“Shew me thy ways, O
LORD; teach me thy paths.” (Psalm 25:4)
God’s communicable
attributes are knowledge, creativity, love,
holiness, forgiveness, and rational
thought. Man can share in the communicable
attributes whereas the
incommunicable attributes; he cannot.
As in previous
studies, we will look at definitions,
scriptures, lexical evidence, commentary
evidence and confessional support for the
purpose of glorifying God in how we
live.
Note: These studies
arise from my personal Bible studies. I
learned long ago to write my studies
down to share with others. Some of these
studies have very little of my
comments. These studies represent my
approach to studying a text of Scripture
or topic. May God be glorified always!
Definitions from two sources:
Communicable attributes:
Those attributes of
God that He shares with humans, although in
a limited way, such as his love,
goodness, justice, and knowledge; those
attributes of God that are to be
imitated in our lives. *
Communicable attributes:
Communicable
Attributes of God - can be possessed by
people. **
If something is
communicable, it can be transferred to
others. In the Scriptures listed below, God
can do all of the following in His
flawlessness or perfection. By God’s common
grace, a man can also but not perfectly.
From Scripture:
Ability to be Creative
“And Moses said to
the children of Israel, See, the Lord has
called by name Bezalel the son of
Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah;
and He has filled him with the
Spirit of God, in wisdom and understanding,
in knowledge and all manner of
workmanship, to design artistic works, to
work in gold and silver and bronze,
in cutting jewels for setting, in carving
wood, and to work in all manner of
artistic workmanship.” (Exodus 35:30-33)
Ability to Forgive
“For if ye forgive
men their trespasses, your heavenly Father
will also forgive you: But if ye
forgive not men their trespasses, neither
will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
(Matthew 6:14-15)
Ability to do Good
“As we have therefore
opportunity, let us do good unto all men,
especially unto them who are of the
household of faith.” (Galatians 6:10)
Ability to think Rationally
“For who hath known
the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct
him? But we have the mind of Christ.”
(1 Corinthians 2:16)
To Be Holy
“As obedient
children, not fashioning yourselves
according to the former lusts in your
ignorance:
But as he which hath
called you is holy, so be ye holy in all
manner of conversation; Because it is
written, Be ye holy; for I am holy.” (1
Peter 1:14-16)
Ability to Love
“He that loveth not
knoweth not God; for God is love. Herein is
love, not that we loved God, but
that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the
propitiation for our sins.Beloved, if God so
loved us, we ought also to love one
another.” (1 John 4:8, 10-11)
Selections from Chapter
18: The
Communicable Attributes of God
by Cornelius Van Til:
God is unlike man; he
has “incommunicable” attributes. God’s also
like man; he has “communicable”
attributes. God is transcendent above but
also immanent in man. As man is
created by God and is like him it is right
to say that God is like man.
In the first place we
speak of the spirituality of God. God is a
Spirit, and they that worship him
must worship him in spirit and in truth In
saying that God is a Spirit we do
not think of some vague generic concept of
spirituality of which God is one
particular instance and man another God is
the absolute Spirit. He is the
self-contained Spirit. He does not need
materiality over against himself in
order to individuate himself. He is the
self-individuated Spirit.
Of this spirituality
man, created as he is in the image of God,
carries within him a faint replica.
It cannot be said of man that he is a
spirit. Man is a physico-spiritual being.
We do not mean by this that man is a
physico-individuated being in the sense
that something spatio-temporal is his basic
principle of individuation God as
self-contained Spirit is man’s ultimate
principle of individuation. God has
created each individual man just as he in
his inscrutable counsel has
determined. But God has created man a
physico-spiritual being.
It
goes without saying that all forms of
materialism are set aside in the notion of
God’s spirituality. He who in any
sense thinks of the spatio-temporal world as
a non-created entity does despite
to the spirituality of God To think of the
spatio-temporal world as non-created
is to think of God at best as a correlative
to this spatio-temporal world. Then
God is reduced to the spiritual aspect of a
spirito-material reality. It is in
this way that idealistic philosophy thinks
of the spirituality of God. And it
is in this way that modernistic theology
also thinks of the spirituality of God.
When it speaks much of spiritual values it
means merely that there is somehow,
beyond the visible aspect of the universe,
another aspect which is spiritual.
It
is only if we see clearly that God is the
self-contained spiritual being that we can
worship him aright. To worship
spiritual values of some nondescript sort is
not to worship God in spirit and
in truth. Nor can one be said to be
spiritual if one meditates frequently on
nondescript higher things of life. We may
legitimately use the phrases “high things
of life” and “spiritual values” if only we
can be clear in our minds that for
us these things are what we call them only
if they are what the self-revelation
of the self-contained spiritual God wants
them to be.
In
connection with the spirituality of God we
may also speak of the invisibility of God.
When Scripture ascribes bodily
organs to God this is no doubt to be taken
figuratively. God alone is immortal
and invisible. Jesus does say that he who
has seen him has seen the Father
also, but this only corroborates the
contention that by “seeing God” is meant a
spiritual seeing. No one saw Jesus’ divinity
except insofar as it was expressed
in his human nature. Bavinck points out
that, under the influence of
Pseudodionysius, the false notion of the
vision.
Dei per
essentiam as a possibility for
ultimate human attainment entered into
Christian theology. Scholastic theology indulged
its
speculative tendency when it spoke of a lumen
gloriae by which man is supposed to be
lifted out of his creatural limitations
in the life hereafter in order that he may
have a large measure of insight into
the very being of God.
Attributes of the
Understanding
We
are told in Scripture that God is light
and that there is no darkness in him at all
(1 Jn 1:5). He dwells in light that
no man can approach unto (1 Tm 6:16).
Bavinck says: “In this appellation there
is included the idea that God is fully
conscious of himself, that He sees
through the whole of His Being, and that
there is nothing in His Being that is
hid to His consciousness.” Or again, “There
is and can be in God no darkness, He is
altogether light, He dwells in light
and is the source of light.”
Or yet again: “God is eternal and pure being.
And His
eternal knowledge has nothing less than that
full eternal essence for its
object. Being and knowledge are coterminous
in God.”
In contrast to this an Arminian theologian,
C. Norman Bartlett says, “His
subconscious perfections flower out into
conscious self-recognition through the
activities involved in the shaping of more
or less refractory material into an
ever closer resemblance to the divine
original.”
God’s
knowledge of himself may further be
spoken of as necessary knowledge. He himself
exists as a necessary being His
knowledge of himself is therefore necessary
in the sense that it is knowledge
of himself as a necessarily existing being.
And it is because God has this full
and extensive knowledge of himself
necessarily, and therefore exhaustively,
that he also has a comprehensive knowledge
of all possibility beside himself.
That possibility itself depends upon God’s
plan with respect to it. God is free
to create what he pleases. This knowledge
that God has of all possibility
beyond himself may therefore be called the
free knowledge of God. It is in this
way that we may keep a rigid and clear
distinction between God’s knowledge and
his power.
Because
God’s knowledge is to be thought of
as analytical we reject what is usually
spoken of as the mediate knowledge of
God. It is contended that in the case of
certain circumstances, God’s knowledge
depends upon certain conditions which are to
be fulfilled by man. So, for
instance, in 1 Samuel 23:11, when David
inquires of the Lord whether the men of
Keilah would deliver him to his enemies if
he remained among them, it seems
that the Lord’s answer depends upon a
condition over which he has no control.
Or again, when Jesus said that if the mighty
works that he did elsewhere had
been done in Tyre and Sidon these cities
would not have been destroyed, it
seems as though there is a condition over
which he had no control. Against this
notion of mediate knowledge, Hodge rightly
contends that there is no other
category beside that of the possible and the
actual and that God controls both
completely. God’s fore-ordination controls
whatsoever comes to pass.
If God had to wait for events to happen
independently of himself before he
could know them, he would be a finite God.
His knowledge would then be
inferential.
The
same objection also holds against the
Arminian
notion that God’s knowledge may be separated
from his fore-ordination. This
would mean that events take place in this
universe independently of the plan of
God. God’s knowledge of such events would be
inferential, post-eventum
knowledge. There is no third
alternative. Either one thinks of God as the
wholly self-conscious being for
whom there are no brute facts, or one makes
God dependent upon brute facts. It
is on the basis of his own decree with
respect to the world that God has full
knowledge of the world.
If
we keep this biblical notion of the
knowledge of God before us, we shall think
of human knowledge as analogical of
God’s knowledge. And only if we do this can
we have a truly Christian
apologetic. Arminianism, with its salvation
on the basis of foreseen faith, and
Roman Catholicism, with its semi-Pelagian
doctrine of human freedom, rest their
thinking upon a false notion of divine
knowledge. Accordingly, they are not
able to offer an effective argument against
idealist philosophy when it reduces
the personal God to an abstract a priori
principle which needs as its
complement an equally ultimate a posteriori
principle. This has become newly
apparent in the writings of C. S. Lewis, C.
Norman Bartlett, and John Thomas.
Wisdom
In
connection with the knowledge of God we
should mention the wisdom of God. It is much
praised in Scripture. God is set
forth as the One who uses the most effective
means for the accomplishment of
his one inclusive purpose. We may contrast
the Christian and the non-Christian
notion of the idea of wisdom. The Christian
notion of wisdom depends upon the
notion of the self-contained God. Because of
his self-contained and necessary
knowledge he can, when he chooses, create a
universe, and create this universe
just as he wants to create it. This is,
therefore, “the best of possible
worlds.” God’s wisdom is displayed in it.
Man can understand something of it if
only he will think God’s thoughts after him.
The Moral Attributes of God
From
the intellectual we turn now to the
moral attributes. First we deal with the
goodness of God. Here, too, we should
distinguish between what God is in himself
and what he is with respect to the
created universe. God is, first of all, good
in himself. There is none good but
one (Mk 10:18). Goodness is not a mere
attribute that must be attached to God
as a subject, but God is goodness. In him,
ideas and being are one.
It is for this reason that God must be
self-centered in all his moral deeds. He
cannot seek anything beyond himself as the
final end of moral action. When God
expresses his goodness to his creatures he
does so ultimately for his own sake.
When
God’s goodness manifests itself to the
utterly undeserving it is called grace. We
cannot speak of the question of
grace fully. That is a matter to be
discussed in soteriology. We merely speak
of it here as a manifestation of the
goodness of God. Only he who believes in
the God of the Scriptures, the fully
self-conscious God, the God in whom being
and idea are coterminous, can really do
justice to the biblical notion of
grace. If one does not believe in the God of
the Bible one must hold that not
all goodness is ultimately dependent upon
him. Then not all evil is an offense
against the goodness of God. And if sin is
not exclusively an offense against
the goodness of God then grace can, at best,
be a sort of fellow-sympathy on
the part of God for beings that are somehow
not as fortunately situated as he.
Common Grace
It
is only if we think concretely of God that
we can also think concretely of the things
of the created world. And therefore
we can think scripturally about the
much-disputed doctrine of” common grace.”
If we think concretely of the question, we
see at once that the term “common”
is really applicable only in a very loose
sense to the idea of grace. God’s
attitude toward the saved and the unsaved
can at no point be strictly common.
It is well that we begin at this point, God
always regards the reprobate as reprobate.
When, therefore, he gives to the reprobate
certain gifts in this life, of which
they are undeserving, and these same gifts
(as, for instance, rain and
sunshine) also come to the saved, we cannot
conclude that, with respect to rain
and sunshine. God has the same attitude
toward the believer and the unbeliever.
When we speak of the attitude of God toward
unbelievers we must take into
consideration the total picture of the
unbeliever’s relationship to God. Thus
the gifts of rain and sunshine to the
believer are the gifts of a covenant God
who has forgiven the sins of his people, and
who knows that his people need
these gifts. In a similar way, the gifts of
rain and sunshine to unbelievers
are gifts to those whom God hates, and are
given because they too have need of
those things to fulfill the purpose that God
has with them God gave Pharaoh
life and ability to rule, that he might be
able to do that for which God had
raised him up.
The Holiness of God
In
discussing the holiness of God, we may
again begin at the point of his
self-sufficiency. Moses says in Exodus
18:11:
“Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the
gods? Who is like thee, glorious in
holiness, fearful in praises, doing
wonders?” In 1 Samuel 2:2, Hannah praises
God as she says, “There is none holy as the
Lord: for there is none beside
thee: neither is there any rock like our
God.” Thus the holiness of God rests
in his incomparable self-existence. God does
not have holiness, but is
holiness. The prophet Amos brings this out
in these words: “The Lord God hath
sworn by his holiness, that, lo, the days
shall come upon you, that he will
take you away with hooks, and your posterity
with fishhooks.” The Lord could
not swear by his holiness if his holiness
were not identical with himself.
By
the holiness of God we therefore signify
God’s absolute internal moral purity It is
naturally to be expected that when
this attribute of God expresses itself in
the revelation of God to man, it
requires his complete purity. This complete
purity in man consists in the
complete dedication of man’s moral activity
to the moral glory of God.
Negatively, this will need to express itself
as separation from sin.
The Righteousness of God
With
the righteousness of God we signify the
internal self-consistency of the divine
being. God is a law unto himself. He is
the absolute self-existent personality and
therefore, at the same time,
absolute law. God does not have law, but is
law. His self-conscious activity
regards with absolute complacency the
internal rightness of relationship
between the various aspects of multiplicity
that are found within the divine
being. He cannot and does not tolerate any
subordination of any one aspect of
his being to any other aspect of his being.
The attributes and the persons of
God are all on a par.
This
self-contained consistency expresses
itself in the created world by maintaining
created consistency among men. There
is, of necessity, a negative and a positive
aspect to this expression of the
righteousness of God among men. God
distributes justice among men and will
finally distribute complete justice among
them. He punishes injustice and
rewards justice. But if God is to reward
justice there must be justice. And
among sinners there is no justice. There is,
to be sure, a measure of civil righteousness
among men. But this proceeds from the “old
man” within them which they have not
been able to subjugate fully. Men may do
that which is right because at bottom
they know they are God’s creatures, but to
the extent that they live up to
their own self-consciously adopted
principles they are wholly unrighteous. If
there is to be any justice in a world of
sinners, it must therefore be given to
them. It must be a gift of the grace of God.
And those to whom God, by his
grace, gives righteousness he rewards with
greater grace. He visits their sins
upon them; that is, he chastises them, but
in the end he rewards them for the
righteousness which is theirs by grace, with
still more grace.
Thus
the consistency that is found in the
believer is correspondent to the consistency
that is found in God. This
consistency in the believer consists in
willingness to think God’s thoughts
after him, in willingness to do God’s will
after him, and to feel God’s feeling
after him. If the Christian realizes this,
he will find it to be his duty to
maintain, as far as he can in himself and in
his fellow men, a correspondence
of the human consistency to divine
consistency. He will seek the maintenance of
God’s laws for men everywhere and at all
times, in ways that are themselves in
accord with those laws. He will not hesitate
to intimate to men that the
natural consequence of their inconsistency
is the eternal separation from the
consistent One. Nor should he fail to point
the weak and wavering to the fact
that for the righteous there ariseth eternal
light.
Attributes of Sovereignty
As
the self-existent being God wills himself
as his own end. He rules himself in the sense
that he
is altogether self-ruled. This is not to be
taken nominalistically. God cannot exist
otherwise than he exists. His will does not
act independently of his nature.
His will wills his nature as his nature
comes to expression in his will.
The Revealed Will
With
respect to the revealed will, also
called the “will of command,” we may remark
as follows; God’s revealed will is
the rule given to his rational creatures by
which they are to regulate their
lives. The revealed will of God tells us
what we must do while the secret will
determines what God does, whether through
man’s agency or not. What, we ask, is
the relation between these two?
God’s Power or Omnipotence
God’s
power should not be identified with his
will, although God’s will implies power to
accomplish what he wills.
God’s
omnipotence does not signify that he
can make a lie true, that he can sin. There
is no absolute power in God that
works in contradiction to his perfections.
God is the source of possibility.
What is possible is determined by God’s
nature. The very question whether God
can do the impossible is impossible. It has
no meaning unless it be first
assumed that there is such a thing as
impossibility apart from God. Now if
there is such an impossibility, God is not
God, so that the question drops. On
the other hand, if there is no such
impossibility, that is, if God is the
source of possibility, the question is
answered before it is put: i.e., then
God does not want to break an impossibility.
He would be denying himself, which
he tells us he cannot do. Nm 23:19, 1 Sm
15:29, 2 Tm 2:12, Heb. 6:18, Jas 1:13,
Jas 1:17 (1)
In closing:
An important qualification
when
studying God’s Attributes”
“Theologians have
chosen different approaches to describing
the attributes of God. The most
common in Presbyterian circles has been the
distinction between communicable
and incommunicable attributes. The former
are attributes that God and man can
share in common, the latter attributes that
they do not share. But in on sense
there are no communicable attribute. Human
love at its best is analogues to
divine love, but it is not the same thing,
for God’s love is original and ours
is derivative from his. On the other hand,
no attribute of God are entirely
incommunicable, for we are his image in a
comprehensive sense. Our love, at its
best, is the love of God imaged in our own
lives. So in presenting the
attributes of god, Scripture does not
emphasize the contrast between
communicable and incommunicable.” (2)
The communicable
attributes of God, which He shares with His
creatures, are finite or limited on
our part. For example, when we talk about
God’s Holiness, it is perfect, but our
holiness is never perfect, except in Christ.
“Blessed
art
thou, O LORD: teach me thy statutes.”
(Psalm 119:12)
“Study to shew
thyself approved unto God, a workman that
needeth not to be ashamed, rightly
dividing the word of truth.” (2 Timothy
2:15)
Notes:
1.Cornelius
Van Til, An
Introduction to Systematic
Theology, (Philipsburg, New Jersey,
Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing
Company 1974). pp. 233-262.
2.John
Frame, Systematic
Theology: An
Introduction to Christian Belief,
(Phillipsburg, New Jersey, 2013), 232.
“To God, only wise,
be glory through Jesus Christ forever.
Amen.” (Romans 16:27) and “heirs
according to the promise.” (Galatians 3:28,
29)
Mr. Kettler has
previously published articles in the Chalcedon
Report and Contra
Mundum. He and his wife Marea attend
the Westminster, CO, RPCNA Church. Mr.
Kettler is the author of the book defending
the Reformed Faith against attacks,
titled: The Religion That Started in
a Hat. Available at:
www.TheReligionThatStartedInAHat.com
For more study:
*
For
a great source of theological definitions go
to Rebecca writes at Rebecca
Writes:
http://www.rebecca-writes.com/theological-terms-in-ao/