Being God: A Short Thought on Our Lust for Divinity

What does it mean to be God? Mere mortals have assumptions about the answer to that question as they covet divinity. As one very honest man admitted in his narrative, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “But that I may reveal my heart entirely unto you, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure it to be no God!” In other words, Nietzsche was saying, if there is a God, how can I bear not to be him? The problem, among other sins, is that the craving in creatures for Godness is a poor vision of what it even means to be God. We have no clue what it is we are proposing when we desire to be on par with the uniqueness of the LORD, yet the temptation is as old as the Garden. By first answering the question, what does it mean to be God, maybe we can pump the breaks on believing we could be God. Let’s look at his attributes with special attention on the attribute of divine simplicity and apply that to our poor attempts to even formulate fantasies about being God. 

Defining Divine Attributes

A biblical path to organizing an answer to the question, what does it mean to be God, or more simply, what is God, is to explore divine attributes. An attribute of God is a character trait or quality that is ascribed to God. Other terms used for God’s attributes include his “perfections, properties, virtues, and predicates” (George, A Theology for the Church, 223). Within the study of divine attributes, theologians have noticed characteristics or qualities about God that reveal his transcendence (otherness) and others displaying his immanence (nearness). Thus, two categories have traditionally been utilized for organizing God’s attributes: incommunicable and communicable. Attributes designated as incommunicable are qualities about God that reveal ways he is not like us. These truths about God do not have any analogy with human experience. They are unique to God alone. For instance, God is omnipresent; he is “exalted above all time and yet penetrates every moment of time with his eternity (Ps. 90:2)” (Bavinck, Guidebook, 56). This reality is incomparable to human nature and incomprehensible to the human mind. Yet it has been revealed in Scripture to bring all people to worship the all-present God. Incommunicable attributes make clear the only true answer to the question: who is God like? “I am God, and there is none like me (Is. 46:9).” 

God’s nearness, his communicable attributes, are presented in Scripture in perfect harmony with his otherness. Attributes designated as communicable reveal a divine quality that is imaged by God’s crown jewel of creation, human beings. Image-bearers are designed to offer a faint reflection of imprinted divine characteristics. For instance, God is love (1 John 4:8). The attribute of God’s love is eternally and ultimately expressed in the one divine love between the Father, Son, and Spirit. We are called to reflect the love of God based on its imprint within us (1 John 4:7). At this point, caution is necessary. Even though communicable attributes are shown to connect to human qualities stamped within mankind by God, we cannot be misled into believing any attribute of God is equivalent to an attribute of man. Compare man’s love and God’s love, for example. God is love. Love is essential to his being; he exists as love. God’s love is exhaustive and eternal. Contrastively, man has love. Love is not essential to man’s being. A person could lose their capacity for love and remain human. In other words, humanity could exist without the capacity to love. Man’s love is finite and inconsistent. So, the essential, exhaustive, and eternal love of God is in an entirely different category than the love of man. Even God’s communicable attributes are incomprehensible! Though there is a “faint likeness” of communicable attributes within the image of man, these “attributes are present in God in an original, independent, unchangeable, simple, and infinite way” (Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God, 122). Both his nearness and his otherness display his uniqueness. 

The Necessity of God’s Simplicity

One final truth that aids our grasp of all God’s attributes is the attribute of divine simplicity. Among other truths about God, The Second London Confession of Faith affirms, “The Lord our God is…a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions… (2.1).” By affirming that God is spirit rather than possessing a body (Jn. 4:24) and denying that God is composed of parts, the early Baptists followed the ancient heritage of theologians throughout church history who confess God as simple. By simple, don’t think God is basic or unintelligent. This term is used to communicate the opposite of something made up of different parts. God is one (Deut. 6:4; 1 Cor. 8:6); he is not a series of pieces put together like a puzzle. Something made up of parts requires a composer, a builder. Certainly, God has no composer, and he has no parts whatsoever. God is simple.

What does God’s simplicity mean for all his divine attributes? It steers us away from thinking of God’s attributes as “parts” of him. God is not a graph made up of percentages where he is 20% love, 30% holiness, 15% wise, etc. Attributes are not things God possesses; they are qualities that God is. In other words, God does not have attributes. He is his attributes. Ponder divine love as expressed earlier. The apostle John does not say, “God has love.” He declared, “God is love.” What is God? God is love. God is holiness. God is all-powerful. God is all-wise. Many theologians have summed up God’s simplicity by confessing that “All that is in God is God,” or, in philosophical language, God’s attributes are his essence. Again, the uniqueness of God is on display. As creatures, we can distinguish between what we are (our essence) and what we have (our attributes). A person can lose their arm or their brain function and still remain human. But God has no division between his essence (what he is) and his attributes (what he has). If he loses the attribute of love or holiness or omnipresence, then he ceases to be God. As Bavinck concludes, divine simplicity tells us God “is all that he has” (Bavinck, Guidebook, 55).

Fantasies about False gods

As we study God’s attributes, the truth of God’s uniqueness displayed in his simplicity should bring us to our knees in worship and shame our dreams of being God. We are not God and cannot even comprehend being God. Yet from ancient Babel to modern America, fallen humanity attempts to rival who God is by aspiring to be him. Among many sins, one of man’s fatal flaws in this divinization project is to fixate on obtaining only one of God’s attributes. Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google, has changed pursuits over the last few years and now brings awareness to the perils of the power of social media, A.I., and the digital revolution that has taken the world by storm. He describes the sense of optimism that many tech leaders embodied as they believed the “God-like” power of these new forms and technological advancements would propel humanity into something like utopia by connecting, educating, and unifying the world. The last few years of extraordinary leaps in A.I. have only furthered this kind of rhetoric. Of course, these hopes have certainly been humbled considering social media and the digital revolution’s impact. People are more than ever disconnected from personal relationships, misguided by competing information, and fragmented through political and cultural wars. The assumed possession of digital omnipotence has turned out to be an untamable beast that could culturally spiral the West. 

Harris’s analysis of the problem teaches an important lesson. He concludes, “How do we wield the power of gods without the love, prudence, and wisdom of gods?” In other words, even if humanity were to possess one attribute of God, particularly divine power, this does not make man divine. The attribute of God’s omnipotence without attributes like divine wisdom is a monster, yet it is the monster man aspires to be. To truly be God is to exist as all-powerful and all-wise. In fact, to be God is to exist as all his attributes. Man has a small and distorted grasp of what he thinks it is like to be God, and this leads him to aspire not to be like the true, incomprehensible God, but to run after an idol god that is just a creaturely conception. 

Divine simplicity destroys our fantasies hypothesizing that if we possessed one of God’s attributes, then we would be like God. We can neither become nor fully conceive of being the eternal, independent, immutable, omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, all-wise, all-loving, holy, good, and just God. All these attributes (and more) are one in him, and he is all these attributes at once. THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS TO BE GOD. Our lusting after divinity is so sinful that even in the setup we lust after a small, self-conceived, self-created shell of a god. Our fantasies are of false gods. Why not just worship the God who is?