HOME | contents | introduction | God -goodness | alternatives | God -morality | -holiness | -righteousness | -mercy | -love
Hitherto only those attributes of God have been mentioned
which refer to His existence and His power.
But there is another class of attributes which belong to His character
and which are of such supreme importance that they are placed in a separate
chapter.
For it is of little use to believe that there is a God, unless we know what
sort of God He is.
top
The Moral Argument (see Chapter
5) teaches us that God is perfectly good, and this is
confirmed by revelation.
But there is probably no Christian doctrine more difficult to accept.
Human history is full of evil and misery;
and though this may be ascribed to the misuse of free will,
it may still be asked why God has bestowed on man a gift which has led to
such terrible results.
A greater difficulty still is that the world, apart from man, appears to
be full of cruelty and fear.
Volcanic eruptions and earthquakes and other natural forces,
which cannot be the result of human free will,
cause an immense amount of misery to human beings and to animals.
It may be asked whether the Creator of such a universe can be a Being of
perfect justice and love.
We must admit frankly that we cannot answer this question completely.
The origin of evil is a mystery that no one has ever yet solved.
But there is no satisfactory alternative to the belief in the goodness of
the Creator,
which is held not by Christians only but also by Jews, Moslems, and all other
Theists.
top
It is possible to believe that the Creator is an evil being who delights
in the misery of his creatures.
But in that case we cannot account for the goodness, order, and beauty of
the world.
Belief that the evil in the universe exceeds the good is probably due to
some nervous or other internal disorder.
Or one might believe, with the ancient Epicureans and modern Deists, that
God is indifferent to His creatures.
In that case man is better than God, and it is hard to see how conscience
and morality ever came to exist.
Or one might believe that there are two gods,
a good one and an evil one Ormuzd and Ahriman,
as the Persians called them constantly struggling for the mastery.
This was the teaching of the religion of Zoroaster or Zarathustra, which
survives in the Parsi community in India,
and of the two religions which sprang from it,
Mithraism and Manichaeism (the former was widely spread among the Roman legions;
the latter, founded by Manes in the third century, extended from Carthage,
where St. Augustine was for a time one of its adherents, to Chinese Turkestan,
and sprang up again in Southern France in the thirteenth century as the Albigensian
heresy).
But Dualism makes it impossible to account for the unity of the material
universe which natural science has proved on a vast scale.
Or one might believe, with the ancient Gnostics, in a finite God who created
the world
but was not able completely to subdue the evil forces opposed to him.
This belief is confronted by all the difficulties of dualism in a more acute
form.
The Bible teaches that God who created all things is perfectly good,
and that His character is most clearly displayed by Jesus Christ,
who, being the express image of His Person, came down,
and became man,
and died in agony on the Cross because He loved us and wished to save us.
It is supported by the spiritual experience of millions of Christians, and
of Jews, Moslems, and other Theists.
Some have thought that the misery in the world, apart from man,
is caused by a revolt against God in the spiritual world before the appearance
of man,
and that the Devil (who is, according to Christian belief, not a rival god
but a created being and, like all other creatures, created good) has more
power over the animal and material world than we are accustomed to think.
But this is mere speculation.
top
According to the Christian revelation, God is absolute moral perfection.
Every virtue proper to the Supreme Being is to be found in Him.
No limit can be placed upon the perfection of any Divine virtue.
The Divine virtues harmonize with each other,
so that His character is perfectly consistent
(Hall, Dogmatic Theology, v.3, p.293).
Because He is supreme,
the virtues of humility and obedience, which are necessary to human perfection,
cannot exist in the Divine nature,
though they were perfectly displayed in the human nature taken by the Incarnate
Son (Phil.2.8; Heb.5.8).
God is by His nature morally perfect.
Goodness is not something different from God to which He conforms,
nor does He, by making it His purpose, make anything good which would not
otherwise have been good.
On the one hand,
His perfection arises from His own nature, not from anything outside it.
This follows from our belief in God as infinite and as Creator.
On the other hand,
God cannot either do, or command us to do, what is contrary to His own nature.
This will become clearer if we contrast it with the traditional Moslem doctrine
of God.
According to that doctrine the will of Allah (God) is completely unlimited.
He could make right wrong, and wrong right.
Right is right solely because it is His will.
Wrong would become right if He commanded it.
The God proclaimed by Muhammad is therefore a kind of supreme oriental monarch,
benevolent but capricious.
Christians, on the other hand, believe that God's character and purpose do
not change because they are based on His unchanging nature.
The fullest and deepest understanding of God's character is found in the
portrait of Jesus Christ drawn for us by the New Testament writers.
It makes a profound appeal to the consciences of many who do not believe
that He is God incarnate.
It is not indeed the only moral ideal placed before men, as the Victorian
Liberals thought.
Many opponents of the Christian religion reject its moral ideals at least
as strongly as its dogmas.
Still we can fairly claim that our Lord Himself called upon His hearers to
test His teaching by their own consciences (St. Luke 10.36, 12.57).
It is because no human being is wholly without the Divine gift of conscience
that we can proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ by showing that it satisfies
the demands of conscience.
The same God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ has not left any man without
a witness to Himself.
[H. Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, ch. 1.]
The Divine virtues which are most emphasized in the Old Testament are holiness
and righteousness.
The beliefs of the heathen nations about their gods represented those gods
as conspicuously lacking in just those two qualities.
The gods in Homer were subject to the same vices as men,
but they were pure and just in comparison with the gods worshiped by most
of the Semitic nations!
top
The prophets of Israel proclaimed the absolute holiness and purity of God.
The original meaning of holiness is separation.
Objects which are "holy to the Lord", such as Mount Sinai (Exod.19.12)
or the Ark (II Sam.6.7), may not be touched.
Israel is the holy nation separated from all other nations by God's choice.
Everything that belongs to God or to His service is separated from common
things by strict taboos (prohibitions which are apparently irrational).
This is common in primitive religions, but the special mark of the Hebrew
religion was that holiness became moralized.
The prohibitions were no longer irrational.
They all had the effect of increasing enormously the reverence of the people
for God and the fear of displeasing Him.
The Hebrews were taught that nothing was more hateful to God than any kind
of sexual impurity,
which was to be punished with the severest penalties;
and the result was that the sexual standard of Israel came to be incomparably
higher than that of any other ancient nation.
This is why our Lord gave little teaching about sexual purity, in comparison
with St. Paul.
Our Lord was addressing Jews whose standard of purity was the standard of
the Law.
St. Paul's correspondents were Greeks, or Jews living among the Greeks,
who were infected by the low standards of the heathen world,
and who had still to be taught
that no sin separates men from God more completely than sexual impurity (I
Cor.6.18)
on the ground that the body is not, as the Greek philosophers taught, a thing
of little value, the mere raiment of the soul,
but the Temple of the Holy Ghost,
which is a necessary part of man not only in this world but in that which
is to come (I Cor.15.35 ff.).
And yet the religion of Israel was not ascetic.
Virginity was not regarded as an honour but as a misfortune.
No sadder fate could befall a man than to have no son to keep his name in
remembrance,
or a woman than to die in her maidenhood.
top
Beside the holiness of God we find in the Old Testament His righteousness
or justice.
Unlike the gods of the heathen, He had no favourites.
His chosen people were not bound to Him by physical descent
(many other nations claimed to be descended from their gods)
but by covenant.
If they forsook His covenant, He would forsake them.
The righteousness of God consisted in the fulfilment of His will, which could
not be other than perfectly just.
As has been already said, it is only because He is omniscient that He is
perfectly righteous.
Righteousness is entirely consistent with love.
There is no difference between the character of God revealed by the prophets,
and His character revealed in the New Testament,
except that the latter marks a further advance.
Many modern people have failed to recognize this because they have lost the
Scriptural hatred of sin.
[And because their knowledge of the Old Testament is superficial.]
The Bible teaches that sin in every form is utterly hateful to God.
Those who do not accept this teaching can never understand what is meant
by the Divine righteousness.
It was necessary that Israel should completely accept the conception of
God as perfect holiness and righteousness before His most profound attribute,
love, could be revealed.
top
In the Old Testament God is described as merciful (as also in the Koran).
Hosea goes further, comparing the love of God for Israel to his own love
for his unfaithful wife.
But the love of God is not revealed as His chief attribute until the New
Testament.
top
St. Paul tells us that love is greater than faith and hope (I Cor.13.13),
and St. John, that God is love (I St. John 4.8).
We are never told that God is holiness or righteousness
[Jer.23.6,
33.16, "The Lord is our Righteousness", comes near it.]
but
that He is holy and righteous.
From this we see that Love is the greatest of the Divine attributes because
it is that one in which God's nature is most profoundly revealed. The
supreme example of the love of God is the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross;
for Jesus Christ is God, and the God in whom we believe is the God who became
Man and died because of His love for us.
This love is not a weak sentimentalism.
It is more than good nature or benevolence.
It is not even the ἔρως (Eros)
of Plato, the desire of beauty for that which is beautiful in the loved one.
It is agape (ἀγάπη),
self-offering love, which desires nothing for itself.
God does not love us for anything in us that deserves love;
while we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us
(Rom. 5:8).
St. Augustine taught that sin is not positive but negative, the absence
of love.
All the other Divine attributes are included in this,
the love that moves the sun and the other stars
(Dante, Paradiso, 33, 245).