Classification of the attributes of God

The classification of the attributes of God is the systematic theology task of sorting the many perfections Scripture ascribes to God into categories. The most common scheme divides them into incommunicable attributes, which have no trace of analogy in any creature (infinity, immutability), and communicable attributes, which creatures bear some limited, analogous likeness to (knowledge, goodness, power). Scripture itself lists God’s attributes together without sorting them this way; the categories are a tool later theologians built on top of that list, not a framework Scripture supplies ready-made, and theologians have long disagreed over how well the tool actually works.

Confessional Witness

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 “infinite in being and perfection… 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.”¹ The Westminster Confession and Larger and Shorter Catechisms follow the same pattern. Neither the 1689 nor the wider Reformed confessional family adopts a classification of the attributes as such; the incommunicable/communicable distinction discussed below is a systematic theology tool built on top of the confession’s own unclassified list, not a category the confession itself names.

Historical Development

Reformed scholastic theologians treated the classification of the attributes as its own locus, built to answer a specific philosophical problem: how an infinite, simple God can be truthfully described using perfections drawn from finite creaturely experience. Francis Turretin took up the question under the heading “The Name Jehovah,” distinguishing two kinds of communication between God and creatures: one “essential and formal,” which is impossible since it would require creatures to share the divine essence itself, and one “by resemblance and analogy,” which is granted, “since God produces in creatures… effects analogous to his own properties, such as goodness, justice, wisdom.”² On this basis he called incommunicable those attributes “so proper to God that nothing similar or analogous, or any image and trace, can be found in creatures.”²

Petrus van Mastricht devoted a full chapter of his Theoretical-Practical Theology to the topic, cataloguing five distributions “customarily arrayed in different ways by different theologians”: proper versus metaphorical, negative versus positive, relative versus absolute, personal versus natural, and finally communicable versus incommunicable, which he called “the most received” of the five.³ He defined the terms carefully: communicable attributes belong to God and creatures “not… univocally… nor… equivocally… but only analogically, such that the thing signified by the attributes belongs principally and originally to God, but to the creatures only participatively,” the way health belongs first to a living animal and only derivatively to the food, air, and medicine that sustain it.³ 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.”³

Two centuries later, Charles Hodge surveyed the whole enterprise with some skepticism. “On few subjects have greater thought and labor been expended than on this,” he wrote of the classification question. “Perhaps, however, the benefit has not been commensurate with the labor.”⁴ He catalogued five competing principles then in use, including a scheme that dispensed with classification altogether by treating all the attributes as one undivided idea of the Infinite, and Schleiermacher’s arrangement built entirely around the creature’s subjective feeling of dependence rather than the nature of God himself.⁴ Rather than adopt any one scheme as authoritative, Hodge chose to follow the order of the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s own answer to “What is God?”⁴

A. A. Hodge, writing not long after, took a similarly qualified view of the communicable/incommunicable distinction specifically. After listing it alongside three other common schemes, he added a direct caution: “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.”⁵ He proposed his own fourfold arrangement instead, organized around which attributes qualify all the others (infinitude, absoluteness), which are natural, which are moral, and the “consummate glory of all the divine perfections in union.”⁵

Herman Bavinck, writing in the early twentieth century, took up the same distinction; his editors note that his point was not finally to defend the label: “the major point there was not to quibble about the classification 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.”⁶

Objections and Responses

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 (aseity, immutability, infinity) 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; an unproven claim of “some greatly obscure similarity” in the supposedly incommunicable attributes does not overturn the scheme unless it can be shown that every attribute is ambiguously one or the other.⁸ A. A. Hodge raised essentially the same difficulty from within the Reformed tradition itself, concluding that the communicable attributes are simultaneously incommunicable “inasmuch as they are all infinite,”⁵ a reason in his view to hold the labels loosely rather than to discard them.

Building a taxonomy for attributes Scripture never sorts this way risks imposing an order Scripture itself doesn’t supply. Charles Hodge raised this concern himself before answering it: the “great diversity of the methods which have been proposed is evidence that no one method of arrangement has such advantages as to secure for it general recognition,” and, in his own estimate, the labor spent classifying has outrun the benefit gained.⁴ His response was not to abandon organization altogether but to adopt the plainer path already used by the Reformed catechisms, letting a confessional answer supply the order rather than a philosophical scheme.⁴

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Francis Turretin, Institutio theologiae elencticae 3.6.2-3 (ed. James T. Dennison Jr., trans. George Musgrave Giger, 1:189-91), quoted in Alex Charles Tibbott, “Turretin and Classical Theism,” in “De Impassibilitate Et Satisfactione: An Examination of the Methodological Implications of Trinitarian Classical Theism for the Doctrine of the Atonement” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 96-97. ↩ ↩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
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), chap. V, § 3, “Classification of the Divine Attributes,” 374-76. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), chap. 8, “Attributes of God,” 137-38. ↩ ↩² ↩³
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. ↩
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. ↩