Knowability — the doctrine's front door
Before the doctrine says anything about God, it must say how anything can be said about God at all. Two claims, held together, do all the work.
- God is incomprehensible. Job 11:7; Ps 145:3; Isa 55:8–9; Rom 11:33–36; 1 Tim 6:16. The finite cannot contain the infinite — no creature will ever hold God whole in its mind, in this life or the next.
- God is genuinely knowable. Jer 9:23–24; Jn 17:3; 1 Cor 2:10–12; Heb 1:1–2. What God reveals of himself is true knowledge, not approximation — apprehended truly even where never comprehended fully.
The working distinctions
- Archetypal / ectypal (Junius) — God's infinite self-knowledge versus theology as creatures can have it: revealed, accommodated, finite, yet true. All human theology is ectypal, including Scripture's.
- Accommodation (Calvin) — God "lisps" to us as a nurse to an infant. Revelation is scaled to the receiver without being falsified by the scaling.
- The three ways — theology reaches God's perfections by causation (from effects to their source), negation (denying creaturely limits: in-finite, im-mutable), and eminence (raising creaturely goods to their supreme degree).
How the words work
When "wise" is said of God and of Solomon, is the word used univocally (same sense — Scotus), equivocally (unrelated senses), or analogically (related but proportioned senses — Thomas)? The classical mainstream answers : creaturely perfections really resemble their uncreated source without ever measuring it.
Univocity quietly places God and creatures in one genus — "being" — and God becomes the largest instance of a category he supposedly created. Equivocity makes theology impossible: if "good" means nothing recognisable when said of God, revelation goes silent. Analogy is the knife edge, and it is load-bearing: nearly every modern revision mapped in §10 begins, visibly or not, by adopting univocal language about God.
Existence and revelation
Scripture never argues for God's existence. Gen 1:1 begins with him already there; Ps 14:1 treats denial as a moral posture, not an intellectual conclusion.
- General revelation — Ps 19:1–6; Rom 1:19–21; Acts 14:17; 17:24–28. Sufficient to leave "without excuse"; not sufficient to save. Calvin adds the — the awareness is internal as well as external.
- Special revelation — God's redemptive self-disclosure in word and act, culminating in the Son (Heb 1:1–2), inscripturated for us.
The classical proofs
- Cosmological — from contingent being to necessary being (Aquinas's Five Ways; the kalam argument from the universe's beginning).
- Teleological — from order and fine-tuning to intelligence.
- Moral — from binding obligation to a lawgiver.
- Ontological — Anselm's single a priori proof: that than which nothing greater can be conceived must exist in reality. Rejected by Thomas, revived in modal form by Plantinga.
What are the proofs for?
Three postures: evidentialism (the proofs ground rational belief), presuppositionalism (argument itself presupposes the God argued for; the mind's suppression of truth — the noetic effect mapped in the doctrine of sin — means proofs persuade no one whose will is set), and Reformed epistemology (belief in God is properly basic and needs no proof, like belief in other minds).
At their strongest the proofs deliver a first cause, a designer, a necessary being — a "God of the philosophers." The doctrinal question is what to do with that: identify him with YHWH and let philosophy build the ground floor of theology (Thomas), or insist the ladder of nature was always meant to be climbed inside revelation, never before it (Barth's Nein, and the presuppositionalists from another direction). Where you land decides how your apologetics and your doctrine of Scripture relate for good.
The names of God
In Scripture God is not deduced but introduced — by name. The names are compressed revelation: each carries a claim.
Hebrew
| Name | Freight |
|---|---|
| El / Elohim | Generic "God"; the plural Elohim with singular verbs (Gen 1:1) read as plural of majesty |
| El Shaddai | "God Almighty" — the patriarchal-era name (Gen 17:1; Ex 6:3) |
| El Elyon | "God Most High," possessor of heaven and earth (Gen 14:18–22) |
| El Olam | "Everlasting God" (Gen 21:33) |
| Adonai | "Lord" — ownership and rule; spoken aloud in place of the tetragrammaton |
| YHWH | The covenant name (Ex 3:14–15; 6:2–8) — ~6,800 occurrences, more than any other name |
| YHWH Tseva'ot | "LORD of hosts" — commander of heaven's armies |
Greek
| Name | Freight |
|---|---|
| Theos | God — carrying the whole Old Testament freight of Elohim |
| Kyrios | The Septuagint's rendering of YHWH — then applied to Jesus (Rom 10:9,13 quoting Joel 2:32; Phil 2:9–11 echoing Isa 45:23). The earliest Christology happens inside the divine name |
| Pater | Father — present in the OT (Isa 63:16), made the characteristic address by Jesus (Abba, Mk 14:36) |
| Pantokrator | "Almighty" — Revelation's preferred title (Rev 1:8; 4:8) |
| Ego eimi | "I am" — Jn 8:58 reaching back to Ex 3:14; the audience's stones show they heard the claim |
Ehyeh asher ehyeh. The metaphysical reading (LXX: ho ōn, "the one who is") hears self-existent Being — the fountainhead of the doctrine of . The covenantal reading hears a promise: "I will be [with you]," a name about presence, not ontology.
The alternative is false. Only a God who is a se can promise presence unconditionally — a dependent god's "I will be with you" is only as good as whatever he depends on. The name grounds the covenant in the being; the traditions err by keeping one half.
Classifying the attributes
One rule governs everything in the next two sections: the attributes are not parts of God. God is not assembled from goodness plus power plus knowledge; each attribute names the one undivided essence under a distinct aspect.
The taxonomies
- Incommunicable / communicable (the Reformed standard) — perfections with no creaturely analogue (aseity, immutability, infinity) versus perfections God shares in creaturely measure (knowledge, love, holiness). The line is soft: even the communicable attributes are held incommunicably — God's love is a se, ours is not.
- Negative / positive — what God is not (in-finite, im-mutable) versus what he is.
- Absolute / relative — God in himself versus God in relation to the world.
- Barth's pairing — "the one who loves in freedom": every perfection an inflection of love or of freedom, each interpreting the other.
Under , no attribute is "more fundamental" than another. God's justice is his love is his holiness — distinguished in our apprehension and in his works, not divided in his being.
Every reduction of the doctrine of God in history begins as a ranking. Make love the real centre and holiness a qualification, and you get liberal Protestantism's grandfatherly deity; make sovereignty the centre and you get a will with no character; make holiness the centre alone and you get a judge no one can approach. The preacher's antinomy — "God's love wrestled with his justice at the cross" — is precluded by simplicity: the cross is not one attribute defeating another but the one God being wholly himself.
Incommunicable attributes
The perfections that mark the Creator–creature line itself. Every one of them is currently contested — which is why this section carries the doctrine's live ammunition.
| Attribute | The claim | Texts | Under pressure from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Aseity | God is of himself — underived, self-sufficient fullness of life; the world adds nothing to him | Ex 3:14; Jn 5:26; Acts 17:24–25; Rom 11:35–36 | Process and panentheist accounts in which the world completes God |
| Simplicity | Not composed of parts; God is his attributes — | Deut 6:4; Jn 4:24; inference from aseity — whatever is composed depends on its parts | Theistic personalism; social trinitarianism; much analytic philosophy of religion |
| Immutability | No change in being, perfections, purposes, or promises | Mal 3:6; Jas 1:17; Num 23:19; Ps 102:26–27 | Open theism; mutualism; the relenting texts (below) |
| Impassibility | "Without passions" (WCF 2.1): nothing outside God can inflict states on him. Not apathy — fully actual love that needs no arousal and fears no exhaustion | Acts 14:15; Job 35:6–7; with the whole witness to God's blessedness (1 Tim 1:11) | The twentieth century's passibilist near-consensus (Moltmann and after) |
| Eternity | Boethius: — not endless time but fullness above time | Ps 90:2,4; Isa 57:15; 2 Pet 3:8; Jude 25 | Temporalist accounts (Wolterstorff, Swinburne, Craig) |
| Immensity & omnipresence | Not contained by space, yet wholly present at every point of it — present in essence, not merely in power | 1 Kgs 8:27; Ps 139:7–10; Jer 23:23–24; Acts 17:27–28 | — |
| Infinity | Without limit in being and perfection; the qualitative mode of every other attribute | Job 11:7–9; Ps 145:3 | Finite-god theologies |
The relenting texts
Gen 6:6, Ex 32:14, Jon 3:10 — God "relents," "regrets." The classical reading: — the unchanging counsel of God described from the creature's side, in the grammar of time, exactly as his "hand" and "eyes" describe his agency without giving him a body.
Impassibility and the cross
The classical tradition never denied that God the Son suffered. Cyril's formula is deliberately shocking: the impassible Word suffered impassibly — truly suffered, in the flesh he made his own, without the divine nature being converted into a sufferer. The is what lets the church say "God was crucified" without saying "deity died."
One chapter holds both wires. God "regrets" making Saul king (vv. 11, 35) — and between those verses the narrator insists God "is not a man, that he should have regret" (v. 29). The chapter is forcing a two-register reading: real engagement described creature-ward, unchanging counsel asserted God-ward.
Open theism takes vv. 11 and 35 straight and treats v. 29 as local to one promise; a flattened classicism takes v. 29 straight and reduces vv. 11 and 35 to mere appearance. Both refuse the double register the text itself sets up — and your reading of this one chapter is, in miniature, your entire doctrine of God.
Communicable attributes
The perfections God shares — in creaturely measure, by grace, never univocally. Here the doctrine turns pastoral, because these are the attributes by which God deals with us.
| Attribute | Content | Texts |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge | God knows himself exhaustively, all actual things (scientia visionis), and all possible things (scientia simplicis intelligentiae) — including counterfactuals (Matt 11:21) | Ps 139:1–6; Isa 46:9–10; Heb 4:13; 1 Jn 3:20 |
| Wisdom | Knowledge ordered to the best ends by the best means — displayed, not merely declared, in creation and the cross | Prov 8:22–31; Rom 11:33; 1 Cor 1:21–24 |
| Power | Omnipotence: God does all he wills. Not the ability to do nonsense (square circles) or to un-God himself — he cannot lie, deny himself, or die | Gen 18:14; Jer 32:17; Matt 19:26; 2 Tim 2:13; Tit 1:2 |
| Holiness | Transcendent otherness and moral purity — the attribute Scripture trebles (the only one it does) | Isa 6:3; Lev 19:2; 1 Pet 1:15–16; Rev 4:8 |
| Righteousness | God always acts in accord with his own being; the Judge of all the earth does right — and at the cross is shown to be "just and the justifier" | Gen 18:25; Ps 97:2; Rom 3:25–26 |
| Love | Defined by the sending, not by sentiment; electing, initiating, covenantal | Deut 7:7–8; Jn 3:16; Rom 5:8; 1 Jn 4:8–10 |
| Grace & mercy | Favour to the undeserving; compassion on the miserable — the self-description God gave at Sinai | Ex 34:6–7; Eph 2:4–8; Tit 3:5 |
| Truth & faithfulness | God is reliable in being and word; his promises cannot fail because he cannot | Num 23:19; Lam 3:22–23; 2 Tim 2:13 |
| Jealousy | Covenant exclusivity — the demand of a husband, not the envy of a rival | Ex 34:14; Deut 4:24 |
| Wrath | Not an attribute in tension with love but holiness and justice in contact with sin — settled judicial opposition, not temper | Rom 1:18; Nah 1:2–3; Jn 3:36 |
Ex 34:6–7 is the hinge text — the description God gives of himself when Moses asks to see his glory, and the verse the rest of Scripture quotes most: Num 14:18; Neh 9:17; Pss 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13; Jon 4:2; Nah 1:3. The Bible's own doctrine of God is this formula, expounded.
Ex 34:6–7 holds "abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity" and "who will by no means clear the guilty" in a single self-description — Scripture's own refusal to rank the attributes. The prophets then quote it against each other's situations: Jonah hurls the mercy half at God in protest (Jon 4:2); Nahum aims the justice half at Nineveh a century later (Nah 1:2–3). A doctrine of God that cannot preach both halves of the same verse has already broken simplicity — it has chosen a favourite attribute and demoted the rest to fine print.
The Trinity — the grammar of the whole
The doctrine of God is not a unitarian essay with a trinitarian appendix. The one God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — one essence, three persons. The full structural treatment lives in its own map: the Trinity Map. What theology proper needs from it:
- The processions — the Father unbegotten, the Son eternally begotten (Jn 5:26; the monogenēs texts), the Spirit proceeding (Jn 15:26). The persons are distinguished by relations of origin, by nothing else — not by rank, will, or attribute.
- The missions reveal the processions — the Son is sent in time because he is begotten in eternity; the economy is our access to the immanent life, truly though not exhaustively.
- Opera ad extra indivisa — the external works of the Trinity are undivided: creation, redemption, and sanctification are works of the one God, with each person acting in the mode of his procession; appropriation assigns a work to one person (creation to the Father, redemption to the Son) without excluding the others.
- One will, one power, one glory — will is a property of nature, not of person. This is why the 2016 evangelical controversy over eternal functional subordination mattered: an eternal relation of authority and submission requires the Son's will to be other than the Father's, and the doctrine of God starts to crack at homoousion.
"The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa." Read as a rule of revelation — the missions truly disclose the processions; there is no hidden God behind the God of the gospel — it is classic and vital. Read as a rule of constitution — God becomes triune in and through his history with the world — it hands God over to the world process: Hegel in Nicene dress.
The test: can you still say God would be the same triune fullness had he never created? Lose that, and aseity, grace, and the freedom of creation all go over the same cliff.
The decree and the will of God
Between who God is and what God does stands what God purposes: one eternal, unconditional, all-comprehending counsel (Eph 1:11; Isa 46:9–10; Acts 15:18).
Distinctions in the divine will
- Decretive / preceptive — what God ordains to occur versus what God commands as right (Deut 29:29). Every tradition uses some form of this; without it, every broken commandment falsifies sovereignty.
- Antecedent / consequent (Damascene, taken up by Arminianism) — God's will considered before and after creaturely response.
- Necessary / free — God wills his own goodness necessarily; he wills creation freely. Nothing outside God compelled the world's existence.
The knowledge–decree order
God's natural knowledge (all possibles) precedes the decree; his free knowledge (all actuals) follows it. Molina inserted a third moment between them — — by which God knows what every free creature would do in any circumstance, and sovereignly selects a world accordingly. The standing objection: what grounds the truth of these counterfactuals, prior to the decree and outside God's essence?
The supralapsarian / infralapsarian question — where the fall stands in the logical order of the decree — is mapped from the sin side in the Doctrine of Sin.
"God desires all people to be saved" — and "our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases" (Ps 115:3). Every tradition resolves the pair by distinguishing two registers of the divine will; they differ only in which register they make load-bearing. The Reformed make the decretive will ultimate and read 2:4 as preceptive or as "all kinds"; Arminians make the antecedent will genuine and universal, resisted in the consequent. The system that refuses any distinction has two exits: universalism, or a God whose deepest desire is eternally frustrated. There is no fourth option on the table.
Providence
The decree, executed in time. Three classical moments:
- Preservation — all things held in being, moment by moment (Col 1:17; Heb 1:3; Neh 9:6). Existence is continuously given, not merely initially granted.
- Concurrence — : God acts in and with every creaturely action as primary cause, while secondary causes remain real causes (Acts 17:28; Prov 21:1).
- Government — all things steered to their appointed end, from thrones to sparrows to dice (Ps 103:19; Prov 16:33; Matt 10:29–31; Eph 1:11).
Miracle is not God intervening in a machine he otherwise ignores, but the ordinary Governor acting extraordinarily — providence made conspicuous.
Providence and evil — the boundary stones (God ordains without authoring; Acts 2:23 with Jas 1:13) and the proposed mechanisms are mapped at length in the Doctrine of Sin; this map only insists the question belongs to theology proper before it belongs to apologetics.
Providence dies by two opposite reductions. Deism keeps secondary causes and retires the primary — God winds the watch and withdraws. Occasionalism keeps the primary cause and dissolves the secondary — creatures are occasions, never agents, and fire does not actually burn. Concursus is not a compromise between them; it is a different claim: two total causes at two levels. Lose it and prayer becomes either pointless (nothing to ask of an absent God) or the only causality there is (nothing else was ever doing anything).
The modern revisions
For eighteen centuries the attributes of §05 were the shared inheritance of East and West, Rome and the Reformation. The last two centuries produced a family of revisions — each powered by a real pastoral instinct, each purchasing it at a price.
| Revision | Core move | What it protects | What it costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Theistic personalism | God as the supreme person who has properties — perfect-being theology in the analytic mode | Intelligibility; philosophical tractability | The Creator–creature distinction thins: God becomes the greatest being among beings, univocally described |
| Theistic mutualism | Real give-and-take: creatures genuinely affect God, whose essence nonetheless holds | The relational texts read straight | Simplicity and strong immutability quietly dropped — often without the author noticing |
| Open theism | The future is partly unsettled; God knows all that can be known, and takes real risks | Libertarian freedom; evil recast as risk rather than ordination | Exhaustive foreknowledge; predictive prophecy; Isa 46:10 |
| Process theism | God dipolar, developing with the world; power persuasive, never unilateral; no creation | A theodicy: God cannot stop evil, only lure against it | Aseity, omnipotence, eschatological guarantee — a God who needs the world cannot save it |
| Divine suffering | Moltmann's Crucified God: the cross taken into God's own being; post-Auschwitz solidarity | God with the victims, not above them | If suffering enters the divine nature itself, the cross's asymmetry — the free one suffering for the bound — begins to dissolve |
Against this family stands the classical resourcement of the last two decades (Webster, Sonderegger, Dolezal, Duby, Barrett, Carter) — a recovery, not a nostalgia: it argues the tradition already held everything the revisions want, in a grammar that doesn't shrink God to get it.
Each revision has noticed something true: God is near, engaged, moved for us; the Bible's God is no iceberg. The weak response is to treat the instinct as an enemy. The strong response is to absorb it and refuse the metaphysics — because each revision buys God's nearness by shrinking the God who is near. The classical wager runs the other way: only the God who needs nothing from you can be wholly gift to you. Aseity is not the rival of grace; it is grace's precondition. A God moved by the world is, in the end, a God the world can hold hostage.
Locate your framework
Four decisions determine nearly everything else in your doctrine of God. Most people inherit answers without ever seeing the questions — then discover their prayers assume one God and their systematics another.
Are God's attributes identical with his essence, or really distinct properties he possesses?
Can God change or suffer?
How is God eternal?
How does God know the future free acts of creatures?
Answer the four decisions above. The readout names where your answers converge, what they commit you to, and — more usefully — where they strain against each other.
Primary sources
- Augustine — Confessions I, VII; De Trinitate V–VII
- John of Damascus — On the Orthodox Faith I
- Anselm — Monologion; Proslogion
- Aquinas — ST I, qq. 2–26 (de Deo uno); 27–43 (de Deo trino)
- Calvin — Institutes I.1–13
- Charnock — The Existence and Attributes of God
- Turretin — Institutes, Third Topic
- Confessional — Nicene & Athanasian Creeds; WCF 2; Belgic 1; Augsburg I
- Bavinck — Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2
- Muller — Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 3
- Barth — Church Dogmatics II/1
- Moltmann — The Crucified God (the passibilist case)
- Weinandy — Does God Suffer?
- Gavrilyuk — The Suffering of the Impassible God
- Frame — The Doctrine of God
- Webster — God Without Measure, vol. 1
- Sonderegger — Systematic Theology, vol. 1
- Dolezal — All That Is in God
- Duby — Divine Simplicity; God in Himself
- Carter — Contemplating God with the Great Tradition