God’s mode of being is different to ours. As one scholar puts it: “What is present in God in immaterial and simple fashion is realised in the creature in material fashion and in different ways.”

It’s kind of like what Roland was talking about a few weeks ago: it’s a way for the biblical authors to talk about upper-register, more ethereal things, using lower register, more concrete things. The Bible (particularly the OT) speaks about God’s outstretched arm in delivering his people; it speaks about his nose getting hot when he gets angry. We’re not meant to picture an actual outstretched arm, or actual nostrils. It’s what we generally call anthropomorphism—from two Greek words: ἀνθροπος, meaning “human” or “person,” and μορφη, meaning “form”—talking about things in person-form.

One scholar writes:

At the heart of this ontological modesty is the recognition that our thought about God is inevitably limited in precisely this way: God’s essence is simple, incomposite; our thought and speech about it are complex, multiple, discursive, and so inexact. One implication of this is that we cannot reason analytically about divine reality, or at least not with any confidence. Our terms have no sure referent but are instead in some degree metaphorical. They cannot bear the weight of precision needed for analytic reasoning.

We can’t understand God as he is, and consequently, we can’t comprehend God’s simplicity as it is. Although we don’t know nothing—we can still talk about God meaningfully by way of analogy—it does mean we can only know him using the categories available to us as material beings. Paradoxically, “We can only have complex propositions and thoughts about the simple God.”

Divine simplicity from scripture

We said earlier that simplicity isn’t found in the Bible, but that that doesn’t make it unbiblical. As one scholar puts it: “though the cognitive realization of divine simplicity requires that we contemplate the implications of other doctrines, it is not for that reason any less biblical. All that is explicitly stated in Scripture and all that must necessarily follow from Scripture must equally be regarded as the Bible’s teaching.” We won’t find it explicitly defined, explained, or defended in scripture, but we can infer divine simplicity by what Paul Helm calls “good and necessary consequence.”

Good and necessary consequences “are consequences drawn from an informed induction of the relevant biblical data.” It means taking into account not only what scripture says, but also the logical consequences of what scripture says. This just comes with the territory of doing systematic theology.

You’ll hopefully remember this diagram from our first week; we spoke about how we take what the Bible teaches us on whatever topic we’re looking at, and we organise it to comes to the unified teaching of scripture on a particular topic. But that organisation doesn’t only mean gathering up texts—systematic theology is far more than gathering proof-texts; it’s combining what we can know from scripture with what we can know from nature, to build a system of thought about God and his creation.

Sometimes it’s somewhat more straightforward, as with the Trinity—the Bible tells us that God is three Persons, that each Person is God, but that there is only one God. From there we infer what we now talk about as the doctrine of the Trinity—which we can legitimately do, despite the fact that “trinity” doesn’t occur once in the Bible. We can then fill out the picture with philosophical concepts—which the early church did, talking about the Trinity in terms of substance and essence and so on.

So, for some topics the work of systematic theology is more straightforward—if not in what we discover about God (like the fact that he is three yet one), then at least in terms of methodology. For other topics, though, it’s less straightforward. Divine simplicity is inferred not from a set of texts (or propositions that summarise a bunch of texts), but from other doctrines which themselves depend on their own sets of texts, organised and combined to systematically explain God as he is. Our way forward, then, will be to look briefly at a few doctrines from which divine simplicity can be reasonably inferred.

Creation

The first is something we’ve spoken about already: God is the cause of everything outside himself. This is how he’s consistently portrayed throughout the Bible. The way Paul puts it in Romans 11: “from him and through him and to him are all things” (v. 36). He is the uncaused cause of everything—again, not just in the sense of bringing everything into being, but in sustaining it every moment it is in existence.

From this divine simplicity can be inferred, since the first uncaused cause would have to be simple, because, as we’ve seen, the uncaused cause of everything would have to be pure actuality and pure being, both of which entail divine simplicity.

Aseity

Linked with the doctrine of creation is the aseity. The word “aseity” comes from the Latin, a se, meaning “from itself.” The idea is that “God depends on nothing other than himself for his existence.” Aseity means that, while everything other than God depends on God for its existence, God depends on nothing apart from himself.

This fits with how the Jews thought about God in Jesus’ day. One scholar explains: “God is the only living one—that is, the only one to whom life belongs eternally and intrinsically. All other life derives from him, is given by him, and is taken back by him”—as we read in Deuteronomy 32:39 we read: “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.” That, by the way, is what is so huge about Jesus claiming in John 5:26 that “as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself.”

But we could take this further: not only does God not depend on things outside himself; he doesn’t depend on certain attributes which make God who he is which are apart from God himself. In Exodus 3:14, God introduces himself to Moses as “I Am”: he is able to deliver the Israelites from Egypt of himself—because of his own self-sufficiency. “By identifying Himself with His own existence, which is one implication of His revealed name, God declares that He is wholly independent of others and thus that our faith in Him need not be ultimately grounded in some source of reliability that lies outside of or prior to Him.”

Again we might think of what Paul says in Acts 17: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (vv. 24–25).

Immutability

The third attribute that points in the direction of divine simplicity is the fact that God is immutable, or unchanging. We could cite a number of texts in support of this: “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind” (Num. 23:19); “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas. 1:17); “I the Lord do not change” (Mal. 3:6).

It’s worth pointing out that these passages chiefly have to do with God’s character, not God’s being. The biblical authors weren’t interested in metaphysics—not to say they were against it, it simply wasn’t their concern or why they were writing. But from these texts concerning the unchangingness of God’s character, we can infer unchangingness in God’s being.

Again, this follows from the fact that God is purely actual. Change, we’ve been saying, is simply the actualisation of a potential. But since God is purely actual, it follows that he doesn’t change. Immutability also follows from God’s eternity, as we’ll see in just a moment.

Infinity and eternity

In Psalm 147:5 we read: “Great is our Lord, and abundant in power; his understanding is beyond measure.” In Job 11:7 we read: “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?” and in 5:9 we read that God “does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number.”

Philosophically we might explain it slightly differently, remembering that philosophy wasn’t what the biblical authors were trying to do, at least not in the sense in which we’re talking about philosophy. The doctrine of infinity is simply that God is without limitations. Everything we can say about God is true of him in an unlimited fashion. But, as we’ve seen, because we only get at our understanding of God analogically, these attributes aren’t just quantitatively greater that what we might see in the world around us; they’re also qualitatively different. For example, when we say that God’s knowledge is unlimited, it’s just that he knows all of the things like Roland knows a lot of the things and I know a few of the things. Rather, it’s that the way in which God knows things is fundamentally different to the ways in which we know things.

We could also infer simplicity from God’s eternity. Eternity is infinity as regards time. In Isaiah 57:15 God is described as “the One who is high and lifted up, who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy.”

Since God is outside of time he doesn’t temporally separated, having his being divided across various moments of time. Since we’re going to be talking about that at some length next week, I won’t say any more on that now. What I will say, though, is that this links up with what we said about immutability—change implies multiplicity in God, since each moment is a different “part” of God, as it were. But since God is outside of time—since God is eternal—it follows that God is immutable, and from this it follows that God is simple.

Reflection

So what does divine simplicity mean for us?

Well again, just take a moment to think: how do you think about God? In your mind, what is God like? If you wrote something at the beginning of this session, maybe take a look at it again, and see how it compares—whether anything has changed as a result of this evening’s talk.

One of the implications of simplicity that we’ve seen is that the various attributes of God are identical with his being, such that God is goodness, and God is wisdom, and God is love. The temptation all through Christian history has been to emphasise one over the other. Sometimes that’s been more radical. Some, for instance, have drawn a hard distinction between God in the OT and God in the NT, in the OT being angry and wrathful, and in the NT being loving and kind.

But sometimes it’s more subtle, thinking along the lines of, “God wouldn’t have a problem with that—God is love.” Or, reacting to that, you’ll have others who say, “No, that’s not what that verse means; first and foremost God is holy”—and they whip out a copy of Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and start beating you over the head with it.

One of the implications of divine simplicity is that we can’t elevate one of God’s attributes above the rest. We can’t latch onto God’s love, and say that, because it says in 1 John that God is love, and not God is holiness, that God’s love should now be thought of as most fundamental—even if we don’t end up pitting it against the rest of his attributes. As Wayne Grudem puts it: “He is the same God always, and everything he says or does is fully consistent with all his attributes.”

Divine simplicity means that we can’t conceive of God’s love without his justice; his goodness without his wisdom; his power without his knowledge; and so on. What all this strongly emphasises is that this is a God in whom we can have confidence. We can know with absolute certainty that we can have absolute confidence because we know not just that God won’t change because he’s said so; it’s that he won’t change because everything that makes God God just is God.