Proposition/claim: God
is self-existent, self-reliant, self-contained, dependent on no one or nothing
outside of himself in any way.
There is nothing more important
than knowing God.[1] At
the very center of Christian theology, of Christianity itself is the
proposition: God exists as the Creator and sovereign Lord over all things. But
the question immediately arises, “who is God and what is He like?” Since God
transcends human experience, and the created order, being immaterial,
uncreated, not extended in space and time, it follows that the source for our
knowledge of who God is and what God is like, is of critical importance. For
the Christian, the only reliable source for our knowledge of God is the
Christian Scriptures. It is in the Christian Scriptures that God comes to us,
revealing to us who he is and what he is like and, in addition, what this thing
we call ‘life’ is all about. One of the things that Scripture reveals to us
about God is that God is A se.
Divine aseity is “a term derived
from the Latin a se, “from oneself.” Aseity, as a
divine attribute, refers to God’s self-existence. In other words, God is not
dependent upon anything else for his existence but has eternally existed without
any external or prior cause.”[2] This
term is often used interchangeably with the term independence.
Scripture itself reveals the general attributes of God’s nature before, and
more clearly than, it reveals his Trinitarian existence. God is independent,
all sufficient in himself, and the only source of all existence and life. YHWH is
the name that describes this essence and identity most clearly.[3]
In the Old Testament book of
Exodus, when Moses asked God essentially who he was, God said to Moses, “I am
who I am.” (Ex. 3:14) This name describes him as the One who is and will always
be what he was, that is, who eternally remains the same in relation to his
people.[4] This
is repeated as a matter of fact that is to be uncritically accepted again in 1
Corinthians 8:6: yet for us there is but one God, the Father,
from whom are all things and we exist for Him; and one Lord,
Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we exist through
Him. In one popular challenge from the Jews, Jesus’ issued the famous riposte,
“Before Abraham was, I am.” (John 8:58) The Writer to the Hebrews tells us that
Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8) If it
is true that God is from himself, it must also follow that whatever God plans
or decrees is also not dependent on anything outside of God. This has serious
implications for all branches of Christian theology, not the least of which is
practical theology, or, as we like to say, Christian living.
To tease this out a little more,
Herman Bavinck writes, “While aseity only expresses God’s self-sufficiency in
his existence, independence has a broader sense and implies that God is
independent in everything: in his existence, in his perfections, in his
decrees, and in his works.”[5]
From this state of affairs, that
God is absolute, self-contained, independent being, all other attributes of God
flow. If the Christian can begin with a right understanding of God in this most
basic and fundamental truth about who God is and what God is like, much error
and even heresy can be avoided.
Now, if God is self-sufficient,
self-existing, not dependent on us for anything a few things worth mentioning
will follow from this:
1.
God does not need. We
have often wondered why God created human beings or even angels for that
matter. In our feeble attempts to understand the why, we come up
with all sorts of creative ideas. We think God wanted a relationship with us so
he created us because he wanted to have someone with whom he could have
fellowship. But this idea would require that God was missing out on something.
We think that maybe God was sort of lonely, like we get when we are alone with
no one to talk to. This view of God is the product of human projection. We
project onto God our own nature. This is a dangerous practice that must be
avoided at all costs.
2.
There is no lack in
God. He wants for nothing. If God wants for nothing and he lacks nothing, then
this means that God is all that God is. I can’t even say that God is all that
he needs because God has no need. There is a serious limitation on the language
we use to describe God. This becomes very apparent the more we try to look for
analogies that may help us better understand God. This is where biblical trust
comes in. We trust God even though he has not revealed everything we might want
to know about him. This means we must avoid the sinful temptation to engage in
conjecture and speculation where the nature of God is concerned. What God has
not revealed, he has not revealed on purpose.
3.
God is never frustrated. A
frustrated deity and divine aseity are not apparent contradictions. They are
real contradictions. If it is true that God’s plan can be frustrated, or go
unfulfilled, then it is true that God is not independent after all, and that he
does have some deficiency by way of dependency in his nature. The popular
doctrine of libertarian free-will threatens divine aseity in precisely this
way. If I am truly free to act against God’s plan, then it follows that God can
be frustrated because I did not do what he had planned for me to do. If Judas
had the kind of free will that some people think he had, then he could have
acted independently from God’s plan or purpose (decree) and frustrated the
divine plan. Unwittingly, those who hold to such a view are affirming a belief
that is contradictory to the nature of God at a basic level. Moreover, it
should be noted that nothing happens that God has not planned. In other words,
your flat tire, or not, is just as planned by God as the crucifixion of our
Lord.
4.
There is nothing we can do
to add value to God’s experience, existence, or
pleasure in any way. God does not need our fellowship. He does not need a
relationship with us. God does not need more people to be redeemed than he has
presently redeemed. God does not need to direct his love toward us. But more
importantly, God does not need our love and devotion or our praise and worship.
He needs NOTHING from us. There is nothing we can do that will result in God
receiving more glory or experiencing greater pleasure than what God receives
always at all times forever and ever. God needs nothing from us, including us.
Moreover, God does not want something from me like I want something from
someone only to experience true disappointment. Any language in Scripture that
one might take this way is what we call anthropopathic. This means that God
often uses human phenomena to describe himself, not because that is actually
what he is experiencing, but because it is similar in a way that at least
humans can understand what he is communicating. Just as we speak baby-speak so
that our young children can understand us, even sometimes pretending to cry so
that they understand us, God does the same with us. God’s communication with
his creation is accommodative. As Cornelius Van Til would say, our knowledge
and God’s knowledge is analogical. Think about it like this: humans experience
anger or disappointment because an outcome was different from what we expected
and from what we had hoped. This is not the case when Scripture is talking
about God’s anger. Scripture uses this kind of language to express his
disposition toward a particular thing because we can understand that God has a
very negative disposition towards that particular behavior.
5.
God does not learn.
There is nothing God does not know. This means that God does not look into the
future in order to learn what will happen and this is how he knows and controls
things. This would mean that God learns. In other words, God does not look into
the future and figure out who is going to believe in him and then choose these
individuals for salvation. Such a view is not consistent with divine aseity
because it makes God’s plan dependent on what others will do. In fact, this
view would mean that the death of Christ was not guaranteed and that Christ’s
death even if it were to materialize, could not guarantee the salvation
of even one person. This is simply a very confused way of viewing God's
sovereignty and how it relates to his knowledge. This also means that God does
not react to things. It means that bad things do not just so happen to you, and
then somehow God figures out how to take that bad thing and turn it into
something good. Your car broke down because God planned it from the very
beginning. Your child died of cancer because God planned it from the beginning.
You lost your home to the bank because God decreed it to be before he created
the first blade of grass. God does not encounter situations, react to them, and
then figure out how to make you benefit from them because he is infinitely
intelligent or really, really smart. Such thinking threatens divine aseity.
The only way God can guarantee our
salvation, the only way we can believe that the Bible is the Word of God
without the possibility of error is if God is self-sufficient. If this position
of divine aseity if wrong. If God is not like what has been described here and
in historic Christian orthodoxy, it could have truly been the case that the
Christ event could have been frustrated by the free choices of human beings.
The only way we can believe that the future promises of God will absolutely
materialize just as God says is if God is in fact A se.
[1] John M. Frame, The Doctrine of God, A
Theology of Lordship (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R Pub., ©2002), 1.
[2]
Stanley Grenz, David Guretzki, and Cherith Fee
Nordling, Pocket
Dictionary of Theological Terms (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity
Press, 1999), 16.
[4]
Ibid., 150
[5] Ibid., 152.
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