Sometimes, theologians (and everyday believers) can think too deeply about God’s attributes. We have a human tendency to overcomplicate things, and we can do that about God as well.
There’s a theological concept that, by its title, seeks to avoid overcomplicating God. It’s called divine simplicity.
“God’s simplicity entails that his essence and existence are identical, signifying that there is no composition or division within the divine nature,” explains the Lexham Survey of Theology. In other words, God is everything that He is all the time.
“God is not the pieces of a pie,” said pastor and author Jonny Ardavanis in a recent podcast interview with Alisa Childers. “I think that’s really important to understand. He’s all of His attributes all of the time.”
A recent Tabletalk devotional points out that “when we talk about divine attributes, we are talking about the qualities that make God what He is. We should note, however, that God is not a composition of attributes as other entities are. When we talk about God’s attributes, we are making distinctions to help us understand His being, but these attributes are ultimately identical with His essence and not distinct from it.”
Another recent Tabletalk devotional explains how God’s simplicity is different from the nature of God’s creation (as well as mythical creatures):
This is not how creatures exist. Human beings, for example, possess attributes and can gain or lose them without losing their essential humanity. Consider the attribute of wisdom. A person may be wise or a person may be foolish, but in either case, the person is still a human being. The same cannot be said of God. If God were not perfectly wise, He would not be God. He is “the only wise God” (Rom. 16:27).
Divine unity and simplicity also mean that God’s existence is identical to His essence. We can conceive of different natures or essences, but not every nature that we conceive of actually exists. An individual created being is a nature that possesses existence and not that nature by itself. For instance, we can conceive of the nature of the mythical half-man, half-goat creature known as a faun; we can know what a faun is. Fauns, however, do not actually exist. That a faun is (its existence) is different from what it is (its essence).
How does the concept of divine simplicity show up in scripture? The most obvious way it shows up is in the name God gives Himself to Moses in Exodus 3:13-14:
Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I am who I am.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”
The Shema starts with an affirmation of God’s unity and simplicity: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4, ESV).
Related: Sunday Thoughts: The Word and the Word
There’s not much in the New Testament that speaks directly to divine simplicity. Some of Jesus’ words point to it, but don’t address it directly. Many statements in the New Testament speak of God’s specific attributes, but they don’t do so at the expense of God’s simplicity. I like how Kevin DeYoung puts it in “Daily Doctrine”:
Simplicity means we should not think of God as what you get when you combine goodness and mercy and justice and power and infinity and immutability and roll them all together into one divine being. This would make God the sum of his attributes, and it would make each of his attributes a certain percentage of God. And that would lead us to rank some attributes higher and more essential than others.
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It is perfectly appropriate to highlight the love of God when Scripture makes it such a central theme. But the declaration “God is love” (1 John 4:8) does not carry more metaphysical weight than “God is light” (1 John 1:5), “God is spirit” (John 4:24), “God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29), or any scriptural statements about God (whether the word is is there or not). God does not just have some attributes. There is no attribute that attaches to him like a barnacle on a ship. He’s not a jigsaw puzzle of divine properties. He’s not a ball of duct tape with lots of attributes stuck to him.
Divine simplicity helps us think about God in the right way.
“For I the LORD do not change,” God declares in Malachi 3:6a. That’s the essence of divine simplicity, and that should drive us to worship and glorify Him.
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