by Cornelius Van Til
We come to a discussion of the attributes of God. The problem that faces us at the outset is that of the relation of the virtues or attributes of God to his Being. In dealing with distinctions in the Godhead, we must needs be careful not to do despite to the simplicity of his Being. We cannot divide up the Godhead. But if this is true, must we then conclude that the distinctions we make are made by merely us, and have only subjective value?
There is only one possible answer to this difficulty. Each attribute of God is coterminous with God. God is light, God is love, God is righteousness, God is holiness. Yet God himself has in his revelation instructed us to make distinctions with respect to his Being. These distinctions help us to understand something of the weak and the richness of his Being.
If we think of the relation of the attributes of God to his being in this manner, we are at once in a position to contrast the Christian to the non-Christian position. The difference is once again that of thinking abstractly and of thinking concretely of God. If one thinks abstractly one obtains a negative, empty essence. This essence is then contrasted to positive thought-content which is said, in the nature of the case, to delimit the essence. Thus a non-Christian notion of incomprehensibility is combined with a non-Christian notion of positive knowledge, and the result is a split in the Godhead as well as the destruction of human knowledge.
It is well, therefore, that we keep in mind the distinction between an orthodox and an unorthodox conception of the way of eminence and the way of negation by which men have spoken of God. The orthodox notion begins with God as the concrete self-existent being. Thus God is not named according to what is found in the creature, except God has first named the creature according to what is in himself. The only reason why it appears as though God is named according to what is found in the creature is that, as creatures, we must psychologically begin with ourselves in our knowledge of anything. We are ourselves the proximate starting point of all our knowledge. In contrast to this, however, we should think of God as the ultimate starting point of our knowledge, God is the archetype, while we are the ectypes. God's knowledge is archetypal and ours ectypal.
If we realize this fact that God is the original and man is the derivative, we may safely apply the way of eminence and the way of negation. We need not fear that we shall reach an empty concept or that our knowledge will be subjective. Our attempts to say something about God then have back of them the original fact that God has said something about himself.
On the other hand, if we do not keep clearly before us this fact of the self-existent God, who has self-consciously and by an act of self-determination revealed himself, then we shall invariably be led by the way of negation into an abstract notion of the essence of God, and by the way of eminence into uncertainty and delimitation of God. Our reflection on the knowledge of God should always begin with the positive self-revelation of God. The way of negation is the way by which creatures, made in the image of God, realizing that their position is a derivative one, reach up to their original. As made in the image of God, these creatures have received a positive revelation of God. It was only after the entrance of sin that man could think of himself as no longer the creature of God. And it was then that he invented the abstract rather than the concrete way of negation. That abstract way of negation is a convenient tool for the sinner by which to remove the positive attributes of God from making direct demands upon him. Man made himself believe that when he spoke of the righteousness of God he was merely ascribing something of his own feelings to a being who in reality lives above all such distinctions.
It was only in the field of special revelation that men began again to think concretely of God. It is in the Old and the New Testaments that God speaks out fully and freely his requirements with respect to man and man knows that these requirements are real expressions of the being of God.
In this connection we may remark that Barth has followed the abstract rather than the concrete way of negation in his doctrine of God. The reason for this seems to us to lie in the fact that he has first accepted the abstract rather than the concrete way of affirmation with respect to man's knowledge of the world. It has been noted before that, for Barth, there is no difference between the Christian and the non-Christian when it comes to knowledge of the things of this world. In true Kantian fashion he claims for man an independent knowledge of the phenomenal world. For Barth, man's knowledge of the phenomenal world is not based upon a prior positive revelation of God. The only thing that remains for him, when he turns to the question of man's knowledge of God, is to follow the abstract way of negation. If man claims to know anything independently of God he has equated the level of his own thought with the level of God's thought. If man claims to have the ultimate unifying principle for the interpretation of the phenomenal world within himself apart from God, he has therewith assumed that he has about him ultimate uninterpreted facts. And if these facts are brute facts for him as an ultimate interpreter, they are also brute facts for God as another ultimate interpreter. And this also amounts to saying that there is really no ultimate interpreter at all. It means that each interpreter is really a brute fact who somehow is the focus-point of a rational principle that somehow seems to run through brute facts. In other words, we are before an alternative that cannot be avoided. We may presuppose God as the only and therefore absolutely self-conscious personal principle of interpretation. In that case man cannot interpret anything aright unless his interpretation be thought of as a reinterpretation of God's interpretation. This Barth is unwilling to do. He wants to maintain independence for man at some point. By doing so he cannot escape the only choice that remains. That only choice is to reduce God to an empty essence, a mere impersonal principle.
We are well aware of the fact that Barth describes positive attributes to God. He seems to out-Calvin Calvin in his insistence on the sovereignty of God. But this does not change the fact that if he were true to his own principle of interpretation he could not ascribe really positive attributes to God. He would have to end up in silence. Barth may say ever so often that God must reveal himself. This is in itself true. But Barth does not really allow God to reveal himself. He sets obstacles in the way of God's revelation in the form of independently conceived human thought. The result is that, according to Barth, we may not rely on anything that has been spoken to man in Scripture as on the word of God. The words of Scripture, argues Barth, are, after all, but human words. The revelation of God cannot speak in them as such. But the only reason he can say this is that he has not made the human mind absolutely subject in its interpretation to the divine mind. He has attributed to the human mind absolute power over against the divine mind. If the human mind were made subject to God by virtue of creation, there is no further reason why it should not be a vehicle by which God can speak to man directly.
Romanist theology also follows the abstract rather than the concrete way of negation and immanence. The "rationalistic" approach of Aquinas is similar to the "irrationalist" approach of Barth. Both have their roots in the notion that man is, in a measure, autonomous. Both Aquinas and Barth hold that man can interpret the phenomenal world aright without referring to God. Both therefore say that man can know only what God is not. They use the way of negation before they use the way of eminence. Then when they use the way of eminence they can do no more, logically, than introduce a finite God, a God who is like man. Thus the analogia entis doctrine of the Romanist and the analogia fidei are not very different from one another, Romanism does, in spite of its Aristotelianism, allow for a transcendent God and therefore is "orthodox." Barth, because of his Kantianism allows for no transcendent God at all, and therefore is unorthodox. But because of its abstract use of the ways of negation and eminence, Romanism cannot offer much resistance to Barthianism.
If we have caught the difference between the orthodox and the non-orthodox notion of the way of eminence and negation, we are then in a position to deal briefly with the individual attributes of God. For it is really the same problem that meets us in the case of each individual attribute. We must speak of God anthropomorphically. The Scripture speaks of God in that way. In fact there is no other way for us to speak of God. On the other hand we must be alert to the danger that we should forget that God is the original and that we are the derivatives.
The church has jealously guarded the originality of God. In its thinking it has therefore quite rightly made the incommunicable attributes of God to precede the communicable. And it has hastened to add that no attributes can, as such, be communicated to man. Nothing can exist in man just as it exists in God. Therefore God is incomprehensible in all that he reveals with respect to himself. Everything with respect to God is on the plane of the absolute, while everything with respect to man is derivative. On the other hand, we have in man a copy, something of that which God has revealed with respect to himself. Man's being is analogical of God's being. If, therefore, we speak first of the so-called communicable attributes of God, it is merely for the purpose of stressing the originality of God. The incommunicable attributes of God are those attributes with respect to which we seem to find the least analogy in ourselves, and of which Scripture therefore speaks largely by way of negation. On the other hand, the so-called communicable attributes of God are those of which we seem to have most analogy in ourselves and of which the Scriptures therefore speak more positively.
The Incommunicable Attributes of God
1. The Aseity or Independence of God
First and foremost among the attributes, we therefore mention the independence or self-existence of God (autarkia, omnisufficientia). Everything we have said about God so far has laid stress upon the self-contained character of God. "He is ipsa per se bonitas sanctitas, sapientia, vita, veritas, etc." God is a se; His creatures are ab alio. "In this aseity of God, thought of not merely as being by itself but as the fulness of being, all other virtues are included; they are but the setting forth of the fulness of God's being."
God cannot be said to be causa sui, if by causa is meant the source of production. God is not self-produced because he is not produced at all. On the other hand God may be said to be causa sui, if by causa is meant the reason for and meaning of his existence. He is self-contained rationality. His rationality is not something he possesses, but is something with which his being is coterminous. For this reason we should be careful when we say that God is the being than whom none higher can be thought. If we take the highest being of which we can think, in the sense of have a concept of, and attribute to it actual existence, we do not have the biblical notion of God. God is not the reality that corresponds to the highest concept that man, considered as an independent being, can think. Man cannot think an absolute self-contained being; that is, he cannot have a concept of it in the ordinary sense of the term. God is infinitely higher than the highest being of which man can form a concept.
It is true that we can think of a being higher than we can conceive or make a concept of. And we may use the word "concept" of God in this broader and looser fashion. In fact, it is in this broader and looser fashion that we must speak when we speak of our concept of God. By it we simply mean that notion or idea which we have, by an analogical process of reasoning, sought to fashion for ourselves, of the being of God. When we speak of our concept or notion or God, we should be fully aware that by that concept we have an analogical reproduction of the notion that God has of himself. Our notions or concepts are finite replicas of God's notions.
Perhaps we can clarify this whole matter by contrasting the scholastic procedure, with respect to finding knowledge of God, to that which we have here advocated as being the consistently Christian procedure. To do this, we may conveniently turn to the work of a modern Catholic philosopher. We take the work of P. Coffey on Ontology, in order to see what he says with respect to the being-of God. We quote a portion of his chapter, "Being and Its Primary Determinations."
"The notion of being, spontaneously reached by the human mind, is found on reflection to be the simplest of all notions, defying every attempt at analysis into simpler notions. It is involved in every other concept which we can form of any object of thought whatsoever. Without it we could have no concept of anything."
"It is thus the first of all notions in the logical order, i.e., in the process of rational thought."
"It is also the first of all notions in the chronological order, the first which the human mind forms in the order of time. Not, of course, that we remember having formed it before any other more determinate notions.
But the child's awakening intellectual activity must have proceeded from the simplest, easiest, most superficial of all concepts, to fuller, clearer, and more determinate concepts, i.e., from the vague and confused notion of 'being' or 'thing' to notions of definite modes of being, or kinds of thing."
"This direct notion of being is likewise the most indeterminate of all notions; though not of course entirely indeterminate. An object of thought, to be conceivable or intelligible at all by our finite minds, must be rendered definite in some manner and degree; and even this widest notion of 'being' is rendered intelligible only by being conceived as positive and as contrasting with absolute non-being or nothingness."
"According to the Hegelian philosophy, 'pure thought' can apparently think 'pure being,' i.e., being in absolute indeterminateness, being as not even differentiated from 'pure not-being' or absolute nothingness. And this absolutely indeterminate confusion (we may not call it a 'synthesis' or 'unity') of something and nothing, of being and non-being, of positive and negative, of affirmation and denial, would be conceived by our finite minds as the objective correlative of, and at the same time as absolutely identical with, its subjective correlative which is 'pure thought.' Well, it is with the human mind and its objects, and how it thinks those objects, that we are concerned at present; not with speculations involving the gratuitous assumption of a Being that would transcend all duality of subject and object, all determinateness of knowing and being, all distinction of thought and thing. We believe that the human mind can establish the existence of a Supreme Being whose mode of Thought and Existence transcends all human comprehension, but it can do so only as the culminating achievement of all its speculation. And the transcendent being it thus reaches has nothing in common with the monistic ideal-real being of Hegel's philosophy. In endeavoring to set out from the high a priori ground of such an intangible conception, the Hegelian philosophy starts at the wrong end."
"Further, the notion of being is the most abstract of all notions, poorest in intension as it is widest in extension. We derive it from the data of our experience, and the process by which we reach it is a process of abstraction. We lay aside all the differences whereby things are distinguished from one another; we do not consider these differences; we prescind or abstract from them mentally, and retain for consideration only what is common to all of them. This common element forms the explicit content of our notion of being."
"It must be noted, however, that we do not positively exclude the differences from the object of our concept; we cannot do this, for the simple reason that the differences too are 'being,' inasmuch as they too are modes of being. Our attitude towards them is negative; we merely abstain from considering them explicitly, though they remain in our concept implicitly. The separation effected is only mental, subjective, notional, formal, negative; not objective, not real, not positive. Hence the process by which we narrow down the concept of being to the more comprehensive concept of this or that generic or specific mode of being, does not add to the former concept anything really new, or distinct from, or extraneous to it; but rather brings out explicitly something that was implicit in the latter. The composition of being with its modes is, therefore, only logical composition, not real."
"On the other hand, it would seem that when we abstract a generic mode of being from the specific modes subordinate to the former, we positively exclude the differentiating characteristics of the species; and that, conversely, when we narrow down the genus to a subordinate species we do so by addition a differentiating mode which was not contained even implicitly in the generic concept. Thus, for example, the differentiating concept 'rational' is not contained even implicitly in the generic concept 'animal': it is added on ab extra to the latter in order to reach the specific concept of 'rational animal' or 'man' so that in abstracting the generic from the subordinate specific concept we prescind objectively and really from the differentiating concept, by positively excluding this latter. This kind of abstraction is called objective, real, positive; and the composition of such generic and differentiating modes of being is technically known as metaphysical composition. The different modes of being, which the mind can distinguish at different levels of abstraction in any specific concept—such as 'rational,' 'sentient,' 'living,' 'corporeal,' in the concept of 'man'—are likewise known as 'metaphysical grades' of being."
"It has been questioned whether this latter kind of abstraction is always used in relating generic, specific, and differential modes of being. At first sight it would not appear to be a quite satisfactory account of the process in cases where the generic notion exhibits a mode of being which can be embodied only in one or other of a number of alternative specific modes by means of differentiae not found in any things lying outside the genus itself. The generic notion of plane rectilinear figure does not, of course, include explicitly its species 'triangle,' 'quadrilateral,' 'pentagon,' etc.; nor does it include even implicitly any definite one of them. But the concept of each of the differentiating characters, e.g., the differentia 'threesidedness' is unintelligible except as a mode of a 'plane rectilinear figure.' This, however, is only accidental, i.e., due to the special objects considered;7 and even here there persists this difference that whereas what differentiates the species of plane rectilinear figures is not explicitly and formally plane-rectilinearity, that which differentiates finite from infinite being, or substantial from accidental being, is itself also formally and explicitly being. But there are other cases in which the abstraction is manifestly objective. Thus, for example, the differentiating concept 'rational' does not even implicitly elude the generic concept 'animal,' for the former concept may be found realized in beings other than animals; and the differentiating concept 'living' does not even implicitly include the concept 'corporeal,' for it may be found realized in incorporeal beings."
"Since the notion of being is so simple that it cannot be analyzed into simpler notions which might serve as its genus and differentia, it cannot strictly speaking be defined. We can only describe it by considering it from various points of view and comparing it with the various modes in which we find it realized. This is what we have been attempting so far. Considering its fundamental relation to existence we might say that 'Being is that which exists or is at least capable of existing'; Ens est id quod existit vel saltera existere potest. Or, that which is not absolute nothingness: 'Ens est id quod non est nihil absolutum.' Or, considering its relation to our minds, we might say that 'Being is whatever is thinkable, whatever can be an object of thought.' "
"The notion of being is so universal that it transcends all actual and conceivable determinate modes of being: it embraces infinite being and all modes of finite being. In other words it is not itself a generic, but a transcendental notion. Wider than all, even the widest and highest genera, it is not itself a genus. A genus is determinable into its species by the addition of differences which lie outside the concept of the genus itself; being, as we have seen, is not in this way determinable into its modes."
It is not our purpose to analyze this passage of Coffey in detail. We note merely that the whole approach of Coffey is abstract. He himself says that the notion of being is obtained by abstraction. If this path is followed out to the end, one is bound to land at the point of pure abstract being. But Coffey is unwilling to land there. He ways that the notion of being is the most indeterminate yet is "not of course entirely indeterminate." He wants to contrast the notion of being to that of absolute non-being. He feels that Hegel's identification of them is utterly unjustifiable. Yet we are bound to maintain that Coffey is headed straight for the purely indeterminate of Hegel. It is only by a happy inconsistency that being and non-being are not interchangeable terms for him. Coffey gets as near to the abyss of absolute non-being as he dares when he says: "Ens est id quod non est nihil absolutum."
When one thus begins with the abstract notion of the analogy of being, God and man are bound to come out of this vague sort of being as correlatives to one another. The various modes of being become, in that case, mutually analogical. Coffey speaks of higher and lower modes of being, and speaks accordingly also of more and less being. He cannot find a real creation doctrine on his basic assumption. One must choose between saying that God is a self-contained being and that human beings are created analogues of him while he is the original and not the analogue of them, and saying that there is a vague general being that divides itself by the process of limitation into various modes. In the former case, we have the truly Christian, and in the second case we have what is really the pagan notion of being. The Aristotelian notion of the analogy of being cannot be harmonized with the Creator-creature idea of Scripture.
The self-existence of God can be maintained only if we start concretely with the notion of God as the fulness of self-contained being; the process of abstraction has always led men astray.
2. The Immutability of God
The immutability of God is involved in his aseity. God is "unchangeable in his existence and essence; as he is in his thought and will, in all his purposes and decrees." He is called the Jehovah who changes not, (Mal 3:6) and with him there is no shadow that is cast by turning.
We are again to be on the alert lest we confuse Christian with non-Christian thought on the question of the immutability of God. The church's doctrine is not to be confused with the aidios ousia akinytos of Aristotle. Bavinck does not bring out this point as it should be brought out. He even tends to minimize the difference between the church's doctrine and that of pagan thought. However, Bavinck himself tells us that for Augustine the immutability of God was the direct consequence of the self-contained fulness of the divine being.11 But surely in the case of Aristotle the immutability of the divine being was due to its emptiness and internal immobility. No greater contrast is thinkable than that between the unmoved noesis noeeseoosʾ/it of Aristotle and the Christian God.
This appears particularly from the fact that the Bible does not hesitate to attribute all manner of activity to God. God creates the world; he keeps his eye on it constantly, not merely on the world in general, but even on the minutest details. But throughout all this activity with respect to the created universe, he himself is said to remain unchanged. Is 41:4, Is 43:10, Is 46:4, Is 48:12, Dt 32:39, Jn 8:58, Heb 13:8. Herein exactly lies the glory of the Christian doctrine of God, that the unchangeable one is the one in control of the change of the universe. If he were the abstract one of Aristotle, he would be nothing but the correlative of the universe, and would therefore have no control over it.
Bavinck points out that the immutability of God has had its enemies.
These enemies have been found among those whose thinking has been informed by pagan philosophy such as that of Heraclitus. Dorner, for instance, sought to harmonize the unchangeability of God with the fact of his active concern for the things of the universe by saying that God is immutable merely in the ethical aspect of his being. God is always love and is always holy. On the other hand, God changed when he actually created the world and when, in the person of the Son, he became flesh. Bavinck insists, and rightly so, that all these efforts are foredoomed to failure. The Scriptures speak anthropomorphically of God, and could not do otherwise, but for all that, God, in himself, is immutable. "There is change round about him; there is change in the relation of things to him; but there is no change in God himself."13 It has been noted in Chapter 14 that Buswell defines the immutability merely as a permanence of relationship of God to the world.
3. The Infinity of God
The infinity of God is also involved in his aseity. By the infinity of God is meant the boundless fulness of his being. God is limitless in his existence, and therefore in his attributes. God is concrete self-existence.
We are again compelled to describe this attribute chiefly by way of negation. But it is again of the utmost significance that we use the way of negation correctly. We may seek to apply the way of negation to two of the major aspects of the created world, in order thus to approach something of the notion of God's infinity We compare God's infinity in relation to time and space. We therefore speak of God as being eternal and as being omnipresent.
In both cases, we must needs be very careful to avoid the bad infinite that results if we follow a process of abstraction. Yet it is very easy when we walk the way of negation to fall into abstraction. The way of negation is all too often identified with the way of abstraction. We are then told that we should simply take the notions of time and of space, and subtract such characteristics as succession or continuity from them in order to reach the notions of eternity and omnipresence. But when we follow this advice we land at the very opposite pole from that of the fulness of the being of God. We then come to pure emptiness.
Accordingly, we need the indescribable fulness of the being of God as the presupposition of our notions of time and space. Then we subtract from these notions the limitations that pertain to them by virtue of the fact that they are created by God. If we do this, we walk theistically on the way of negation. The way of negation is then, at the same time, the way of affirmation. God then appears so full and rich in his being that we cannot even make negations with respect to him without the presupposition of the fulness of his being.
The notion of the infinity of God brings out with special force the fact that man's predication with respect to him should not be independent, predication. Independent predication on the part of man implies the delimitation of God and, therefore, the finitization of God. Thus the abstract way of negation, which assumes the ability of man to engage in independent predication, frustrates itself; it seeks an eternal world, and ends up by finding one which is nothing but a negative counterpart of the spatio-temporal universe. Such a being may be either deistically or pantheistically conceived. In both cases, the difference between Creator and creature is really ignored.
Accordingly, we begin our thought about the infinity of God by insisting that the fulness of the being of God is back of the active fulness and variety in the spatio-temporal world. Scripture leads us in this respect. It has no hesitation in speaking anthropomorphically of God. It ascribes all manner of activity to him. Of this activity we cannot think otherwise than spatially and temporally. So we are face to face with the choice either of thinking of God as altogether like unto ourselves, or of thinking ourselves the finite analogues of the fulness of his being. As we cannot do the first without wiping out the difference between Creator and creature, we are compelled to do the latter.
Thinking of the infinity of God in relation to time in this manner, we therefore think of that fulness of internal activity of which the movement in the temporally conditioned universe is a created replica. God is self-determinatively internally active. God is the self-predicator God is life in himself. Plato's god had the idea of life standing above him; the Christian God knows no definitory principles over against himself. And because he is thus life and internal activity, the God of Christianity, unlike the god of Aristotle, could become the self-Contained source of the created universe. Aristotle's god was not the active source of the world about us. For both Plato and Aristotle, time has some sort of reality independent of the creative fiat of God.
Thus we have, as Christians, a distinct philosophy of history. All that has happened in the past, all that happens in the present, and all that will happen in the future, rests for its presupposition upon the self-sufficient internal activity of the self-predicating and therefore non-delimited being. The movements of history are not determinative of the self-sufficient activity of God; when God created the world by the determination of his will there was no change in himself. When the second person of the Trinity became incarnate there was no change in God. God gave the world existence alongside of himself. He could do so just because he is the self-contained infinite being. Thus the doctrine of the infinity of God, so far from leading us into pantheism, is the best possible safeguard against it. Any attempt to safe-guard the doctrine of God against pantheism by subtracting from the self-contained internal activity of God is foredoomed to failure. It is here that Arminianism, which insists that the historical is not fully dependent upon the self-contained internal activity of God, though it wishes to protect Christian doctrine from the dangers of pantheism, yet leads eventually into pantheism. Then Arminianism speaks of God it speaks of him by the abstract way of negation. It cannot do otherwise if it is to remain faithful to its principle of giving to created man a certain ultimate predicative power over against God. Accordingly Arminianism has little resistance to offer to such modern idealistic systems of philosophy as that of A. E. Taylor, and of others, for whom time reality is something which God himself has not fully explored.
Buswell defines time as the "mere empty possibility of relationship in sequence, and time in the literal sense is infinite." But on Christian principles there is no such thing as an "empty possibility of relationship in sequence." All possibility of sequence depends upon the counsel of God. Buswell's position here is of a piece with the fact that he, with the Romanist and the Arminian, attributes a measure of autonomy to man and therefore also attempts to make Christian teaching accord with the principles of interpretation of the natural man. In defining the eternity of God, as well as in defining the immutability of God. Buswell therefore does not speak of the self-contained God at all. "When we say God is eternal, we mean that there never was or shall be any possibility of any relationship in sequence independent of God. God is self-existent from infinite time past to infinite time future."15 Speaking of immutability he says: "We have here no unrelatedness, no immovability, no indifference, no absoluteness in any mathematical sense, but we have perfect consistency, perfectly complete relatedness at every point in the temporal process."
We should note in this connection that, on the question of the eternity of God, Karl Barth and his school also stand with those who virtually attribute independent predicative and, therefore, delimiting powers to created man, and independent existence to created forces in general. Karl Barth follows the abstract way of negation throughout when he deals with the doctrine of God. And in particular does he follow the way of abstraction when he discusses the eternity of God.
Barth says that there are three kinds of time. There is our ordinary calendar time, the time in which we daily move and have our being. But this is not to be identified, says Barth, with time as created by God. Creation time is therefore a second sort of time. This creation time, however, is hidden from us. In our daily life we know nothing but our own calendar time. Accordingly, if God is to speak to us and reveal himself to us, he will have to break through this ordinary time of ours. Therefore there must be a third sort of time, namely, a revelation time.
Why does Barth feel compelled to speak of three kinds of time? The chief reason seems to lie in his idea that if we did not make these distinctions we should be obliged to claim that we can solve the difficult questions of the meaning of the present, the question of the beginning and the end of time, and the relation of time to eternity. Here, we believe, lies the source of Barth's error. If we begin all our thinking by presupposing the self-predicating God, we need not claim and cannot claim that we shall, for instance, understand, that is, conceptualize, the relation of time to eternity. In fact, we then know in advance that we cannot understand that relation. We are bound to speak of God in temporal language. And we know that time categories, when applied to God, must be thought of as merely analogous of the full richness of his internal being.
In contrast to this Barth, basing his thought on the abstract principles of a non-Christian logic, insists that the God of our thinking must be reduced to the proportions of what man can comprehend. And then when he recognizes that man cannot think through the whole of reality, he thinks of God as that remnant of reality that somehow is supposed to lie beyond the reach of man's interpretative powers. Thus does Barth's rationalism lead him into irrationalism. To the extent that Barth is consistent with his own principle of interpretation, the eternity of his God must turn out to be an empty concept. It is only because of the fact that he is often happily inconsistent that he ascribes internal fulness to God's being.
The sad consequence of thinking abstractly of the eternity of God appears most strikingly in the case of Barth's theology. The result of Barth's abstract mode of thought is that he virtually denies historic Christianity. Ostensibly opposed to the ideationalism of idealistic philosophies. Barth falls into idealism himself. The work of Christ, according to Barth, does not take place in our ordinary time. It is not because of the infinite value of the work of Christ done for us on the cross of Calvary, it is not because of the actual physical resurrection with the same body with which he died on the cross that Christ has redeemed his people. It is rather because of something that is said to have happened in "revelation time" of which the things that happen on calendar time are pointers that Christ is said to be our Savior. For Barth, nothing that happens in our time can have infinite value. Our time is but a shadowy reality, something in the nature of Plato's moving image of eternity. It has a quasi-independent existence, but it is not a fit theatre for the activity of God.
Thus the basic contrast between a Christian and a non-Christian notion of eternity of God stands before us. He who thinks of the infinity of God concretely as the internal fulness of the activity of God, also thinks of this world as really existing and as being a significant theatre for the transient activity of God. For him there was a real Adam whose acts in history had real significance. There is a real redemption wrought out in calendar time for the salvation of man. On the other hand, he who thinks of the eternity of God abstractly, and therefore immanentistically, reduces God to an empty inactive principle, and makes of the facts of history either a wholly or a partially independent theatre for the activity of independently existing man.
We can now be brief in our discussion of the infinity of God with respect to space. We again begin with the internal fulness of the being of God as the positive foundation of the created world and, therefore, of its spatial aspect. It is this self-existent being who has created the world by an act of his will, and who can and must therefore be present to all, space with the fulness of his being in order that it may exist at all. When we have thus begun by placing a positive foundation under our notions of spatial relations, we do not absolutize these relations in order then to draw from them negative conclusions with respect to the infinity of God. We may absolutize space either positively or negatively. If we absolutize it positively, we identify God directly with his creation and think of him materially or mechanically. If we absolutize it negatively, we tend to identify God with his creation indirectly, and think of his omnipresence as being some ethereal impersonal principle which is the abstract counterpart of the determinate spatial relations with which we have daily contact. It is this negative absolutizing of space that appears ofttimes in orthodox garb. It is the result of the abstract use of the way of negation spoken of above. Men say that God is not circumscribed by space, they say he is not spatial at all but spiritual. Yet in saying these things, they do not mean what orthodox theology means When we say that God is not circumscribed by space. We may mean either of two things If we have presupposed the creation of this world by God, space cannot, circumscribe God, because its very existence from moment to moment depends upon the continued substraining power of God who, by an act of his own internally existent being originally created space. If, on the other hand, we have not presupposed the creation of the world by God, and say that God is not circumscribed by space, we can mean merely that God is, for us, some vague indefinite something that we cannot reach with our delimiting powers. Needless to say, Christianity holds to the former notion of the infinity of God with respect to space.
4. The Unity of God
By the unity of God we mean that God is one God, and that he is not composed of parts. We therefore speak of unity of singularity and of unity of simplicity. Singularity and simplicity are involved in one another. We have in the case of God absolute numerical identity and, therefore, internal qualitative sufficiency.
Absolute numerical identity should be opposed to specific or generic unity. God is complete self-consciousness. If he were not, he would not be One Lord, and the words of Deuteronomy "Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord" would not be strictly true (Dt 6:4). There would then be some vague undefined subject or substance not exhaustively predicated it is therefore because of the fulness of the concrete self-existence of God that he is simple.
In maintaining the unity of simplicity of God on the basis of biblical teaching, the church is face to face with more enemies on every side. It is not only he who professes polytheism that opposes the simplicity of God. All who in any manner separate the ideas or universals in the Godhead from the subject or person of God are opposed to the Christian doctrine of the simplicity of God. And all such as with Greek philosophy begin the interpretation of reality with the assumption of the ultimacy of the human mind, separate the being of God from the ideas. If one begins with the assumption of the ultimacy of man one impersonalizes the ultimate foundation of predication. God is then demoted to a position of finitude. If there is to be unity it must then be sought by the process of abstraction from an ultimately existing plurality. Such a unity will be an empty and lifeless unity. It is such a unity as we find in the philosophy of Plato or Aristotle. Aristotle's "God" is a principle, not a person.
When discussing the aseity of God we quoted from Coffey, a Roman Catholic theologian in order to show that, if one begins his thinking with an abstract notion of being, one cannot come to the notion of the self-existence of God. In the present connection, we wish to quote a passage from another Roman Catholic theologian, namely, Etienne Gilson, in order to show that, as in the case of the aseity of God, so in the case of the simplicity of God, Roman Catholic theology is not fully true to the Christian position.
We quote from Gilson on the question of the relation of the God of Aristotle to the God of Christianity.
When we speak of Aristotle's god for the purpose of comparison with the Christian God, we refer of course to the unmoved mover, separate, pure act, thought of thought, set forth in a celebrated text of the Physics (8, 6). How this text is to be taken we shall have to consider later on; for the moment I would simply observe that the first unmoved mover is very far from occupying in Aristotle's world the unique place reserved for the God of the Bible in the Judeo-Christian world. Returning to the problem of the cause of movements in Metaphysics (12, 7–8) Aristotle begins by glancing back to the conclusions previously established in the Physics: 'It is clear, then, from what has been said, that there is a substance which is eternal and immovable, and separate from sensible things It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible. But it is also clear that it is impassive and unalterable; for all the other kinds of change are posterior to change of place. It is clear, then, why this first mover has these attributes.' Well, and what more could we ask? An immaterial, separate, eternal and immutable substance—is this not precisely the God of Christianity? Perhaps—but read, read the next sentence: 'We must not ignore the question whether we have to suppose one such substance or more than one, and, if the latter, how many?' Then at once he plunges into astronomical calculations in order to determine whether, under the first mover, we ought not to admit forty-nine, or perhaps even fifty-five other movers, all separate, eternal and unmoved. Thus although the first unmoved mover stands alone in being first, he is not alone in being an unmoved mover, that is to say a divinity. And were there but only two, that would be enough to prove that 'in spite of the supremacy of the first Thought, the mind of the philosopher is still profoundly impregnated with polytheism.' In short, Greek thought, even in its most eminent representatives, did not attain to that essential truth which is struck out at one blow, and without a shadow of proof, by the great, words of the Bible, "Audi Israel, Dominus Deus noster Dominus unus est' " (Deut. 6:4).
What strikes us in this passage from Gilson is the fact that he begins by stressing the great difference between the Aristotelian and the Christian concept of God. Not only in this passage, but elsewhere in the book from which we have quoted, Gilson contrasts the Christian position from other positions by referring to Deuteronomy 6:4; "In order to know what God is, Moses turns to God Be asks His name, and straightway comes the answer 'Ego sum qui sum, Ait: sic dices filiis israel; qui est misit me ad vos.' (Ex 3:14) No hint of metaphysics, but God speaks, causa finita est, and Exodus lays down the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be suspended. From this moment it is understood once and for all that the proper name of God is Being and that, according to the word of St. Ephrem, taken up later again by St. Bonaventura, this name denotes His very essence Now to say that the word being designates the essence of God, is to say that in God alone essence and existence are identical. That is why St. Thomas Aquinas, referring expressly to this text of Exodus, will declare that among all divine names there is one that is eminently proper to God. Namely, qui est, precisely because this qui est signifies nothing other than being itself. Non significat forman aliquam sed ipsum esse. In this principle lies an inexhaustible metaphysical fecundity; all the studies that here follow will be merely studies of its results. There is but one God, and this God is Being, that is the corner-stone of all Christian philosophy, and it was not Plato, it was not even Aristotle, it was Moses who put it in position."
All of this leads us to have high expectations. It would seem that we might reasonably expect to find in the thought of Gilson a consistent effort to work out a Christian philosophy and theology. One who has really seen the truth that in God being and essence are coterminous should seek to interpret all reality in the light of the presupposition of the self-contained God. Gilson does not do this. He would not be a good follower of St. Thomas if he did. Gilson insists that, though Aristotle and the Greeks did not find a true notion of God, this was not due to any false principle of reasoning. "For my part," he says, "I see no contradiction between the principles laid down by the Greek thinkers of the classical period and the conclusions which the Christian thinkers drew out of them. It would seem, on the contrary, that from the moment these conclusions were deduced, they presented themselves as evidently contained in the principles, so that it then becomes a question how those who discovered the principles could so wholly fail to appreciate the necessary consequences there implied. My own view of the matter is this: that Plato and Aristotle missed the full meaning of the ideas they were the first to define, because they failed to explore the problem of being to that point where, transcending the plane of intelligibility, it touches that of existence. The questions they put were the right ones, for the problem they had in hand was certainly the problem of being; and for that reason their formulae remain good. The thinkers of the thirteenth century, seeing there the reflection of their own minds, welcomed them not merely without difficulty, but with joy, for they found themselves able to read the truths they contained, although neither Plato, nor even Aristotle, had ever been able to decipher them.
And so it came about, at one and the same time, that Greek metaphysics made decisive progress, and that the progress was realized under the impulsion of the Christian revelation. The religious side of Plato's thought was not revealed in its full power till the time of Plotinus in the third century A. D., that of Aristotle's thought one might say without undue paradox, not till its exposition by Aquinas in the thirteenth. Substituting rather the name of Augustine for that of Plotinus, and bearing in mind in any case that Plotinus himself was not altogether ignorant of Christianity, we can conclude that if mediaeval thought succeeded in bringing Greek thought to its point of perfection, it was at once because Greek thought was already true, and because Christian thought, in virtue of its very Christianity, had the power of making it still more so. When they raised the problem of the origin of being, Plato and Aristotle were on the right road; and it is precisely because they were on the right road that to go further along it was a progress. In their march toward the truth, they stopped short at the threshold of the doctrine of essence and existence conceived as really identical in God and really distinct in everything else. There we have the fundamental verity of the Thomist Philosophy and also, we may say, of all Christian philosophy whatsoever for those of its representatives who think it proper to contest the formula agree at bottom in recognizing the truth. Plato and Aristotle were building a magnificent arch, all the stones of which converged upon this keystone; but it was due to the Bible that the keystone was put in position, and it was the Christians who actually put it there. History ought never to forget either what it owes to the Greek tradition on the one side, or what it owes to the Divine Pedagogue on the other. His lessons carry with them a luminous evidence such as we do not remember always to have been vouchsafed."
Our comment on all this must needs be brief. The main point would seem to be-this: In saying that the principles of reasoning as employed by Plato and Aristotle are essentially right, Gilson has been untrue to Deuteronomy 6:4, in accordance with which, as he has told us, he wishes to build his theology. If, in God, being and essence are really coterminous, we have before us an absolute personality. There is then no distinction between absoluteness and personality.
God does not merely have personality, but is absolute personality. This implies that he is the absolute originator of any being that may exist beside himself.
And this in turn implies that the mind of man must, in its interpretative activity, think God's thoughts after him. Or we may turn this about. We may begin with the notion of a really created mind. Such a mind will, if it reasons according to the principle of its createdness, come to the conclusion that God exists as the one in whom essence and being are coterminous.
In contrast to this, we may take the position of the Greeks. Here too it makes little difference at which end we begin. We may begin with the vague notion of being. Then God is not presupposed as forming a cotermineity of essence and existence. In that case there may be and is existence next to God that is not created by him. Thus man's mind is not a created mind. Thus there are ultimates next to God. And if there are ultimates next to God, God's being and essence are not coterminous. On the other hand we may begin with the assumption of the Greeks to the effect that the mind of man is not a created mind. If it is not a created mind, its interpretation does not, in the last analysis, depend upon the mind of God. This non-created mind is then a brute fact for the divine mind, and this implies that the divine mind is not coterminous with its own being.
It appears that for all his laudable effort to work out a Christian philosophy Gilson has been unable to do so. He cannot do justice to the unity or simplicity of God. Thus Roman Catholicism cannot furnish a truly effective antidote to the upsurge of finite deities that envelops us today. Roman Catholic writers are accustomed to blaming the Reformation principle for the modern helter-skelter in the religious world Fulton J. Sheen, for instance, has written the book Religion Without God in which he reviews the many gods of liberal theologians, and then seeks to trace a connection between this confusion and the original Reformation theology. As a matter of fact, it is Roman Catholic theology, with its failure really to think of the being and essence of God as coterminous that is allied to Modernism and polytheism.
In this connection we may again call attention to Barth and his school. His nominalistic notion of God is, in effect, a denial of the simplicity of God. If God's rationality is coterminous with his essence, he cannot deny himself. If God's essence is coterminous with his being there can be and must be in this created universe a rational expression of his plan. In that case the mind of man is made in the image of God and is, as such a fit instrument for the conveyance of the truth of God to man. This mind of man, once it has become sinful, needs the cleansing of regeneration in order to become the medium of God's self-expression, but it is not inherently unfit to be such a medium as Barth claims it is.
-----
From: An Introduction to Systematic Theology by Cornelius Van Til