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Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today the Doctrine of God, Part 1. For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org Today we begin
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a new locus which is the doctrine of God. This is the centerpiece of theology. Indeed, sometimes it's called theology property. The Study of God. Charles Spurgeon, in his morning sermon of January 7, 1855 began with these words. It has been said by someone that the proper study of mankind is man. I will not oppose the idea, but I believe it is equally true that the proper study of God's elect is God. The proper study of a Christian is the Godhead, the highest science, the loftiest speculation, the mightiest philosophy which can ever engage the attention of a child of God is the name, the nature, the person, the work, the doings and the existence of the great God, whom he calls His Father. Spurgeon went on to say, there is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the divinity. It is a subject so vast that all our thoughts are drowned in its immensity, so deep that our pride is lost in its infinity. No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind than thoughts of God. But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. He who often thinks of God will have a larger mind than the man who simply plods around this narrow globe. Nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man. As a devout earth earnest continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity. It is to that subject, said Spurgeon, that I invite you this morning. And it is also to that subject that I invite you this morning as we begin our locus of the study of the doctrine of God. The knowledge of God is really what life is all about. In his marvelous book Knowing God, J.I. packer writes the what were we made for? To know God. What aim should we set ourselves in life? To know God. What is the eternal life that Jesus gives? Knowledge of God. John 17:3. This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent. What is the best thing in life, bringing more joy, delight and contentment than anything else. The knowledge of God. Packer goes on to say, we have been brought to the point where we both must, can and must get our life's priorities straight from current Christian publications. You might think that the most vital issue for any real or would be Christian today, church union or social witness or dialogue with other Christians and other faiths or refuting this or that ism, or developing a Christian philosophy and culture, or what have you. But he says our line of study makes the present day concentration on these things look like a gigantic conspiracy of misdirection. Of course it is not that the issues themselves are real and must be dealt with in their place. But it is tragic that in paying attention to them, so many in our day seem to have been distracted from what was, is, and always will be the true priority for every human being. And that is learning to know God in Christ. The knowledge of God ought to be our number one priority life. But here an important distinction needs to be made. There's a great difference between knowing about God and knowing God. Knowing about God is primarily a matter of information, whereas knowing God involves firsthand personal experience and involvement. To illustrate, suppose you're a single young man and I had a crystal ball into which I could look and reveal to you what the woman you will someday marry is like. I could tell you what she looks like, her likes and dislikes, her strengths, her weaknesses, her talents, her intellectual abilities, her spiritual maturity. You would know all about her. But could you truly say that you know her? I don't think so at all. There is no personal relationship between you and her. In fact, you might even say, upon hearing my revelation, wow, I can't wait to get to know her. There's a huge difference between knowing about someone and actually knowing that person. Through the crystal ball. You might know all about her, but then someday she'll walk into your life and you'll get to really know her on a personal level. And it's exactly the same way with God. We can know a lot about God and yet not really know him well or at all. Now in this class, I can help you to know about God. I can give you information about God, his nature and existence. But unfortunately, my ability to help you to know God is limited. Because it's up to you to do the knowing. Nobody else can do that. For you to think of the illustration of the young man again, maybe I could buy my crystal ball, tell you all about your future wife. But I couldn't give you that intimate, personal relationship with her that you'd want to have. You have to do the loving, the caring, the building, the communicating yourself. And it's exactly the same way with God. I can give you a lot of information about what God is like so that you can know more about Him. But only you, through your personal engagement, can get to know God better for yourself. So someone might say, well, then what good is it learning all this doctrine and information about God if it isn't sufficient for really knowing Him? Well, think about it. It can be very helpful to know about someone if you're trying to get to know that person personally. For example, it would be very helpful, wouldn't it, to know that someone has, say, a poor self image that causes him or her to act in certain ways. Or it might be good to know that someone can be trusted with a secret. If we hear that this person is a loyal and dependable friend, then it'll be much easier to want to get to know him and to commit ourselves to Him. And it's exactly the same way with God. Once we correctly understand what God is like, then it will change our lives. When we grasp God's love, then we will be drawn to him in turn and want to respond and love Him. When we truly comprehend God's holiness, then we'll turn away from our sins with loathing and we'll reverence God with awe. When we understand God's aseity, then we will fall on our faces before him in humility. When we see God's power, then we will go forth for him in confidence and triumph. When we learn of God's omniscience, then we can trust him and his guidance as we go through the trials and and valleys of life. And we can quit depreciating ourselves and understand and accept ourselves rightly as those who are beloved by God. So I think you can see that knowledge about God can be very helpful indeed in getting to know God. So who is this God then that reveals Himself to us in the Bible? Well, he is the infinite personal God. God is on the one hand, an infinite being. On the other hand, God is also a personal being. The God of the Bible is the infinite personal being. And this is in contrast to the gods of many other religions in the world. For example, the gods of Greco Roman mythology were certainly personal beings, but they were not infinite. The God of Eastern Pantheism, like Hinduism and Taoism, is infinite. But this concept of God is not personal. And what the Bible says is that God is both infinite and personal. And so insofar as God is infinite, there is a great chasm that separates him from everything else. In all creation, including man, animals and inanimate life, God stands alone as the infinite being. On the other hand, insofar as God is personal, man as made in the image of God, finds himself on God's side of the chasm that separates him from all of the rest of creation. Which are not persons. And so you have this very interesting concept of God in Judaism and Christianity as a God who is infinite and therefore unlike all the rest of creation, and yet who is also personal and therefore can be known in a personal way. Now, in our first section of this class, we want to look at those attributes of God which are his in virtue of being, an infinite being. And then we will later look at those attributes of God which are his in virtue of his being, a personal being. The Westminster Shorter Catechism describes God in the following. Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His Being, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth. I'll repeat that God is Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His Being, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth. And we want to look at those attributes or properties of God which are his in virtue of His Being, an infinite being. Now in one sense this distinction is artificial because God has all of his attributes to an infinite degree, but nevertheless he has certain attributes which are not his in virtue of his being personal. And so we'll look at these separately. Now a lot of times you'll hear people in our culture say, well, you can't really know anything about God. If God does exist, you can't say anything about about what he is like. So for these sorts of people, God is just a sort of nebulous force or something of that sort, not something that can really be described. But in reality, such an entity would be a non being. Anything that exists in reality has attributes or properties that make it what it is. And to describe it so a God that literally had no attributes, that had no properties, would be non existent. Anything that exists has certain properties or attributes. The 19th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach expressed this point well. Feuerbach wrote, a being without qualities is one which cannot become an object to the mind. And such a being is virtually non existent. Where man deprives God of all qualities, God is no longer anything more to him than a negative being. To the truly religious man, God is not a being without qualities, because to him he is a positive real being. The theory that God cannot be defined and consequently cannot be known by man is therefore the offspring of recent times, a product of modern unbelief. On the ground that God is unknowable. Man excuses himself for his forgetfulness of God, his absorption in the world. He denies God practically by his conduct. The world has possession of all his thoughts and inclinations. But he does not deny God theoretically. He does not attack his existence. He lets that rest. But this existence does not affect or incommode Him. It is a merely negative existence, an existence without existence, a self contradictory existence, a state of being which as to its effects, is not distinguishable from non being. The alleged religious horror of limiting God by positive predicates is only the irreligious wish to know nothing more of God, to banish God from the mind. So God as an infinite personal being must have certain qualities that make him the kind of Being that He is. And the question then is, well then, what qualities are these? What are these properties that God has? And here, fortunately, God has not left us to work this out by our own ingenuity. Rather he has revealed Himself to us in his word. The Bible is not a philosophy book, even a book in systematic theology. But it is the story of God's acts in human history, revealing to us what God is like, what this person with whom we have to do is like. And so it's to the Bible that we will want to turn in order to discover what God is like. And we'll examine four of the infinite attributes of God. Now, two controls help to guide this inquiry into the divine nature. First is Scripture. And then second is Perfect Being theology, Scripture and Perfect Being theology. I've already said that Scripture will be our guide in seeing what God has revealed to us about himself. But for thinkers who are in the Judeo Christian tradition, the concept of God, enunciated by Saint Anselm as the greatest conceivable being or the most perfect being, has guided our theological reflection upon the raw data of Scripture, so that God's biblical attributes are to be conceived in the greatest possible way, in a way that would serve to exalt God's greatest greatness. When the Bible says, for example, that God is all powerful, or that God is all knowing, we should take this attribute to the greatest possible degree that we can. That is coherent, to say that God is omnipotent and omniscient, and to construe these attributes in ways that would exalt God's greatness. Now, since the concept of God is under determined by biblical data, that is to say, the biblical data do not always make it clear how we are to understand God's attributes. And since what constitutes a great making property is to a degree debatable, theologians and philosophers who work within the Judeo Christian tradition have a considerable latitude in formulating a philosophically coherent and biblically faithful doctrine of God. To give just one example of this, the Bible affirms clearly that God is eternal. But it doesn't make clear whether this means that God is infinite throughout all time, or whether God transcends time altogether. The biblical date is under determinative with respect to how we grasp or understand divine eternity. And this is also an attribute where I think it's not clear whether it is greater to be timeless or to be infinite throughout all time. This is a matter of debate among philosophers and theologians. So this would be one example of where Christian theologians and philosophers have differed in their doctrine of God. They all affirm the core doctrine that God is eternal. But some will maintain that God is atemporal, that he exists beyond time. Others will say, no, God is omnitemporal and exists throughout infinite time. And both of these would be acceptable as Christian doctrines of divine eternity. Our exploration of the divine attributes will be guided by these two constraints of Scripture and then perfect being theology. What we'll want to do is to look first at the scriptural data relative to any particular attribute, and then we will look at an application of this attribute, a systematic summary of it and and its impact on our lives. So let me ask if there are any questions about this introduction to the locus on the divine attributes and God's nature.
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Yes, Steve, possibly this is intended as an underlying assumption, but both A and B are great. But don't we have to also contemplate all that we know of this realm here, the world, the physical universe and the history and all aspects of it, and in light of that still show God is perfect throughout time?
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Yes. What's driving the question, Steve? That seems clear to me.
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It seems like you could get detached from the world and come up with a systematic theory. We have to tie it down to all of what we know of this world.
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Okay, I think that's right. Take the example of God's eternity. Again, since the biblical data is under determinative and it's not clear whether timelessness or omnitemporality is the greater property, we're going to have to look at this in terms of what we know about time. What does modern science tell us about time? What does our experience of time tell us and reflect upon this in order to try to enunciate a doctrine of divine eternity that will take account not only of the biblical data, but also all that we know about the nature of time so as to have a coherent theology. Yes, Jim, could you repeat that quote from Saint Anselm, please? No, I didn't actually quote Anselm, but what Anselm said is that God is the greatest conceivable being. He said God is aliquid quo nihil maius cogitare posit that than which a greater cannot be conceived. Or more simply put, the greatest conceivable being. So this is the Anselmian concept of God. God is the greatest conceivable being. And I think that's a right definition, because if you could think of something greater than God, well then that would be God. So by the very concept of who God is, he must be the greatest being conceivable. Or you're not really talking about God, you're talking about some lesser thing. All right, our first attribute that we want to look at is God's aseity or self existence. Let me just put that on the whiteboard for you. In case you're not familiar with this word, God's aseity or self existence. And. And rather than plunge into that at this point, I think we will finish early today and we will open that for discussion. Next time, let's close with benediction from Romans, chapter 11. Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways. For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.
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The copyright for the content of this recording is held by Dr. William Lane Craig. For more go to reasonablefaith.org.