Philosophical Theology

God is a simple being or he is not. If God is not a simple being, then he is made up of parts or a composite being, in which case God’s attributes would be what he has rather than is, making his attributes abstract properties that self-exist without ultimate reference to God. God would be subject to change and evaluation against forms without origin. Yet if God alone self-exists, then God is a simple being. As such, God is identical to what is in God. 

There are at least five traps or ditches we must avoid when considering divine simplicity:

• One is to say that each attribute is identical to the others because God is his attributes. 
• Another trap to avoid is to deny divine simplicity because “God is love” obviously means something different than “God is holy.” 
• A third trap to avoid is trying to resolve the conundrum presented by the first two ditches by positing a kind of penetration or infusion of attributes using propositions like, God’s holiness is loving holiness.
• A forth trap to avoid, which is an advancement of the first, is saying that x-attribute is identical to y-attribute in God’s mind even though the transitivity of attributes is unintelligible to human minds.
• Finally, another trap to avoid is saying that because God is simple, then everything about God, including his will to create, must be God or identical to his essence. 

Like creation ex nihilo, divine simplicity can be derived negatively. (Creation ex nihilo is deduced by the negation of eternal matter and pantheism.) Given that divine simplicity is entailed by God’s sole eternality, God is not comprised of parts. Accordingly, God’s revelation of his particular attributes is an accommodation to our creatureliness. It’s ectypal and analogical, not archetypal and univocal. 

Theology and the creator-creature distinction:

When we consider God’s attributes we must be mindful that we are limited to drawing theological distinctions that pertain to the one undivided and divine essence that eternally exists in three modes of subsistence. Given our finitude we cannot help but draw such useful distinctions, but we should be mindful that such nuance, although proper in its place, does not belong to any true division in God. 

God is unequivocally knowable yet incomprehensible. Notwithstanding, we only know God analogically, discretely and in part. Because our understanding of God is analogically-theological and not original or intuitive, we shouldn’t expect our compartmentalized creaturely understanding of (a) God is love and (b) God is holy to imply that at the univocal or analogical level love = holy. Consequently, there’s no reason to dismiss the doctrine of divine simplicity simply on the basis that love and holiness are not identical ideas. Nor should we be led to believe that attributes are mysteriously identical in God’s mind though not in our minds. That particular mystery card reduces each attribute to a meaningless predicate when played. Attributes become vacuous terms. Surely the law of identity was never intended for such misuse. 

Given such frothy objections to simplicity, there’s no reason to try to resolve the fabricated problem by positing a kind of penetration or infusion of attributes using propositions like, God’s holiness is loving holiness. Although a helpful and in a sense unavoidable to a point, the infusion of attributes eventually breaks down when we consider love and wrath. Attempts to qualify attributes with other attributes do not save divine simplicity but instead, if taken too far, end in its denial. God is his undivided essence in three persons, yet reveals himself to his covenant creatures in discrete and sometimes interpenetrating attributes.

As a simple being, God is one divine, undivided and incomprehensible essence – yet revealed to us through created things (e.g., language) because God’s simplicity is too complex to take in all at once due to the creator-creature distinction. Accordingly, God’s self-disclosure comes to us as particular attributes, an accommodation to our creatureliness.

Before addressing the notion that God’s decree is essential to God, a bit more backdrop is in order. 

We must not confuse God’s revelation of himself with God himself. Accordingly, it may be rightly said that we can apprehend God, but we can never comprehend God. To comprehend God is to know God exhaustively, as God knows himself. Surely, we would have to share in the divine essence to know God originally and intuitively – or as he is, a simple being. (This is related to the Clark / Van Til controversy, briefly discussed here.)

Many of God’s attributes are further distinguished by their relation to creation, which are sometimes called relative attributes (or secondary attributes, which is not the happiest of terms). Although all God’s attributes are eternal and ultimately one, at least some of God’s revealed perfections are inconceivable to us apart from considering them in relation to something other than God. For instance, God is long-suffering, but what is it to be pure patience in timeless eternity without objects of pity? That an attribute such as long-suffering is revealed in the context of created-time and patience toward pitiful creatures, such does not imply that God is not eternally long-suffering in his being. The same can be said of God’s holiness, for what is holiness without created things? God cannot be separate from himself; yet God is eternally holy. That is to say, God does not become holy through creation, or long-suffering through the occasion of sin and redemption. Is omnipresence a spatial consideration dependent upon creation or is it an eternal reality that is expressed or not expressed apart from creation? 

We mustn’t confuse God as timeless pure act with a notion of God’s timeless doing. That there’s no potential with God does not mean God’s existence entails an eternal expression of his divine attributes – for our only conception of expression entails time-sequence, which in turn entails creation! Just as relative attributes are only understood in relation to things outside of God, what are sometimes classified as absolute attributes (e.g., Love) cannot, also, be conceived other than analogically and relatively as well. Consequently, it’s special pleading (and proves too much!) to dismiss any eternal perfection or attribute on the basis that it can only be understood in temporal terms relative to creation. To do so on the basis of analogical contemplations of time-function intra-Trinitarian expressions of non-temporal Trinitarian existence is somewhat arbitrary and inconsistent. It introduces time into the eternal, which ends in Social Trinitarianism.

Our freedom vs God’s freedom:

All our willful acts are free, though triggered by intentions that are caused according to God’s sovereign determination of the relationship between prior states of affairs and our intentions to act. It can be rightly said that our intentions pass through us as we approve of them. Although our intentions cannot be other than what God has determined and causally secured by mapping prior states of affairs to them, the choices that flow from them are nonetheless free and compatible with God’s ultimate determination.

Like us, God approves of his own intentions and cannot act contrary to them. For what would it be for God (or any free moral agent) to act contrary to his own will? Yet, unlike us, God is most free. God’s acts do not proceed from intentions that are caused by preceding states of affairs. In other words, God’s intentions do not pass through him for God is the eternal beginning of all things. With God, there is true agent causation, autonomy and self-determination. So, unlike us, God is the ultimate source of his intentions, being able not just to guide their ends but to regulate them according to his will.

God is triune but has intention(s). 

Creation itself isn’t essential to God, for creation is not a property of God, and God existed without creation. Yet why isn’t the decree essential to God? That question has been the subject of much debate. After all, God never existed without it!

There is a significant difference between God’s essence and the divine will. For one thing, God’s essence is necessary, whereas God’s decree is only contingently true. After all, if God’s decree is essential to God, then all objects of divine knowledge are as necessary as God’s holiness. Nothing could be otherwise. Such a modal collapse needn’t be railed against by classical theists. However, to cling to a form of hyper-simplicity that incorporates God’s free intention into the divine essence ends in more than apparent contradiction. 

Although God both desires to be triune and to create, only the latter desire is volitional and creative. In other words, the creative decree is manifestly volitional whereas God’s attributes are necessary and not willed into eternal existence. With that distinction in mind, it’s not difficult to see that God necessarily knows he is triune and can’t do anything about it(!); whereas the decree is freely known and something that could have been otherwise had God so willed.

Why find it strange?

Should we find it strange that God cannot exist without some eternal intention to create or not create? Is it possible for God to have no intention, even an intention not to have an intention? Surely God must exist with an intention he never did not have. That’s just built into God being God! However, unlike God being triune and love, the decree is a product of an eternal choice. Accordingly, although it is necessary that God have some intention, that does not imply that the intention is itself necessary. In conditional (Classical Compatiblist) terms, God could have not created this world had he so willed. Or, rather than contemplate hypotheticals that change a fixed future by altering the past, we might contemplate a different future that would entail a different past: Had God not created, he would have intended not to create. Either way, God’s intentions and external acts are most free and agreeable to God according to a “mesh” of creative intentions and divine approvals. However, we may not say the same of God’s divine perfections. God is not free to desire, let alone be, other than he is!

Closing:

If nothing outside God acts upon God resulting in an intention to create, then God’s absolute freedom to create is intact. That said, what’s the problem with the “necessity” of the divine decree (allowing for the infelicitous theological and philosophical phraseology, which should be limited to eternal contingent truth)? What does the charge even mean? What is lurking behind the question? For God to be most free, must he be able to form another eternal intention given the eternal intention God (always!) eternally approved of for himself? How is that freedom?!

If we want to say that God alone has libertarian freedom, then such freedom is due to God being the only source of his eternal intention to act. It is not because God is free to act contrary to how he eternally desires! That God’s act of creation was a free act implies God had the power to try to create or not create. Moreover, God eternally intends and self-determines all free acts, even his own, which are ultimately sourced in him alone. However, such supposed “necessity” of the divine intention is not equivalent to the necessity of the divine essence given that the former is coterminous with the will, whereas God doesn’t will his himself into existence. It’s equivocal to think otherwise, lest we make all counterfactuals of creaturely freedom necessary truths, which would make sinful creaturely choices not a matter of God’s all wise and predeterminate counsel, but a reflection of God’s essence(!) (just like the laws of logic). That monstrosity is where hyper-simplicity leads. (It’d be absolutely impossible for one to choose otherwise, as all free choices would be essential to personhood.)

Surely, God would not be God if he were not love. Yet had God loved Esau and hated Jacob, God would still be God. Accordingly, God is not his willful works.

The simple solution for those wanting to hold to a coherent doctrine of divine simplicity is to deny that God’s decree is necessary or a divine attribute.* Simply abandon hyper-simplicity altogether.

* God’s creative decree, which logically precedes God’s free knowledge, is not necessary. If it were, God’s knowledge would be wholly natural knowledge. Yet the objects of God’s natural knowledge are all necessities including all possibilities. From a Reformed perspective possibilities are things God is free to actualize. Consequently, God freely knows the future because he has freely determined the future from the infinite “set off all possibilities” God knows he could actualize.