Theopedia

Simplicity of God

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.”

— Deuteronomy 6:4

Definition

The simplicity of God is the doctrine that God is not composed of parts. He is not an assembly of separate attributes, a mixture of substance and accidents, or a being whose existence is one thing and whose nature is another; each of his attributes is identical with his one, undivided essence.1 Simplicity is also called divine simplicity, and it is a close corollary of God’s unity: a God made of parts would depend on those parts and on whatever combined them, and so would not be the one, self-sufficient God Scripture describes.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the doctrine in its opening description of God himself: “The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection… a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.”2 “Without… parts” is the confession’s own simplicity language, standing alongside its denial of a body (God is not composed of physical parts) and of passions (God is not composed of, or swept along by, successive emotional states the way creatures are).

This is not a bare denial. Bavinck explains that when Reformed theology refused to distinguish God’s essence from his attributes, it was not denying that God has “being,” but insisting that in every attribute he “is pure being, absolute reality,” so that no attribute is added to him from outside or represents only a part of what he is.1 Because every attribute is identical with his one essence, God is not composed of goodness plus wisdom plus power as separate ingredients; his goodness is his wisdom is his power, each naming the whole of the one undivided God under a different aspect.

Biblical Basis

Israel’s confession, “the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4), is the scriptural ground most directly tied to this doctrine: a God who is truly and only one cannot also be, at the same time, a combination of separate parts assembled into a unity.3 James describes God as “the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17), a constancy that composite beings, forever shifting as their parts interact, cannot share. Paul locates “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” in Christ (Col. 2:3) without treating wisdom and knowledge as parts added to him from elsewhere, the same pattern Scripture uses throughout for God’s own attributes.

Historical Development

The doctrine has deep roots in patristic and medieval theology. Augustine argued that in God “life and wisdom and the other [attributes]… are not parts of [him], but all are one, and each one of them is wholly what [he is] and what all the others are,” language later developed further by Anselm and Aquinas.3 Reformed orthodoxy received this classical doctrine rather than rejecting it as a piece of unwanted philosophical baggage: Bavinck treats it as essential to maintaining “the perfection of [God’s] oneness, independence, and immutability,” not a metaphysical abstraction imported from outside Scripture but “the end result of ascribing to God all the perfections of creatures to the ultimate divine degree.”1

The doctrine also has a history of being tested and defended against specific errors. In the twelfth century, Gilbert of Poitiers proposed that God and “divinity” are not simply identical: divinity, on his account, is the form by which God is God, yet is not itself God, so that, in his own words, “God exists by virtue of divinity, but divinity as such is not God.” Bavinck treats this as exactly the kind of separation of God’s being from his attributes that simplicity exists to rule out, alongside Plato’s positing of independently existing ideas and Philo’s treatment of the divine “energies” as substances in their own right.1 Once God’s essence is allowed to stand apart from what he is and does, even by one conceptual step, an attribute like his love risks being treated as less fully, less absolutely real in him than his bare existence is.

Opposing Views

Eastern Orthodoxy. Following Gregory Palamas, Eastern Orthodox theology distinguishes God’s essence, utterly unknowable and unparticipated, from his “energies,” God’s own uncreated activity, by which he genuinely communicates himself to creatures. On this view the energies are not identical with the essence; Palamas describes the divine essence as, in some sense, the “cause” of the energies, and includes among the energies not only God’s outward actions but attributes such as knowledge, will, and goodness.4 Duby argues this creates an ontologically awkward result Palamas himself would likely resist: it makes God the cause of his own perfections, as though his knowledge or goodness were effects produced by his essence rather than simply identical with it.4 The Western and Reformed tradition, represented here by Thomas Aquinas and Peter van Mastricht, instead treats God’s activity as “the essence operating,” his one undivided being directed toward creatures in diverse ways without multiplying, or standing behind, what he essentially is.4

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t simplicity contradict the Trinity, since God is somehow both one and three? Bavinck answers that this objection trades on a confusion of terms: “the term ‘simple’ is not an antonym of ‘twofold’ or ‘threefold’ but of ‘composite.’ God is not composed of three persons, nor is each person composed of the being and personal attributes of that person, but the one uncompounded (simple) being of God exists in three persons.”1 Simplicity denies that God is assembled out of parts; it says nothing against three persons each fully possessing that one undivided being.

If every attribute is identical with God’s essence, doesn’t that make all of God’s attributes identical with each other, so that his justice just is his mercy and his wisdom just is his power, an apparently absurd result? This is the shape of the modern philosophical objection pressed by critics such as Alvin Plantinga.5 The Reformed answer distinguishes what is true of God’s one undivided being from what is true of human language about him: God’s attributes are really identical in him, but they are not synonyms in meaning, since each names the one God from a genuinely different angle of his self- revelation, none of them adequate on its own to describe him completely. As Augustine put it, each attribute is “wholly what” God is, not a piece that could be added or subtracted, and the multiplicity of names is required precisely because no single one, on its own, is sufficient to say who God is.3

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩

  3. Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 5, “Is God Made Up of Parts? Simplicity.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  4. 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,” 187-230. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Alvin Plantinga, Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), arguing that classical simplicity entails treating God as a property or abstract object, which cannot act or be worshiped. ↩