The attributes of God — simplicity, impassibility, timelessness

The Foundations article Who is God? introduced the attributes of God in plain words: holiness, love, justice, power, knowledge, presence. This article goes further into what theologians call theology proper — the doctrine of God himself — and into the attributes that have been most debated in the last century: aseity, immutability, simplicity, impassibility, eternity and omniscience.

These may seem remote from ordinary faith. They are not. Whether God changes, whether he suffers, whether he knows tomorrow, whether he is in time with us — these questions sit underneath every prayer for guidance and every funeral. And the answers given by the church for most of its history have been challenged, often by thoughtful Christians, in ways every serious student needs to understand.

Classical theism

Classical theism is the name for the doctrine of God shared, with differences of emphasis, by the church fathers, the medieval theologians, the Reformers and the post-Reformation confessions. Augustine, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin, the Westminster divines, Francis Turretin and Stephen Charnock all held it. The Westminster Confession summarises it:

There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions; immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute.— Westminster Confession of Faith, 2.1

The Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles use the same phrase in Article 1: "without body, parts, or passions". That phrase contains three of our topics — God is not made of parts (simplicity), and he is not subject to passions (impassibility).

Classical theism is not the same as Greek philosophy, though its defenders freely used philosophical tools. Its starting point is the biblical distinction between the Creator and the creature. God is not the biggest thing in the universe. He is the one on whom the universe depends, and he depends on nothing.

Incommunicable and communicable

Reformed theologians in particular have divided the attributes into two kinds.

• Incommunicable attributes are those God shares with no creature: aseity, immutability, simplicity, eternity, infinity, omnipresence.
• Communicable attributes are those of which creatures can have a finite reflection: love, wisdom, goodness, justice, truthfulness, mercy.

The division is useful, but it has limits. Even God's communicable attributes are infinite and simple in him; our love is a faint likeness of his, not a smaller portion of the same stuff. And the incommunicable attributes qualify all the others: God's love is an eternal, unchanging, self-existent love.

Aseity: God from himself

Aseity (from the Latin a se, "from himself") means God exists of himself and depends on nothing. "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14). He "gives to all mankind life and breath and everything", and he is not "served by human hands, as though he needed anything" (Acts 17:25). "The Father has life in himself" (John 5:26).

This is the root of the other incommunicable attributes. A being who depends on nothing cannot be improved or damaged by anything outside himself. Aseity is also deeply practical. In many African traditional settings, as in the ancient world, the gods and spirits need sacrifices and can be manipulated by gifts. The living God needs nothing — which means he cannot be bribed, and that his love for us is pure gift.

Immutability: God does not change

"I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6). With the Father of lights "there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17). "God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind" (Numbers 23:19).

Classical theology means more than "God keeps his promises", though it means that. It means that God does not move from potential to actual, does not grow or decline, does not acquire new perfections. He is already fully what he is.

The obvious objection is the many texts in which God relents, regrets or responds (Genesis 6:6; Exodus 32:14; Jonah 3:10). The classical answer is that these describe real changes in the relation between God and creatures, seen from our side. When the Ninevites repent, it is the unchanging God who meets repentance with mercy, just as he meets rebellion with judgement (Jeremiah 18:7-10). The sun does not change when wax melts and clay hardens before it.

Some modern evangelicals, including Wayne Grudem, hold a modified immutability: God is unchanging in being, perfections, purposes and promises, but does act and feel differently in response to different situations. This is an important internal disagreement, and it leads straight into the next two attributes.

Simplicity: God is not made of parts

Divine simplicity is the most misunderstood doctrine on this list. It does not mean God is easy to understand. It means God is not composed. He has no parts — physical, logical or metaphysical. He is not a combination of goodness plus power plus wisdom; he is not a nature plus an existence; he does not have attributes as a person has qualities. In Augustine's phrase, God is what he has.

Why would anyone hold this? Because anything made of parts depends on its parts and on whatever puts them together. If God were composed, something would be more basic than God. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 confessed God as one "altogether simple" substance, and Aquinas treats simplicity as the first thing to say about God's nature.

The pastoral consequence is significant. If God is simple, his attributes cannot compete. His justice is his love, viewed from another angle. God never has to decide which part of himself to obey.

The criticisms are real. Alvin Plantinga argued in Does God Have a Nature? (1980) that strong simplicity seems to make God identical to a property, which would make him an abstract object rather than a person. Others ask how a simple God can freely create, since it seems he might have done otherwise and so have been otherwise. Defenders answer that these objections treat God as an object within our categories, and that "property" language applies to God only by analogy. William Lane Craig, among others, has rejected strong simplicity; James Dolezal and Matthew Barrett defend it vigorously. The debate is ongoing.

Impassibility: God is not overcome by passions

Impassibility is the doctrine that God is not subject to "passions" — not acted upon from outside, not swept by emotion, not subject to suffering in his divine nature.

It is easily caricatured as a cold, unfeeling God. That was never the claim. The older word "passion" meant something suffered or undergone — being changed by something outside you. Human emotions rise and fall; they can overwhelm us; they can be manipulated. God's love, joy, wrath and compassion are not like that. They are perfect, settled, active dispositions of his own being. Anselm put the question directly in the Proslogion: how can God be compassionate and yet not suffer? His answer was that God is compassionate in what we experience of him, not in being affected as we are.

Love and wrath

What, then, of God's anger, or his anguish in Hosea 11:8 — "How can I give you up, O Ephraim?... My heart recoils within me"? The classical reply is that such texts reveal true things about God's love and holiness, in language suited to human hearers. And Hosea goes on: "I will not execute my burning anger... for I am God and not a man" (Hosea 11:9). God's compassion is unlike ours precisely because it is not fickle. His wrath is not a loss of temper but the settled opposition of perfect goodness to evil.

Christ's suffering

The hardest question is the cross. Did God suffer? The ancient church gave a precise answer.

The Son of God truly suffered and died. This is not pretence. But he suffered in and through the human nature he took, not in the divine nature as such. Cyril of Alexandria famously said the Word "suffered impassibly" — a deliberately paradoxical phrase meaning that the one who suffered was truly God the Son, while the divine nature itself was not changed. In the sixth century, the so-called "theopaschite" formula, "one of the Trinity suffered in the flesh", was accepted at the Second Council of Constantinople (553). This is distinct from patripassianism, the earlier heresy that the Father himself suffered, which the church rejected.

So the classical view does not keep God at a distance from suffering. It says the impassible God, without ceasing to be God, entered suffering in the person of the Son. Charles Wesley's hymn captures it: "'Tis mystery all: th' Immortal dies".

Modern challenges

In the twentieth century, the doctrine came under heavy attack. After the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust, many theologians found an unsuffering God unbelievable. Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from prison that only a suffering God can help. Jürgen Moltmann's The Crucified God (1972) argued that the cross is an event within God himself, in which the Father suffers the loss of the Son. Process theology, building on Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, went further: God is not the unchanging Creator but a fellow-sufferer who grows with the world, persuading but never controlling.

Many evangelicals have adopted a softened "passibilism", holding that God genuinely experiences emotions in response to creatures. Others have recently argued for a recovery of classical impassibility. A middle path, defended by Rob Lister in God Is Impassible and Impassioned (2013), holds that God is not overpowered or manipulated by creatures but does have real, freely chosen emotional responses.

Eternity: timeless or everlasting?

Scripture is clear that God has no beginning or end: "from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (Psalm 90:2). He "inhabits eternity" (Isaiah 57:15). With him "one day is as a thousand years" (2 Peter 3:8). The question is how God relates to time itself.

The timeless view

Augustine argued that time is part of creation, so asking what God did before creation misunderstands the question — there was no "before". In Confessions Book XI he admits the difficulty: if no one asks him what time is, he knows; if he tries to explain it, he does not. Boethius gave the classic definition: eternity is the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of unending life. God does not live through a succession of moments; he possesses his whole life at once. Aquinas, Anselm and the Reformed scholastics followed this view. Its strength is that it fits God's aseity and immutability; a God in time would seem to be subject to it. Paul Helm is a leading modern defender.

The everlasting view

Nicholas Wolterstorff, in an influential 1975 essay titled "God Everlasting", argued that the biblical God acts in history — he speaks, responds, remembers, promises — and that action requires sequence. God therefore experiences time, though without beginning or end and without being limited by it as we are. Many evangelical philosophers find this closer to the biblical narrative.

Craig's view

William Lane Craig proposes a combination: God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation. On this view, God freely entered time when he created the universe. Craig argues this preserves both God's transcendence and his genuine, real-time relationship with the world. Critics from both sides question whether a being can coherently be both, and whether such a change compromises immutability.

Omniscience and open theism

God knows everything: "his understanding is beyond measure" (Psalm 147:5); "he knows everything" (1 John 3:20). That includes the future: "declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done" (Isaiah 46:10).

Open theism, launched among evangelicals by The Openness of God (1994) and developed by Clark Pinnock, John Sanders and Gregory Boyd, argues that the future free choices of creatures are not yet there to be known. God knows everything that can be known, but the future is partly open even to him. Open theists appeal to texts such as Genesis 22:12 ("now I know that you fear God") and Jeremiah 19:5 (something "nor did it come into my mind"), and they argue that genuine relationship and genuine risk require an open future. Their motive is often pastoral: to free God from responsibility for evil and to give prayer real influence.

That should be heard sympathetically. But the view faces serious objections.

1. Scripture predicts free acts. Jesus foretells Peter's threefold denial and Judas's betrayal (Matthew 26:34; John 13:26). The prophets name Cyrus generations ahead (Isaiah 44:28).
2. Foreknowledge is God's credential. In Isaiah 41–48, God's ability to declare the future is what proves he is God and the idols are not (Isaiah 41:21-23).
3. The "now I know" texts prove too much. Read the same way, Genesis 3:9 ("Where are you?") would mean God did not know where Adam was.
4. It undermines confidence. If God does not know what free creatures will do, his promises about the future depend on guesses.

The Evangelical Theological Society debated the issue at length; in 2001 it passed a resolution affirming that God has complete, accurate and infallible knowledge of all events, past, present and future. Calvinists, Arminians and Molinists disagree about how God knows the future (see the article on election and free will), but they agree that he does.

Why it matters

These doctrines can seem like the hardest part of theology. But they protect simple faith.

Because God is self-existent, he does not need you — so his love for you is free. Because he is unchanging, his promises in Christ will not be revised. Because he is simple, his justice and mercy will never be at war. Because he is impassible, he is never overwhelmed by the world's evil, and so he can overcome it. Because he is eternal, he holds your whole life at once, beginning to end. And because he knows all things, nothing that will happen to you tomorrow will take him by surprise.

The God who is all this is also the God who, in the person of his Son, wept at a tomb and died on a cross. That is not a contradiction. It is the centre of the Christian faith.