The attributes of God

What God has shown us of himself

What is God like? People easily picture a god shaped by their own hopes and fears. So the church begins with what God has said about himself, and calls what Scripture reveals of his character his attributes. At Sinai God proclaimed his own name:

Then the LORD passed in front of Moses and called out: “The LORD, the LORD God, is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness,

Exodus 34:6

In the same breath he says that he "will by no means leave the guilty unpunished" (Exodus 34:7). Scripture does not make God simpler by dropping either his mercy or his justice.

The church has often sorted the attributes into two groups. Some belong to God alone. He is not served by human hands "as if He needed anything" (Acts 17:25); "from everlasting to everlasting You are God" (Psalm 90:2). His immutability, his omnipresence, his knowledge of all things and his omnipotence belong here too. Others God shares, in a creaturely measure, with those he made in his image: holiness and love, justice and goodness, wisdom and faithfulness. "Be holy because I, the LORD your God, am holy" (Leviticus 19:2). In God these are infinite; in us they grow as we come to resemble him.

One God, not a collection of qualities

God is not assembled from parts. His love is holy love, and his holiness is loving; his justice does not quarrel with his mercy, nor does his power act apart from his wisdom. The church calls this God's simplicity (see essence). So at the cross God shows himself "to be just and to justify the one who has faith in Jesus" (Romans 3:26). The Westminster Shorter Catechism gathers the teaching into one sentence:

God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 4

Augustine, at the opening of his Confessions, addresses God as most merciful and most just, most hidden and most present Augustine, Confessions 1.4. Attributes that seem to us to pull apart meet in him.

A continuing conversation

The Fathers, the medieval teachers and the Reformers taught that God in his divine nature does not suffer; this is called his impassibility. They did not mean that God is cold, but that his love is not a passion stirred from outside: it is full and steady from the beginning. When Scripture says that "the LORD regretted that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart" (Genesis 6:6), they read it as God stooping to describe his real dealings with us in human terms.

Since the twentieth century many theologians in several traditions have argued that God is truly affected by his creatures' suffering and suffers with them, and that cries such as "My compassion is stirred!" (Hosea 11:8) should be given their full weight. Both sides confess that God never changes in his faithfulness and promises, and that he is never indifferent to us. See the lesson What God is like and Does God have feelings?