Theopedia

Being

“God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM.’”

— Exodus 3:14

Definition

Being is the most basic ontological category: that which is, rather than what does not exist.1 A creature’s nature determines what kind of thing it is, but its being, that it exists at all, is received from another.2 God’s being differs in kind: he is not one instance of a wider class that also includes his creatures; he simply is (Ex. 3:14).3 The three persons of the Trinity do not each have a separate being, the way three humans each have their own instance of human nature; they share one undivided being.4

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names this divine reality directly: “In this divine and infinite Being there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided.”5 The confession’s own wording is deliberate: God’s single, undivided reality is a “Being,” and Father, Son, and Spirit are “subsistences” within it, not three beings alongside one another.5

Being and nature are not the same thing. Nature or essence names what something is, the sort of thing it belongs to; being names that a thing is, its own particular existence.4 Three human persons share one human nature, but each is a distinct being, with a separate existence of its own. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, by contrast, share not only one divine nature but one and the same, numerically identical being: they are “not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations.”5 This is why the confession, and the wider Reformed tradition, resist any picture of the Trinity as three separate divine minds or wills; that would multiply beings, not merely distinguish subsistences within one.4

Biblical Basis

The name God gives himself at the burning bush names his own being directly. Asked who is sending him, Moses is told, “I AM WHO I AM… Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you’” (Ex. 3:13-14). The name, Yahweh (“He Is”), is not one designation among others; it discloses that God’s being is unlike any creature’s, since he does not derive it from another or hold it in common with anything outside himself.3 Isaiah repeats the same self-identification, “I am he,” in passages stressing God’s underived, sovereign existence (Isa. 41:4; 43:13, 25; 46:4; 48:12; 51:12), and the Greek Old Testament renders the name “I am he who is” (ho on), language the New Testament echoes when Jesus applies it to himself (“Before Abraham was, I am,” John 8:58) and when God is called “the one who is and who was and who is to come” (Rev. 1:8; cf. 1:4; 4:8).6

This underived being is why Scripture presents God as needing nothing from his creatures. He does not dwell in temples built by human hands “as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24-25); the Father has “life in himself” and grants that same divine life to the Son (John 5:26).7 Paul makes the same point to the Athenians: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28); every creature’s being is derivative of God’s own.

The New Testament also supplies vocabulary later theology used to speak of “being” in a more technical sense. Hebrews calls the Son “the exact imprint of his [the Father’s] nature [hypostasis]” (Heb. 1:3), Paul describes those who “by nature [physei] are not gods” (Gal. 4:8), and he says that in Christ “the whole fullness of deity [theotes] dwells bodily” (Col. 2:9).8

Historical Development

Reformed scholastic usage

Reformed scholastic theologians of the early modern period took up “being” (ens) as a technical philosophical term and asked carefully how, if at all, it applies to God.9 For Bartholomäus Keckermann, metaphysics is “the science of being,” where a being is “that which is” or “what has essence”; God, he argued, is properly aliquid supra ens, “something beyond being,” and supersubstantia, “beyond substance,” because God is his own essence and does not merely “have” one the way a creature does. Keckermann held that God is called a “being” only “on account of the weakness of our intellect,” which cannot speak of him except by analogy to creatures.9 Johann Alsted and Johannes Maccovius reasoned similarly: metaphysics studies “being insofar as it is being” as its proper subject, but God, existing “outside the order of creatures,” falls under that science only as its cause, not as one more instance within it.10

This carefulness answered a standing worry: that calling God a “being” places him in the same class as everything else that exists, as though “being” were a genus containing both Creator and creature. Duby argues this reading misreads the older tradition: theologians from Augustine and Boethius to Thomas Aquinas and Keckermann “insist that it is emphatically not appropriate to treat God as though he were just one more instance of ‘being.’”11

The modern critique of “being” language

Beginning in the nineteenth century, several theologians grew wary of applying “being” and related metaphysical terms to God at all. Friedrich Schleiermacher objected that “nature” language, drawn from a world of “mutually conditioned” finite entities, sat awkwardly with the person of Christ.12 Albrecht Ritschl warned more broadly against metaphysical concepts in the doctrine of God, and Karl Barth, in the twentieth century, resisted treating “being” as a “master-concept” applicable in the same sense to both God and creatures.13 The underlying concern, in each case, was that a “metaphysical” doctrine of God turns him into an elevated version of the creature, standing over the world rather than truly transcending it.13

Opposing Views

Some theologians, following Barth’s lead, prefer to ground the doctrine of God in his self-revelation in Christ and in the economy of salvation rather than in the inherited philosophical vocabulary of “being,” “essence,” and “substance.” On this account, that vocabulary risks reducing God to an elevated version of the creature, an unchanging “ground of created being” no longer free to draw near to the world in the incarnation, and it opens a gap between who God is in himself and who he is toward us in Christ.14

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t calling God a “being” place him in the same class as everything else that exists, alongside his creatures? On the classical Reformed account, “being” applies to God and creatures only analogically, not as members of one shared genus. Keckermann held that God is, strictly speaking, “beyond being” (supra ens); Scripture calls him a “being” only by accommodation to human weakness, which cannot conceive of him except through creaturely categories.9 Duby argues that the historical charge that classical theologians flattened God and creature into one common concept of being is itself mistaken: figures from Augustine and Boethius to Aquinas and Keckermann “insist that it is emphatically not appropriate to treat God as though he were just one more instance of ‘being.’”11

Is “being” language a philosophical import foreign to Scripture’s own categories? Duby answers that Scripture itself supplies both the material and the formal grounds for it. Paul describes those who “by nature are not gods” (Gal. 4:8) and says the fullness of deity dwells in Christ (Col. 2:9); Hebrews calls the Son the “exact imprint” of the Father’s hypostasis (Heb. 1:3). These terms already overlap with the later technical vocabulary of being, nature, and substance, so the church’s developed usage continues a trajectory Scripture itself began rather than substituting an alien philosophy for it.8

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 4, “Theology and Metaphysics Revisited,” 188-189. ↩

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩

  3. Samuel G. Parkison, The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God, ed. Matthew Barrett, Contemplating God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2026), chap. 3, “I AM,” 33. ↩ ↩2

  4. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 3. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. Duby, chap. 1, “Theologia Within the Divine Economy,” 14. ↩

  7. Duby, chap. 1, 14-15. ↩

  8. Duby, chap. 4, 211-212. ↩ ↩2

  9. Duby, chap. 4, 207. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  10. Duby, chap. 4, 207-208. ↩

  11. Duby, chap. 4, 208-209. ↩ ↩2

  12. Duby, chap. 4, 190-191. ↩

  13. Duby, chap. 4, 189. ↩ ↩2

  14. Duby, chap. 4, 189-190. ↩