Charles Hodge has written that a simple definition of God is a perfect being, differentiating him from all other beings. He is not an idea but a being.[i] God is a real, substantive being.[ii]
However, the objection is that this definition does not fully express the idea of God.[iii]
Our best way of distinguishing God from other things is to describe His attributes.
The best definition uses His attributes and appears in chapters 2-3 of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms.
God is Tri-personal, Oneness (not made of parts), the First Cause, the Ultimate Ground, and the One Self-Existent Being, among other things. He is not Spinoza’s one self-subsistent being with transient methods, Hegel’s totality of all, or Bradley’s relation to nothing.
We cannot fully comprehend God, but He can. We do, however, know Him.
God’s attributes are not because He is made up of different elements, like we are, nor do they all mean the same thing.
Some have tried to define God’s attributes in many ways. But we look at it simply as The Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, The Shorter Catechism, question number 4 does.[iv]
We consider God’s attributes to be of two types: incommunicable and communicable. The incommunicable attributes apply only to God and His being; the communicable attributes apply to God and man’s personalities.
We should remember that God has all His attributes, the incommunicable and the communicable, and He has them perfectly. Humankind has a copy of His communicable attributes only in an imperfect state.
INCOMMUNICABLE ATTRIBUTES
God’s incommunicable attributes apply only to God and cannot be shared with his creatures. They have to do with his Being. Some of the perfections that apply to God and God ONLY are the following. He is:
- Spiritual: “God is Spirit” (John 4:24). His being is distinct from the world, immaterial, indivisible, and has no body parts. When God is spoken of as having body parts, He is usually referred to using the literary technique of personalization.
- A Being, not an idea or concept.
- Having one essence and three persons, the only being of this kind that has ever existed;
- Self-existent, in that the ground of his existence is in himself;
- The First Cause of all existing things.
- The Ultimate Ground of all existence.
- Autonomous (Sovereign), having the power of self-government without outside control;
- Infinite; He is free from all limitations of divine Being or attributes. This attribute should not be confused with boundless extension or a negative concept. His perfections and attributes manifest him. It includes:
- absolute perfection, in a qualitative sense.
- eternal. It is related to time, and He has no temporal limits and successive moments (Ex, Ps. 90:2). He is one indivisible present Being who has always existed. 100% of God exists everywhere, always. He is the same past, present, and future.
- immense. He transcends all spatial limits and is present everywhere with his whole Being. It includes things such as:
- omniscience, having complete knowledge.
- omnipotence, having unlimited power and authority.
- omnipresence, present everywhere at once, and
- transcendence, able to exist in the spiritual and material environments, which is beyond the comprehension of human beings.
- Immutable; He is absent of all change. “So God is immutable in his essence and attributes. He can neither increase nor decrease. He is subject to no process of development or self-evolution.”[v]
- One. The unitas singularitatis and the unitas simplicitatis. The unitas sigularitatis means that God is numerically one and unique, distinguishing Him from other beings. The unitas simplicitatis implies that God has the inner quality of the unity of the Divine Being.
COMMUNICABLE ATTRIBUTES
His communicable attributes have to do with his personality, and these attributes apply to God and human beings.
- Spirituality: Although God is Spirit, humankind can only use spiritual attributes on earth to communicate with God. The soul is incorporeal, not a physical one, and is created by the human being’s brain. It identifies the human being as a unique person.
- Personality—God is a tri-personal God, though man is a unipersonal creature. God has a perfect personality, whereas man is merely a finite copy of God’s personality and not perfect. Nevertheless, they are both personal, and man may communicate with God. God is revealed in the Bible as a personal presence. He is a real person, with personal attributes…without human limitations. The soul is not the spirit each human has as a gift from God. Both the soul and the spirit go to heaven when the human dies, the soul to identify the human, and the spirit to communicate with God. This is believed if one is a trichotomist. Dichotomists believe that the soul and the spirit are the same.
- Knowledge, Berkhof defines God’s knowledge as “that perfection of God whereby He, infinite and entirely unique manner, notice Himself and all things possible and actual in one eternal and most simple act.”[vi] God has the perfect intellectual apprehension of truth, past, present, and future. It includes foreknowledge. God’s knowledge is archetypal, obtained from within, whereas humans get it from without. His knowledge is perfect, unlike humankind, which gained knowledge from observation or reasoning, which is imperfect. God sees things in their entirety, whereas humans see things as they come to them.
- Wisdom—Berkhof defines wisdom as “that perfection of God whereby He applies His knowledge to the attainment of His ends in a way which glorifies Him most.” It is God perfectly taking his knowledge and applying it most wisely. Both knowledge and wisdom are imperfect in humankind as opposed to God’s absolute perfection. Humankind takes its imperfect knowledge and attempts to select the means to produce the best results. Only by applying it to the written word of God can human beings hope to achieve the proper result.
- Truth may be defined as “that perfection of His Being by which He fully answers to the idea of the Godhead, is perfectly reliable in His revelation, and sees things as they are.”[vii] God is the source of all truth. He is all he can be: ethical, logical, and faithful. Truth is available to humankind imperfectly.
- Goodness may be defined as “that perfection of God which prompts Him to deal bountifully and kindly with all His creatures.”[viii] Only believers manifest a proper appreciation of its blessings, desire to use them in the service of their God, and thus enjoy them in a richer and fuller measure.[ix] But they still don’t have it perfectly.
- Love may be defined as “that perfection of God by which He is eternally moved to self-communication.”[x] It is when God’s goodness is exercised toward His rational beings.[xi] As the Bible says, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in goodness and truth” (Ex. 34:6). Believers should exercise all the love that is distinguished in the Bible by God, though they will do so imperfectly.
- Grace is “the unmerited goodness or love of God to those who have forfeited it, and are by nature under a sense of condemnation.”[xii] It is this for God only. For humans, it is the favor shown one to another (Gen. 39:4), but imperfectly.
- Mercy, Berkhof defines it as “the good this our love of God shown to those who are in misery or distress, irrespective of their desserts.”[xiii] Humans should show this to all other humans, such as compassion and lovingkindness, even when others don’t deserve it.
- Patience is “that aspect of goodness or love of God in virtue of which He bears with the forward and evil despite their long-continued disobedience.”[xiv]Patience is something that human beings should show to everyone
- Holiness is “that perfection of God, in virtue of which He eternally wills and maintains His own moral excellence, abhors sin, and demands purity in his moral creatures.”[xv] God implants this kind of holiness in the souls of human beings. It is active in the conscience and when humans read the word of God.
- Righteousness (or Justice), He is a personal God whom humankind can trust and who sustains them.[xvi] The human being is righteous only to the extent that he or she duplicates the Bible’s knowledge, wisdom, and truth.
- Willful, in other words, He has the perfection of self-determination and existence of the thing He determined to be. It is free to the full extent of the word. It includes all His attributes. Humans’ will depend on their human thought processes, which are imperfect by design.
Other attributes of God are communicable but are not mentioned here.
[i] Hodge, Charles, Systematic Theology (Hendrickson Publishers, 2016), p. 366.
[ii] Hodge, p. 367.
[iii] Hodge, p. 366.
[iv] The Orthodox Presbyterian church, The Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms (Presbyterian Church in America, 2005, 2007). pp. 357-59.
[v] Hodge, p. 390.
[vi] Berkhof, p. 54.
[vii] Berkhof, p. 58.
[ix] Berkhof, p. 59.
[xi] Berkhof, p. 59.
[xii] Berkhof, p. 60.
[xiv] Berkhof, p. 61.
[xv] Berkhof, p. 62.
[xvi] Berkhof, p. 53.
