What comes to mind when you think about God? “What we think about God is the most important thing about us.” That’s the opening sentence of A. W. Tozer’s wonderful little book, The Knowledge of the Holy. That’s how he starts his book, rehearsing the idea of what God is like and what His attributes are.
About a century before, Charles Haddon Spurgeon said: “The highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy, which can ever engage the attention of a child of God, is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings, and the existence of the great God, whom He calls His Father.” J. I. Packer says “these words, spoken over a century ago by C. H. Spurgeon, at the time only 20 years old, were true then as they are true now. Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you. This way you can waste your life and waste your soul.” That’s from his book Knowing God. After The Knowledge of the Holy, I can’t really think of any book that dealt directly with the attributes of God until Packer’s Knowing God. I highly recommend that as well.
So what is the concern? At least my concern, and I suspect it will be your concern too, once I make it your concern. It’s the two camps in this debate about what God’s attributes are, what is true of God. The two camps, if you will, regarding the attributes of God are often labeled classical theism and theistic personalism. I’ll comment on how the term classical is used in a moment, and I must point out that the label theistic personalism was given to that camp by its detractors. Perhaps some, if not many, of the theistic personalists don’t accept that term for themselves. Most monikers get attached to people by their detractors. Methodists were called that by their detractors. Baptists were called that by their detractors as well. So I’m not going to referee the debate as to why it’s called theistic personalism. That doesn’t concern me.
But I am concerned about something else. The title of this talk is “God Fading Away.” So what do I mean by that? Increasingly, the classical attributes of God, which I want to define here in due course, are being forgotten or outright denied, even by evangelical theologians. I’m not particularly surprised at what happens within liberal theology. We sort of expect nothing more than bad theology from liberal theologians. But when things start to seep into the evangelical community, then I think there’s cause for alarm.
So what do I mean by classical attributes? First of all, what is an attribute? An attribute is a characteristic of God’s nature and actions, known from creation and from God’s word. The term classical, for my purposes, means understood along the contours of the categories of Western thinking arising from the ancient Greeks, the Christian Church Fathers, and the medieval scholastics.
So if you put those together, a classical attribute is: the characteristics of God’s nature and actions, known from creation and from God’s word, understood along the contours of the categories of Western thinking arising from the ancient Greeks, the Christian Church Fathers, and the medieval scholastics.
Now, to say that these have been the dominant view about God’s nature and actions throughout church history is not proof that they’re actually true. I’m not saying this is what we’ve always thought about God’s nature, so therefore it must be true. That’s not my argument. But I also would say that to say they are understood along the contours of the philosophy of the ancient Greeks is not in itself proof that they are false. I sometimes get amused by contemporary evangelicals who malign the importation of Greek philosophical categories into contemporary thinking, and I would like to ask them: have you retired the Pythagorean theorem? Because that’s from the ancient Greeks as well. Pythagoras was as pagan as anybody else, but we’re not going to retire the Pythagorean theorem because of that. It could still be true even if it was said by a pagan Greek.
I have a longer version of this presentation, and I’ll tell you how to get a PDF of it, with all the slides I’m going to be skipping here. In it, I go through a litany of what I term the classical theologians, and then the classical church confessions, to give examples of these attributes of God. By classical theologian, I mean Christian theologians who, to a greater or lesser degree, defend the classical attributes of God. Not all classical theologians discuss every attribute, and not all of them defend every attribute. So it’s a bit of a mix. Admittedly, for the purposes of this presentation, the line may be blurry as to who might or might not be classified as a classical theologian.
But who are some of these classical theologians? Let me give you a rundown: Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Basil the Great, Pseudo Dionysius, Augustine, Boethius, John of Damascus, Anselm, Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Martyr Vermigli, John Calvin, Girolamo Zanchi, Domingo Bañez, Jacob Arminius, Francis Turretin, John Owen (regarded by many as the most brilliant Christian to ever write in English), Stephen Charnock, John Gill, William G. T. Shedd, Charles Hodge, A. A. Hodge, Robert Lewis Dabney, Benjamin Warfield, James Petigru Boyce, Herman Bavinck, Lewis Sperry Chafer, Louis Berkhof, Henry Clarence Thiessen, and then, more contemporary, our illustrious Norman Geisler, who co-founded Southern Evangelical Seminary with Ross Rhodes, pastor at Calvary Church in Charlotte. Also R. C. Sproul, J. V. Fesko, Richard Muller, Daniel Moritz, Winfried Corduan, Stephen Duby, James Dolezal, Travis Campbell (who is actually at the conference and will be given a breakout session), and David Haines, who is a graduate of SES.
So you have these luminaries. Again, I’m not arguing that because these figures are, to one extent or another, classical theologians or philosophers, classical theism is therefore true. I am suggesting, though, given the illustrious history that classical theism commands, it behooves the contemporary Christian to take heed and closely consider the erosion of the classical attributes of God.
Now, the same thing with the classical confessions. What do I mean by those? The same criteria apply, and some of those would be the Fourth Lateran Council, the Belgic Confession, the Thirty Nine Articles, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Irish Articles, the London Baptist Confession of 1644, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, and the London Baptist Confession of 1677. Notice they are all post printing press, and, except for one of them, they are all Protestant.
So the Protestants were publishing confessions of faith. It’s not like you could post your doctrinal statement on the web in the 17th century. People locally had to state their views. The reason the list might strike you as relatively short is that, as I said, not all of these theologians speak about all of the attributes of God. And very many of the confessions, I have a four volume set of the English translation of the confessions from the 16th and 17th centuries, very few of them actually deal with the question of God’s nature and existence, because those weren’t issues of contention as much as things like the doctrine of salvation, the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, and other issues that defined Protestantism.
So what are these classical attributes? In the long presentation, just to tease you to go get it, I give a list of a number of these attributes. Let me give you one example, from Norm Geisler, in the second volume of his four volume systematic theology on God, where he lists all of these as various attributes. I suspect that many, if not most, of those expressions are familiar to you. There might be a few where the word isn’t obvious. I do the same thing with the classical confessions, so when I tell you how to get the long version, you can see examples from all of these sources supporting what I’m alleging that they say.
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This article is based on a video transcript and does not necessarily reflect the official positions of SES. To watch the full video, click here: https://youtu.be/mQHmGrhJ8oY
