50 Key Concepts in Theology
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50 Key Concepts in Theology - Rayment-Pickard
The Divine Attributes
The analysis of God by considering his various qualities. One way of approaching theology is to analyse God’s various attributes. Many of these attributes are given in the Bible – such as God being holy and all loving – but others, such as God’s simplicity, derive from philosophical ideas (mostly neo-Platonic) about the necessary character of God. There is a basic underlying tension here between the Hebraic story of God found in the Bible and the Greek philosophical conception of divinity. Producing a simple list of potential divine attributes is fairly unproblematic, since God, by definition, has every attribute in perfection. So when we consider God’s power, we must conclude that he is omnipotent (all powerful), and when we consider his knowledge, we must say that he is omniscient (all knowing). Other doctrines affirm God’s immutability (unchangeability), eternity (timelessness), impassibility (freedom from passions), aseity (self-sufficiency) and simplicity (indivisibility). But difficulties soon present themselves. A first set of problems arises when we try to reconcile the various attributes. So if God is simple, is this not a restriction on his omnipotent capacity to be as complicated or as simple as he likes? And if God is unchangeable, how is it possible for him to exercise his power at any moment in time, since the exercise of his power would involve him in a process of change? Theologians – particularly scholastic theologians – have offered intricate answers to these kinds of questions, but they become increasingly convoluted and unconvincing. A radical alternative to harmonising the attributes is to accept that God may be paradoxical. Søren Kierkegaard argued in Philosophical Fragments (1844) that the doctrine of the two natures of Christ – divine and human – is an absolute paradox. Rowan Williams has offered another rationale for theological paradoxes: ‘We utter paradoxes not to mystify or avoid problems, but precisely to stop ourselves making things easy by pretending that some awkward or odd feature of our perception isn’t really there. We speak in paradoxes because we have to speak in a way that keeps a question alive’ (Open to Judgement). Another set of problems arises when we consider the logical contradictions arising from the absolute nature of the attributes. If we were to say that God is very powerful, the problem would not arise, but we make his power an absolute omnipotence. If God’s power is absolute, is it possible for him to create a rock that is too heavy for himself to lift? The answer, logically, must be both yes and no. Another version of this paradox runs: ‘It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.’ A further area of difficulty concerns the very act of dividing God into separate qualities and faculties. This reduces God to a list of human categories and contradicts the doctrine of divine simplicity, which says that God is not composed of parts. The main theological objection to the analysis of divine attributes is that the process appears to limit God to human ideas about the necessary nature of God. Nicholas of Cusa suggested an alternative approach: the consideration of the possible nature of God or, as he called it, God’s possible-actuality (possest). He argued that God’s infinite possibility can contain ‘the coincidence of opposites’. In this way God embraces his own paradoxes. THINKERS Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) argues in his Summa Theologiae that God’s perfection means that his attributes are necessarily unified. The attributes appear to be diverse because of the limitations of human thought. St Augustine (354–430) stressed the unity of the attributes, but also relished the possibilities for divine paradox: ‘What art Thou then, my God? Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent; most merciful and most just; most hidden and most present; most beautiful and most strong, standing firm and elusive, unchangeable and all-changing; never new, never old; ever working, ever at rest’ (Confessions). D. M. Baillie (1887–1954) argued (in God was in Christ) against the doctrine that God is impassible (impervious to suffering) on the grounds that impassibility could not accommodate Christ’s agony on the cross. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) describes (in The Divine Comedy) God’s three primary attributes, corresponding to the persons of the Holy Trinity: Power, Wisdom, Love. Colin Gunton (1941–2003) argues (in Act and Being) that the divine attributes can only be understood within a narrative about what God does: ‘God is what he does and does what he is.’ Gilbert de la Porrée (1070–1154) argued that there was a basic distinction between the essential nature of God and his attributes. His views were deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) argued that God’s nature was love and that all other attributes must derive from this. IDEAS Coincidentia oppositorum: or coincidence of opposites, a view developed by Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century (in On Learned Ignorance) and recently revived by Thomas Altizer, that sees all contradictions contained within God’s infinity. Divine command theory: this states that God is not subject to our definition of goodness and determines what is good through his ordinances. The Euthrypo dilemma was posed by Socrates in Plato’s Euthrypo and asks whether ‘God’ and ‘goodness’ are one and the same. Is an action good because God approves of it? Or does God approve of good actions because they are good? The latter position would put goodness above God. The problem of the one and the many: the ancient philosophical puzzle of how to reconcile the diversity of the world with its unity. BOOKS Colin Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine Attributes (Eerdmans, 2002) Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes (Blackwell, 2002) |
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