Concept

Divine Attributes

Intro

When we say things about God, are we describing real things about Him, or just guessing? Christian theology has a careful answer.

The divine attributes are the things the Bible and the church have always said God is: eternal, all-knowing, all-powerful, good, holy, just, merciful, present everywhere, never changing. The whole subject is called theology proper because it is theology about God Himself, before we get to creation, sin, salvation, and so on.

The classical view does not treat God's attributes as a list of features He has stacked on top of His being, the way a person has height and weight and a job. It says God's attributes are His being, named under different angles. God does not have love; God is love (1 John 4:8). His goodness is not a quality He possesses; it is what He is. The technical name for this is divine simplicity: God is not made of parts.

The attributes are usually sorted into two groups. The incommunicable attributes are the ones only God has and creatures cannot share, things like aseity (He depends on nothing for His existence), eternity (He is not in time), immutability (He does not change), and infinity. The communicable attributes are the ones creatures can faintly share by participation, like wisdom, love, justice, mercy, and holiness. We can be wise; God is wisdom. The difference is between borrowing and being.

This is the master hub. Each attribute has its own page going deeper. Read this one for the map; then drill into Aseity, Divine Simplicity, Divine Immutability, Divine Impassibility, or any of the others.

Quick reply line: "God's attributes are not parts of God He has; they are what God is. He does not have love; He is love. He does not have wisdom; He is wisdom. That is the classical view, and it is why God is one and simple."

In full

The doctrine of the divine attributes is the part of theology proper that asks what may be truly predicated of God: what God is, what God has, and what God does. The classical answer is that God's attributes are not parts or properties God possesses alongside himself but identical with his one infinite divine essence, named under different aspects as the finite mind grasps the one God by many concepts.

The Christian tradition has organized the attributes under a long-standing taxonomy, incommunicable attributes that belong to God alone and cannot be shared with creatures, and communicable attributes whose creaturely analogues participate, derivatively, in what God is in himself.

The classical taxonomy

Incommunicable attributes, predicates true of God alone; creatures cannot possess any analogue of them in kind, only by remote analogy or negation:

Aseity, God's existence from himself, depending on nothing. See Aseity.
Simplicity, God is not composed of parts, whether spatial, temporal, metaphysical, or property-bearing. See Divine Simplicity.
Eternity, God's mode of existence is not measured by time; the classical tradition reads this as timeless (atemporal) existence. See Eternity (Divine).
Immutability, God does not change in being, will, knowledge, or perfection. See Divine Immutability.
Impassibility, God is not acted upon by creatures; his life is not modified by external causes. See Divine Impassibility.
Infinity, God is unlimited in being; no perfection in him is bounded. See Infinity.
Omnipresence, God is wholly present to every place by his being, power, and knowledge, without being spatially extended.
Pure Act, God has no unactualized potency; he is actus purus. See Actus Purus.

Communicable attributes, predicates true of God primarily and of creatures derivatively; creatures bear an image or analogue of these perfections by participation:

Holiness, God's absolute moral purity and ontological separateness.
Love, God's self-giving willing of the good of the beloved, paradigmatically realized within the Trinitarian relations.
Goodness, God as the source and standard of every good.
Justice, God's perfect rectitude in willing and rendering what is due.
Mercy, God's gratuitous goodness toward the unworthy.
Truth, God as the ground of all truth and the perfect knower of all that is.
Wisdom, God's perfect ordering of means to ends in creation and providence.
Omniscience, God's knowledge of all that is, was, will be, and could be.
Omnipotence, God's power to do whatever is logically possible and consonant with his nature.
Freedom, God's self-determining will, undetermined by anything outside himself.

The communicable/incommunicable line is heuristic, not absolute. Aseity, simplicity, and pure act are clearly incommunicable. But love, goodness, and holiness, while called communicable, are in God himself the very being of God, and as such are no more "shareable" than aseity is. What is communicated to the creature is an analogous image, not a piece of the divine perfection.

Are the attributes really distinct?

A foundational architectural question: when we say God is wise, good, just, and merciful, do we name distinct features God possesses, or one infinite reality that the finite mind divides into many concepts?

Three classical answers stand out:

Real identity, conceptual distinction (Aquinas). The attributes are not really distinct in God; they are identical with the divine essence and with each other. The distinctions are secundum rationem, drawn by reason, with a foundation in the creature's mode of knowing, not in re. See Thomas Aquinas on the doctrine of divine simplicity, where this is the load-bearing claim. God's mercy is his justice is his being.
Formal distinction (Scotus). John Duns Scotus accepted divine simplicity but distinguished formalities in God, the divine intellect is formally not the divine will, even though in reality there is no composition. The Scotist position preserves a stronger sense in which God's wisdom and justice are not collapsed into a single undifferentiated predicate.
Real distinction of properties (theistic personalism). Some contemporary analytic theists treat the attributes as distinct properties God exemplifies, omnipotence is one property, omniscience is another, perfect goodness a third, held together by the fact that one being instantiates all of them maximally. See Theistic Personalism. This rejects strict simplicity and brings the doctrine of God closer to the picture of a maximally great person.

The choice among these is not merely technical. It shapes how every other attribute is read: whether the attributes can come apart, whether one can over-ride another, whether God's love and justice can stand in tension, and whether terms like love and justice mean the same thing applied to God and to creatures.

Simplicity as the linchpin

In the classical synthesis, Divine Simplicity is the central rule by which every other attribute is understood. If God is simple, then:

The attributes are not really distinct features that could be added, removed, or held in different proportions; they are one infinite divine reality.
God does not have love, goodness, or justice in the way a creature has properties. God is love (1 John 4:8) in the strict sense, there is no distance between the lover and the love, the knower and the knowledge, the willer and the will.
No attribute can be defeated by another. God's mercy and justice are not two finite forces in tension to be balanced; they are one perfection differently named.
Predication of attributes is analogical, not univocal. Wisdom in God and wisdom in a creature share a name and a real proportion, but not a common ratio (see Aquinas on analogy of being).

Reject simplicity and the architecture changes everywhere. The attributes become properties; properties admit composition; composition implies a composer; and the doctrine of God begins to look much more like a description of a very great being than of the source and ground of all being.

This is why the contemporary CT/TP debate cannot be reduced to a debate over simplicity alone. Simplicity is the linchpin, but the rest of the architecture stands or falls with it.

Position spread: classical theism vs. theistic personalism

The contemporary debate over the attributes is not chiefly over which attributes God has, both camps affirm aseity, eternity, immutability (in some sense), omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, love. The dispute is over how God has them and what they mean.

Classical theism, the patristic, medieval, and Reformed-scholastic synthesis (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Calvin, Turretin, Bavinck, Feser, Davies, Hart):

God is ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself, not a being among beings. See Ipsum Esse Subsistens.
The attributes are identical with the divine essence (real identity, conceptual distinction).
Eternity is timelessness; immutability is strict; impassibility is real.
Predication is analogical.
God is actus purus with no potency for change.

Theistic personalism, a contemporary analytic alternative associated with Swinburne, Plantinga (in certain modes), Wolterstorff, William Hasker, and (in a different vector) the open theists:

God is the greatest possible person; God is a being, the greatest one.
The attributes are distinct great-making properties.
Eternity may be everlastingness in time rather than timelessness.
Immutability is moral immutability (God's character does not change) but not strict immutability of state.
Impassibility is rejected or significantly qualified, God genuinely responds to creatures.
Predication is largely univocal, knowledge means the same thing in God and creatures, only maximally instantiated in God.

The two camps are not symmetric heresies. Both stand inside the broad church. But they differ on what kind of object the doctrine of God is describing, and that difference cascades through every locus, providence, the incarnation, prayer, the cross, and the relation of God and time.

For the position-spread overview, see Classical Theism and Theistic Personalism. For the related dispute over God and time, see Eternity (Divine) and A-Theory vs B-Theory of Time and Divine Foreknowledge. For the Trinitarian context in which the attributes are exercised, see Trinity.

Why the doctrine matters

The attributes are not a topic among other topics in theology. They are the description of the One who is the subject of every other doctrine. Christology stands or falls with what omnipotence and impassibility mean in the incarnation. Soteriology stands or falls with what divine love, justice, and mercy are in the atonement. Theodicy stands or falls with what divine goodness and omniscience commit God to in providence. Prayer stands or falls with what immutability does and does not entail about God's responsiveness.

A vague doctrine of the attributes makes every doctrine downstream a moving target. A precise one, well-held, anchors the whole.