The Attributes of

• The nature of God – what God is like.

Omnipotence • People wonder whether the concept of God’s is compatible with his other attributes – and : - Illogical for God to capable of doing evil (omnipotent) and unable to do evil because he is all loving. - Does God have the power to stop evil? – Inconsistent triad. • Question whether omnipotence is in itself a logical concept: • Omnipotence – Can God create a stone that he cannot lift? - Yes – then he is not omnipotent because he cannot lift it. - No – then he is not omnipotent because he cannot create it.

Bible • Many passages in the Bible which support God’s omnipotence: - God gave Sarah and Abraham a child even though Sarah was past menopause. • If God were not omnipotent then he would not be able to perform : - ‘For nothing is impossible with God’ – Luke 1:26-37 • God is capable of doing anything that he wants – but there are things that he would not do because they go against his nature: - Breaking laws of logic. - Being unjust. - Failing. • If God did not have supreme power then he would not be able to do the things necessary for salvation: - Couldn’t carry out plans for the . - People would not be able to be saved from their sins. - He would not be able to resurrect people from the dead. - He would not be able to give eternal life in heaven.

Anselm • Links God’s omnipotence to the . • ‘God is that which nothing greater can be conceived’. • God has all the perfections, including perfect power – omnipotence is a predicate of God, therefore he is that which nothing greater can be conceived. • If God were less than omnipotent then we would be able to conceive of something greater being who is more powerful – by definition, god must be omnipotent.

Descartes • God can do absolutely anything – even things which are logically impossible. • God is the source of logic – he can suspend or replace logic if he wants to.

Weaknesses of Descartes View • This would turn God into an arbitrary tyrant – cannot be relied on. • If God is all powerful – capable of doing evil, being unforgiving, turning against us, and failing – capable of being self contradictory. • Contradiction to say that God is capable of doing evil because of his omnipotence, but he is also incapable of doing evil because of his loving nature. - Some argue that because God is omnipotent then he can get around this contradiction – even if we do not understand. - Others will argue that this response is just refusal to admit that religious does not make sense – dodging the question. • Descartes’s view creates difficulties for : - Some theologians argue that God cannot act in any other way that he does – we would be deprived of free will. - Suffering is a price to pay for freedom of choice. - However, if God is capable of suspending the laws of logic, then we should be able to have free will without the consequences of evil – evil is something that God could change if he wants to.

Thomas Aquinas • God is completely omnipotent – ‘he can do everything that is absolutely possible’. - ‘Everything that does not imply a contradiction is among those possibilities in respect of which God is called omnipotent’ • Responsible for creating the world and keeping it in existence – everything is the world is dependent on God for its existence. • God cannot do anything that is inconsistent with his nature. • God is incorporeal (has no body) – cannot swim, die, become tired. • God is perfectly good – cannot deceive or do any other form of evil.

Peter Vardy • The Puzzle of Evil. • God’s omnipotence is much more limited than Christians have suggested – God is not in control of history – can’t change history. • Wrong to suggest that things happen because God wills it. • The universe is finely tuned – God cannot act in a different way because everything would not exist as it does now. • The world is perfectly suited for the existence of free will and rational human beings – God’s omnipotence must be limited. • This limitation is SELF IMPOSED – God is still omnipotent because nothing limits his power except for when he chooses.

John Macquarrie • Principles of Christian . • When believers speak of the power of God they are using analogy – God’s power is different from our idea of power. • Similar to Aquinas – there will always be aspects of God’s nature that will remain unknown to us. • God’s omnipotence is something we have difficulty understanding – beyond our knowledge and understanding. • The limitations of God’s omnipotence are SELF IMPOSED. • He is not constrained by logical, or the physical world – he is constrained by his omnipotence because he chooses to limit his power out of love for humanity.

• Doctrine of Kenosis – God ‘emptied himself’ of his own omnipotence – in order to come down to earth as a man. • This was a deliberate choice made by God for the benefit of humanity – salvation. • He put limitations on his powers so that people could have free choice.

• Most scholars argue that God’s omnipotence means that he is able to do that which is logically possible within the nature of God – he cannot do evil because that is not in his nature. • He could not give us free will without the existence of evil – not logically possible.

The Eternity of God • Atemporal – eternal, outside of time. • Sempiternal – everlasting, moving along the same timeline as us.

• 2 main views: 1. God is timeless – outside of time, not bound by time – God is the creator of time – ATEMPORAL. 2. God is everlasting – he moves along the same timeline that we do, but he never ends or begins – past for us is also the past for God – the future is unknown to us and to some extent unknown to God – SEMPITERNAL.

• This understanding affects other ideas about the attributes of God: - Omniscience – can God know events that have not happened? - The – can God see the whole picture from beginning to end? Does this mean he is responsible for evil? - Omnipotence – can God change the past and undo events that have already happened? • This also challenges the idea that God answers prayers – if God is unchanging and knows what is going to happen in the future, is there any point of praying? - If prayer can change God’s mind, then is God a perfect being ‘than which nothing greater can be conceived’?

God is Timeless – Atemporal • Anselm, Augustine, , Aquinas and Schleiermacher. • God exists outside of time – he can see the past, present and future. • Time is an aspect of the human world – God is in control of it, therefore he is not bound by time or space – he can be and is everywhere at once, he exists in every part of the past, present and future. • This view shows that God is not limited – God introduced time. • God’s omnipotence is not threatened because God is not bound by time. • This allows for God to be immutable (unchangeable) – necessary if God is perfect. • If God was bound by time – he would be limited – he would have to wait and see how events turn out before he can act – unforeseen difficulties. - His omnipotence and omniscience would be reduced to a point where He cannot be called all-powerful and all-knowing. - A God who was sempiternal rather than atemporal would not meet Anselm’s definition as ‘that which nothing greater can be conceived’. • Those who say that God is outside time argue that concept’s on God’s relationship with time do not recognise the uniqueness of God – God can bring about changing without being changed himself (Aristotle – ). • Things are possible for God because of his unique nature – we have limited understanding.

God is Everlasting – Sempiternal • Some argue that saying God is timeless creates more problems than it resolves: - If God is timeless – cannot be immutable, cannot be a person, cannot be said to have a ‘life’. - Nelson Pike and – a person with life has to be changeable in order to have relationships and respond to people – a timeless God would not be able to love because he would not be affected by anything. • Love cannot be compatible with immutability – a loving being responds to the object of his or her love.

Richard Swinburne • A timeless God contradicts the Bible – he would be a “very lifeless thing”. • He argues that a perfect being does not have to be changeless – Plato suggested that a world of unchanging and unchangeable concepts, but we do not have to accept Plato’s ideas. • God does not have fixed purposes for all eternity – does not intend to remain unchanged. • God interacts with people – his decision about what will happen may change because he has relationships with individuals. • Isaiah 38:1-5 – God plans to end Hezekiah’s life. But is persuaded to change his mind – however there are also passages in the Bible where God is portrayed to be unchanging.

Augustine • Questions whether the Bible supports the idea of an atemporal or sempiternal God – opposite conclusion to Swinburne. • Augustine saw the problem that God had made the world at a particular point in time – what had he been doing all that time before he created the world? • If God moves along the same timeline as we do – why did an everlasting God pick that particular moment in time to create the world? • The biblical account of creation points towards a timeless God – created day and night, seasons etc. – God surpasses notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’.

God as Impassible • Suggests that God is unaffected by anything – incapable of suffering pain or harm; unfeeling. • – argued that God cannot be changed by anything outside himself – links to Aristotle’s Prime Mover – he set things in motion, but is unaffected – cannot be acted upon.

• Origen – early Christian fathers – impassible had different understandings: - It meant lacking all emotions, being unperturbed, incapable of being emotionally affected by others and incapable of feeling emotion towards others – this means God cannot suffer.

• Clement of Alexandria – early Christian teacher: - Impassible – God cannot be distracted from his essential nature. - God is single-minded in his purposes – this does not mean that he is uninterested.

R.S. Franks • Encyclopaedia of and . • Impassibility – whether God is capable of being acted upon from the outside – God can cause feelings and emotions within himself. • He can still have feelings of love and forgiveness – they arise as part of God’s own nature.

Classic Views • Immutability came from Plato and Aristotle. • Plato – ‘’ – concept, incapable of being affected because it has no personality. • Aristotle – Prime Mover – first in the chain of cause and effect – uncaused – nothing acts upon it, unchanged by anything. • Augustine and Aquinas took up this idea.

Augustine • . • God is absolutely immutable – completely unchangeable. • Links to the idea that God is timeless.

Aquinas • When we speak of God we need to recognise that we are using analogy – not univocal language. • We cannot use words from our own experience to describe God because God is not like us or like anything else in the world. • We have to use analogy – ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ – does not mean God physically moves from one place to another – ‘Loving father’. • There are philosophical difficulties when trying to understand the attributes of God.

• The idea that God is timeless – linked to the idea that God is immutable – presents problems for Christians: - Means that God cannot answer prayers or interact in a personal way – outside of time. - Creation – whatever happens on earth does not affect God (disasters) – remains unmoved.

Charles Hartshorne • Divine Relativity – The Logic of Perfection. • God cannot be loving if he is also impassible: - He would be ‘the cause of everything and effect of nothing’. • If God was impassible – he would be pure activity of actuality – he can give, but not take, he remains uninfluenced by the world. • The world could suffer tragedies – God would be unaffected – glass of water remains unaffected by the reading of an eloquent poem. • If God is impassible – he cannot know us, interact with us, sympathise with us, hear or respond to our prayers. • An immutable God would have no purpose to a changing world – god would be no more of a person than someone dead.

Nelson Pike • God and Timelessness. • Rejects the idea that God is impassible. • Considers the philosophical implications of the idea that God exists outside of time. • Impassible God is linked to the idea that God is timeless – ‘a timeless being could not be affected or prompted by another’. • God is not outside time – present in the world with us, acting and responding, loving, rejoicing and suffering as we do. • God does not know the future, he knows what the possibilities are – real free will.

Defending the View that God is Immutable

Aquinas • God can be both loving and immutable because he is God – people cannot do this, but God is not like us. • Distinction between God’s nature combined with God’s will (which are immutable) and god’s activity: - God’s nature is perfect - unchanging, always loving and always perfect goodness. - God’s will – God does not change his mind, knows good because he is goodness in itself – does not change his will because of circumstances which he did not expect. - God is still capable of having loving relationships.

Creel • Divine Impassibility. • God can be loving as well as immutable. • God can know what his own will is in response to any of infinite number of possibilities. • He does not have to wait for people to exercise their free will to know how to respond – he knows all the possibilities and knows his response in advance. - We can decide what we will do tomorrow depending on the weather. - If it is sunny – go for a picnic. - If it rains – go to the cinema. - The weather is ‘free’ to ‘make up its mind’ and the way I act as a result depends on the weather – but I do not change my mind – I know the possibilities in advance. • God’s will remains immutable – unchanging because of his unchanging nature. • God does not have to be changeable to love because he is the essence of love – God’s love is not caused by anything. • God is love – therefore he can be immutable and loving at the same time – our imperfect version of love involves change.

Omniscience • God knows everything – his knowledge includes things that are unavailable to the human mind – long forgotten details of history. • God has no false beliefs – cannot be mistaken. • He even knows people’s secret thoughts which are never expressed – knows how many grains of sand there are in the Sahara. • This raises questions: - Does God know future events as well as events in the past? - If God knows the numbers that will come up in the national lottery, does this mean he has decided who will win? – Predetermined? - If God knows all the moral choices that people will make in their lives – do we still have free will? - Example of giving to charity – if I make a choice to give £10 to a charity, does God already know that I am going to make the donation? If he can never be mistaken, then do I have free choice not to make the donation? Does God’s knowledge of the donation prevent me from changing my mind? If I have no choice but to donate the money, then the moral act has no moral value. • Christianity, Islam and Judaism – believe that God is omniscient. • Humans are responsible for their actions – they have genuine free choice when presented with a moral dilemma – God leaves individuals to decide. • People can be held responsible for their choices on earth – Islam stresses that life on earth is a test, so choices are judged by Allah – place in heaven depends on right decisions.

Friedrich Schleiermacher • We can have free will while God has omniscience – “intimacy between two persons”. • Analogy of a close friend – know each other’s behaviour: - If you tell my friend that you plan to travel from A to B – she will give you advice about the best route to take. - I know that if I mention to her that I plan to take a journey – she will do this. - If I tell her I plan to go to Oxford, am I somehow limiting her choice so that she is not free to say anything other than “If I were you I’d avoid Milton Keynes”? • Schleiermacher would say no – because I may know what she will say, but this is a reliable guess – there is a possibility that I could be wrong.

Criticisms of Schleiermacher • God’s knowledge is infallible (dependent) – unlike the knowledge we have of close friends, because we have the potential to be wrong. • If God knows that my friend will give travel advice, does this make it inevitable that she will give the advice? – She has no freedom to do anything else because God already knows what she will choose. • If our freedom to act morally was clear – we would not be able to be held responsible because we could not act in any other way – God already knows what we will do.

Kant • Without freedom there can be no moral choices. - If God’s omniscience determines our choices then God cannot punish us when we do wrong, or reward us when we do good – unjust.

• If you made a robot – programmed to smash a vase with a hammer – you cannot blame the robot for the broken vase. - This would be your fault – you could have chosen to programme it differently. - If God knows the future, then he knows what we will do – God can be held responsible for evil – including moral evil. • God knows from the beginning of time who will have and who will have doubt – knows before we are born – we can do nothing about ending up in heaven or hell because God already knows.

• If God did not know the future – this would make him a less powerful God. • This means that God can be surprised or make unwise choices – capabilities seem to be limited. • If God knew all the choices that Nelson Mandela was going to make – were any of his choices real choices from free will? • Answers to omniscience and freedom may depend on our understanding of eternity – if God is timeless and he can see the whole picture, then his omniscience is eternal. - Knows the past, present and future because he is not limited by time. • If God is everlasting, he moves on the same timeline as us – knows the past and present, but not the future. - Knows all the contributing factors to our decision-making. - Knows what we will choose as far as this is logically possible. - Choice remains free.

Boethius • The Consolation of Philosophy. • Seems it would be wrong for God to punish and reward us if he knows the future – but the Bible teaches about punishment and rewards. • ‘How can God foreknow these things will happen if they are uncertain?’ – if God knows something will happen, when it is in fact uncertain – God’s knowledge will be mistaken and this cannot be possible. • However, if God knows that something MIGHT happen, there is still the possibility that it might not happen – this cannot be called ‘knowledge’ because God would know just as much as we do. • But if God knows things – they become inevitable – reward and punishment become unfair. • Boethius realises that God can see things differently from us – humans exist within time. - Humans have pasts, which are fixed, present, which is gone in an instant, and futures, which are uncertain – because the future is uncertain, humans have free will. • When God is omniscient – does not have the same constraints that we do. - God has no past, present or future – ‘so his knowledge too, transcends all temporal change and abides in the immediacy of his presence’. • God can look down on us, moving along our timelines – he can see us in the past, present and future, so he has perfect knowledge of what we will freely choose to do. • He does not know the moral choices in advance of our making them – there is no such thing as ‘in advance’ for God. • All events occur simultaneously for God – in his eternal presence. • Makes no sense to talk of what God knows in the future because he does not know things in advance of them happening – they all happen simultaneously for him. • He cannot be accused of lack of wisdom for not realising that Adam and Eve would sin – cannot be accused of lack of morality because he allows evil dictators to be born. • God does not know what we will do in the future because there is no future for God – therefore we have genuine free will and can be rewarded or punished with justice.

Omnibenevolence • Christian teaching – God’s nature is love. • God’s love is connected to the ideas about his goodness and righteousness. • In the Bible – love is compared with the love of a human parent – hurt when the child rejects the love shown. • Hosea: - Told to marry Gomer – adulterous. - Marriage became a visual aid for Hosea – taught people about their behaviour and consequences. - Gomer was repeatedly unfaithful to Hosea – just as Israel was unfaithful to God – but Hosea loved her and took her back each time. - Israel is tempted away from God by the attractions of other and the secular lifestyle – God is hurt and angry – determined to punish them, even though he wants to restore their loving relationship.

• Can God be affected – hurt/suffer? – Does this limit his omnipotence? • If God loves his people unconditionally and is also omnipotent, why does he not stop them from doing things that will hurt him?

Old Testament • Showing love for each other is the proper response to the love that God has shown to humans. • Love of God cannot be separated from righteousness – not sentimental love – demand that the people should follow the commandments. • God’s love is expressed through judgement and forgiveness – punishment of sin is because of his love. - God punished Israel out of love – ‘For alone have I cared among all the nations of the world; therefore will I punish you for all your iniquities’ (Amos 3:2). • Jewish post-holocaust theologians – Jews were singled out for God’s punishment because they were his chosen people – others would say this implies that the holocaust was God’s doing and he wanted it to happen.

New Testament • Agape – unconditional love. • Connotations of showing love through action. • God is the source of love – John actuates love with God (first letter of John). • God demonstrated his love by becoming incarnate in Jesus – this gives people the opportunity to see God through seeing his love for the world. • The source of all human love is God – the love of God requires humans to show love for each other. - ‘Let us love on another, for love comes from God’ – 1 John 4:7-9. • Love is linked with the concepts of salvation, reconciliation and redemption – life and death of Jesus is proof of God’s love. • Any love shown for humans is a reflection of God – god’s love involves activity, which is shown through the sacrifice of Christ = evidence of God’s love.

• God’s love is perfect love and unconditional (agape) – everlasting and personal to each individual. - ‘… Even the hairs of your head are all counted’ – Matthew 10:30 • Paul – explains how the love for God will be revealed in the way people treat each other.

• The existence of evil and suffering may seem to contradict the idea that God is all-loving and all-powerful – Hume and J.S. Mill.

• People cannot full understand the love of God. • We can experience love because it comes from God – we cannot know why God acts the way he does. • God does not leave us to suffer on our own – he came to earth in human form and suffered with us. • He is with us in our pain – even if we do not understand the reason for it. • Shares the pains of human existence to the extent of suffering death by torture. • We may not understand God’s love, or the reason for suffering – must be confident of a life after death when everything will become clear.

Aquinas • When we speak of God’s love we are using analogy. • A love that is like ours – must remember that God is infinitely greater than us and we can only understand a proportion of his divine love.