Blake Long

Once in awhile I will write a “thinking about theology” post where I take a doctrine of the faith and explain it in three parts: (1) with an academic quote from a trusted theologian, (2) explain that in my own words, and (3) explain some ways it’s practical to our lives as Christians. Hope you enjoy! This post is over divine simplicity.

From the scholar: “Divine simplicity means that God is not composed of parts, but is a simple, indivisible whole. In him there is no composition of substance and accident, essence and existence, or potential and actual.” (Herman Bavinck)

For the laymen: The doctrine of God’s divine simplicity does not get spoken of much, but it should. This leads to ignorance on the issue. For example, for God to be “simple” doesn’t mean He’s incompetent or dumb, as we perhaps would call someone simple. Just as Bavinck said, divine simplicity simply means God is one whole being. In other words, God is not half wrath, half love. For God to be simple, it means His wrath and love, for example, are His essence. He certainly has more attributes than those two, but the point is that his attributes are not things that are added to His essence, but are inherently part of Him.

Applying it: When we think about how this affects our daily lives as Christians, it’s important to understand God is not thrown by the whims of His different attributes. It’s not as if He’s full of wrath but no love one day, and full of love but no wrath another day.

Because of this, we can trust God all the more. Perhaps you have people in your life that are more prone to anger than compassion. Maybe you have someone in your circle that is easily upset in contrast with being happy. God isn’t like that. We don’t have to brace ourselves with how God may act one day. God’s not unpredictable. He is simple, and He loves His blood-bought children. Therefore, we can trust the Lord even more!

Coming soon…