Free Speech: Scripture in the Context of Divine Simplicity and Divine Freedom

Divine Simplicity and Divine Action

The bearing of the doctrine of divine simplicity, especially its claim that God is pure act, on the freedom and transcendence of God’s speaking in Scripture can be seen when we consider biblical descriptions of God’s plenitude and omnipotence. The Old and New Testaments emphasize that God is, as Barth would have it, ‘rich in himself.’ ⁸ This is implied where God is called the ‘living God’ over against lifeless, impotent idols (2 Kgs 19:15–19; Jer. 10:1–16; Acts 14:15; 1 Thess. 1:9). The God of Israel lacks nothing and needs nothing from his creatures (Ps. 50:7–15). Rather, he possesses all that is good in himself and generously shares that goodness with creatures (Ps. 24:1; Acts 17:24–28; Rom. 11:36; Phil. 4:19). Significantly, the action of God whereby he accomplishes his works is not a matter of exertion. He calls creation into being by sheer command (Ps. 33:6, 9; 148:5; Rom. 4:17). Because he has life in himself, God the Son is capable of raising the dead by the power of his word (John 5:25–26). Likewise, he can overthrow the ‘man of lawlessness’ by the mere ‘breath of his mouth’ and the ‘appearance of his coming’ (2 Thess. 2:8).

Accordingly, God informs his people that nothing is difficult for him to accomplish. Sarah laughs at the thought of having a child in her old age, but God responds and asks, ‘Is anything too hard for YHWH?’ (Gen. 18:12–14). Jeremiah employs the same language to speak of God’s ability to create the heavens and the earth, to deliver Israel out of Egypt with signs and wonders, to give Judah over to Babylon and to restore her to the land again: ‘Nothing is too hard for you’ (32:17; cf. 32:27). Furthermore, the activity of God according to Scripture is eternal and constant. God did not start to exercise his intellect and will with the beginning of creation. Instead, he knew and loved and chose his people ‘before the foundation of the world’ (Eph. 1:4–5; 2 Tim. 1:9). Indeed, in the triune life of God, the divine intellect and love are exercised even without any reference to creatures: the Father loved the Son ‘before the foundation of the world,’ and we are then brought into the fellowship of that prevenient love (John 17:20–24). In his relationship to the economy, God is ever ‘working,’ even through the Sabbath intervals that punctuate the lives of his creatures (John 5:17). He is constantly sustaining the world (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3) and, in the words of the psalmist, ‘he who keeps Israel does not slumber or sleep’ (Ps. 121:4). Juxtaposing the constant activity of God and the ease with which he acts, Augustine thus observes, ‘You, Lord, are always working and always at rest.’ ⁹

Of course, there are texts in which God is said to sleep: ‘Awake! Why do you sleep, Lord? Wake up! Do not reject us forever’ (Ps. 44:23; cf. 12:5; 59:5; Isa. 28:21; 33:10).Yet, as John Chrysostom observes, where God is said to sleep, this does not indicate inactivity on God’s part but rather patience and forbearance. ¹⁰ When God rouses himself to act, it is not a matter of exertion or an elevation of God’s actuality and efficacy; rather, it is a matter of God’s already complete, multi-faceted actuality breaking forth at fresh points in time according to God’s wise judgment and according to the needs of his creatures. Thus, Hilary of Poitiers writes that God accomplishes his works without the various motions that creatures require in order to perform their works. God is always active in his omnipotence, and ‘no labor is required where there is no weakness.’ ¹¹

The non-exertive character of divine action and the pure actuality of God gathered from Scripture and encapsulated in the doctrine of divine simplicity imply the conclusion of older theologians that divine action is nothing but God’s essence operative under a certain relation to created objects and circumstances. ¹² In other words, God acts by what he already is as God (that is, by his own essence). This is different from creaturely action, where the creature is moved from inactive potency to actuality and thereby increases in force and efficacy. This is why God is said not to undergo motion—not because he is immobile in the popular sense of the word but, instead, because he is active a se and eternally and thus does not pass from inertia to activity. Though the claim that God is pure act is sometimes taken to mean that God is impersonal or cannot engage in personal action, the notion that God is pure act in fact accentuates that God’s personal action is so lively in his own being that it is not augmented but rather simply turned outward or applied by God to us for our good when God meets us in the economy.

This identity of God’s action with his essence in the doctrine of divine simplicity entails that God’s action cannot be circumscribed or taken over by creatures. For God’s essence is infinite and exceeds every field of created reality (cf. 1 Kgs 8:27; Isa. 40:12–26; Jer. 23:24). The consequent immensity of God’s action means that it cannot become encased or comprehended under any media or loci of divine revelation. This will of course have implications for the transcendence of God’s communicative action in Scripture. Yet, en route to explaining this, it is worth noting that, since God’s simplicity also reminds us that God’s essence is indivisible, the identity of his action with his essence under a certain relation also has implications for the genuineness of his active presence in speaking in the Bible. Stephen Charnock points out that ‘whatsoever is compounded of parts may be divided into those parts, and resolved into those distinct parts which make up and constitute the nature.’ ¹³ God, however, has no such parts and is therefore wholly and immediately himself in his action. On the one hand, the infinity and indivisibility of the divine essence reinforce that God’s action, which is God’s essence working under a relation to creatures, will always transcend created media, for there is no ‘part’ of God that can be separated from God’s being and reduced to a feature of created reality. As Hilary comments, wherever God is, he is there in the simple wholeness of his indissoluble being. ¹⁴ On the other hand, this also highlights that God is fully himself in his revelatory action. With creatures, essence possesses various capacities for action, but those capacities may lie dormant for long periods of time, and, when creatures do actualize those capacities, there is always some difference between the underlying principle by which they act (essence) and the action itself. With God, however, the identity of God’s action with God’s essence under a certain relation implies that there is no ontological space between what God is in his essence and what God is in his action toward us. ¹⁵

What, then, are the specific implications for God’s speech in Scripture? We have noted that Barth thought God would surrender his freedom and lordship over the Bible if the Bible were continually the word of God, but divine simplicity reframes the nature of God’s revelatory action and sheds lights on the transcendence of that action. When we say that the Bible does not become the word of God but rather continually is the word of God, we are saying that God continually speaks the locutions written in the Bible. As God speaks those locutions, he is acting by his essence. In authoring Scripture with its human authors and committing himself to speaking continually in Scripture, God, or God’s revelatory action, is therefore not domesticated by the text of Scripture. For God’s infinite, indivisible essence simply cannot undergo such domestication. As infinite, the action and being of God exceed the field of the sacred text. As indivisible, they have no constituent, finite parts that might be disconnected from God’s infinity and left behind, as it were, in the text, resulting in a diminishing of God’s transcendence. Rather, the force with which God speaks in the Bible is that of his very essence, which resists any circumscription or reduction. Yet, precisely because of this, we can also trust that God is uninhibited in his speech in Scripture. He can and does continually address us in the Bible with no concern that he might somehow compromise himself in condescending verbally to reveal himself to us.

In sum, God’s simplicity, particularly his pure actuality, impresses upon us both the transcendence and sovereignty of his speech in Scripture and also the depth of his immanence in this speech. It may at first appear reverent to deny that God would so bind himself to communicating to us in a book that this book could be identified as the constant word of God. It can be argued, however, that it is in fact an underestimation of the greatness of God that would lead us to attempt to protect God’s transcendent freedom by rejecting the notion of him continually addressing us in lowly creaturely terms. If we think that the fullness and transcendence of God might be threatened by his condescension, we might feel the need to mitigate his condescension. By contrast, if we recognize that God’s greatness is, in the infinite actuality and indivisibility of his being, entirely incapable of any attenuation whatsoever, then we are free to affirm God’s ongoing speech in the humble language of the prophets and apostles. There is no concern that a traditional account of Scripture as the word of God will somehow weaken the majesty of God. Some have suspected that a classical doctrine of God, of the sort in which simplicity can be found, might have been designed to keep God from ever truly relating to his creation. But, properly understood, divine simplicity confirms that God’s incorruptible plenitude and transcendence foster a rich understanding of his immanence: he is able to act continually in the field of the biblical text without ever worrying about losing himself in so doing. Such is, I submit, the significance of God’s simplicity for his freedom and sovereignty in the action of his revelation in Scripture. Next we consider divine simplicity in connection with the content of his revelation in Scripture.

Divine Simplicity and the Content of God’s Revelation

Moving beyond the implications of divine simplicity for divine action, we now examine the manner in which God’s simplicity bears on human knowledge of God and helps us to see that the continual accessibility of the content of God’s revelation in Scripture does not render God an object that can be mastered by the human mind. God’s works in the economy, including his speech in Scripture, truly make God known to us. Indeed, they make known not just God’s relationship to creation but also God himself. This means that the (created) media of revelation do not exhaust the content of revelation. Yet, at this point, when we have identified the Bible as revelation and when we recognize that biblical revelation gives us knowledge of God himself, divine simplicity helps us still to honor the transcendence of the content of God’s self-revelation in the Bible, or, put differently, the incomprehensibility of God.

God’s incomprehensibility is set before us in various biblical passages. In Exodus 3, where the LORD gives his name () to Moses before he goes to lead the people of Israel, there is an interweaving of hiddenness and revelation. For this reason, the passage is a helpful vantage point from which to reflect on the transcendence of God in the midst of his ongoing self-disclosure in Scripture. On the one hand, though God answers the anticipated question of the Israelites in Exodus 3—‘what is his name?’—he still declines to give a full description of himself. He deploys a tautology, ‘I AM WHO I AM,’ to give assurance that he is to be trusted and, at the same time, signal that he will not place himself under the jurisdiction of human beings. ¹⁶ Bruce Waltke comments that in this passage ‘[t]he Eternal lowers himself into a bush amid the dirt and rocks’ and promises Moses ‘I am who I am for you.’ ¹⁷ However, Waltke happily does not separate this humble covenant faithfulness from the implications of the name for God’s own being: God is a se, all-sufficient, ‘pure being without dependence,’ ‘pure power without limitation,’ ‘pure love without self-regard.’ ¹⁸ That Waltke is right to discern implications for God’s own transcendent being can be seen in the broader canonical development of the name ‘I AM.’ In Deuteronomy 32:39 God emphasizes ‘I am he’ to make the point that he alone is God and is the omnipotent giver of life. In Isaiah, ‘I am he’ is used to express God’s singularity and eternal life (41:4; 43:10, 13; 48:12). ¹⁹ Christ himself invokes this thread of biblical teaching to convey his eternal existence when some wondered how he could speak authoritatively about the patriarch Abraham (John 8:58). ²⁰ Finally, in Revelation, the divine name is unfolded in various pericopae where God is ‘the one who is and who was (and who is coming)’ (1:4, 8; 4:8; 11:17; 16:5). ²¹ The point is that across the canon of Scripture the divine name ‘I AM’ indicates, not only God’s covenant faithfulness, but also God’s eternal life and incomprehensible plenitude. It is not a matter of idle speculation, then, to say, with John of Damascus, that the God of Holy Scripture is not a limited being but ‘like a sea of essence infinite and unseen’ (πέλαγος οὐσίας ἄπειρον καὶ ἀόριστον). ²²

On the other hand, while the name ‘I AM’ points toward God’s fullness and incomprehensibility, the name is given to communicate knowledge of God’s fullness to us in the biblical text. In Exodus 3, the God who is ‘I AM’ is YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The one who is eternally is the one revealed in the history of the patriarchs. The redemptive-historical exposition of the name ‘I AM’ continues in chapters 33–34 of Exodus. When Moses seeks confirmation that God will go with him in leading the people and entreats God to reveal his glory, God replies that he will manifest his goodness and proclaim his name, YHWH (33:12–19a), which is then glossed by the statement, ‘I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy’ (33:19b). The proclamation of the name is cast in terms of announcing God’s free grace and mercy. ²³ If someone sees the face of YHWH they will die, but, when YHWH proclaims his name, Moses may still see his ‘back’ (33:20–23). YHWH then passes before Moses, proclaiming his name, ‘YHWH, YHWH, a God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and full of steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but by no means leaving the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons and upon the sons of the sons, upon the third and the fourth generations’ (34:6–7).

Human persons cannot comprehend God (cf. Ps 145:3; 1 Tim 6:16), and sinful human persons cannot see him face to face without perishing (cf. Isa 6:5; Heb 12:14; 1 John 3:2), but, in the teaching of Exodus 33–34, they can indeed know him by his many attributes: goodness, grace, mercy, patience, love, faithfulness, justice, and so on. God’s proclamation of his ineffable name by his attributes in Exodus 33–34 is echoed in John 1, where Jesus ‘tabernacles’ among us as YHWH did in Moses’ day and displays God’s glory in his grace and truth (v. 14). ²⁴ Though no one has ever seen God, Jesus has made him known (v. 18). Chrysostom comments on John 1:18 that no human being has ‘perfect comprehension of God.’ Even among the prophets none ‘saw God’s essence in its pure state’ or ‘in its exact nature.’ ²⁵ That is why Chrysostom says elsewhere that, when Paul speaks of the imperfection of our knowledge in 1 Corinthians 13:8–12, Paul ‘does not know what God is in his essence. He knows,’ for example, ‘that he is wise but he does not know how great that wisdom is.’ It is not that Paul knows one ‘part’ of God’s essence but not another; rather, he simply does not know the immensity of God’s simple essence or the mysterious working of God’s providence and so must know God by attributes like wisdom, greatness, and so on. ²⁶ As John Damascene explains, since God does not exist in a category of things, finite creatures cannot demarcate God’s nature. Instead, we content ourselves with ‘affirmations’ (ὅσα … λέγομεν ἐπὶ θεοῦ καταφατικῶς) like goodness, justice, and wisdom ‘concerning God’s nature’ (περὶ τὴν φύσιν). ²⁷

What is the particular relevance of all this to divine simplicity in connection with the transcendence of the content of God’s revelation in Scripture? The doctrine of divine simplicity illumines the biblical dynamic, carried forward by various church fathers, of affirming God’s eternal, incomprehensible plenitude and then understanding that plenitude in a limited (but still true) fashion by the many attributes God gives to us in Scripture. God’s rich, infinite essence cannot be known precisely or exhaustively by the human mind, but each of God’s attributes is really identical—is the same ‘thing’ (res)—with his essence. They are not qualities inhering in God but are glosses of the whole perfection that God is as God. To appropriate some scholastic language, the attributes or perfections of God by which God’s triune essence is known are one with God’s essence, not ‘formally’ as though the formal notion or definition of each could capture the fullness of the essence, but rather ‘identically’ as wisdom, justice, goodness, and so on just are the essence of God taken under some aspect. ²⁸ As in Exodus, so according to a traditional account of God’s simplicity the divine attributes are critical to our knowledge of God himself. Yet, while they are spoken de essentia (‘about the essence’) and even are ipsa essentia (‘the essence itself’), they are, in the strict sense of the word, ‘inadequate’ concepts of God’s incomprehensible plenitude. ²⁹

All of this implies that when we read Scripture as divine revelation and the very word of God and see that it speaks of God himself, we can never master the content of the revelation in Scripture and thereby puncture God’s transcendence. It is not simply that we should not do so; the doctrine of divine simplicity underscores that we truly cannot do so. We lack the epistemic capacity to conceive all the fullness that the triune God is; we apprehend him but can never comprehend him. This frees us to affirm that Scripture is continually God’s self-revelation without worrying that we are subjecting God to our intellectual mastery. Though the content of his revelation in the Bible is continually accessible to us, his transcendence is not in danger on that account. ³⁰

Though it may initially seem to the contemporary reader to be a presumptuous speculation about God’s being, divine simplicity in fact discourages speculation by reminding us of God’s incomprehensibility and committing us to thinking about God by way of his biblical attributes. And, once again, we can note that it is not that God’s transcendence must be upheld by us distancing God from Scripture. As we have seen, a biblically rooted account of divine simplicity confirms that the action of God’s revelation in Scripture exceeds the field of the text even as he continually speaks in it. Similarly, divine simplicity confirms that the content of God’s revelation in Scripture exceeds our finite noetic capacity even as biblical description of God’s triune perfection is an ongoing form and locus of revelation. For, even in revealing himself, God makes clear that the fullness of his being is incomprehensible to creatures.

Conclusion

In this essay, I have aimed to take seriously Barth’s concern to maintain God’s freedom and sovereignty in his self-revelation. However, I have also attempted to examine some points of intersection between bibliology and theology proper in an effort to make the case that the Bible can be identified as the (ongoing) word of God without foregoing the transcendence of the action and content of God’s revelation. In this connection, the doctrine of divine simplicity reframes the nature of God’s action, including his speech in Scripture. For God’s action is really identical with his essence, which entails that God’s ongoing communicative action exceeds the field of the text, indicating that God or God’s action is not somehow encased within or reduced to the text itself even as he constantly addresses us in it. Divine simplicity also drives home the transcendence of the content of God’s speech in Scripture. For what is revealed of God himself pertains to or glosses God’s rich essence but does not demarcate or comprehend it. In this way, I hope to have exhibited the potential fruitfulness of divine simplicity for helping the church to continue its historic affirmation of Holy Scripture as the word of God. The importance of that affirmation is expressed well by Bavinck:

Holy Scripture is not an arid story or ancient chronicle but the ever-living, eternally youthful Word, which God, now and always, issues to his people. It is the eternally ongoing speech of God to us…. In it God daily comes to his people. In it he speaks, not from afar but from nearby. In it he reveals himself from day to day, to believers in the fullness of his truth and grace…. Scripture is the ongoing rapport between heaven and earth, between Christ and his church, between God and his children. It does not just bind us to the past; it binds us to the living Lord in the heavens. It is the living voice of God, the letter of the omnipotent God to his creature. God once created the world by the word, and by that word he also upholds it (Heb. 1:2–3); but he also re-creates it by the word and prepares it to be his dwelling. ³¹