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THE CHARACTER OF GOD
THE PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES are divine qualities, such as life, spirit, will, and freedom. God enjoys these perfectly, and communicates them to human beings in proportion to their capacity to receive them (Hilary, On Trin. 1.19, 4.2, VI.9; Augustine, Trin. 15.42; Tho. Aq., ST1 Q29). Each step toward the clarification of divine attributes leads to greater personalization. With each step we move ever closer to discerning features of divine-human interaction.
God is free, living, active, spiritual, and personal, while not ceasing to be God—unsurpassably present, knowing, and influential. The consensus is searching for characterizations of God that are adequate to the divine reality attested in scripture (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q6; Quenstedt, TDP 1:288).
To this point we have been considering only those characteristics of the divine life that are attested by Scripture (1) as intrinsic to God alone without reference to creatures—in that God is necessary, infinite, eternal, one, and alive—these are known as primary or essential attributes; and (2) as displaying God’s way of being present to, knowing, and influencing the cosmos generally (omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence), known as relational attributes, conceivable primarily in relation to the world of creaturely beings. But in this chapter we are speaking of those attributes of the character of God that manifest qualities analogous to (3) human personality, freedom, and will.
God as Incomparably Personal
A personal relationship involves and requires an interactive speaking and listening relationship of free beings. Even though God’s way of being a person far transcends human ways of being persons, nonetheless the divine-human encounter is portrayed in Scripture as a personal relationship of meeting, communication, becoming mutually committed, experiencing frustrations and failures, splitting up, and becoming reconciled again (Exod. 28:43; Num. 11:33; 1 Sam. 10:1–5; Pss. 4:1; 17:1; 74:1; Hos. 14:1; Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 2.1). All these are things that happen to persons.
Scripture portrays God as one who is self-determining, conscious, feeling, and willing. God has intricate, evolving relationships with other personal beings (Matt. 7:21; 26:39; Augustine, Trin. 15.42). God is known and celebrated in the life of prayer as personal, and understood by means of metaphors of human personal responsiveness (Matt. 6:10; John 6:38–40).
Persons by definition have feelings. Each one has an identifiable self, intellect, and capacity for response. God is represented in Scripture as having much of the psychological makeup of what we know as personhood: God speaks (Gen. 1:3), sees (Gen. 11:5), and hears (Ps. 94:9). By rough analogy with human feelings it is said that God can be angry (Deut. 1:37), jealous (Exod. 20:5), and compassionate (Ps. 111:4). God has intellect and emotion. No stone or abstract idea or amoeba can speak words, listen, care for others, get angry, respond to hurts. Only personal beings can experience these feelings (Origen, Homily 18.3; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q29).
Although God is far more than what we can signify by our term personal, God is certainly not less than personal being. But what do we mean when we speak of God as “person”?
Two preliminary observations clear the way for the answer: God speaks as “I,” and God has a name.
God Speaks as “I”
God can say “I.” Whatever being can say “I” is a person. For knowing oneself or another as capable of saying “I” requires self-consciousness, intentionality, the will to communicate, and self-determination. Rocks and plants, however beautiful, cannot call themselves “I” because they lack the capacity for personal awareness. They lack words to say it. They lack the freedom to conceive it. This is why rocks and plants are so different from human beings and superpersonal intelligences (angeloi, angels) and God. All creatures share being, but all creatures do not share personhood.
A central feature of anyone who can say “I” is a memory that is sustained over varied experiences (Augustine, Conf. 1–3). Even with a vastly varied history of experience, the person remains an “I” throughout all those stages of development. I am different in experience from what I was as a child, but I still remain “me.” I may choose one way in one moment, another later, but it is still me choosing differently. Memory helps me grasp the continuity in my choosing, and to identify what it means when I say “I.” Memory binds together my awareness of my self as a history of choosing (Kierkegaard, Either/Or 2.2).
God is spoken of in Scripture as one who chooses, who has memory, who lives through a history of choosing, and whose character is known as One who has made certain choices. These are things that look like human personality, but God’s personality is different, for God has an eternal memory of all things. God experiences all times in eternal simultaneity. God holds in unified integrity the awareness of all events. God’s memory is in some ways like, but in more ways unlike, human memory.
There are times when God seems to have forgotten the faithful (Pss. 13:1; 44:24) and when God is earnestly asked to remember the people in their affliction (Lam. 3:19). Yet Scripture marveled that God would always remember the covenant, remaining ever faithful to it, even when the people had forgotten it (Gen. 9:15, 16; Lev. 26:42; Jer. 44:21; Gregory of Nazianzus, Theol. Orat. 28.28).
God Reveals His Name
God is not a nameless energy or abstract idea. Hence God is not an “it.” God is inadequately described by impersonal terms such as ground of being or the Unconditioned (Tillich, Syst. Theol. I), external infinity (S. Alexander, Space, Time, and Deity, 2:353), Reality Idealized (E. S. Ames, Religion: 153–55), the Absolute (Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind), or the Creative Event (H. N. Wieman, Source of the Common Good). For to none of these abstract descriptions is a personal name attached.
God has a name. This points to a major difference between persons and things. To Moses, God’s name is revealed with clues embedded in the name itself. Calling Yahweh by name is something quite different than speaking abstractly of an “unmoved Mover,” or trying to pray to “Reality Idealized,” or petitioning to an undifferentiated “ground of being” (Aristotle, Metaphy.; Ames, Religion; Tillich, Syst. Theol. I), all of which duck away from naming God with a personal name. Different from these is the God of Scripture, whose name is constantly being revealed through events to persons in history. “How wrong it would be if we were to believe people’s testimonies on the basis of what others say about them, yet not believe God’s Word when he talks about himself” (Ambrose, On Abraham, 1.3.21).
The history of revelation is the history of the meeting of named beings, not unnameable abstractions or distilled ideas. The Pentateuch reports that as early as Cain and Abel, persons “began to invoke the Lord by name” (Gen. 4:26). Scriptural accounts constantly call God by name, and therefore assume a divine-human interpersonal relationship, a meeting between personal beings (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 3.1; Tertullian, Ag. Praxeas17).
Pronouncing the divine name of the incomparably holy One (Yahweh, El, Adōna
) was regarded as a most perilous matter. “You shall not make wrong use of the name of the Lord your God; the Lord will not leave unpunished the man who misuses his name” (Exod. 20:7). Each of the various names God allows himself to be called was thought to reveal something decisive of the character of the One named. It was no small or accidental matter that God revealed the divine name as Yahweh or El or Elōhm or El Shadda, for these names provided trace indications of the unique sort of person God is (Exod. 20:24; 23:21; Ezek. 43:7–8; Calvin, Inst. 1.10.3; 1.13.3–4).
Impersonal Terms Are Inadequate for God
Since God is a person, God cannot properly be thought of without using personal terms (Hilary, On Trin. 3.23; Augustine, Conf. 5).
This point was vigorously pursued by early Christian teachers. It became an important feature part of the careful regulation of Christian language about God. It helped to defend Christian teaching
- from pantheism, the view that God is the world (which cannot see any difference between God and the world, or between creator and creature)
- from polytheism (which abuses the analogy between human personality and divine personality by unilaterally attributing to God human limitations and faults)
- from agnosticism (which denies that anyone can know the divine person even if such a person existed)
- from atheism (which denies that any eternal personal being exists)
The fullness of personhood exists in God alone. It is not that God’s personhood is derived from human understandings of personality. That would convey an inadequate reflection of the sovereign freedom which is found incomparably in God and only inadequately in ourselves (Augustine, Trin. 15.42; Barth, CD 1/1:279, 3/4:245; Oden, KC 4:114). Yet this is not to deny that human beings, too, have a refraction of personhood, which is not wholly dissimilar from God’s personhood (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q29) since humanity is created in the image of God.
God Is Spirit
That “God is Spirit” is the most direct definition of God that Jesus offered (John 4:24). Jesus was speaking to a woman of Samaria, teaching that “those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth,” correcting the idea that the worship of God is confined to particular places such as Mount Gerizim (Chrysostom, Comm. on St. John 33–34).
Pneuma (spirit), like the wind, is known only by its effects (Tertullian, On the Soul 11–12). God is invisible, for “No one has seen God at any time” (John 1:18; Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Theol. Orat.; Calvin, Inst. 1.13.14; 2.2.20). God as Spirit cannot be objectified in the same way that bodily and physical matter may be viewed as objects (Origen, OFP 1.1).
God as pure Spirit is “the Father of our spirits” (Heb. 12:9), who creates other self-determining, responsible beings, and enters into interpersonal interaction and communion with them (Augustine, Trin. 8.3). The ascription of spirituality to God awakens a profound rejoicing in the human spirit, along with a humble acknowledgment that the human spirit is akin to God the Spirit (Clement of Alex., Stromata 4.3). It is also a guard against the demeaning of humanity and the physical or temporal localization of God (Athenagoras, A Plea for the Chr. 15).
Intellect, affect, and volition are essential powers of personal spirit. We know this because we possess in lesser degree these competencies that God possesses in completeness (Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 7, 8; Augustine, CG 13.24). It is due to our own individual experience of feeling that we can know that God also feels. It is from our own acts of willing that we can understand in some small measure that God has sovereign freedom.
Christian teaching does not conclude, however, that the human ability to think, feel, and will is capable of providing a fully adequate understanding of God’s mind, experience, and will. Rather, our natural analogies stand constantly under the guidance and critique of Scripture, and of the ecumenical tradition’s exegesis of Scripture (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q13; Calvin, Inst. 1.13.20). Moreover, it is on the basis of God’s knowing, feeling, and willing that it is possible rightly to consider and understand human knowing, feeling, and willing (Augustine, Enchiridion 26; Barth, CD 3/4; Oden, KC 2).
In reducing the reality of God to the finite world, pantheism regards the world as God’s body indistinguishably. In doing so it has met constant resistance from classic Christian teaching. The first commandment forbids reducing God to a visible image or idol or object of the senses (Exod. 20:3). In doing so, it makes a decisive moral claim based on the divine attribute of spirituality. That God is Spirit means God is invisible and incorporeal, not a body, not reducible to matter, not an object of empirical investigation, not evident to our eyes (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q3): “On the day when the Lord spoke to you out of the fire on Horeb, you saw no figure of any kind; so take good care not to fall into the degrading practice of making figures carved in relief, in the form of a man or a woman, or of any animal on the earth or bird that flies in the air, or of any reptile on the ground or fish in the waters under the earth” (Deut. 4:15–17).
God’s Freedom Makes Ample Room for Human Freedom
Pivotal among personal qualities attributed to God in Scripture is will. What is God’s distinctive way of being free? To speak of divine freedom is to ascribe to God in infinite degree something we know quite well—personal freedom.
We ascribe willing to God because we experience our own finite willing as radically dependent upon some Whence or source of prior causes, without which our willing would remain absurd and unexplainable (Hilary, Trin. 8.12). If there is any movement or change at all in the causal order, it must be caused. To avoid the intellectual clumsiness of an infinite regression of causes, we infer that there must be a primal source of all causes (Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Theol. Orat. 8; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q19). If willing exists at all in creation, some source of willing beings must be posited, however named.
We ourselves experience our own self-determination as incalculably good. The proof of that is to take away freedom, and test out whether anyone likes that. Anything that is good to such an extraordinary degree we may properly ascribe in infinite proportion to God, an argument by way of heightening, the way of eminence (Augustine, Trin. 10.13; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q96).
Humans are here swimming in a sea of which we already have knowledge—intimate, personal knowledge—namely, of ourselves, since we are to some extent free (Josh. 24:15; Phil. 2:13; Origen, OFP 3.1.1–12; Augustine, CG 5.10; Calvin, Inst. 2.3). No sentence could be read without assuming the power to read or not read it. That implies some capacity for self-determination (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 4.18–21; Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will 2.28; Anselm, On Freedom of Choice 3).
We are now studying God’s qualities of personhood in close conjunction with our own self-examination and with our personal self-knowledge (Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 21; Calvin, Inst. 1.1.1, 3.2–4). For what we mean by being a person is to some large extent precisely this: a capacity to will (Ambrose, Six Days of Creation 6.3.10).
Discerning the Will of God
The divine will is the infinite power of God to determine God’s own intentions, execute actions, and use means adequate to the ends intended (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q19). God’s will is the effective energy inherent in God by which God is able to do all things consistent with the divine nature (Calvin, Inst. 1.18.1).
The will of God is eternally directed toward the good, according to Scripture. Hence it is a will that lives in complete felicity (Augustine, CG 22.30). “Whatever the Lord pleases, that he does” (Ps. 135:6).
Since the One who wills is God, that will must be independent, unified, and eternal (Hilary, Trin. 9.26; Anselm, Monologium 7). The will of God is intrinsically connected with the related divine attributes of omnipresence and omniscience. The freedom of God is the sufficient reason why anything exists at all (John of Damascus, OF 3.14; Calvin, Inst. 2.3.10).
Since we have already discussed God’s power, it might seem pointless to speak further of God’s freedom or willing. However much interwoven, God’s power and God’s will may be functionally distinguished. One may have power without willing to exercise it (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q25). One of the powers of will is the will not to exercise power.
The Divine Will and Other Wills
Choice is definitive of personal existence. What makes us persons is that we know ourselves to be able to act in one way rather than another.
Human freedom shares in divine freedom, yet within the limits of finitude. In Scripture both kinds of freedom are seen in close connection: “Freely you have received, freely give” (Matt. 10:8; John 8:32–36; 1 Pet. 2:16). We pray to God: “Grant me a willing spirit” (Ps. 51:12).
Scripture frequently attests to the derived character of human freedom, derived, that is, from God’s own freedom (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 3.17.1–2). “In Christ indeed we have been given our share in the heritage, as was decreed in his design whose purpose is everywhere at work. For it was his will that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, should cause his glory to be praised” (Eph. 1:11–12).
God wills to empower other wills. God “wills himself and things other than himself; himself as the end, other things as ordered to that end. It befits the divine goodness that other things should be partakers therein” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q19.2).
In this way human freedom is ordered in relation to divine freedom. We are persons because God is a person. It is from divine freedom that human freedom is derived and made understandable.
The Primordial and Consequent Will of God
Classical Christian teaching has persistently held that God’s will may be viewed in two ways:
- Primordially, God wills what God wills eternally, that is, before creation,
- Consequentially, God wills what God wills in consequence of creation and in the light of the specific contingencies of creaturely beings (Ps. 143:10; Eph. 1:1–9; John of Damascus, OF 4.19–21; Heppe, RD: 90; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1: 404).
Since the divine intellect knows all things eternally, and thus antecedently to the world and time, so the divine volition wills all things antecedently from the viewpoint of providence. God is not without a will prior to creation. This is God’s original will for the world before the fall of human freedom.
Yet as history develops after the fall and thus consequently, God is and remains free to express and execute the divine will within the changing conditions of fallen history (Ps. 40:8; Matt. 6:10; John 7:17; Tertullian, On Prayer 4.1–2; Origen, OFP 3.1.6–22). This occurs not merely through direct intervention, but also through the layers of divinely ordered natural causality.
God is said to will primordially or antecedently when God wills something independently of creatures, without regard to other wills or any subsequently developing contingent circumstances. For example, it is said that God antecedently wills the good (Rom. 12:2). The good that God wills consequent to contingent circumstances is also good, but good in relation to those circumstances.
God’s antecedent will is sometimes called God’s secretive or absolute or decreeing will. It is simple, independent, eternal, efficacious, and inseparable from God’s very being (Rom. 9:18, 19; Heppe, RD: 90). This general will predates later developing historical circumstances in which the divine good will is willed in and through contingent circumstances following the fall (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q19; T. Jackson, Works 5:331–36).
Within the tangled conditions of history, God wills consequent to whatever changing historical circumstances prevail. As a consequence of particular contingencies occurring in the history that God creates and permits, God consequently wills under contingent conditions. “If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us” (1 John 5:14).
Even after human wills have done all the damage and good they can do under the divine permission of human freedom, God still rules and overrules, commands and countermands, prewills, wills, and postwills through and beyond all human willing.
God’s freedom remains free to respond to what is humanly willed. The consequent will of God follows in the wake of divinely permitted human willing (Rom. 1:10; 1 Cor. 16:12). It is the will of God in response to human willing (1 John 2:17; John 7:17; Cyril of Alex. Comm. on John 4.5). “It is possible to will a thing to be done now, and its contrary afterwards; and yet for the will to remain permanently the same” (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q19).
In this way the divine will exists in itself prior to the complications of fallen human history, yet the divine will also operates and functions in response to human fallenness. God can express the divine good will amid changing historical circumstances and contingencies, but it must be remembered that God’s will remains the same, eternal covenant love, even amid intensive responsiveness to whatever human or historical misery might occur (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 4.4, 5; Hooker, Eccl. Polity 1.5). Although God can will changes, God does not change the eternal divine purpose. Though God can respond to contingencies, God does not make the divine eternal will finally contingent upon the contingencies God has permitted (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q86; Molina, Scientia Media, RPR: 425).
This is why classical Christian teachers have often distinguished between God’s single, unified “necessary will” antecedent to creation, and God’s “free will,” freely utilizing variable means of response to the freedom of creatures (Eph. 1:1–11; Hilary, On Matt. 21.28–32; John of Damascus, OF 19). The terms primordial and consequent will of God may be prematurely assumed by modern readers to be the product of the recent tradition of process philosophy and theology (Whitehead, Hartshorne, Cobb, Ogden), but it is evident that Whitehead himself borrowed these concepts from classical Christian teaching (Clement of Alex., Instr. 1.9; Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 2.4–17; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q19). It is a telling irony that Whitehead’s followers, apparently unaware of how the classical tradition employed deliberate distinctions between the antecedent and the consequent will of God, have used the distinction as the basis of a sustained polemic against the very tradition of classical theism upon which their reasoning depends. Once again ancient Christian teaching has been borrowed, diminished, and fashioned into a tool by which its borrowers have then supposedly “transcended” classical Christian theism.
The Convergence of Divine and Human Willing
Human volition is and remains, however deeply corrupted, always the gift of the divine volition. God’s primordial will is that humanity be saved, but on the way to the last day, many contingencies have emerged.
God does not deal with human beings as sticks. God does not throw them, like stones, in order to coerce virtuous responses. This would deny free personal responsiveness. God deals with human beings not coercively but persuasively, respecting human freedom and its ever-present correlate, human responsibility.
When we act counter to God’s command, God is still able to take our idolatry and sin and make it work toward a greater good, all to God’s glory. Such contingencies may be viewed as the consequent will of God, consequent to historical challenges, failures, and fallenness (Heb. 10:5–10).
Jesus poignantly exclaimed: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that murders the prophets and stones the messengers sent to her! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings; but you would not let me. Look, look! there is your temple, forsaken by God.” (Matt. 23:37–39, italics added). That means: God antecedently wills to save Jerusalem—and all humanity by extension of the metaphor—but Jerusalem has the power of will, divinely granted, momentarily to delay, or temporarily to “not let God complete” the antecedent divine intention except at the intolerable cost of God’s having to destroy or override the gift of human freedom. Human willing is able to resist the will of God temporarily, though never ultimately (Chrysostom, Concerning the Statues 17; Calvin, Inst. 2.3).
Three of the four sets of divine attributes have been described above:
1. The divine being (primary and essential attributes of God: Sufficiency, underived existence, unity, infinity, immeasurability, eternity, life)
2. The divine majesty (the relational attributes of God: All-present, all-knowing, almighty)
3. The divine Person (free, congruent, interactive Spirit)
We are now poised for the fourth cycle of qualities that describe God’s character:
4. The divine goodness (holy, constant, compassionate)
Holiness and Love are Intrinsic to the Divine Character
Among chief moral characteristics attributed by Scripture to God are holiness, justice, righteousness, constancy, truthfulness, goodness, and love. Moral attributes are divine qualities beheld primarily in God’s meeting with, fidelity to, and guidance of free human creatures who are morally accountable within human history. These are features intrinsic to the divine character as made known by Scripture in the history of salvation. Classical Christian exegetes were constrained by Scripture to acknowledge that God is incomparably holy (Ps. 105:3; Isa. 43:14, 15), good (Pss. 25:8; 86:5), merciful (Ps. 130:7; Jer. 33:11), and just (Isa. 45:21; Zeph. 3:5).
Though plants, animals, and earth are recipients of divine mercy, justice, and love, they are not held morally accountable for appropriate responses as fully as are human beings. Higher capacities for reason, language, and responsiveness are largely lacking in these creatures, in comparison with human beings (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 27–30).
Some measure of honesty, justice, and love is necessary for the maintenance of human society, for child raising, and for human happiness. These moral qualities are viewed in Scripture as intrinsic to the divine being itself and most fully beheld in God alone (Hilary, On Trin. 6.19, 9.61, 176–7; Basil, Hex. 9, Letters 2–7).
The great variety of moral qualities attributed to God by Scripture revolves particularly around two—holiness and love. These may be said in summary form to constitute the moral character of God (Ps. 93:5; Hos. 11:1–9; John 17:11–26; Jerome, Ag. Pelag. 2.23).
Holiness (Hebr: godesh) is the essential perfection of God that necessarily stands opposed to all idolatry and sin (Amos 4:1–3). Among attributes that link closely with holiness are righteousness, justice, moral purity, veracity, and faithfulness. That God is love implies that benevolent affection, good will, and empathic understanding are the defining qualities in God through which God relates compassionately to creatures (Clement of Alex., Stromata 4.16–18). Among attributes that Scripture most closely associates with divine love are goodness, grace, mercy, and compassion. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely bound that we may rightly behold the character of God (Pss. 31:21–24; 146:8; John 3:16; 1 John 2:15–17; 4:7–21; Rev. 15:4; Eucharius, Exhortation to Valerian).
In Scripture we learn how God’s goodness interpenetrates the variable forms of God’s power (Ps. 90; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q25), how God’s mercy accompanies the omnipresence of God (Ps. 51), how God’s compassion pervades the judgment of God (Ps. 103). But such connections seem hollow and unconvincing apart from an actual history of God’s holy love that we can share. The moral characteristics of God penetrate and interfuse with the divine omnipresence, omniscience, and will. Moral requirements that responsible persons feel impinging upon them through conscience correspond in some degree to qualities that are ascribed in their unlimited degree to God (Tertullian, An Answer to the Jews 1,2; Ag. Marcion 2.12–16; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect. 4.15–21; Ambrose, Duties of Clergy 1.24).
God Is Holy
Any sentence that contains the word “holy” shows how profoundly humans struggle with frail human language to express an insight that emerges deeply from the interior life of Christian worship. It points to a sweeping awareness of the difference that lies between God’s goodness and our own. So deeply is this experienced that it seems impossible for human languages to conceptualize anything at all about God’s perfect goodness, because of the blemishes we feel in our moral awareness and earth-bound finitude.
Often we do best finally to stand in awe of God and silently celebrate God’s holy presence (Gregory of Nazianzus, Second Theol. Orat.). But because we must say something rather than nothing, and because this quality of God is so central to worship and so prevalent in Scripture, it is necessary for Christian teaching to make some attempt to express it with language if we are going to speak at all of the character of God.
To say that God is holy is nothing other than to say that God is perfect in goodness, both in God’s essential nature and in every act or energy, or operation that proceeds out of that nature (Gregory of Nyssa, Answer to Eunomius’ Second Book). If holiness is perfect goodness, it includes within it already the idea of perfect being, which Anselm defined as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” (Proslog. 3,4).
Holiness implies that every excellence fitting to the Supreme Being is found in God without blemish or limit. All other excellent features of God’s character such as goodness, justice, mercy, truth, and grace are unified and made mutually harmonious in infinite degree in God (Isa. 6:1–10; 43:10–17; 1 Pet. 1:12–16; Rev. 4:8; John of Damascus, OF 1. 14). To glimpse this divine harmony is to glimpse God’s holiness (Chrysostom, Hom. on Statues 7.9).
God’s holiness consummates and harmonizes all the other divine characteristics (Athanasius, Ag. Heathen 38–40). Holiness points especially to the undivided glory of God in all of God’s diversely good qualities (Tho. Aq., ST 2–2 Q81). All attributes of God are indivisible, due to the unity of God, for God’s being is fully present in each attribute. Hence holiness is not to be conceived as one trait among many other divine traits in such a way that these other traits may or may not include holiness. Rather, holiness summarizes, unifies, and integrates all the other incomparably good characteristics of the divine life.
The call to holy living is heard in Jesus’ call to his disciples: “There must be no limit to your goodness, as your heavenly Father’s goodness knows no bounds” (Matt. 5:48; 1 Pet. 1:15, 16; Clement of Alex., Stromata 6.12). Jesus taught his disciples to pray, “Hallowed be thy name,” and thereby attributed holiness to God the Father (Matt. 6:9), a confirmation of God’s holiness heard throughout the common acts of Christian worship. God is revealing his holiness to all nations through the events of history: “When they see that I reveal my holiness through you, the nations will know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God” (Ezek. 36:23; Tertullian, Of Idolatry 14; Wesley, WJW 6: 414, 526).
Character is Revealed in God’s Actions and Guidance
Holiness is the fullness of moral excellence intrinsic to the divine character. God’s holiness is revealed in God’s character, God’s actions, and God’s righteous claims upon creatures (Calvin, Inst. 2.8.14–15; 3.12.1; Heppe, RD, 92).
God is good without defect. “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, worthy of awe and praise, who works wonders?” (Exod. 15:11). “You alone are holy” (Rev. 15:4). “God is untouched by evil” (James 1:13). The end time celebrants of the Book of Revelation are found singing: “Holy, holy, holy is God the sovereign Lord of all, who was, and is, and is to come!” (Rev. 4:8).
The divine holiness is conveyed in everything God does, the entirety of God’s activity (Gregory of Nyssa, Ag. Eunomius 1. 17–24; Calvin, Inst. 2.12). All God’s actions are holy, for there is no inconsistency between God’s being and God’s activity. God acts so as to express God’s character, which summarizes and unifies all other divine excellences. The constant excellence of God’s acts expresses the perfection of God’s being (Tho. Aq., SCG 1. 40, 41). Even when God does temporarily permit that which seems harsh, there is an awareness in Scripture that discipline occurs with some purpose consistent with God’s holiness (Hab. 1:13; Chrysostom, Comm. on Job 35). God does not forever countenance wrong-doing, and will in time overrule it and bring it to a better purpose (Augustine, Enchiridion 3). God’s ultimate redemptive activity can be counted upon because of God’s character—replete with infinite goodness. “As he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct” (1 Pet 15–16; Didymus the Blind, Comm. on 1 Pet.). God’s holiness is finally the criterion for human moral activity, even though in our finitude perfect goodness is always inadequately expressed.
“I am the Lord your God; you shall make yourselves holy and keep yourselves holy, because I am holy” (Lev. 11:44; Leo I, Sermon 94.2). This is not to say that God simply requires what is impossible. For it is not impossible for creatures to reflect proportionally the goodness of God as their gifts and capacities allow it (Origen, OFP 1.3.5–7). It is in this sense that God calls men and women to be holy and provides them with the means of grace (prayer, Scripture, sacraments) in order to reflect God’s holiness in partial, yet real, vital, and significant ways (Gregory of Nyssa, Comm. on the Canticle, sermon 5, FGG: 183–203).
In being called of God, Isaiah was grasped by this overwhelming sense of awe as he felt his own radical moral limitation and the moral taint pervading human culture: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory…. Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips” (Isa. 6:3–5; Jer. 51:17, 18; Calvin, Inst. 1.1.3; R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy). God is better, holier, purer than we can imagine (Ps. 71:22, 23). Yet creatures can refract aspects of God’s goodness within their finitude (Catherine of Siena, Prayers 3).
Refracting the Divine Holiness
God creates beings who are capable of actualizing creaturely goods, and thereby are able to reflect in some measure the incomparable glory of divine goodness. God draws the good willing of humans toward the incomparable divine goodness.
God does not coerce creatures into doing good. That would deny one of the most fundamental goods of human creatures, freedom (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 4.37). Would it not take away from human freedom all the formative goods of discipline, education, and the habituation of will if God were either to coerce good or make creatures unable to do evil? Only those who despair of freedom think that God would have done better by making it such that freedom would necessarily, inevitably, and unerringly will and do the good (Origen, OFP 2.1, 2; Augustine, CG 14.11).
Insofar as idolatry and sin infest human life, God actively opposes them, and this opposition is itself an expression of God’s holiness. Sin impedes the moral goodness for which God created the world. God permits sin to come into human life, but only on behalf of a greater good—namely, freedom—and God overrules sin wherever it appears to threaten God’s greater purpose (Augustine, Enchiridion 4–9). It is in this light that Scripture speaks metaphorically of God as angry at our sins and jealous of our gods that obstruct our full reception of divine grace. God the Spirit supports and encourages our efforts to recover the capacity to better reflect God’s holiness. In this sense God’s anger is an unremitting expression of God’s own holiness.
God is Set Apart from Sin
God’s holiness includes the idea of set-apartness or separation from all that is sinful, unworthy of God, or unprepared for God’s righteousness. Seen in this way, the holiness to which we are called requires disconnecting from anything that would separate anyone from God (Gregory of Nazianzus, In Defense of His Flight to Pontus; Teresa of Avila, Life CWST, 1:288).
There is profound ethical import in the teaching of God’s holiness. Those who are called to holiness of heart and life are thereby called to consecrate themselves to a life of radical responsiveness to God’s love and accountability to God’s own justice (Mother Syncletica, 19, SDF: 196; Baxter, PW 15: 539–44; Wesley, WJW 7: 266).
Paul instructs the church at Corinth to “not unite yourselves with unbelievers; they are no fit mates for you. What has righteousness to do with wickedness?…The temple of God is what we are” (2 Cor. 6:14–16). He exhorted them: “Separate yourselves.” “Touch nothing unclean” (v. 17; Chrysostom, Comm. on 2 Cor. 13.6.17). “Let us therefore cleanse ourselves from all that can defile flesh or spirit, and in the fear of God complete our consecration” (2 Cor. 7:1; Calvin, Inst. 14.14.21). Sinners need the cleansing of repentance and faith to come into God’s presence (Chrysostom, Baptismal Instructions 9.21; Luther, Ninety-five Theses 1).
God is so utterly distant from corruption that even to enter into the presence of this One or to come into the sanctuary where this One dwells requires that the worshiper go through an act of purification or a period of penitence, centering, mortification, and discipline (Acts 21:26; James 4;8; Teresa of Avila, Way of Perfection 10). God is not to be treated like any worldly reality.
In this way the faithful are called through grace to be partakers of God’s holiness (Heb. 12), restored to their primordial capacity to reflect, like a mirror, the radical holiness and purity of God, even though their mirroring is always imprecise (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 5.16).
Righteousness Essential to God’s Being
As God who is holy calls us to holiness, so does God who is just call us to justice. God who is wholly just requires reasonable justice in human relationships (Amos 5:24; Mic. 6:8; Ps. 15:1–2). Those called to the just life are to be placed beside the plumb-line of divine justice (Amos 7:7, 8).
Justice is the perpetual and constant will to render to each his or her due or right (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q58.1). “These are the words of the Lord: Maintain justice, do the right; for my deliverance is close at hand, and my righteousness will show itself victorious. Happy is the man who follows these precepts” (Isa. 56:1, 2; Clement of Alex., Stromata 6.12; Augustine, CG 20.28).
That God will judge justly in the final judgment is a source of comfort to believers and a call to penitence to those who pervert justice. The good news is that God has provided the gift of Christ’s righteousness to clothe us in God’s own uprightness in the time of final judgment (Rom. 5:17; Chrysostom, Comm. on Timothy 4). The righteousness of God, therefore, consists simply in the fulfillment of God’s will through our willing by the power of grace. God works in us in accord with his own good purpose (Theophilus, To Autolycus 3.9–12).
Righteousness in its most complete form exists essentially in God alone, and derivatively in creatures. “All his ways are just” (Deut. 32:4). God “does no wrong, righteous and true is He!” (Deut. 32:4). “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne” (Ps. 97:1, 2; Ps. 89:14).
The righteousness of God is revealed in God’s covenant love and faithfulness: “Your unfailing love, O Lord, reaches to heaven, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the lofty mountains, your judgments are like the great abyss” (Ps. 36:5, 6; Calvin, Inst. 1.17; 3.11–13).
Attesting to God’s Righteousness amid Evil Days
Christian teaching seeks to speak rightly of God’s justice (theos-dike, theodicy) under conditions in which it is assailed. Theodicy seeks meaningfully to set forth God’s goodness and justice as seen in creation and redemption, despite apparent contradictions of them in history (Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 92–94; Augustine, Enchiridion 3–6).
Unfair distribution of rewards and punishments are best understood in relation to the anticipated resurrection of the just and unjust, the end-time vindication of God’s justice, beyond history’s injustices (Tertullian, Resurrection of the Flesh). The best that human choosing can do is to follow God’s requirement insofar as conscience, reason, law, and grace make it known. Meanwhile, lacking completeness, we still may affirm God’s own righteousness as completing what is humanly incomplete, celebrating: “The Lord is our Righteousness” (Jer. 23:6; Luther, Treatise on Good Works 11).
God’s Righteousness Expressed in Law and Gospel
God provides the law and enables it to be heard in the human heart. “The law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul. The Lord’s instruction never fails, and makes the simple wise. The precepts of the Lord are right and rejoice the heart. The commandment of the Lord shines clear and gives light to the eyes” (Ps. 19:7, 8).
Even Paul, who was so keenly aware that human sin could pervert the best of laws and the law in turn could intensify sin, nonetheless affirmed, “The law is in itself holy, the commandment is holy and just and good. Are we to say then that this good thing was the death of me? By no means” (Rom. 7:12, 13).
God’s righteousness is expressed in the history of providence. God’s guiding and overruling governance in history is grasped only by examining universal history. God’s righteousness patiently and surely pervades the historical process, assuring its rightful outcome, yet honoring human freedom by allowing it to actualize itself under both sin and grace (Rom. 1:18–25; 3:21–28; 5:1).
Central to the account of God’s righteousness made known in history is the gospel, that God’s righteousness is made known in Jesus Christ and is available to all who believe (Rom. 3:22; Chrysostom, Comm. on Rom. 7). Paul preached that the same righteousness of God that was known by Abraham and the prophets was made known in Jesus (Rom. 1:17; 3:21; 4:3–6). Righteousness has God as its source (Phil. 3:9). It is most fully revealed in Christ’s death and resurrection. Through his perfect obedience to God’s will in life and death, Christ bore the curse of our alienation from God (Gal. 3:13; Chrysostom, Comm. on Galatians 4; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q21; Wesley, WJW 5: 313). The sinner receives Christ’s righteousness by grace through faith (2 Cor. 5:21; Eph. 2).
We feel God’s judging righteousness immediately and personally in the pain of an offended conscience (Justin Martyr, The Sole Government of God; Calvin, Inst. 3.2; 3.10; 3.19 f.; Wesley, WJW 6:186). “Remember where you stand,” warned the Epistle to the Hebrews. “You stand before Mount Zion and the city of the living God, heavenly Jerusalem, before myriads of angels, the full concourse and assembly of the first-born citizens of heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of good men made perfect, and Jesus the mediator of a new covenant” (Heb. 12:18–24).
As persons who acquire habits, personality traits, and, in the long run become moral or immoral in our character, we habitually come to act in ways that make us more or less fit to receive divine blessings. As decision-makers we act concretely in good or evil works that either please or displease the holy, just, and good God (Prov. 29:26; Luke 11:483).
God is just in punishing sin, yet in Jesus God has taken our sin upon himself: “We come to you therefore as Christ’s ambassadors. It is as if God were appealing to you through us: In Christ’s name, we implore you, be reconciled to God! Christ was innocent of sin, and yet for our sake God made him one with the sinfulness of men, so that in him we might be made one with the goodness of God himself” (2 Cor. 5:20, 21; Cyril of Alex., Letter 41). In Christ, “God’s justice has been brought to light. The Law and the prophets both bear witness to it: It is God’s way of righting wrong, effective through faith in Christ for all who have such faith—all, without distinction” (Rom. 3:21). It is God’s own righteousness, therefore, that has become “the remedy for the defilement of our sins, not our sins only but the sins of all the world” (1 John 2:2; Origen, Ag. Celsus 8.13).
The Divine Reliability—Constant, Unchanging Love (Immutability)
Scripture stresses the constancy of God’s purpose, based on the divine reliability—the trustworthiness of God’s character. Other things “will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment, and they pass away; but you are the same, and your years have no end” (Ps. 102:26–27). Even though the people change their minds about the covenant, the Lord does not alter commitment to the covenant: “I am the Lord, unchanging” (Mal. 3:6). The psalmist marveled at the reliability of the Lord whose “plans shall stand for ever, and his counsel endure for all generations” (Ps. 33:11; Origen, Ag. Celsus 1. 21).
The divine constancy is celebrated in the New Testament, for whom God is the source of every good gift, “the Father of the lights of heaven. With him there is no variation, no play of passing shadows” (James 1:17; Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance 22.62). God remains always consistent with his own nature as insurmountably good (Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catech. I). God’s essential nature does not change from better to worse, but remains always only the best (Julia of Norwich, Showings, CWS: 197–99). God as known in Christ is “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8). Faith’s confidence in the divine reliability is caricatured if stated without reference to other divine qualities—mercy, love, and justice. If pressed in isolation from God’s character as responsive, empathic, and compassionate, then the assertion of the divine reliability turns easily into an abstract, speculative assertion of divine rigidity and unresponsiveness.
The celebration of divine reliability is a religious affirmation that no change can or will take place in the divine nature—that God will never cease being God, incomparably good and powerful. But that does not imply that God does not respond to changing human circumstances: “For, continuing unchangeable in His essence, He condescends to human affairs by the economy of His Providence” (Origen, Ag. Celsus 4.14).
That God can will change is essential to his sovereign freedom, but this does not imply that God changes in essential nature as good (Chrysostom, Exhort. to Theodore 1. 6). God is “unchangeable, yet changing all things, never new, never old, making all things new, yet bringing old age upon the proud, and they know it not; always working, ever at rest; gathering, yet needing nothing” (Augustine, Conf. 1.4; CG 14.10).
It is precisely because God is unchanging in the eternal character of his self-giving love that God is free in responding to changing historical circumstances, and versatile in empathy. “The unchangeable God holds an unchangeable purpose, but steadiness of purpose requires variety in execution” (Hall, DT 3:89; Whitehead, Process and Reality: 521). Early Christian teachers held together the unchanging love of God with the responsiveness required by that unchanging love: “For abiding the same, He administers mutable things according to their nature, and His Word elects to undertake their administration” (Origen, Ag. Celsus 6.42). Here process theology has depended upon the classic Christian theism against which it has so often caricatured polemically.
The biblical narrative views God not as immobile or static, but as consistent with his own nature, congruent with the depths of his own essential goodness, stable, not woodenly predictable. If God promises forgiveness, “he is just, and may be trusted to forgive our sins” (1 John 1:9), because the character of God is dependable.
This affirmation prompted the classical exegetes to rigorously probe those Scriptures that speak of God “repenting” (nacham, Gen. 6:6, 7; Exod. 32:14; 1 Sam. 15:35; Jer. 26:3, 13, 19; Amos 7:3; Jon. 3:10). Does this thereby imply a fundamental change in the divine being or essence? No. The Bible represents God as responsively dealing with new human contingencies by taking ever-new initiatives and thereby sloughing off older forms that had served their time (Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 2.24; John of Damascus, OF 1. 11, 12). But such passages never imply that something has changed in the essential being of God or that any divine attributes have mutated.
What may appear to be a change of God’s mind may upon closer inspection be a different phase of the hidden unfolding of the provident divine plan. The execution of the divine purpose is firm precisely because it is responsive to temporal contingencies (Augustine, CG 22.2). The worshiping community celebrates: “From age to age everlasting thou art God” (Ps. 90:2). Creaturely purposes, actions, and intentions have beginnings, stumblings and endings, but God’s character does not change. In dealing flexibly with the changing scenes of history, God remains faithful to his own constant will (Lactantius, Div. Inst. 4.12; Calvin, Inst. 2.8–10; 3.2; 3.8).
Times do change, yet God is always actively changing the times as needed according to a changeless purpose: “Blessed be God’s name from age to age, for wisdom and power are his. He changes seasons and times” (Dan. 2:20–21a).
The Divine Veracity, Faithfulness, and Congruence
Closely related to this divine reliability is the scriptural witness to God’s truthfulness (veracity). This implies God’s faithfulness to the truth that God alone is and fully knows. God’s awareness is not torn apart or internally conflicted. There is a steady congruence between who God is and what God does. God’s actions and disclosures are in no way inconsistent with God’s essential goodness (Chrysostom, Comm. on John 73; Augustine, Of True Religion 94–113; Calvin, Inst. 2.8).
By veracity we mean simply that God is true, and being true, tells the truth, and becomes revealed as truth through history. That God not only makes known the truth but is the truth. This is a steady theme of Scripture (John 3:33; 8:13–26; 1 Cor. 11:10; Augustine, On Profit of Believing 34). It is “impossible for God to lie” (Heb. 6:18). Yahweh is the “God of truth” (Ps. 31:5), whose “word is founded in truth” (Ps. 119:160).
The faithfulness of God means that God proves true to his promises by keeping them. God’s faithfulness is a continuing reliable application of divine truth to changing, developing historical circumstances. Trusting God’s fidelity, the faithful are kept by him “sound in spirit, soul, and body, without fault when our Lord Jesus Christ comes. He who calls you is to be trusted; he will do it” (1 Thess. 5:23, 24). For “the Lord is faithful” (2 Thess. 3:3), the incomparably “true one” (Rev. 3:7) upon whom supplicants can rely as trustworthy (Irenaeus, Ag. Her. 4.20.; Luther, Preface to the Psalms).
The church fathers were aware, long before modern psychotherapy, that one of the primary conditions of constructive psychological change is congruence, the capacity to feel one’s feelings fully, to remain in touch with one’s experiencing process, and to share in another’s estrangement without losing one’s self-identity (Ambrose, Letters to Priests). It is when one senses the inner congruence of another, and knows one is in the presence of another who is in touch with him- or herself, that it becomes possible to enter more fully into one’s own estrangement, and become more congruent within oneself. (Centuries later Carl Rogers would define congruence as the state in which “self-experiences are accurately symbolized” (“A Theory of Therapy, Personality and Interpersonal Relationships,” in Psychology: A Study of a Science: 206; Oden, KC, 2). The model of congruence is not the therapist but the incomparably congruent One, God.
The Divine Benevolence
The divine benevolence is that attribute through which God wills the happiness of creatures and desires to impart to creatures all the goodness they are capable of receiving (Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 2; Augustine, Trin. 8.4, 5; Anselm, Proslog. 23–25). The psalmists delighted in meditating day and night on the enduring generosity of God (Pss. 1:2; 77:12).
God is not only good in himself, but wills to communicate this goodness to creatures. Having freely offered life to creatures, God then allows life to be sustained and perpetuated, to propagate and defend itself, to further define itself adaptively, and in so doing to enable innumerable secondary values (Neh. 9:20, 21; Song of Sol. 1:15–2:6; Tho. Aq., SCG 1. 38). God displays the goodness intrinsic to the divine character by bestowing upon living creatures prolific capacities for enjoying creation, for receiving the goods God has created, and for creating secondary goods that both God and creatures can enjoy (Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catech. I; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q6).
God Is Love
Nowhere is God defined more concisely than in the First Epistle of John: “God is love” (1 John 4:16; Hilary Trin. 9.61). The love of God is that excellent way by which God communicates himself to creatures capable in varying degrees of reflecting the divine goodness. Consequently love is of all terms the one most directly attributable to God as essential to God’s very being.
God’s holiness does not remain trapped within itself, but reaches out for others. When Scripture tells the story of how God reaches out, it does not merely use objective, descriptive, scientific language, but rather the warmest, most intimate, most involving, engaging, and powerfully moving metaphor in human experience: love (Clement of Rome, Corinth. 48–56; the terms amor, dilectio, caritas, in Augustine, CG 14.7).
God’s love reveals the divine determination to hold in personal communion all creatures capable of enjoying this communion (Catherine of Genoa; The Spiritual Dialogue). Love is beheld in God’s desire to communicate the depth of divine goodness to each and every creature and to impart appropriate goods to all creatures proportional to their capacity to receive the good (Tho. Aq., SCG 1. 91). All things are loved by God, but all things are not loved in the same way by God, since there are degrees of capacity, receptivity, and willingness among varied creatures to receive God’s love (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q20).
The primary purpose of creation is that God wishes to bestow love and teach love, so that creatures can share in the blessedness of divine life, of loving and being loved (Teresa of Avila, Way of Perfection 6–7). No other purpose of creation transcends this one (Basil, Hex. 7.5).
It is impossible to speak of Christian teaching without speaking of God’s love. To make clear what God’s love means is the central task of Christian preaching (Calvin, Inst. 2.16.1–4). The music God makes in creation is not a dirge but a love song to, for, and through creatures (Origen, Song of Songs, Prologue).
Agape and Eros
Love is a confluence of two seemingly paradoxical tendencies: The desire to enjoy the object of love, and the will to do good for the beloved. One impulse takes and the other gives (Ambrose, Duties 2.7; Luther, Heidelberg Disputation 28). In Greek, the passion to possess another is called eros, whereas self-giving love is called agapē. They are joined in creative tension in all human love.
Although agapē and eros seem to be opposites, they may come together and flow in balanced simultaneity and support each other’s impulses. Both are expressions of the inestimably high value the heart sets upon that which is loved (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection). Both involve a prizing: Love prizes the beloved so earnestly that it cannot rest without its possession (eros), without experiencing the completion of itself in the other. Love prizes the beloved so highly that it does not withhold any feasible gift or service (agapē). Eros yearns for the self’s fulfillment through another; agapē yearns for the other’s fulfillment even at a cost to oneself (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves; Nygren, Agapē and Eros).
To separate eros and agapē or to oppose them or set them sharply off against each other may fail to understand how one dimension may strengthen the other. Agapē may give itself unstintingly for the other, while it yet longs for answering love from the beloved. John’s epistle deftly captured the heart of this reciprocity: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19; Wesley, WJW 11: 421).
God loves creatures in the first form (eros) of taking delight in them, in having and beholding them, as parents enjoy children. In perfect desire God desires creatures to be what they most truly are. But this perfect enjoyment melds with the second dimension of love, agapē, the will to be radically for creatures even when creatures are stubbornly against themselves.
One who loves may love wrongly or unworthily. Augustine thought that the heart of the problem of sin was misguided love, which loves the lesser rather than the greater good (Augustine, Chr. Doctrine 1. 23–33; On Patience 14). The deeper that love becomes rooted in reality (i.e., the reality of divine love), the more fully is the passion for the other complemented by the self-giving spirit (Clement of Alex., Stromata 4.15). Ordered love first loves God, the One most lovable (Chrysostom, Comm. on John 78–79).
Love may remain completely unreturned without ceasing to be love. Love for one’s beloved is not finally dependent upon its being reciprocated. Love that promises to be returned yet remains for a long time unreturned, or love that confronts vast obstacles is the subject of the greatest literature and drama (Abelard, The Story of My Misfortunes; Kierkegaard, Stages Along Life’s Way, The Works of Love). “Even its shadows are beautiful” (Clarke, CDG: 85). But love that becomes fulfilled is that which finds some balance of giving and receiving, of self-fulfillment and fulfillment of the other, of eros and agap, of love received and love poured out if not now, over time, bound by fidelity, and if not in time in eternity (Ambrose, Duties 2.7.37). A perfect love would be that which receives to the limit whatever goods can be received from a relationship and gives without bounds whatever goods can be given (Tho. Aq., SCG 1. 91; Teresa of Avila, Way of Perfection 6). “Is there a man among you who will offer his son a stone when he asks for bread, or a snake when he asks for fish? If you, then, bad as you are, know how to give your children what is good for them, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him!” (Matt. 7:9–11).
We are called to love God “as ourselves” (Luke 10:27), thus assuming that we will be loving ourselves, prizing ourselves, acknowledging our own worth, and putting a high value upon our own lives (Ignatius, Ephesians 14; Augustine, On Chr. Doctrine 1.23–26; Luther, WLS 2:830). But to organize our lives primarily around the love of ourselves is wretched and dehumanizing, because we were intended to love a more encompassing object of love than ourselves alone (Augustine, Of True Religion 87).
God loves all creatures in the twofold sense that God unapologetically enjoys them for their own sake and desires their answering, enjoying love in response to eternally patient, self-sacrificial love (Augustine, On Chr. Doctrine 1. 22). God feels the worth of creatures and longs to do them good. Because God loves in both of these ways in full and fitting balance, we say that God is love.
The Scope of God’s Love
Ultimately the cost is God’s only beloved Son, Jesus Christ, the most crucial reversal in the drama of God’s love. “God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, that everyone who has faith in him may not die but have eternal life” (John 3:16). As God loves in this way, by self-sacrificial giving and serving the needy neighbor, so do we learn how to love, by loving as God loved, in whatever ways are possible for us as enabled by grace (Augustine, Hom. on the First Epis. of John 6–7; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q20; Calvin, Inst. 2.7).
God loves sinners, because he sees in them something they may not see in themselves, namely, lovability, or at least potential lovability, and the possibility of restoration to the fullness of the divine fellowship (Augustine, Man’s Perfection in Righteousness). “Christ died for us while we were yet sinners, and that is God’s own proof of his love towards us” (Rom. 5:6–8). Those whose human love mirrors God’s own holy love are much beloved of God.
The end of history is understood in the light of Jesus’ resurrection, which anticipates the end and through which believers can share in the end and therefore the meaning of history. “He who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in him. This is for us the perfection of love, to have confidence on the day of judgment; and this we can have, because even in this world we are as he is. There is no room for fear in love; perfect love banishes fear” (1 John 4:17–18; Bede, On 1 John 4.17)
Despite all the distortions of human loving, the faithful are enabled by grace to experience perfect love in the form of hope, viewed in relation to the end time. Perfection in love is precisely to have confidence in the work that God is working in the whole of history. Perfect love lives out of a deep affinity with faith. For perfect love is none other than to have confidence in God’s redemptive work. This perfect love we can have. For it is within our reach, enabled by grace, to trust in God’s love (Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection; On Perfection, FGG: 83, 84; Teresa of Avila, The Way of Perfection 6).
Holiness and Love United
God is holy love. Holiness and love point directly to the center of the character of God. In God’s holiness all of God’s moral excellences are summed up and united. In God’s love, God’s holiness is manifested in relation to creatures (Augustine, On Nature and Grace, 84). God loves by imparting his holy love to creatures in the fullest measure possible. The circle of this love is complete only with the answering love of the beloved, when the creature’s heart and life joyfully reflect the beauty of God’s holiness (Pss. 29:2; 96:9; Augustine, On Psalms 96).
Holy love is most radically beheld in God’s treatment of sin, especially in the cross of Christ. This does not imply that prior to human fallenness these qualities were not already present in the divine character, but that they were fully revealed there on the cross. Holy love is attested by Scripture of God from the beginning. The “Lamb that was slain” fulfills a promise set forth “since the world was made” (Rev. 13:8), even “before the foundation of the world” (1 Pet. 1:20).
It is especially through beholding and responding to this salvation event, Jesus Christ, that Christians have come to understand the holy love of God and the relation between God’s holiness and God’s love. It was the love of God that sent God’s only Son into the world (John 3:16). It was the holiness of God that required the satisfaction of divine justice through the sacrifice of the Son. These two themes are brought together powerfully in the first Johannine letter: “The love I speak of is not our love for God, but the love he showed to us in sending his Son as the remedy for the defilement of our sins” (1 John 4:10; Chrysostom, Comm. on John 27–28; Augustine, Hom. on the First Epis. of John 7; Enchiridion 32). Similarly in Paul’s letters, it is precisely in God’s act of love that God’s righteousness and holy justice “has been brought to light” (Rom. 3:21). “It is God’s way of righting wrong, effective through faith in Christ for all who have such faith—all without distinction” (v. 22; Luther, Comm. on Galatians, MLS: 109–15).
Wherever holiness is spoken of in Scripture, love is nearby; wherever God’s love is manifested, it does not cease to be holy. Neither holiness nor love alone could have sufficed for the salvation of sinners (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1). For a love that lacked holiness would hardly be just if it ignored sin, and holiness without love would hardly be able to effect the reconciliation.
God’s holy love bridges the gulf. “It is precisely in this that God proves his love for us; that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Love is the way holiness communicates itself under the conditions of sin (Clement of Alex., Instr. 1. 9). God’s holiness detests sin; the motive of reconciliation is God’s love for the sinner, which is so great that it is willing to pay the costliest price to set it aright.
The most profound New Testament moral injunctions hold together God’s holiness and love precisely as they had become manifested in Christ: “Live in love as Christ loved you, and gave himself up on your behalf as an offering and sacrifice whose fragrance is pleasing to God” (Eph. 5:2; Ignatius, Letter to Ephesians I). The mystery and power of this fragrance is to be found precisely in the delicately balanced interface of holiness and love.
Grace and Mercy: The Forbearance and Kindness of God
The reckoning of divine attributes would be incomplete if we failed to point finally to God’s grace, mercy, and forbearance. Closely intertwined, they are nonetheless distinguishable in scriptural teaching.
Grace means unmerited favor. To affirm that God is gracious is to affirm that God does not deal with creatures on the basis of their works, merit, or deserving but rather out of abundant divine compassion (Ignatius, Magnesians 9–10; Luther, Comm. on Galatians). It is through grace that God’s mercy is freely given precisely to penitent sinners (Matt. 9:36). Yet this gift does not imply that recipients have no responsibilities to be accountable for it: “For it is by grace you are saved, through trusting him; it is not your own doing. It is God’s gift, not a reward for work done. There is nothing for anyone to boast of. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to devote ourselves to the good deeds for which God has designed us” (Eph. 2:8–10; Augustine, On Grace and free Will).
Divine mercy is the disposition of God to relieve the miserable, salve the wounds of the hurt, and receive sinners, quite apart from any works or merit (Chrysostom, Comm. Philippians 4; Luther, The Freedom of a Chr.; Calvin, Inst. 3.2.7; 3.12.4–8). God’s mercy is never disconnected from God’s holiness or justice (Anselm, Cur Deus Homo 1. 19–2.4; Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q21). Even where sin gains power over the human will, God offers mercy, still seeking to restore the fallen creature to the good life. The restoration comes only through the suffering of God the Son who willingly dies for sinners (Rom. 8:1; 1 Cor. 5:11–21). Mercy is the form taken by divine love when sin has blocked off other avenues. Nowhere is God’s almighty power manifested more clearly than in showing mercy to sinners. No mercy is greater than that beheld on the cross, reaching out to redeem sin.
The forbearance of God is seen when divine love and mercy delay or lessen retribution, making one aware that “God’s kindness is meant to lead you to a change of heart” (Rom. 2:4; Calvin, Inst. 2.8). The psalmist prayed for the kindness of God to be revealed: “But you, O Lord, are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness. Turn to me and have mercy on me; grant your strength to your servant” (Ps. 86:15, 16).
The mercy of God is patient: “With the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like one day. It is not that the Lord is slow in fulfilling his promise, as some suppose, but that he is very patient with you, because it is not his will for any to be lost, but for all to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:8, 9; 1 Pet. 3:20; Fastidius, On the Christian Life 21). The forbearance of God is “compassionate and gracious, long-suffering, ever constant and true, maintaining constancy to thousands, forgiving iniquity, rebellion, and sin, and not sweeping the guilty clean away” (Exod. 34:6, 7).
Reprise: Having dealt with the primary attributes of God (uncreated, sufficient, necessary being, eternity, life), and the relational attributes (insurmountable influence, presence, and knowing), and the personal attributes of the divine life (spirit, will, freedom, self-determination), and the moral attributes (holy love, grace, mercy, and forbearance), there yet remains one more attribute of God that brings these all together in a blessed focus: the extraordinary notion of divine happiness. Only God can be happy in the way that God is happy.
The Divine Happiness
To say that God is eternally blessed means that God rejoices eternally in the outpouring of goodness, mercy, and love upon creatures, each in accordance with their ability to participate in God’s being. The blessedness of God, or divine beatitude, means that God’s life is full of joy, both within the Godhead and in relation to creatures. God’s enjoyment of redeemed creation is compared to the joy of a bridegroom who rejoices over the bride (Isa. 62:5). God’s joy is eternal joy (Calvin, Inst. 3.25.10–12), causing the rivers to “clap their hands” “let the mountains sing together for joy; let them sing before the Lord” (Ps. 98:8, 9; Catherine of Genoa, Spiritual Dialogue).
The blessedness of God is enjoyed and shared by the angelic hosts and by the faithful, and for that reason they are called, by way of refraction, blessed (Augustine, CG 11.11, 12; Valerian, Horn. 15–16). The Lord takes delight in the celebration of the faithful (Prov. 15:8). The fitting response of the faithful to the joy of God is the life of praise.
There is no end to the life of praise, for the faithful, sharing in the eternal life of God, thereby participate in eternal life, in ceaseless divine blessedness (Catherine of Siena, Prayers 17). “As the abounding grace of God is shared by more and more, the greater may be the chorus of thanksgiving that ascends to the glory of God” (2 Cor. 4:15). “Through blessedness every desire is given rest, because, when blessedness is possessed, nothing else remains to be desired, since it is the ultimate end. He must, therefore, be blessed who is perfect in relation to all the things that He can desire” (Tho. Aq., SCG 1. 100). In this way beatitude belongs in full measure to God, and to creatures in proportion to their nearness to God (Tho. Aq., ST 1 Q26; Teresa of Avila, Exclamations of the Soul to God, CWST 2: 402–20). The presence of God is described by Ezekiel as an “encircling radiance,” “like a rainbow in the clouds” (Ezek. 1:28).
Do scriptural expressions of God’s rejection of idolatry and sin constitute an interruption of the divine happiness? Terms such as “God’s anger” are based on analogies that point to God’s veto on the entitlement of sin. Since the foreknowledge of God always already envisions the triumph of grace over sin, and since God is eternally aware of both fallenness and its being overcome, and since the fall provides for God a new contingency in which God’s mercy and grace can once again be powerfully manifested, God rejoices also at the overcoming of sin, even while sin is amid history gradually being judged and overruled (Julia of Norwich, Showings, CWS: 263–65, 320 f.; Calvin, Inst. 2.10). “Where sin was thus multiplied, grace immeasurably exceeded it, in order that, as sin established its reign by way of death, so God’s grace might establish its reign in righteousness, and issue in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 5:21; Tertullian, Ag. Marcion 5.13, 14).
The gamut of divine attributes is therefore brought to a exhilarating culmination in Scripture’s witness to the beauty of God’s holiness. “Might and beauty are in his sanctuary” (Ps. 96:6).
Among all themes of Christian teaching, none is more capable of eliciting theological delight than the study of the divine perfections. It is a joyful act to study eternal joy. It is merciful that God has allowed sinners to study God’s mercy. It is the delight of theological reflection to see in their proper light the unity, harmony, balance, and proportion of the characteristics of the divine life. A right understanding of this proportionality goes far to prevent misunderstandings of God. This is why the divine attributes have so often been considered an essential part of early baptismal instruction (Cyril of Jerusalem, Catech. Lect.; Chrysostom, Two Instr. to Candidates for Baptism; Augustine, Instr. of the Uninstructed; Luther, Smaller Catech; Westminster Conf.).
Conclusion: What Do We Mean When “We Say God”?
What follows are the key terms attributable to God as essential to God’s being. Each belongs to the preliminary definition of God—preliminary, that is, to subsequent Christian instruction, and definition insofar as the reality of God yields to human language and definition. Each word in the ensuing sentence provides a glint of color within the mosaic pattern of characteristics of the divine life, which seeks to be beheld in its wholeness.
God is the source and end of all things, that than which nothing greater can be conceived; uncreated, sufficient, necessary being; infinite, unmeasurable, eternal One, Father, Son, and Spirit; all-present, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-empowering creator, redeemer, and consummator of all things; immanent without ceasing to be transcendent, Holy One present in our midst; whose way of personal being is incomparably free, self-determining, spiritual, responsive, and self-congruent; whose activity is incomparably good, holy, righteous, just, benevolent, loving, gracious, merciful, forbearing, kind; hence eternally blessed, eternally rejoicing, whose holiness is incomparable in beauty.
The next chapter will seek to clarify whether such a reality exists.