Divine Simplicity

The first installment in our explainer video series examines God's incommunicable attribute of "Divine Simplicity."

Our full explainer video series on the incommunicable attributes of God can be viewed on our Clearly Reformed YouTube channel. Click To Watch Now

The note below was written by Kevin at the time of the first video's release in September 2022.

Over the past few years I’ve noticed, along with other colleagues and friends in ministry, that while there is a lot of good written content out there from our Reformed neck of the woods, there isn’t nearly as much when it comes to video. Yes, there are plenty of recorded sermons, conference messages, and lecture series. But we don’t have a lot of short explainer videos, especially when it comes to theology and history.

So, about a year ago I started exploring what it would take to make a professional level explainer video for various topics and terms in systematic theology. I got a board together and started a ministry called Clearly Reformed. You may hear more about that in the weeks and months ahead. Initially the plan was to make a whole series of theological explainer videos. The good news: we got a great crew together to record a professional level video with teaching on the doctrine of divine simplicity. The bad news: it took a lot of time and a lot of money. The time and money aren’t anyone’s fault, that’s just what it takes to make a video like this. We tried one and learned what it takes.

The upshot is that the “pilot episode” on divine simplicity is the only video we’ve made as Clearly Reformed. We have other ideas for the ministry and other ideas for the explainer concept. We are exploring more time efficient and cost-effective ways (e.g., a new podcast, a teaching series) to deliver the same sort of theological content. I am under contract with Crossway to do a book that will include 260 short chapters on theological terms and themes. So a book is definitely in the works, hopefully other complementary projects too.

All that to say, we’ve had this video for several months now and haven’t been sure what to do with it. But whether we make another video like this or (more likely) go in a different direction, we thought one video was better than zero videos! So take a look, and if the video is helpful for you or your church, feel free to use it.

Transcript

“We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God.”

That’s the first line from the Belgic Confession (1561), one of the earliest and longest lasting confessions to come out of the Reformation. I wonder if you noticed those three words about God.

God is a single being, meaning there is only one God.

He is a spiritual being—that is, he’s not a material substance; he doesn’t have a body.

And God is a simple being.

That’s the tough one. What does that mean? The simplicity of God is a classic doctrine of the faith that most Christians have never heard of. By “simple” we do not mean God is slow or dim-witted. We do not mean that God is easy to understand.

Simple, as a divine attribute, is the opposite of compound. The simplicity of God means God is not made up of things. He doesn’t have parts, like a Lego tower. He isn’t a kitchen recipe with lots of ingredients.

Simplicity means we should not think of God as what you get when you combine goodness and mercy and justice and power and infinity and immutability and roll them all together into one divine being. This would make God the sum of his attributes, and it would make each of his attributes a certain percentage of God. And that would lead us to rank some attributes higher and more essential than others.

Have you ever heard people say, “God may have justice or have holiness, but God is love.” The implication being: love is the very nature of God, when these other attributes are only incidental qualities of God. But that’s not what God is like. The declaration “God is love” (1 John 4:8) is wonderful, good news, but it does not carry more metaphysical weight than “God is light” (1 John 1:5), “God is spirit” (John 4:24), “God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29) or, for that matter, all that the Bible says about every other attribute.

God does not just have some attributes. God is whatever he has. Every attribute of God is identical with his essence. There is no attribute that attaches to him like a barnacle on a ship. He’s not a jigsaw puzzle of divine properties. He’s not a ball of duct tape with lots of attributes stuck to him.

The doctrine of divine simplicity matters because it helps us think about God in the right way. We should not first conceive of a class of beings called “God” and then we relate certain attributes to this particular God. God is in a class by himself. God is not a type of divine being, like a giraffe is a type of mammal. The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck once remarked that if God were composed of parts like a body, or composed of genus and species, or composed of potential realities and actual realities, “then [God’s] perfection, oneness, independence, and immutability [could not] be maintained” (Reformed Dogmatics 2:176).

In other words, there is only one God. There is only one way to be God. And everything about this one God is absolutely essential to being God. That’s why we ought to believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that God is simple.