DOGMATICS I NUMBER 34 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> You just spoke about God's attributes. Can you explain them in greater detail? >> When you look at the textbook of Dogmatics, and at the section that deals with the (inaudible) *** of God, you find the rather extensive part dealing with the attributes of God. They talk about the trinity, individual persons of the trinity, you talk about the divine essence and then you talk about the attributes of God. Some newer dogmaticians don't like that. They think you shouldn't have this kind of a separate section on the attributes of God, because they feel that this in some respect undermines the Trinitarian concept of God. It seems as if you have just talked about God being Trinitarian, God being relational and so on, and then you go on and write pages and pages about the divine essence as if you can talk about God without continually referring to Him as Trinitarian. Now, there is something right in that observation that if we are not aware of the Trinity, then a long treatise on the divine attributes seems to be somewhat antiTrinitarian. But if we are aware of it, if we keep in mind that God exists from eternity, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, then the talk about divine attributes can be meaningful and helpful. We ask here what do the persons have in common? Well, the short answer to that is, as we have said before, is the divine essence. That's what they have in common. Can you say more? Yes. You can describe the divine essence and you can say that God is righteous, love, just, omnipotent, infinite and so on, thereby saying God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are righteous, love, infinite, omnipotent and so on. What is the relationship of the divine essence and the attributes? One statement that is fundamental is that God has no parts. It's called the simplicity of God, and we will talk about that in a little while. God is not made up of things. And that means when we distinguish between divine essence and the attributes, it's not so that we say that God is and additionally he is also righteous, love, omnipotent, as if these things were accidental to him, as if he could be that or he could also be different from that. Essence and attributes are not separate, but they are one. God is an infinite and also noncomposite being. What does it mean when we nevertheless talk about the divine attributes? When you talk about the divine attributes, we talk about conceptions we have, how God is. It is a way how we perceive who God is. And since we are limited beings, since we have no way to really have a concept of the absolute simplicity that God is, he condescends to our weakness and in His words divides himself as if he were a collection of attributes, so that we can grasp that and that we can believe in Him. Again, that is part of God employing human language and it's part of Him adopting our way of thinking and accommodating himself to the laws of human thought processes or logic. So every divine attribute speaks of one facet of the infinite life in God. In God, it's all one. In our perception, it is different. When we talk about the divine attributes, then there are different ways to classify that. Lutherans traditionally have classified the divine attributes into quiescent and operative attributes, or negative and positive attributes. There are also other classifications about incommunicable and communicable attributes. What is meant by all that? Quiescent attributes are those attributes that are seen as having no relationship to the world. These are attributes that describe God as he is in himself. Sometimes they are also called absolute attributes. For example, eternity, simplicity, infinity. Operative attributes are those that express an operation in the world or a relation to the world, like omnipotence, omnipresence, justice, mercy, love. They are also called relative attributes, because they express a relation. The other way to classify the divine attributes is a distinction between negative and positive attributes. Negative means here attributes that show that you cannot ascribe to God the imperfections of the creatures, like unity, simplicity, immutability, infinity, eternity. Positive attributes are those that can be found also in men, but are in God in an absolute sense, like life, knowledge, wisdom, holiness, righteousness, truth, power, love, goodness, grace, and mercy. It's not really important how you group these divine entities, how you classify them, although I don't personally like the terminology of quiescent attributes. Because that suggests that there is something in God which is kind of, you know, quiescent, it's not doing anything. And I would prefer that when we talk about God's attributes, we see them headed under the term "the living God." God is the living God, that is an Old Testament term where He is opposed to all the well, nonliving, nonexistent dead idols. So everything in God is life. There is nothing static. That has also to be considered when we talk about the so-called quiescent attributes, or the negative attributes as they are called, because -- and that's another reason why some people don't like these qualifications. They seem to evoke the picture of a static God, of a kind of self-contained entity that is somewhere in eternity, but totally remote, existing in itself. See that's one of the dangers when we talk about the divine attributes and have no continual relationship to or reference to the Trinity. We come to a concept of God which is static, instead of a concept of God that is relational, that is life. Also, in the history of theology, the section on the attributes of God was heavily influenced by philosophical, especially Greek thought, about God. We have to go back through some of the traditional concepts and traditional language back to scripture and see what is meant when we say God is immutable. What is meant when we say God is infinite. What is meant when we say God is simple. So when we now talk in more detail about some of the divine attributes, we have to keep that in mind. It is the triune God, the living God, about whom we are speaking. It's not an abstract object we are describing. It is God in his infinite essence, which is infinite life, that reveals Himself in these different aspects. But it's truly a unity. The different attributes for us might seem to be contradictory, but in God they are not. There again we have to realize that our power to concept --