A Special Episode from the Doctrine Matters Podcast by Crossway

Life and Books and Everything — Clearly Reformed

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A Special Episode from the Doctrine Matters Podcast by Crossway

February 10, 2025

Life and Books and EverythingClearly Reformed

Listen to a special episode of Life and Books and Everything promoting Crossway's new Podcast, Doctrine Matters.

Transcript

Greetings and salutations. Welcome back to Life and Books and Everything. I'm Kevin DeYoung, your host, and this is a special episode of LBE.

It's a brief episode. You may or may not be aware that beginning at the start of 2025, in partnership with Crossway, I started a new podcast called Cast. In addition to this one, it's called Doctrine Matters.

And each week, I take about 15 minutes and work through some of the key elements of systematic theology. So this is coming out of my book, Daily Doctrine. But it's not just reading those chapters.

It's really in an informal way, trying to teach through some of the highlights of systematic theology over the course of a year. So, right here is, this latest episode. We're gonna drop it in here at LBE first.

And if that's an interest to you, you might want to go over to Doctrine Matters and think about subscribing. You can go and get the ones you've missed, or just pick up where you are, and start listening for the rest of the year. That would be a helpful, weekly, short injection of systematic theology, because after all, Doctrine Matters.

Last week, we were beginning to look at theology proper. That is the doctrine of God. And we tried to lay out some important, and maybe new theological distinctions, talking about the very language we use to speak of God, that it is not univocal.

We don't mean the same thing by goodness related to a dog, as we mean goodness related to God. But it's not equivocal. But it's not a equivocal.

Our human words are not completely removed from reality. They're not completely different, but analogical. So there's a relationship, though we cannot know God exhaustively.

We can know God truly, as He reveals Himself to us. And then we talked about the spirituality of God, what it means that God is Spirit. Now we're moving into the attributes of God.

The divine attributes are qualities or characteristics that can be predicated of God. Some people refer to these as perfections, or virtues, or excellencies. Others use the word property because we are speaking about what is proper to God.

In Eastern Orthodoxy, they sometimes speak of God's essence in God's energies. Just as we cannot land on the sun, the essence, but can experience the rays of the sun, its energy. So we are capable of knowing true things about God, even if we cannot plumb the depths of the very Godness of God.

So that's one helpful way. We're talking about what are those rays of the sun, even if we cannot land on the sun and plumb the depths of the essence of God. So there are lots of different terms we can use, but most typically people have spoken of the attributes of God.

We should not imagine that in attributing qualities to God, we are assigning something outside of God to God, or adding something to His essence. God's attributes are not things that exist apart from Himself, nor are they things that come together to form God. What God is cannot be separated from what God has.

While there's no authoritative list of divine attributes, there's lots of good summaries. The Belgian Confession says God is a single and simple spiritual being, eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, unchangeable, infinite, almighty, completely wise, just and good, and the overflowing source of all good. I like that definition.

Or the Westminster Confession, more exhaustively, says God is a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts or passions, immutable immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things, according to the council of his own, immutable, and most righteous will for his own glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant and goodness and truth. And if you can have the patience for one other definition, one of the most famous definitions of God's attributes comes from John of Damascus, an Eastern theologian, who was known for his apophatic theology. That word means we understand God by what he is not.

It is true in theology, especially in the doctrine of God. It's often easier to say what God is not or to explain certain terms by saying, here's what we don't mean. So here's a paragraph from John of Damascus.

So then we both know and confess that God is without beginning. So notice all the negative language, apophatic theology. He is without beginning, without end, eternal and everlasting, uncreated, immutable, unchangeable, simple, non-composite, incorporeal, that means he doesn't have a body, invisible, impelpable, uncircumscribed.

Limitless, ungraspable, incognisable, unfathomable, good, just almighty, the creator of all created things, sovereign overall, overseeing all, exercising foresight overall, having supreme power overall and judge of all. It's a great description from John of Damascus. And it's also helpful to remember because sometimes people will get to, say, the Westminster Confession of Faith from the 1640s and say, well, look at what they've done to God and they've put him in a box and they've just reduced to him to a list of attributes.

Well, no one there thought you could reduce God to a list of attributes or that you didn't have to have a personal relationship with God, but Christian theologians have been doing this for hundreds and over a thousand years. So a thousand years earlier, give or take, you had this paragraph from John of Damascus who is also giving. So don't say, well, it's Western versus Eastern or it's Greek versus Hebrew.

This has always been an area of Christian reflection to think about how do we describe what is proper to God. Typically theologians have divided the attributes of God between his incommunicable and his communicable attributes. Now, that's not the only way to talk about them.

Some people talk about his absolute attributes or relative attributes or his constitutional attributes and his attributes of personality or his attributes of greatness. Those things that highlight the grander of God and then his attributes of goodness that highlight the excellency of what he does. Now, all of those are really getting at the same kinds of things and most typically and usefully theologians have fallen back on this distinction between the incommunicable and the communicable attributes of God.

And that's helpful because we don't want to think that some attributes are essential and others are relative or some are just about what is great and others are about what is good. The word incommunicable refers to those attributes that cannot be communicated to us. We may have something akin to them, but really they cannot be communicated to us.

Because immensity, eternity, infinity are incommunicable because nothing analogous to these attributes can be found in God's creatures. We may be able to give eternal life to live forever, but we are not eternal beings without a beginning. And then love, mercy, goodness, are deemed communicable.

Think about if you say that's a communicable disease, you mean you can catch that disease, it can be communicated from one person to another. So those attributes are communicable because we also, though never in the same way God is entirely, we also can be loving and merciful and good and just. When we speak then of communicable attributes, we're thinking of something that can be caught by God's creatures in a way that incommunicable attributes cannot.

God's attributes are describing then what is proper to him and we're going to look at some of those attributes. We're not going to look at all of them in the weeks ahead, but some communicable and some incommunicable. One last distinction that's going to help us in particular as we think about some of the incommunicable attributes.

And that's an important Aristotelian distinction between substance and accidents. They may say, well, why are we dealing with something that Aristotle taught? Well, it's true. We don't want Aristotle or any philosopher to be more important than the scriptures, of course.

And yet the Greek philosophical tradition is so ubiquitous in Western thought, even if we said, we want to get rid of Aristotle. You couldn't. Anytime you talk about the soul or form and matter or genus and species or potential and actual or the difference between an efficient cause and material cause, a formal cause, a final cause, these are all indebted to Aristotle.

So you try to say, I'm not going to think along with Aristotle, you're not going to be able to do it. And in fact, so much of what Aristotle put words on are the sort of things that intuitively we understand that there's an essence of the thing and then there's the things that are considered nonessential to the thing. Some of the Aristotelian categories are simply putting words upon human ways of thinking.

And also remember that the New Testament, quite a bit more than we think, has some of these philosophical categories. Philippians 2, Christ is in the form of God, Morphe. Hebrews 1, 3 uses the word hypothesis to refer to God's nature.

Romans 1, 20, God's divine nature. 1 Timothy 1, 17, the king of glory is immortal, invisible, the only God. So there are these kinds of categories, logos.

So it's not like the New Testament tried to flush Greek philosophy down the toilet, they understand that's the world they live in. So all of that is just some preface to come back here just real briefly to this important distinction between substance and accidents. So in Aristotle's logic, there's a basic distinction between the thing itself, the substance, and what may be said about the thing accidents.

Our word accident sounds like a crash or an oops. So it's better to think of the word incidental. What is the substance of a thing and what is incidental to a thing? Theologians were keen to use this distinction.

Now, some of you may know that this comes up later in talking about the Lord's Supper. And Protestant theologians will reject it because it was part of the theory of transubstantiation. So their reformed theologians are going to say, well, that's in irrationality.

So they didn't think that that was a good rationale for transubstantiation, but that doesn't mean they rejected the idea in total. An accident adds a quality to the substance of a thing without changing the kind of thing the substance is. So you take a dog, for example, a dog has dogginess.

You might say that's its substance, but a dog can be brown or fluffy or have spots or be small or all sorts of other things. Those are its accidents. And I understand talking about dogs and accidents is probably a bit confusing.

So those are the the incidentals. It's still a dog. It still has the same dogginess.

No matter its color or size, you take away those accidents, those incidentals. It's still a dog. The accidents change.

What sort of dog are we talking about? In simple terms, an accident in Aristotelian thinking gives to a substance its quality or its quantity. So when we talk about God, he does not have substance and accidents. There is nothing incidental to God.

There is nothing that you can say, we'll take this away from God and he's still God. Or there is a class of beings we call God. And just like there's a class of things we call dogs and some are big or shorts and some are brown and some are whites.

But they're all dogs. So God is not like that. Here's what Turretin says, that no accident can be granted in God.

We're talking about this Aristotelian category. Because of God's simplicity, because accidents imply he's composed of parts, because of God's infinity, because accidents would add to the substance some new quality, a different kind of God. And because of God's immutability, accidents always allow for change.

If you have something that is incidental to your substance, you could be that same substance in another way, which means you are open to change. God is the great I am. The one who is that he is, the one whose essence and existence cannot be augmented by any further properties.

That's what we mean. And that's why this distinction between substance and accidents has been important throughout the history of the church. Here's the bottom line.

Everything about God is essential to God. And nothing, not one of his attributes, is incidental to God. Thanks for listening to life and books and everything.

This is brought to you by Clearly Reformed. You can go over to clearlyreformed.org for more episodes and articles and thousands of resources. And until next time, glorify God, enjoy him forever, and read a good book.