What is God Like? Introducing Divine Attributes
Ways of Knowing God in Scripture
The Bible is a God-centered book. Take the book of Romans, for example. Among other titles, the apostle Paul penned the word “God” 153 times. The Bible’s opening words begin with God as he displays who he is in creation. God’s separation and opposition to sin is revealed in man’s fall. His holy love is expressed in the Bible’s plan of redemption, and the final chapters end with God displaying who he is in the consummation of his kingdom. Every act is first and foremost for the glory of his name (Ps. 19:1–2; Is. 48:9–11; Ez. 36:22–23; Rom. 1:5). If the Scriptures are read for reasons other than ultimately knowing who God is, then readers will miss its primary purpose. From beginning to end, the Bible answers the question, “What is God like?”
Christians have explored Scriptures' answer(s) to this question in two complementary ways. First, by reading through the Bible’s storyline, a verbal portrait of God unfolds before us as more and more of the Lord’s character and acts are revealed. Second, Christians have organized what Scripture says about who God is into categories that define and detail different characteristics of God. This second method of biblical reasoning is called systematic theology. The Gospel Forum’s forthcoming articles will be a systematic exploration of what God is like. Systematic theologians answer this question by identifying certain “attributes” of God revealed in the Bible.
Categorizing God’s Attributes
An attribute of God is a character trait or quality that is ascribed to God. Other terms used for God’s attributes include his “perfections, properties, virtues, and predicates.”1 Within the study of divine attributes, theologians have noticed characteristics or qualities about God that reveal his transcendence (otherness) and others displaying his immanence (nearness). Thus, two categories have traditionally been utilized for organizing God’s attributes: incommunicable and communicable. Attributes designated as incommunicable are qualities about God that reveal ways he is not like us. These truths about God really do not have any analogy with human experience. They are unique to God alone. For instance, God is omnipresent; he is “exalted above all time and yet penetrates every moment of time with his eternity (Ps. 90:2).” This reality is incomparable to human nature and incomprehensible to the human mind. Yet it has been revealed in Scripture for the purpose of bringing all people to worship the all-present God. Incommunicable attributes make clear the only true answer to the question: who is God like? “I am God, and there is none like me (Is. 46:9).”
God’s nearness, his communicable attributes, are presented in Scripture in perfect harmony with his otherness. Attributes designated as communicable reveal a divine quality that is imaged by God’s crown jewel of creation, human beings. Image-bearers are designed to offer a faint reflection of imprinted divine characteristics. For instance, God is love (1 John 4:8). The attribute of God’s love is eternally and ultimately expressed in the one divine love between the Father, Son, and Spirit. We are called to reflect the love of God based on its imprint within us (1 John 4:7). At this point, caution is necessary. Even though communicable attributes are shown to connect to human qualities stamped within mankind by God, we cannot be misled into believing any attribute of God is equivalent to an attribute of man. Compare man’s love and God’s love, for example. God is love. Love is essential to his being; he exists as love. God’s love is exhaustive and eternal. Contrastively, man has love. Love is not essential to man’s being. A person could lose their capacity for love and remain human. In other words, humanity could exist without the capacity to love. Man’s love is finite and inconsistent. So, the essential, exhaustive, and eternal love of God is in an entirely different category than the love of man. Even God’s communicable attributes are incomprehensible! Though there is a “faint likeness” of communicable attributes within the image of man, these “attributes are present in God in an original, independent, unchangeable, simple, and infinite way.” Both his nearness and his otherness display his uniqueness.
The Necessity of God’s Simplicity
One final truth that aids our grasp of all God’s attributes is the attribute of divine simplicity. Among other truths about God, The Second London Confession of Faith declares, “The Lord our God is…a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions… (2.1).” By affirming God is spirit rather than possessing a body (Jn. 4:24) and denying that God is composed of parts, the early Baptists followed the ancient heritage of theologians throughout church history that confess God as simple. By simple, don’t think God is basic or unintelligent. This term is used to communicate the opposite of something made up of different parts. God is one (Deut. 6:4; 1 Cor. 8:6); he is not a series of pieces put together like a puzzle. Something made up of parts requires a composer, a builder. Certainly, God has no composer, and he has no parts whatsoever. God is simple.
What does God’s simplicity mean for all his divine attributes? It steers us away from thinking of God’s attributes as “parts” of him. God is not a graph made up of percentages where he is 20% love, 30% holiness, 15% wise, etc. Attributes are not things God possess; they are qualities that God is. In other words, God does not have attributes. He is his attributes. Ponder divine love as expressed earlier. The apostle John does not say, “God has love.” He declared, “God is love.” What is God? God is love. God is holiness. God is all-powerful. God is all-wise. Many theologians have summed up God’s simplicity by confessing that “All that is in God is God,” or, in philosophical language, God’s attributes are his essence. Again, the uniqueness of God is on display. As creatures, we can distinguish between what we are (our essence) and what we have (our attributes). A person can lose their arm or their brain function and still remain human. But God has no division between his essence (what he is) and his attributes (what he has). If he loses the attribute of love or holiness or omnipresence, then he ceases to be God. As Bavinck concludes, divine simplicity tells us God “is all that he has.”
Worshipping the Right God
As we study God’s attributes, the truth of God’s uniqueness displayed in his simplicity should bring us to our knees in worship. We are not God and cannot even comprehend being God. Yet from ancient Babel to modern America fallen humanity attempts to rival who God is by aspiring to be him. Among many sins, one of man’s fatal flaws in this divinization project is to fixate on obtaining only one of God’s attributes. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, has changed pursuits over the last few years and now brings awareness to the perils of the power of social media, A.I., and the digital revolution that has taken the world by storm. He describes the sense of optimism that many tech leaders embodied as they believed the “God-like” power of these new forms and technological advancements would propel humanity into something like utopia by connecting, educating, and unifying the world. Of course, these hopes have certainly been humbled considering social media and the digital revolution’s impact. People are more than ever disconnected from personal relationships, misguided by competing information, and fragmented through political and cultural wars. The assumed possession of digital omnipotence has turned out to be an untamable beast that could culturally spiral the West.
Harris’s analysis of the problem teaches an important lesson. He concludes, “How do we wield the power of gods without the love, prudence, and wisdom of gods?” In other words, even if humanity were to possess one attribute of God, particularly divine power, this does not make man divine. The attribute of God’s omnipotence without attributes like divine wisdom is a monster, yet it is the monster man aspires to be. To truly be God is to exist as all-powerful and all-wise. In fact, to be God is to exist as all his attributes. Man has a small and distorted grasp of what he thinks it is like to be God, and this leads him to aspire not to be like the true, incomprehensible God, but to run after an idol god that is just a creaturely conception. We can neither become nor fully conceive of being the eternal, independent, immutable, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, all-wise, all-loving, holy, good, and just God. All these attributes are one in him, and he is all these attributes at once. This is what God is like.
Timothy George, “The Nature of God: Being, Attributes, and Acts,” in A Theology for the Church, ed. Daniel L. Akin (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2007), 223.
Herman Bavinck, Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion, trans. Cameron Clausing and Gregory Parker (Peabody: Hendrickson Academic, 2022), 56.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God (Glenside: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019), 122.
Bavinck, Guidebook for Instruction, 55.
