Book Review: God Without Parts: Part 1

"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.