Attributes of God

The attributes of God are the perfections Scripture reveals God to possess: not separable parts added together to compose him, but the one, simple divine being described from different angles. Attributing a perfection to God is not granting him something he previously lacked; it is recognizing what Scripture shows is already and eternally true of him.¹

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession lists many of God’s attributes together in a single sentence, without sorting them into any formal scheme: God is “every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and withal most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin.”² The Westminster Confession and Larger and Shorter Catechisms follow the same pattern. Neither the 1689 nor the wider Reformed confessional family adopts a formal classification of the attributes; that is a tool later theologians built on top of the confession’s own unclassified list, not a category the confession itself names.

Biblical Basis

God himself declares his own character to Moses in almost identical terms: “the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty” (Exod. 34:6-7). John names love as God’s own nature rather than merely one of his acts: “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and James names him “the Father of lights” in whom “there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17).

God’s Goodness and Love

Scripture presents God’s goodness toward his creatures in several distinct modes rather than as one undifferentiated quality. His covenant love, hesed, is his steadfast favor toward his own people; his mercy, rachamim, is shown especially toward those in misery and distress; his forbearance, or long-suffering, is his patience that withholds deserved judgment.³ Bavinck states the whole point directly: “God himself is the supreme good of all creatures,” and everything creatures call good in themselves is itself derived from and dependent on the good God who made them.³

Classifying the Attributes

Scripture lists God’s attributes together without sorting them into categories; doing so has instead been a systematic theology task, built to answer a specific philosophical problem: how an infinite, simple God can be truthfully described using perfections drawn from finite creaturely experience. Theologians have long disagreed over how well any such classification actually works.

The most common scheme, dating to Reformed scholasticism, divides the attributes into incommunicable ones, which have no trace of analogy in any creature (aseity, simplicity, immensity), and communicable ones, which creatures bear some limited, analogous likeness to (power, goodness, mercy, righteousness).⁴ Petrus van Mastricht, who called this “the most received” of five distributions theologians have used,⁴ defined communicable attributes as belonging to God and creatures “not… univocally… nor… equivocally… but only analogically,” the way health belongs first to a living animal and only derivatively to the food, air, and medicine that sustain it.⁴ Incommunicable attributes, by contrast, “include in their formal concept something so peculiar to the divine essence that not even a trace of it may be discovered in any creature.”⁴

Not every theologian who has used the distinction has been fully satisfied with it. Charles Hodge surveyed the whole enterprise with some skepticism: “On few subjects have greater thought and labor been expended than on this. Perhaps, however, the benefit has not been commensurate with the labor.”⁵ Rather than adopt any one scheme as authoritative, he chose to follow the order of the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s own answer to “What is God?”⁵ A. A. Hodge raised a more specific caution about the communicable/incommunicable label itself: “This distinction, however, must not be pressed too far… All God’s attributes known to us, or conceivable by us, are communicable, inasmuch as they have their analogy in us, but they are all alike incommunicable, inasmuch as they are all infinite.”⁶

The line between “communicable” and “incommunicable” cannot be drawn cleanly, since every attribute is, in different respects, both. This was pressed against Mastricht directly by Cartesian theologians such as Christoph Wittich: taken strictly, every attribute is a divine property and so all are equally incommunicable; taken broadly enough, even attributes normally called incommunicable turn out to have some obscure similarity in creatures, which would erase the distinction from the other side.⁷ Mastricht answered that communication comes in three kinds, equivocal, univocal, and analogical, and that the received distinction only requires the analogical kind to hold.⁸ Herman Bavinck, writing in the early twentieth century, took a similar view of the underlying stakes: his editors note that his point was not finally to defend the label, “but to note that in relation to his creatures we can speak of analogues in God and vice versa; God can genuinely communicate without being altered.”⁹

Related Doctrines

References

Peter Sammons, Forgotten Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2023), Introduction, 14-15. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩²
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 5, “The Attributes of God in General,” 158-59. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. V, § 3, “Classification of the Divine Attributes,” 374-76. ↩ ↩²
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” 137-38. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 5, “The Attributes of God in General,” 163-64. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 5, “The Attributes of God in General,” 164-65. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth,” editorial note 36. ↩