1.

The Nature of God

There must be a God who is a simple being yet made up of three inexplicable persons existing forever outside of time without a beginning, who therefore never learned anything new, never took a risk, never made a decision, never disagreed within the Godhead, and never had a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.1

ohn Loftus first objects to Gods very nature. These objections are primarily made with a single one of Gods many attributes in mind: immutability. Although the immutability of God is supported by several verses, God himself announces it in Malachi 3:6, when he says, For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. What, exactly, does immutability mean? Loftus takes it to mean that God never learns, never risks, makes decisions, disagrees among the Trinity, and never chose his own nature. That would make God fairly static. Implicit in this problem is that in order to exist meaningfully, the being in question should grow, learn, change, and interact with his environment. The problem with that notion is that God made man in his image, and we are dynamic people. We grow, change, learn, make decisions, and often disagree. If we are capable of doing all of this, it only makes sense that God can do it all, too. After all, Jesus tells us that the servant is not greater than the master.2 Immutability refers only to Gods ontology, it doesnt refer to his agency. What this means is that Gods attributes (e.g. his divinity, goodness, morality, impartiality, holiness, love, perfection, and wrath) are all unchanging. Gods agency (e.g. his ability to perform actions) can change; which means that God is capable of learning, taking risks, changing his mind, and repenting. However, one would be hard put to show he did any but the last one. God is generally considered omniscient.3 It only follows from that that God cannot learn anything, since he already knows everything. However, since we who are made in the image of God are capable of learning, it only stands to reason that God has the capacity to learn. But God designed everything in the universe, and therefore knows it intimately already. In chapter 3, we will discuss Gods divine decree in detail. The Westminster Confession of Faith tells us that God knows what will come to pass under every possible condition. 4 What this essentially means is that it is unnecessary for God to take a risk, since he already knows exactly how things will turn out in any given situation. To be considered perfect, God would not change his mind since he would make the right decision the first time. Changing his mind, however, is within Gods scope of ability and it does not conflict with the idea of immutability. Thoughts are a part of agency (not ontology). Scriptures often cited that show God changing his mind usually fail to consider that God will

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make conditional prophecies: If you do X, Ill do Y. It does not signal God changing his mind, it shows God acting in response to a human agent. The Scriptures do speak of God repenting. 5 Repentance is not an attribute, but an action. Therefore, this does not conflict with Gods immutability.

DIVINE SIMPLICITY
God is identical with his attributes.6 God is not a whole made up of parts; he simply is what he is.7 Nothing exists external to God that could be used to define God. In the beginning, God existed and that was it. The attributes associated with God, therefore, flow from him and are defined by his nature, not the other way around. Since nothing external to God defines him, this means that things like morality, goodness, faithfulness, love, justice, perfection, holiness, and wrath are defined by the way God executes them. They are not concepts that are used to judge Gods actions or person. That is why most criticisms of God on moral grounds fall apart it is God who defines morality. It is useless to judge God by any man-made definition of morality, goodness, faithfulness, love, justice, perfection, holiness, or wrath. These divine attributes are God, and cannot be known apart from him.

INEXPLICABLE?
It is little wonder that Loftus, an atheist, would think that God is inexplicable. Many Christians say the same thing: The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up. 8 That is not true. The Bible has little problem defining each person of the Trinity in fair detail. The Father has his role as Creator, the Son is the Mediator between man and God, and the Spirit convicts men of their sins even as the Father draws them close. Perfect teamwork, perfect harmony. Therefore, contrary to Bell and Loftus, the Bible draws neat little lines around God and defines him in a specific way. The challenge for the theologian and the individual is to stay within the biblical description, and not to stray from it. The moment we stray from it, that is the moment we are dealing with somebody that we have made up.

RISKING, DECIDING, & DISAGREEING

Loftus finds it incredible that God does not risk, make a decision, or disagrees within the Godhead. These are asserted with no argument, so I admit that I am somewhat at a loss for knowing exactly why these are bad, or why these are necessary to complete a conception of God. To our human minds, it is a bit weird that a person would never need to take a risk. Often, we dont have all of the information we need to make a proper decision and so we have to go with what we have. That means we take a risk. However, God always has every possible piece of information available to him by virtue of his omniscience. That means that God never has to risk when making a decision. He gets it right the first time. Now, as for God never making decision, I absolutely do not know where Loftus gets this

1. The Nature of God

idea. The Christian conception of God requires nothing. So the very act of creation itself was an act of will a decision to create, and a decision to create things as we see them now. Finally, we come to disagreement among the Godhead. The three Persons of the Trinity share a nature, like a human person is a soul. The soul is our nature, who we are at the core. The three Persons of the Trinity are God at the core; so why would they disagree? In fact, it seems as if they willing submit to one another. On the night of his betrayal, Jesus prays to the Father to take this all away, but nevertheless not my will, but yours, be done.9

CHOOSING NATURE
This objection falls totally flat. No one chose to be him or herself. I did not choose to be me, and Loftus did not choose to be him. My wife did not choose to be Jody nee Hahn. Ontology is something that one has, not something that one chooses. A raccoon may as well try to choose to be a squirrel. Why would anyone think that God is somehow exempt from that? That said, God does seem to possess some limited ability to alter his nature. Paul writes:
Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.10

The Son emptied himself voluntarily of many of his divine attributes to come to us in the likeness of flesh. Since God cannot be fully grasped, the only way to teach us would be to become us. Imagine an ant crawling on the ground toward an ant trap. In the trap is poison that smells and feels just like food that an ant would normally carry back to the nursing infants in the colony. Unfortunately, this stuff will not nourish the young, but kill them instead. If you wanted to save the ants from the poison, and teach him how to avoid more ant traps in the future, how could you do this? You could not stay you. The ant does not understand your language, and certainly would not grasp many distinctives of human communication: hand gestures, metaphors, connotation, syntax, and grammar. However, if you could become an ant, all your interspecies communication problems vanish. That is exactly what God did. By taking the form of a human, he erased all of the problems of communication that would have otherwise impeded a human-divine encounter.

CONSISTENCY
So, none of the problems with the nature of God really are problems. They are perfectly consistent with what we know of ontology in general. The real objection seems to be that God is not us, but really, if he is God, we dont expect him to be us.
1) John W. Loftus. Reality Check: What Must be the Case if Christianity is True? Debunking Christianity. <http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/05/reality-check-what-must-be-case-if.html>. Accessed June 12, 2010. 2) John 13:16, 15:20. 3) See Proverbs 3:19-20, 5:21; Psalm 33:13-15; Isaiah 48:5-6; Daniel 2:20-22; and Hebrews 4:13.

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4) Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter III, paragraph 2. 5) Such as Genesis 6:6-7. 6) 1 John 4:8 isnt a proof text of the concept that God is identical to his attributes, but it speaks to that idea. God doesnt love, the feelings that he has toward man arent described by an abstract concept outside of God that we would call love; noGod is love. 7) When Moses asks God what his name is, God replies I am who I am (Ex 3:14). In ancient literature, the names of individuals often represented who they were. In this case, God is effectively saying that he simply is; he exists, and thats all there is to it. 8) Rob Bell. Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith. Zondervan Publishing Company, 2006, p. 25. 9) Luke 22:42 10)Phillipians 2:5-7.