50 Key Concepts in Theology

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,

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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.

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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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