must be both yes and no. Another version of this paradox runs: ‘It is the final
proof of God’s omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.’
A further area of difficulty concerns the very act of dividing God into
separate qualities and faculties. This reduces God to a list of human categories
and contradicts the doctrine of divine simplicity, which says that God is not
composed of parts.
The main theological objection to the analysis of divine attributes is that
the process appears to limit God to human ideas about the necessary nature of
God. Nicholas of Cusa suggested an alternative approach: the consideration of
the possible nature of God or,
as he called it, God’s possible-actuality
(possest). He argued that God’s infinite possibility can contain ‘the
coincidence of opposites’. In this way God embraces his own paradoxes.
THINKERS
Thomas Aquinas (1224–74) argues in his Summa Theologiae that God’s
perfection means that his attributes are necessarily unified. The attributes
appear to be diverse because of the limitations of human thought.
St Augustine (354–430) stressed the unity of the attributes, but also
relished the possibilities for divine paradox: ‘What
art Thou then, my God?
Most highest, most good, most potent, most omnipotent; most merciful and
most just;
most hidden and most present; most beautiful and most strong,
standing firm and elusive, unchangeable and all-changing; never new, never
old; ever working, ever at rest’ (Confessions).
D. M. Baillie (1887–1954) argued (in God was in Christ) against the
doctrine that God is impassible (impervious to suffering) on the grounds that
impassibility could not accommodate Christ’s agony on the cross.
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) describes (in The Divine Comedy) God’s
three
primary attributes, corresponding to the persons of the Holy Trinity:
Power, Wisdom, Love.
Colin Gunton (1941–2003) argues (in Act and Being) that the divine
attributes can only be understood within a narrative about what God does:
‘God is what he does and does what he is.’
Gilbert de la Porrée (1070–1154) argued that there was a basic distinction
between the essential nature of God and his attributes. His views were
deemed heretical by the Catholic Church.
Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89) argued that God’s nature was love and that all
other attributes must derive from this.
IDEAS
Coincidentia oppositorum: or coincidence of opposites, a view developed
by Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth century (in On Learned Ignorance) and
recently revived by Thomas Altizer, that sees all contradictions contained
within God’s infinity.
Divine command theory: this states that
God is not subject to our
definition of goodness and determines what is good through his ordinances.
The Euthrypo dilemma was posed by Socrates in Plato’s Euthrypo and
asks whether ‘God’ and ‘goodness’ are one and the same. Is an action good
because God approves of it? Or does God approve of good actions because
they are good? The latter position would put goodness above God.
The problem of the one and the many: the ancient philosophical puzzle of
how to reconcile the diversity of the world with its unity.
BOOKS
Colin Gunton, Act and Being: Towards a Theology of the Divine
Attributes (Eerdmans, 2002)
Joshua
Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes
(Blackwell, 2002)