"In summary, knowledge of the divine attributes, no less than of the divine proper names, involves a knowledge of God's inmost essence. Our knowledge is not exhaustive, to be sure, since God's incomprehensibility, which evangelicals affirm, means that we know no more concerning the divine nature than what God intends and enables us to know by revelation. Although Luther and Calvin speak of the incomprehensibility of God's essence--it is unknowable by a priori speculation concerning divinity--they do not deny authentic knowledge of God's essential nature on the basis of scriptural revelation."
Carl F. H. Henry. God, Revelation, and Authority. Vol. 5. 1982. 2nd edition. (Wheaton: Crossway, 1999). P. 140.
Book Review: God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of
God’s Absoluteness
By James E.
Dolezal
[James E. Dolezal. God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of
God’s Absoluteness. (Eugene: Pickwick, 2011).
I read this book some time
ago. I had intended to review it earlier
but never seemed to find the time.
Honestly, I had never considered this doctrine before since it is only
briefly mentioned in chapter 2 of the Westminster Confession of Faith. I had assumed that it was simply a rejection
of the patripassionism view that was made popular by Jürgen Moltmann. That being said, I will be reviewing this
book from the point of view of the apologetics and theology of the late Dr.
Gordon H. Clark.
The first indication of trouble
is a remark by Paul Helm in the foreward to the book:
God the Creator
is one God, and not creaturely. Because God is timeless he is changeless,
immutable. Not simply in the sense that he has chosen to be so, or covenanted
this, proposals which offer a rather unstable account of God’s changelessness
and are probably incoherent. He is metaphysically changeless. Such
changelessness in turn entails divine impassibility, an idea frequently
misunderstood and derided. But impassibility is not to be confused, as it often
is, with impassivity or with dispassion. Although it may seem paradoxical, the
stress on impassibility is meant to safeguard the fullness of God’s character.
He is eternally impassioned, unwaveringly good, not moody or fitful as he is
buffeted by the changes of his life, some of them, perhaps, unexpected changes.
Dolezal, James
E. God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God's
Absoluteness. Pickwick Publications, An Imprint of Wipf and Stock
Publishers. Kindle Edition.
The late Dr. Gordon H. Clark held
that the body has emotions and sensations, but the mind itself thinks in terms
of propositions. Since God has no body,
God cannot literally have any emotions.
Emotions as defined by Dr. Clark were outbursts of bodily
sensations. Since God is a spirit, He
has no bodily sensations or emotions or passions. (John 4:24 KJV). Dr. Clark referred to the emotions attributed
to God in the Bible as anthropopathisms.
Just as God has no physical body parts such as a nose or mouth or hands
or feet, God cannot and does not have emotions or passions of any kind
whatsoever. The idea that God has body
parts attributed to Him metaphorically in Scripture is called
anthropomorphism. The problem with the
comment of Helm above is that he contradicts the doctrine of God’s
impassibility by using another word that is practically synonymous to affirm
that God does indeed have passivity or emotions. Oddly, Helm only holds that God has good
feelings of love, not feelings of wrath or anger as Scripture clearly says. The most obvious passage of Scripture that
affirms that God has anthropopathic wrath or anger is Romans 1:18-21 KJV. Evangelicals are too caught up in the idea of
God’s benevolence and beneficence to face the reality that God cannot be
manipulated by our tears, sufferings, or situational case studies.
There is no partiality with God. (Romans 2:11-14 KJV).
He does what He pleases in the heavens.
(Psalm 115:3). The Lord God
Almighty has no problem whatsoever with condemning the wicked to hell. (Matthew 7:21-23; Psalm 6:8; 2 Timothy 2:19
KJV). Apparently, Dolezal holds to this
view, although it is not unusual. Even
the late Dr. Robert L. Reymond held to the idea that even though God is
dispassionate, He must also have some kind of feelings for the elect. However, Dr. Gordon H. Clark defined love, as
seen from the human perspective, as obedience to God. If you love me, obey my commandments. (John 14:15 KJV). On the other hand, God’s love for humanity is
seen in His unconditional election to save some humans in His supralapsarian
and logical order of the dual or double decree to election and
reprobation. This double decree is the
first decree in the logical order according to the supralapsarian view.
A further problem with asserting
that God has feelings or emotions of any kind, including feelings of love or
beneficence, is that such emotions would violate God’s absolute
immutability. Although certain portions
of Scripture seem to indicate this, the anthropopathism actually points toward
God’s eternal volition to save His elect:
The LORD hath
appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting
love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. (Jeremiah 31:3 KJV).
Even the term lovingkindness is a
Hebrew word that indicates mercy or grace or favor rather than an emotion. God never breaks His covenantal promises to
save His elect people and elect persons within the congregation of Israel.
In the preface to the book,
Dolezal presupposes an analogical view of Scripture rather than a propositional
view of Scripture. In a recent podcast,
I prematurely advocated that my listeners read Dolezal’s book. (See: Reasonable
Christian: Divine Simplicity, Logic, and the Foreknowledge of God). It has been some time since I had read the
book or listened to Dolezal’s YouTube videos on the topic. Unfortunately, this goes directly back to the
Clark/Van Til controversy of the 1940’s.
It seems to me that history is repeating itself. Dolezal reveals his beginning axioms for his
book in the preface:
The classical
doctrine of simplicity, as espoused by both traditional Thomists and the
Reformed scholastics, famously holds forth the maxim that there is nothing in
God that is not God. If there were, that is, if God were not ontologically
identical with all that is in him, then something other than God himself would
be needed to account for his existence, essence, and attributes. But nothing
that is not God can sufficiently account for God. He exists in all his
perfection entirely in and through himself. At the heart of the classical DDS
is the concern to uphold God’s absolute self-sufficiency as well as his
ultimate sufficiency for the existence of the created universe.
The pages that
follow set forth both metaphysical and theological arguments in favor of divine
simplicity. Along the way I seek to answer some of the leading recent critics
of the doctrine—most notably those objecting from within the modern school of
analytic philosophy. The assumption that God and creatures are correlatives
within a univocal order of being dominates this school of philosophy and is
arguably the chief reason why their criticisms of the DDS fail to hit the mark.
By appealing to God’s simplicity, I aim to show that God and the world are
related analogically and that the world in no sense explains or accounts for
God’s existence and essence. If God were yet another being in the world, even
if the highest and most excellent, then the world itself would be the framework
within which he must be ontologically explained.
Ibid., Dolezal.
Kindle Edition.
The problem here is that Dolezal
presupposes that reformed epistemology is essentially Thomistic and that God’s
knowledge and man’s knowledge do not coincide at any single point. This results in the parallel lines analogy
where truth is seen to be twofold, and the creature’s knowledge and God’s
knowledge do not meet anywhere. The two
parallel lines continue into infinity with no meeting anywhere at any single
point whatsoever. Logic must be curbed, and the Bible must never be explained, nor should any apparent contradiction or
paradox be resolved. A further problem
with Dolezal’s remark is that he does not define what the “world” is. Does he mean creation? Or does he mean epistemology or truth? Even the philosopher Arthur Holmes once
remarked that all truth is God’s truth.
In other words, if humans know anything that is true, then surely God
knows that same truth. I have argued
elsewhere Gordon H. Clark did not confuse the creature with the Creator when he
insisted that the Bible is the univocal word of God because Clark distinguished
between God’s omniscience as intuive and man’s knowledge as discursive and
limited to thinking one thought after another.
Van Til insisted that logic is
created and that man’s knowledge of logic is mere human logic. The implication of this is that God’s logic
and man’s logic must different and that logical contradictions do not require
any resolutions; instead, the paradoxes should just be left standing and at any
points of cognitive dissonance in preaching to congregations the minister
should just appeal to mystery. Van Til
went so far as to say that all Scripture is apparently contradictory, or at
least that is what John Frame said in one of his lectures on Van Til. (See: Gordon
H. Clark lecture: John Frame and
Cornelius Van Til, page 4). Clark
says that Van Til took vows to uphold the system of doctrine in the Westminster
Confession of Faith. Unfortunately, the
Van Tilians get around this by saying that the Westminster Confession is an
analogical system of doctrine, not a propositional system of doctrine. But this would seem to contradict the WCF in
paragraph 1:6, which says:
The whole
counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's
salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by
good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: . . . (WCF 1:6 WCS)
Another way of saying this is
that logic is the science of necessary inference. Plainly, the Westminster divines were not
appealing to Thomist philosophy when they wrote section 1:6. This is an appeal to propositional logic, not
analogical philosophy. In other words,
Gordon H. Clark was correct to say that the WCF is a system of propositions
which is logically deduced from the propositions in the Bible and that that
system is deduced by necessary inference.
Dolezal’s argument that this is
an issue of being or essence misses the mark because no one on the Clarkian
side of the issue is saying that the human nature or essence is participating in
the divine essence whatsoever. This is
an argument about Reformed epistemology, not an argument about divine
simplicity per se. Dolezal confuses
categories by saying that this is an ontological issue or an issue of the
divine being versus the limitation of the human being or nature. The issue here is one that focuses on not
only divine simplicity but also the issue of special revelation and the
epistemological issue of how do we know God at all? If God is totally transcendent, and there is
no point at which we can know God, then the obvious conclusion is that even the
Bible is merely human information, not special revelation from God. A shadow of God’s truth is not the truth
itself. In other words, God’s truth and
man’s truth as revealed “analogically” in the Bible are totally separated and
do not coincide at any single point whatsoever.
As this will be an extended review
of Dolezal’s book, I will end here and continue the review in subsequent posts. I would like to close with a quote from one
of Dr. Gordon H. Clark’s students, Dr. Carl F. H. Henry. Both Clark and Henry did uphold the doctrine
of divine simplicity and this is evidenced by the following:
Evangelical
theology insists on the simplicity of God. By this it means that God is not
compounded of parts; he is not a collection of perfections, but rather a living
center of activity pervasively characterized by all his distinctive
perfections. The divine attributes are neither additions to the divine essence
nor qualities pieced together to make a compound. Peter Bertocci has well said
that God “never was, nor will ever be, ontologically divisible” (The Person God
Is, p. 219). God’s variety of attributes does not conflict with God’s
simplicity because his simplicity is what comprises the fullness of divine
life. Augustine wrote of God’s “simple multiplicity” or “multifold simplicity.”
For this very reason the statement “God is”— if we know what we are saying—
exhausts all that a course in theology can teach concerning him. If we give the
subject “God” and the predicate “is” their true and full sense, we must speak
of God’s essence, names, attributes, and triunity, and do so expressly on the
basis of his revelatory self-disclosure addressed to his created and fallen
creatures. If we say “God is” on any other basis than God’s self-revelation our
predications have no sound epistemic ground. Augustine declares that “in God to
be is the same as to be strong or to be just or to be wise.”
Henry, Carl F.
H. God, Revelation and Authority (Set of 6) (Kindle Locations
59369-59380). Crossway. Kindle Edition.
This is a quote from Vol. V. I could not locate the exact page number, but
it is from chapter 6, “God’s Divine Simplicity and Attributes.” Pp. 127-140.
Part 2 will be posted in the next installment.
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