On Theological Exegesis and the Simplicity of God

I love the Bible. And I love Bible scholars. They're a fun bunch, to be honest; their deep dives into lexicography, grammar and syntax, history, and many more important aspects of studying ancient texts are an effort for which I am extremely grateful.

But sometimes the posture and method of contemporary biblical scholarship breed a myopic approach to the Bible that can privilege historical-grammatical analysis and discriminate against other means of interpreting a text. Much has been said on this by others (among them Matthew Levering, on whom see my previous post), but I wanted to add my own two cents, and in so doing zero in on a related issue that I have been thinking about for a bit.

I.

I try to keep a foot in both sides of the Bible/theology pool, which means that I sometimes witness a fair bit of talking past one another. A recent example of this is in an episode of the Bible Project podcast — a (generally) less scholarly and (typically) more accessible program which can (and often does) indirectly mediate for many people the main debates and topics in contemporary biblical studies. The hosts were discussing God's attributes in Exodus 34, and stumbling over how to reconcile God's mercy, faithfulness, and justice. They had previously done word studies on these various attributes and came to wonder if justice is being talked about in Exodus 34:6-7, or if it is absent from that condensed revelation of God's character. 

I noticed that the discussion was ruled by two assumptions: 1) a concept is usually absent from a text if a specific word is absent, and 2) God's numerous characteristics are individuated elements of his nature (i.e. "personality"). Both of these are problematic. The first is an important exegetical fallacy: the absence of the normative language for a concept does not prima facie rule out the presence of that concept under a different idiom. The second is what I am more interested in for the purposes of this post.

A (for lack of a better term) naively 'biblical studies' approach to the divine attributes tends to treat God as a character in the story just like Abraham or Moses — a straightforwardly concrete particular. He has a history (previous acts, relationships, and so forth), a personality (loving, kind, slow to anger, etc.), and reacts in real-time to events that occur. But because this approach exhibits a rather naive hermeneutic of Scripture qua divine speech, it gets tripped up when Scripture speaks in a way that transcends that hermeneutic. For example, when the 'characteristics' of God seem to overlap, blend into one another, or otherwise exist coterminously, suggesting that God might be more than simply a concrete particular. Under the rubrics of general literary analysis, these phenomena are inexplicable, or (for more skeptical minds) evidence of contradiction and incoherence. 

An orthodox account of divine simplicity serves us well here. God is not composed of parts, and everything that God has is God. While this might initially seem like an imposition of Greek metaphysics onto the text of Scripture, we do well to ask whether such an ostensive imposition actually coheres with (adheres to) the internal logic of the text; that is, whether it helps us read the text more coherently and, I would argue, faithfully. I think it does. When we understand that God's existence (that God is) and his essence (who God is) are the same — this is one of the important entailments of simplicity — and we tether that to the biblical testimony to the One God (cf. Deut. 6:4), then moments like this and many others in the biblical text become more intelligible and less easily dismissed as contradictions. There is one God, and he is one. He does not have some parts of himself that are more or less Godlike. Further, he does not have parts of himself that are "in tension." For this reason, then, we can look at a moment in Scripture like Exodus 34 and see that God is not dealing with an internal dissonance or a difficult decision between being merciful or being just. Rather, God is mercy/steadfast love (hesed), and he is justice and righteousness, and these are formal distinctions of what is, in God, the same, viz., God's essence. In other words, God is all that he is, and all that he could be.

On a related note, I think this is why it is important to think through the implications of classical doctrines like simplicity for the doctrine of God as a whole (pun not intended). Simplicity articulates in philosophical idiom what is, I believe, a quite rational entailment of other divine attributes that even the most biblicist among us believe about God’s being, like his eternity and omnipresence, as well as other orthodox doctrines like aseity, impassibility, and immutability. Because I’d rather this blog post not bloat into a book chapter, I’ll be brief.

II.

God is eternal. He did not come into being, nor will he ever cease to be. Scripture speaks of this when it presents God as the one creative agent behind the cosmos, and when it displays God’s wisdom “before all ages.” That God is eternal, we understand, means that he does not wear down or deteriorate in any way. He doesn’t get tired, or age, or even reverse age like Benjamin Button. He is, in the words of Hebrews, “the same yesterday, today, and forever.” This is Scripture’s way of speaking of God’s immutability. God does not fundamentally change from day to day, but is utterly, completely, and always himself. He is the same at all times.* And God is the same everywhere. That is, he is omnipresent. The Bible assumes this when it speaks of God’s action simultaneously in heaven and on earth, or when it speaks of his working among the nations as well as in Israel specifically (e.g., Isaiah). 

In order for God to be all these things, he mustn’t rely on another for sustenance or power or anything else. This is why Christians have named God as a se (self-existent). God’s aseity (his a se-ness) declares that God is complete in himself; he is self-sufficient and does not need anything in order to be who he is. We can begin to see how these attributes constitute an interwoven “fabric” (to use Richard Lints’ term), with each attribute mutually entailed by the others. Because God is self-existent, he can exist forever (eternity), he can do so without needing to improve or beginning to deteriorate (immutability), he can exist everywhere (omnipresence); because he exists everywhere, nothing is hidden from him (omniscience), and nothing is beyond his agential “reach” (omnipotence). He is all of these things, and these things are not logically at odds but are mutually informing. To go one step further, all of these attributes name the one essence of God. In other words, they all lead us to confess divine simplicity, because God is all that he has, and everything in God is God.

This is supremely good news, because it means that when Exodus 34 refers to God’s hesed and emet (his steadfast/covenant love and faithfulness), it is not referring to two competing character traits in God. God is not at war with himself, or torn between two equally legitimate courses of action. No, God is utterly and gloriously simple; all the attributes of God are one in God. In the course of the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible, God’s hesed and emet are held together, even if their parity is not always clearly defined or explained. Nevertheless, within the OT canon there is testimony to the unity of these attributes: 

        Steadfast love and faithfulness meet;

               righteousness and peace kiss each other.

                                                        (Psalm 85.10)

III.

To conclude, reading the whole Bible as a testimony to the One God in his simplicity (with the various attributes assumed therein) is a faithful reading of Scripture as God’s living and active word to us. By responding nimbly to the pressure applied by various texts and following the guidance of skilled theological exegetes like Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, and others throughout history, we are led to confess of God what Christians (especially American conservative evangelicals) should want to confess in our effort to resist idolatry and exhibit lasting fidelity to the God who is. God is merciful and just. Just and merciful. And this because he is magnificently simple. Because of this, we can be assured that God's mercy will not remain outside of us, despite the abundance of evidence indicting us on countless accounts of ungodliness. Here is the peak illustration: the cross of Christ, far from demonstrating the fundamental incompatibility of mercy and justice, reflects the sublime unity of the Eternal Son of the Father in the love of the Holy Spirit — this One, this Triune Lord, judges sin in the flesh of Jesus, acquits sinners by his blood, and accomplishes our salvation in utter unicity and simplicity: one in will, act, and love.

* Here we might take a detour on impassibility. In brief, impassibility means that God does not have ‘passions,’ which is an old word that essentially refers to the way humans can be tossed emotionally to and fro by the circumstances of their life. God, in other words, is not surprised by the events of the world (he is eternal and omniscient), nor is he emotionally damaged by any activity on the earth. Of course, this need not make God into some sort of strange, austere and distant God who is apathetic. As will be seen, the doctrines which entail and are entailed by impassibility block this assertion: God’s omnipresence and immutability mean that he is ineradicably ‘God with us,’ and his aseity means he is utterly free to love us for our own sake.