The simplicity of God is probably not a perfection you heard about much growing up in Sunday School. Discussions of God’s simplicity can quickly get rather abstract and technical. Indeed, whereas most attributes of God mentioned in Sunday School are usually apparently positive, simplicity might seem to be suggesting something negative about God–how could God not be complex? Isn’t complexity in some way better than simplicity? Isn’t the real world messy and complicated?
The Westminster Confession of Faith defines God in Chapter 2, Section 1 as (among other descriptors) “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.” It is these words that relate usually to how simplicity is defined in evangelical and reformed traditions. Simplicity refers to God not being made of parts, hence its relation to the phrase “without body, parts, or passions.” This concept is very helpful; I find it’s one of my “favorite” attributes of God when having theological discussions. Because of simplicity, we can say God does not have a “merciful side” and a “just side,” for example. He has to be as merciful in his justice as he would be just in his mercy.
A corollary of this definition of simplicity is the statement “All that is in God is God,” or in other words, any property or perfection of God is God himself, or put in still other words, “God’s perfections are identical with his essence.” These statements do tend to catch people off guard and boggle minds. I get it. It’s a level of abstraction I hadn’t reached between finishing abstract algebra in college and taking doctrine of God in seminary. However, thinking of these statements in mathematical, abstract ways helps demonstrate how logically productive they are. For God to be his holiness and also to be his grace, for example, like in the example of mercy and justice above, means that God is always perfectly holy in his grace and perfectly gracious in his holiness. Indeed, if all God’s perfections are God, then God cannot change (any change in God is a change of his perfections, and vice versa). For God to not be made of parts precludes God from changing (there are no parts, so parts can’t change in their relationship, so God can’t change) or from having anything resembling human emotion or passion (which are somatically related to–changes of substance, in particular hormones).
Understandably, however, these discussions seem far afield of the biblical text. Can a God who interacts in the stories of the Old Testament match this description of simplicity? That would require a fairly long piece to answer. Instead, I found some notes in an old notebook I made for myself to reference some of the main passages that are related to developing the doctrine of simplicity in the evangelical and reformed tradition. That will answer the question, “Where is God’s Simplicity in the Bible?”
The first of several key texts that Westminster cites for God lacking body, parts, and passions are:
But take close care of your souls, for you did not see any form on the day YHWH spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a graven image in the form of any figure or the pattern of male or female.
Deuteronomy 4:15–16
The rationale God gives for the ban on idolatry is that he did not reveal himself in any form, particularly of male or female, which supports the God is without body.
God is spirit, and it is necessary to worship him in spirit and truth.
John 4:24
Look at my hands and my feet, for I myself am he. Examine me and look, for a spirit does not have flesh and bone as I do.
Luke 24:39
In contrasting Jesus’ statement about God as a spirit and his own statement about a resurrected body, we see that in Jesus’ humanity he was not just a spirit, but had a body. A spirit does not have a body, and in particular, does not have body parts. So these statements go slightly further in arguing not just that God does not have a body, but that he doesn’t have body parts. Whereas more would be needed to get all the way to an argument for God lacking pats entirely, God’s nature as spirit is suggestive that in someway he is a comprehensive, indivisible whole in his essence.
In saying that God does not have passions, Westminster cites:
And upon seeing what Paul did, the crowd lifted up their voice in Lycaonian saying, “The Gods have become like man and descended to us”…But upon hearing this, the apostles Barnabas and Paul tore their garments and rushed to the crowd, crying out and saying, “Men, why are you doing this? We are also men of the same nature as you, proclaiming good news to you to turn from empty things to the living God, who made heaven and earth and the see and all that is in it.
Acts 14:11, 14–15
The reason for the citation seems to be that the word for “of the same nature” has the path- root in it which we would associate with passions and emotions, or pathos if you will. This sort of argument tends to raise my linguistic skepticism, however, Greek was much more a part of education in the 17th century than it is today, and there could be philosophical arguments to associate like passions with like nature. So whereas I still want more in terms of texts to discuss impassibility and its relation to simplicity, I can at least see a historical reason that this text would have been associated with it and can appreciate that the difference in human and divine nature is itself enough to remind us that God would not necessarily need passions or emotions to relate to his creatures.
Outside the Westminster Confession, I found James Dolezal’s book All That Is in God to be extremely helpful in terms of learning about simplicity. Dolezal frequently takes “God is” statements in the Bible as support for simplicity. One example suffices to illustrate. Consider 1 John 4:8:
Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
The statement God is love is an identity statement. In logic, in mathematics, etc., we would know if A = B then B = A, and that if A = B and B = C, then A = C. What this means is that love is God, not in the sense that we can worship an abstract concept of love, but that if God’s essence is love, then the truest ideal of love is God’s essence. Likewise, if we have another statement, for example Jesus saying “I am the truth,” (John 14:6), from which we can infer God is truth, then truth is God, and truth is love, or love is truth. The interrelationships we see in these statements is essentially equivalent to saying that God’s essence is identical with his perfections, or that God is simple. In other words, any “God is” statement indicative of God’s perfections (not an analogy like Jesus saying “I am the door”) supports the concept of divine simplicity.
While this has been at best an introduction, I hope it is thought provoking and helpful.
Citizens & Sons 