Bible Stories

The fathers’ ways of thought and speech about God were overhauled and upgraded in the thirteenth century by Thomas Aquinas. There are three basic principles in Thomas’s theism:

• God is essentially the act of his own existence, pure and simple. God, we might say, is in no respect a passive principle or static essence, but eternally exists as total, inexhaustible, personal energy — a living God, actively forming and ordering everything in his world.
• God is perfect; complete both in power and in virtue. He is infinitely and eternally intelligent and competent. He always wills good (that is Thomas’s definition of God’s love) and so from every point of view he is worthy of praise. All thought about particular acts of God, or what happens under God, must pass through the grid of this fundamental conviction.
• Human knowledge about God, and the language that crystallizes and conveys it, are alike analogical. The language of analogy expresses partial but not complete similarity between things or people. No divine quality or activity (knowledge, love, anger, for instance), and no divine relationship (such as father, shepherd, husband) is identical with its human counterpart. For the fact that we are finite and flawed by sin marks our humanity at every point, whereas God’s qualities, activities and relationships reveal his perfection.

Yet the difference is not absolute, for though we are finite and flawed we remain rational creatures who bear God’s image. So we may rightly use terms taken from the world of people to specify who God is and what he does. When applied to God, these terms are not used in exactly the same sense as when used of people (univocally), nor in a completely different sense (equivocally), but analogically (that is, with a certain correspondence of meaning and at the same time a certain contrast).

So, each time we think or speak about one of God’s qualities, activities or relationships, we have to remember that he displays it in its perfection, whereas our human experience of it is flawed. God is a perfect Father, for instance, while human fathers are less than perfect. Christians, following the Bible’s example, are always careful to divest each particular quality of all human imperfections when they ascribe it to God.

This is to state Thomas’s principles in somewhat modern style and from a perspective supplied by mainstream Protestant theology. Thomas himself, and much Roman Catholic theology since, tried to establish these principles as certainties of natural theology (that is, theology drawn from reflection on the natural order without reference to the Bible).

Many Protestants in the tradition of Luther and Calvin see this venture as misconceived and a failure. But Thomas’s ideas about God as energy; about divine perfection as expressed in all that God does; and about theological language as ‘analogical’, were taken into Bible-based Protestant theology with hardly any change. Theologians saw these notions as implied or presupposed by the Bible, and before Reformation theology was a century old they had all taken their place in its way of expressing the character of God.

Belief in God

The Apostles’ Creed (second century AD) acknowledges ‘God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth’. The Nicene Creed, in the fourth century, uses the same statement without alteration. Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches still use one or both of these creeds regularly in worship.

The first of the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles (ratified in 1571) speaks of one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible’. The 1530 Augsburg Confession (Lutheran) says that God is ‘without body, indivisible’, and ‘without passions’ (Latin, impossibilis). This means not that God is untouched by feelings such as sympathy, outrage and so forth, but that these feelings are not forced on him from without, as ours are forced on us. God experiences only what he has freely chosen to experience. He is spiritual (has no body), integrated (with no possibility of inward conflict), and sovereign.

The 1647 Westminster Confession (used in the Reformed churches) states theism thus: ‘God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself, and is alone and unto himself all-sufficient, not standing in need of any of the creatures which he has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things, and has most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever himself pleases.’ To which may be added this, from the Shorter Catechism: ‘God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth.’

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