Excerpt From
What Are Christians For?
By Jake Meador
An Immense Inheritance
Christianity has traditionally taught that God is simple. When we use that word conversationally, we mean something like “the opposite of complex.” But that is not what simplicity means when Christians are talking about God. When Christians say that God is simple, they mean he does not have multiple parts. He is one. Christianity teaches that when we talk about God, we cannot distinguish between God’s being—the blunt fact of his existence—and God’s characteristics—his love, his mercy, his justice, and all the rest.
This can seem an abstract debate at first. Why do Christians care about this? What difference does it make whether God has separate parts to his identity? But the answer is quite practical. Classical Christian theism has said that there is nothing that can act on God from the outside, for there is nothing that exists independent of God that can sustain its existence without God. So we cannot think of God’s love and God’s holiness as being competing characteristics within his being, as if God confronts something happening in the world and has to decide how to respond by balancing his love for people with his regard for his own holiness. That is not how Christianity has understood God traditionally. If that were how we thought of God, we would implicitly be saying that something outside of God is influencing him, either nudging him to favor his love or to favor his holiness. Once we have done that, we have functionally reduced God to a kind of super-powered human, something closer to the Greek gods than to the Christian God. This we should not do—for if you know your Greek mythology, you know that the humanized gods of the Greek myths are often vindictive, petty, and cruel. But God is none of those things.
Rather, because his being and his attributes are the same, we can say that God is complete in himself. The needs and lacks that drive the Greek gods toward vicious behavior simply do not apply to God as he is described in Christianity. Alone among all the beings in existence, God needs nothing outside of himself to sustain his existence or to give him pleasure. He has no need within himself. This can, wrongly understood, cause God to seem aloof and distant. Yet this is precisely the opposite of what our conclusion ought to be from this teaching.
God is complete in himself. He does not need anything else to be satisfied. And yet you and I still exist. This world still exists. The flowers are dressed in splendor, the birds sing with joy, the ocean roars in praise of God. If God is complete in himself and lacks nothing, and if God still moved to create, then he did not create out of some need or fear or insecurity. God did not act because he desires power or wishes to control people or cause them pain. He already is fully powerful, fully realized, fully satisfied within his own inner life. He did not create because he had to. He created because he loves. Creation is gratuitous. It is unnecessary. It is a gift. God in his action is utterly free from all the things that drive human creatures to act sinfully toward their neighbors. And in that there is great comfort because we know when he acts toward us, he acts for us, for he has no need of anything from us.
Our existence itself is a gift of God. Indeed, the entire cosmos is a gift of God. It is the product of divine intentionality, a means through which God can give of himself to us. Thus even if the more immediate ways in which the world can reveal its order to you—such as family or church or neighborhood—have failed you, that order can still be seen because you have been given the gift of existence by God. The late English theologian John Webster explains it well: “Because God is not one being and agent alongside others, and because he is in himself entirely realized and possesses perfect bliss, he has nothing to gain from creating. Precisely in the absence of divine self-interest, the creature gains everything.” Elsewhere in that same essay, Webster quotes the nineteenth-century German Lutheran Isaak Dorner who said, “Love is also a lover of life.” And in that, there is some comfort—and even joy.
It is precisely because God exists outside of us that we can receive his law as good. It is because God, acting in love, made the world that we can be confident that the world is good, that the way in which God made the world to work is good. In one of his sermons, Webster writes that “God’s law is not an arbitrary set of statutes managed by some divine magistrate; still less is it a mechanism for relating to God through a system of rewards for good conduct and punishments for misbehavior. God’s law is best thought of as God’s personal presence. It is God’s gift of himself, in which he comes to his people in fellowship and sets before them his will for human life. God’s law is the claim that God makes upon us as our Maker and Redeemer.”
God looks at this world and loves it, which is why we can and should do the same. This world is not something we should seek to escape through conquest or bend to our will through technique, power, or control. Rather, it is a gift given to us by God for our joy and his glory. Because God is love and his law is good, we can look at our neighbor and love him or her. Because God gave himself to us, we can give ourselves to others. We can confidently and joyfully enter into these debts of love that we build up over a lifetime of living in the world, and we can dispense them with extravagance, trusting that whatever wrongs we might experience today as a result of such living will be gathered up and made right in the glorious and perfect love of God.
Excerpted from What Are Christians For? by Jake Meador. Copyright (c) 2022 by Jakob R. Meador. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. IVPress.com
