Infinitude of God

Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.

— Psalm 145:3

The infinitude of God, or God’s infinity, is the perfection by which he is free from every limitation, not an unusually great degree of power, wisdom, or goodness but each without any bound at all.¹ Infinity is qualitative rather than quantitative: infinite power is not a vast quantity of power but power qualitatively free of defect, and the same holds for each of God’s other perfections.² Applied to his duration this perfection is called his eternity; applied to his relation to space it is called his immensity, or omnipresence; infinitude names the more general perfection both share.

Confessional Witness

The wider Reformed confessional family opens its doctrine of God with the same clause: God is “infinite in being and perfection.”³ The Second London Baptist Confession repeats the point later in the same sentence, alongside “immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty”: God himself is “every way infinite.”⁴ Where “immense” names God’s infinity as it bears on space and “eternal” names it as it bears on duration, “infinite” is the confession’s own word for the more general perfection those two specify; the Baptist confession states it twice in one sentence, a degree of emphasis the Westminster and Savoy wording does not share.

Biblical Basis

Job’s friend Zophar challenges him to plumb what cannot be plumbed: “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven… deeper than Sheol… Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea” (Job 11:7-9). God himself later silences Job with the same argument from his own unsearchable years: “Behold, God is great, and we know him not; the number of his years is unsearchable” (Job 36:26). The psalmist turns the same limitlessness into praise rather than rebuke: “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable” (Ps. 145:3). Isaiah measures the greatest visible things against God and finds them nothing: the nations are “a drop from a bucket,” “less than nothing,” and the coastlands weigh no more to him “than a very little thing” (Isa. 40:15, 17). Solomon confesses that “heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain” the God he built a temple for (1 Kings 8:27), and Paul answers his own question, “who has known the mind of the Lord?” with an exclamation rather than an answer: “how unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33-34).

Historical Development

Patristic testimony

Ambrose, commenting on Ephesians in the late fourth century, already states the doctrine: “Just as in a sphere there is as much length as breadth, and as much height as depth, so also in God are all things equal in the immensity of his infinity… God does not only fill all things but also exceeds them, for he is not hemmed in, but he holds all things within himself.”⁵ Against this patristic consensus stood the Anthropomorphites, or Audians, an early sect that pictured God as possessing a literal human body, “hands, feet, heart, eyes,” and so could not allow that his essence was infinite.⁶

Reformed scholastic disputes

Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706)⁷ answered two later denials of the doctrine in his own chapter on it. Conrad Vorstius denied God’s infinity while trying not to contradict the church’s Christology outright, since an infinite divine essence would already be wherever Christ’s human nature was, which threatened his own view of the incarnation.⁶ The Socinians denied it for two further reasons: an infinite essence shared by Father, Son, and Spirit was exactly the premise behind the doctrine that all three share one essence, and an infinite value in Christ’s death and obedience was exactly the premise behind the claim that his satisfaction covers every sin of everyone to whom it is applied.⁶ Mastricht answered that Scripture’s own testimony to God’s unsearchable greatness (Ps. 145:3), together with reasons drawn from his being the first, independent, and most perfect being, holds regardless of what any one denial is meant to protect.⁸

Lutheran theologians raised a different question about the same doctrine: whether God’s infinity, like his other properties, was communicated to Christ’s human nature at the incarnation, the premise behind their doctrine of Christ’s bodily presence everywhere in the Lord’s Supper, a dispute treated fully at Extra Calvinisticum. Mastricht answered that infinity is entirely incommunicable to any creature: were it otherwise, Christ’s human nature would itself become divine, its parts could no longer be separated at his death and resurrection, and infinity would belong to a human nature rather than remaining, as both sides actually agreed it must, a property of God alone.⁹

Opposing Views

Some modern thought answers the doctrine by making God finite instead. Henri Bergson’s philosophy of “creative evolution” pictures God as an unfinished, striving life force rather than a complete being: an “ever creating life, of which every individual and every species is an experiment,” which Berkhof assesses as “Bergson’s God, a God who is finite, who is limited in power, and who is seemingly impersonal.”¹⁰ Barrett answers that this kind of finitude is not a live option once perfect-being reasoning is granted: God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought,” and an oxymoron like “a finite infinite being” is no more coherent applied to God than “a round square” is anywhere else, since to be infinite just is to be unbounded and to be finite just is to be bounded.¹¹ A God who is dependent, composed of parts, or capable of losing or gaining perfections is, on this reasoning, not the perfect being Christian theology confesses, whatever else such a being might be called.¹¹

Objections and Responses

By God’s infinity, wouldn’t every creature be equally perfect, since each would be equally infinitely distant from him? Mastricht answers that this wrongly measures perfection by distance from the infinite rather than by “the degrees of perfection, whether more or fewer, that are conferred by the most perfect”: two finite things can differ sharply in what they have been given, even though both remain, in the same sense, infinitely short of God himself.⁸

Doesn’t Scripture’s promise that the redeemed will see God (1 John 3:2; Matt. 5:8) mean he cannot really be infinite? Mastricht answers that this vision is “not visible with the eyes, but with the mind, not in his essence, but in his attributes,” so that God is “apprehended,” grasped in part, rather than “comprehended,” grasped in full: a creature’s real but partial knowledge of an infinite being no more makes that being finite than seeing part of the ocean from the shore makes the ocean small.⁸

If God is a “something,” distinct from everything that is not God, isn’t he one being among others and so finite, the way any single object is limited by not being every other object too? Mastricht answers that God is that “certain something” only formally, not by way of exclusion: he is “eminently, all things,” containing in himself, without division, whatever perfection any other kind of being has, and it is exactly his infinity, not a boundary standing alongside it, that distinguishes him from everything else.⁸

Related Doctrines

References

Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 9, “The Infinity and Greatness of God,” 224-225: “we call infinite that which has every perfection that anyone can conceive, or that can possibly exist… he possesses in actuality whatever he can possess, and in that which he possesses, there are no limits.” ↩
Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 46-47: “The infinity of God must be conceived as intensive rather than extensive… Infinite power is not an absolute quantum, but an exhaustless potency of power; and infinite holiness is not a boundless quantum of holiness, but a holiness which is, qualitatively free from all limitation or defect.” ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1; substantially the same wording appears in The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 2, para. 1. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 2, “Of God and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Ambrose, Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians 3:18, quoted in Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:223-224. ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:225. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Adriaan C. Neele, “Petrus van Mastricht (1630-1706): Life and Work,” in Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), 52. ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:226. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, 2:229. ↩
Berkhof, Systematic Theology, 148. ↩
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 3, “Is God the Perfect Being? Why an Infinite God Has No Limitations.” ↩ ↩²