The Attributes of God: The List and the Debate Over Each

The attributes of God are the perfections Scripture and the church ascribe to Him: in classical theism, aseity, simplicity, eternity, immutability, impassibility, infinity, omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence, together with His goodness, holiness and love. Every one of them is disputed today, and most of the disputes turn on a single worry: that a God this complete leaves no room for our free will or for a real relationship with Him. Below we set out the list first, then each attribute in turn, with who argues what and how each is held without loss to us.

Key takeaways

• The attributes of God form an ordered list. Aseity is the root, simplicity follows, and eternity, immutability and impassibility follow from simplicity.
• Every modern objection asks one question: does a timeless, changeless, simple God crowd out our freedom or a real relationship with Him?
• Both sides see something true. The theistic personalist reads God from our finite frame; the classical theist reads Him from His own.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps both points, where William Lane Craig's hybrid view and open theism each give up part of the classical list.
• Each attribute has its own deep dive and its own volume, linked in its section below.

What are the attributes of God?

An attribute of God is a perfection truly predicated of Him. In the classical tradition it is not a part He is assembled from or a property He happens to have, but what He is, known by us under many names. "God is just" and "God is merciful" are both true, and both say something real about one God.

Two sources build the list. The first is Scripture's own self-disclosure: God names Himself "I AM WHO I AM" (Exodus 3:14), declares that He does not change, and is praised as holy, almighty and present everywhere. The second is the method now called perfect being theology, which reasons from the conviction that God is maximally great. Anselm gave it its classic formula in the Proslogion: God is "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived" (ch. 2), and so "God is whatever it is better to be than not to be" (ch. 5). Anselm's method, and what it can and cannot settle about freedom, is addressed in Book 1 of the Many Beings series, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma.

The divine attributes are best read in the order of their derivation. Aseity, God's existence of Himself, is the root, because it is the one quality whose contradiction defines every creature: we depend, and He does not. A being that depends on nothing can have no parts, which is simplicity. A being without parts has no succession of states and nothing to gain or lose, which gives eternity, immutability and impassibility. The "omni" attributes then describe how this God stands to all He has made. The full field these questions belong to is the doctrine of God, or theology proper.

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The attributes of God list, with one-line definitions

There is no fixed number. According to the standard summary, John of Damascus "listed eighteen attributes for God," while Aquinas "focused on a shorter list of just eight attributes, namely simplicity, perfection, goodness, incomprehensibility, omnipresence, immutability, eternity and oneness." The Westminster Confession (2.1) compresses the Reformed version into one sentence: "There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty" (CCEL).

The attributes of God list below follows the order of derivation rather than the alphabet.

The last column uses a classification many Reformed theologians favour: "the communicable attributes (those that human beings can also have)" and "the incommunicable attributes (those that belong to God alone)." Placing power and knowledge is contested, since Scripture gives us both and yet nothing like His. The split has its own section below, and the communicable attributes have a page of their own.

The position this page argues is stated in one place; read the statement.

Why are the attributes of God disputed today?

The attributes of God are disputed because two families of theology now read them in opposite directions. Classical theism holds the full list above. Theistic personalism, a term "popularized by the British philosopher Brian Davies," names "a family of views in the philosophy of religion that construe God as a personal agent" (Wikipedia), with His personhood understood in nearly the same sense as ours. Both positions are set side by side on the theistic personalism page, and whether God is a person has its own treatment.

The personalist case deserves its full strength. The God of Scripture hears, answers, relents and grieves. A God who cannot be affected by anything we do seems unable to love us in any sense we recognise, and a God who knows our whole lives in a timeless instant seems to leave nothing for us to decide. The recurring question is whether the classical attributes of God leave room for our free will or for a relationship that is real on both sides.

The classical case is just as strong. A God who changes, depends or is composed of parts could be otherwise, needs something, and is therefore not the ground of everything else. If the price of relationship is a God who is less than God, the relationship has lost the One it was with.

The theistic personalist interprets God from the human finite frame, our temporal, sequential and contingent mode of existence, and from inside that frame the objections are strong. It does not seem to make sense that God knows all things in the eternal now, the nunc stans, and also engages with us in time; from where we stand those look mutually exclusive. The classical theist interprets the same God from God's own frame, and from there the attributes are simply what a self-existent being must be. If God has a frame of reference different in kind from ours, He can hold His own perceptual frame and ours at the same time, and the two descriptions stop competing.

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. One reality is known in two incommensurable ways: God knows it in a frame that is atemporal, simple and a se, and we know it in a frame that is sequential, composite and contingent, and God's frame contains and grounds ours. Treating a term as though it meant the same on both sides is the error FICT calls the Many Beings Fallacy. Where theistic personalism revises the attributes to keep the relationship, and Craig's hybrid view and open theism each surrender part of the list for the same reason, FICT keeps the whole list and locates the relationship's reality in each party's own frame.

Volume One lays the foundations for every section below, and it is yours to download.

Aseity: does God depend on anything?

Aseity is God's existence of Himself: He depends on nothing for His being, His life or His perfection, and everything else depends on Him. Paul preached it in Athens:

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else." (Acts 17:24–25, NIV)

The classical tradition from Augustine to Aquinas holds aseity without qualification. The live challenge comes from abstract objects. If numbers, propositions and properties exist necessarily and uncreated, then something besides God exists of itself and God's nature would seem to depend on properties He did not make. Some theists accept a version of that conclusion; Craig answers it by denying that abstract objects exist at all, a form of anti-realism. The full debate is on the aseity page.

The reader's difficulty is more personal. If God needs nothing, is creation pointless to Him, and is our love irrelevant? Aseity is what makes creation a gift rather than a transaction. God does not create to supply a lack; He creates from fullness, which is the question of why God created at all, and He creates from nothing, which is creatio ex nihilo. Our love adds nothing to God, and it is still received, because the One who receives it needs nothing from it.

Of all the attributes of God, aseity marks the whole difference between God and us, and Frame-Indexed Classical Theism holds it without the qualification the theistic Platonist allows or the dependence process theism builds in. The opening proof of the Many Beings series uses it as the test for a difference in kind: one nature exists of itself and the other exists from another, and those two qualities contradict each other. A God who differs from us in kind will perceive differently from us, and that is where every later section begins. The classical argument from contingency reaches the same being from the other side, reasoning from dependent things to the One who depends on nothing.

Volume One sets out the difference in kind step by step, and the download is free.

Divine simplicity: does God have parts?

Divine simplicity is the doctrine that God has no parts of any kind: no physical parts, and none of the metaphysical compositions creatures have, such as essence with existence or substance with attribute. Augustine said God is what He has; Aquinas called God ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) confessed the divine essence to be absolutely simple, and the Westminster Confession says God is "without body, parts, or passions." The fuller treatment is on the divine simplicity page.

The doctrine is under heavier attack than any of the other attributes of God. Alvin Plantinga's Does God Have a Nature? (1980) argued that if God is identical with each of His properties, the doctrine "seems flatly incompatible with the obvious fact that God has several properties," and worse, "If God is a property, then he isn't a person but a mere abstract object" (as quoted in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). R. T. Mullins pressed a second objection in "Simply Impossible" (Journal of Reformed Theology, 2013): if God is identical with His one act, and that act is the creating of this world, then a necessarily existing God yields a necessarily existing world. This is the modal collapse argument.

Craig declines strict simplicity for his own reasons: it seems to make God incomprehensible, and Scripture reveals God as this and not that. The Eastern church takes a different route again, distinguishing God's essence from His energies, which has its own page on the essence and energies of God.

The difficulty is this: if God is one act, did He have to create us, and are His justice and His mercy secretly the same thing?

The first half has a formal answer. Necessity attaches to God's act taken in itself. "The act of creating this world" names that act by way of its effect, and necessity does not pass through a description of that kind; Christopher Tomaszewski showed the inference invalid in Analysis (2019). The difference between a world God creates and one He does not lies in the created term, not in God. Creation is free, and so is the creature God freely sustains.

The second half is where the personalist sees something true. Plantinga and Mullins are right that a God who was an abstract property could not be the God of Scripture. The classical theist is right that a God composed of parts depends on them and is not a se. Both are correct, and both have assumed that the many names we use for God must map onto many items in Him.

Book 4 of the series replies with an old picture given a new mechanism. White light passed through a prism arrives as many colours, and the colours are real. God's one simple act, received by a finite mind, arrives as many perfections, and the perfections are true knowledge of Him. The plurality belongs to the receiving frame; the unity belongs to God's. "The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God … Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished" (Exodus 34:6–7) names one God under distinct perfections, and the concepts stay distinct while the God they name is one. Where Plantinga and Mullins give up simplicity to keep the category of property, and Craig gives it up to keep God comprehensible, FICT indexes the category and keeps the doctrine. God is not an inert property but pure act, living, knowing and loving, and Volume Four derives strict simplicity as a result.

The simplicity chapter and its derivation are in Volume Four.

Eternity: is God outside of time?

Eternity, in the classical sense, is God's possession of His whole life at once, without past or future. Boethius gave the definition the tradition still uses, eternity as "the complete, simultaneous and perfect possession of everlasting life" (as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives it). Augustine placed time inside creation rather than God inside time, asking, "What times existed which were not brought into being by you?" Aquinas taught that all of time is present at once to God's eternal gaze (Summa Theologiae I, q. 10). Scripture agrees: "Before the mountains were born … from everlasting to everlasting you are God" (Psalm 90:2, NIV). The medievals called this the nunc stans, the standing now.

Is God outside of time? This is now the most contested of the divine attributes, and the positions are distinct. The classical view, held by Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas, says God is timeless. William Lane Craig holds a hybrid: in his words, "God ought to be considered as timeless sans creation and temporal subsequent to creation," because "if God sustains real relations with the world, the co-existence of God and the world imply that God is temporal subsequent to the moment of creation" ("God, Time and Eternity," Reasonable Faith). R. T. Mullins, in The End of the Timeless God (2016), argues that a timeless God cannot survive creation, the incarnation, or genuine relationship, and that the doctrine should be retired. Open theists hold that the future is genuinely open and that God lives through it with us. Process theism places God in succession, receiving each moment of the world into His own life.

Grant Craig's intuitions before anything is said against them. He insists on two truths at once: that God is in Himself eternal and self-sufficient, and that Scripture presents His engagement with us as relational and responsive. He is right that a relationship real for the creature and a polite fiction for God would be unworthy of the biblical portrait. He is also right that a knower who could not know what is happening now would seem to be missing something.

The overreach lies in one assumption: that a real relation must be held in the same mode on both sides. Grant it, and since we cannot rise to timelessness, God must come down into time. Much of modern theology has made exactly that trade, giving up God's eternity to secure the relationship. Volume Three refuses the trade. Offered a perfection or a relationship, or both, it takes both: eternity kept in its truest form, and a God who relates genuinely to His creatures.

Here is the resolution Frame-Indexed Classical Theism offers, where Craig's hybrid and open theism each bring God into time to keep the relationship. From God's own frame, the whole of created time is apprehended in a single act, as a finished whole that He sustains from beyond it. From our frame, time genuinely flows: the past is fixed, the future is open, and the present is real. That experience is not an illusion; it is the true and necessary mode in which a finite nature takes in reality. God holds His frame and ours at once, because His frame is not a rival position in the same series but the frame that contains every position in it. What Craig placed inside God's relational life, the sequence, is real, and it belongs to the receiving frame. Supply that index, and Craig's own two-tier picture completes itself: the changeless core stays changeless, the sequence stays real, and eternity is no longer the price of relationship.

Our freedom is untouched for the same reason. God's eternal knowledge of a free act is grounded in the act, not the act in the knowledge. A perfectly calibrated thermometer cannot read the room wrongly, yet the heat causes the reading and not the reverse; God's knowing is not literally an effect of the world, since He is a se, but the direction of truth is the same. Certainty in God's frame never becomes necessity in ours. That is the core of the reply to theological fatalism, and the question of whether God can know the future without fixing it is taken further on its own page.

Volume Three works through God and time chapter by chapter; see the book.

Immutability: can God change?

Immutability is the attribute by which God cannot change. It is not the stillness of a stone. God is pure act, a life already perfectly full, with no unrealised potential to actualise and nothing that change could add or remove. Scripture says as much: "I the LORD do not change. So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed" (Malachi 3:6), and God is "the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows" (James 1:17).

The positions divide sharply. Aquinas and the classical tradition hold strong immutability. Craig holds that God is changeless in His existence, character and purposes while His relational life changes as the world does. Open theists, whose movement dates to The Openness of God (1994) by Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, hold that God "sometimes changes His mind as a result of dialogue with His people" (IEP); the movement is surveyed on the open theism page. Process theism goes furthest: God's "consequent nature" is "the world's influence on God" (SEP), so that God grows with the world.

The difficulty comes from Scripture's own narrative. God relents from disaster after Moses intercedes, and spares Nineveh when it repents. If God cannot change, does prayer do anything? The question has its own page: does God change His mind?

The dispute lives in a different word. Believers and critics largely agree on what immutability means. What they disagree about is interaction. For God, interaction is one eternal act that upholds the whole of every exchange at once; He does not wait for our next word in order to frame His reply. For us, interaction is a series of exchanges strung out in time: we speak, we wait, we are answered. Both are real, and neither must be forced into the other's mode.

The classical tradition has a precise tool here, which the position argued on this page grounds rather than replaces. A Cambridge change is a change in what can be said of a thing without a change in the thing: Socrates "becomes shorter" when Theaetetus grows, though nothing in Socrates alters. When the world begins, God "becomes Creator"; when a sinner repents, God "becomes reconciled" to her. Aquinas taught that such relations are real in the creature and relations of reason in God.

One guardrail is essential. The creature's becoming is fully real: the world really begins, and the sinner really is reconciled at her conversion. What is mistaken is only the transfer, reading the creature's real becoming as a change in God. "God became Creator" is true as indexed to our frame; "God acquired nothing new" is true as indexed to His.

Prayer, then, is a real cause. The believer's repentance and prayer fix real content in the relationship: had she not returned, the story would eternally have been a different story, because God's knowledge tracks what she freely does. Yet nothing in God becomes, because He knows and sustains the whole in one act. Where open theism keeps the relationship by giving up immutability, and strict classical theism has sometimes kept immutability by thinning the relationship to appearance, FICT keeps both, because the change is located in the creature and the creature's change is real.

Volume Four is built around exactly this question; read about it.

Impassibility: does God feel or suffer?

Impassibility is the attribute by which God is not acted upon so as to undergo passions: states caused in Him from outside, rising and subsiding over time. The Westminster Confession says God is "without body, parts, or passions," and the classical tradition held that God's love and joy are real without being passions.

The modern church has largely turned the other way. Richard Bauckham, surveying the shift in Themelios, observed that "The idea that God cannot suffer … has in this century been progressively abandoned," and recalled Dietrich Bonhoeffer's line from a Nazi prison cell, "only the suffering God can help." Jürgen Moltmann's theology of the cross became the best-known modern statement of the suffering God. Open theists describe a God who can be disappointed in His hopes and who grieves with the victims of our sins (IEP), and process theism builds the world's influence into God's nature.

The scriptural pressure is real. "The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:6). In Hosea the divine feeling reaches its most unguarded expression:

"How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboiim? My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused. I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim. For I am God, and not man" (Hosea 11:8–9, NIV)

Notice what the impassibilist and the passibilist share. Both assume that creaturely feeling, suffered from outside and unfolding in sequence, is what emotion is. The strict impassibilist, rightly refusing to put passion in God, denies Him emotion; the passibilist, rightly refusing to empty the biblical portrait, puts passion in Him. Both have read God's affections in our frame's mode.

Index the mode, as Frame-Indexed Classical Theism does where strict impassibilism and the passibilism of open and process theism do not, and both are right. In God's frame His affections are real and held whole: the full measure of His love, His compassion, His holy opposition to evil and His delight, possessed at once in the one act that He is. In our frame that one fullness meets us as successive expressions, wrath where it meets unrepentant sin, mercy where it meets repentance, grief where it meets the ruin of what He loves. Hosea gives the reason itself. The compassion holds steady because "I am God, and not man"; a human heart in that place would have let its anger run its course. He does not feel less than we do; He feels without remainder.

So does our sin grieve God? Yes, truly, as real affection and not as a wound that changes Him. Where the Son does suffer, He suffers in the human nature He assumed, which is the question of whether God can suffer at the cross. The general question of divine feeling is on the page asking whether God has emotions.

The chapter on divine emotion sits in Volume Four; explore the volume.

Omnipotence: can God do anything?

Omnipotence is God's power to do all that is possible. Aquinas defined it carefully: "God can do all things that are possible; and for this reason He is said to be omnipotent," and "whatever implies contradiction does not come within the scope of divine omnipotence, because it cannot have the aspect of possibility." His conclusion still settles the famous puzzles: "Hence it is better to say that such things cannot be done, than that God cannot do them" (Summa Theologiae I, q. 25, a. 3, New Advent). Jeremiah says it in worship: "Ah, Sovereign LORD, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you" (Jeremiah 32:17). The omnipotence of God, including the stone paradox, has its own page.

The paradox of the stone asks whether God can make a stone too heavy for Him to lift. Aquinas's answer applies: "a stone an omnipotent being cannot lift" describes nothing, as "a square circle" describes nothing, and failing to do nothing is no failure of power. The deeper disputes are about how power relates to freedom. Process theism holds that "God acts by persuasion rather than by coercion" (SEP), giving up coercive power altogether. Open theism keeps God's power but holds that He limits its use to leave the future open. The Reformed tradition holds exhaustive sovereignty over all that comes to pass.

For the reader the question is sharper: if God's power governs everything, is there room for any creature to do anything of its own?

Book 1 of the series, arguing Frame-Indexed Classical Theism, dissolves the tension by indexing "sovereignty" and "freedom" to the two frames. Absolute sovereignty, in God's frame, is His perfect governance of all reality according to His will. Finite freedom, in ours, is the genuine capacity to choose among real alternatives within the bounds our nature allows. The two are different in kind, so the exercise of one does not subtract from the other. More than that, God's power over our frame is exercised by sustaining our finite, undetermined choices in being, not by overriding them. Omnipotence is the ground of our freedom, not its rival. That is why Volume One can affirm full libertarian free will and exhaustive sovereignty together, where theological determinism keeps the second at the cost of the first and open theism keeps the first at the cost of the second.

Volume One makes the full case for freedom under sovereignty, and it costs nothing; download it.

Omniscience: does God know everything, including the future?

Omniscience is God's knowledge of all that is true, the future included. "Great is our Lord and mighty in power; his understanding has no limit" (Psalm 147:5). The classical tradition, following Boethius and Aquinas, holds that God knows past, present and future in one timeless act. The full argument, including the Cantorian objection that there is no set of all truths, is on the page asking whether God is omniscient.

Three rival accounts press on the classical one. Molinism adds middle knowledge, God's knowledge of what every possible creature would freely do in every circumstance, to secure both providence and freedom. Open theism holds that God knows "all the possible ways the world might go" but not "the one way the world will go" (IEP), because free choices not yet made are not yet there to be known. And a third argument, pressed by Norman Kretzmann and taken up by Craig, says a perfect knower must know what time it is now; since that keeps changing, a knower who always knows it must change too, and so cannot be timeless.

The last argument is the sharpest, and its force lies in one word. "Now" is an indexical, like "here" and "I": its content is fixed by the position of whoever uses it. To know what time it is now, in the sense the argument requires, is to occupy a moment and register that one occupies it. That is a demand that God know as we know, from inside the sequence. From His own frame God knows the complete content of every moment, including its presentness to the one living it, and He sustains the creature in the very living of it. From ours, knowledge updates: we learn that the deadline has passed. The creature's "it is now" is real knowledge, and it is knowledge in the occupant's register.

David celebrates this kind of knowing:

"O LORD, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O LORD." (Psalm 139:1–4, NIV)

He does not say God keeps pace with him; he says God knows the word before it reaches the tongue. As for freedom, the reply given under eternity holds here: God's knowledge of a free act is grounded in the act, so it never fixes what it knows. Where Molinism adds a layer of knowledge and open theism subtracts one, FICT needs neither.

Volume Three treats foreknowledge and future contingents in full; learn more.

Omnipresence: is God everywhere?

Omnipresence is God's presence to all things. The psalmist could find no place outside it:

"Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast." (Psalm 139:7–10, NIV)

"Do not I fill heaven and earth?" declares the LORD (Jeremiah 23:24). Aquinas explained how, without making God a vast body spread through space. God is in all things "as an agent is present to that upon which it works," and in three ways: "by His power, inasmuch as all things are subject to His power"; "by His presence in all things, as all things are bare and open to His eyes"; and "by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being" (Summa Theologiae I, q. 8, New Advent). The omnipresence of God page compares this non-spatial view with spatial and panentheist alternatives.

The relational question returns. If God is equally present everywhere, what can it mean to draw near to Him? James commands it: "Come near to God and he will come near to you" (James 4:8). And what can it mean for God to hide His face? And why does He so often seem absent, the question of divine hiddenness?

Index the term and both truths stand. In God's frame His presence is one undivided, sustaining act, the same at every point because it is the cause of every point: "For in him we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28). In our frame presence is experienced as nearness and distance, approach and return, and that experience is not a mistake. The drawing near James promises really happens, on our side, as a change in us; and God's side of it was never absent, because the One we approach was holding us in being before we moved.

Volume One explains why our experience of God is real without being the measure of Him; get it free.

Infinity: in what sense is God unlimited?

Infinity, said of God, is not an enormous quantity; of all the attributes of God, it is the one most often misread as a size. Aquinas distinguished the infinity of quantity, which belongs to matter and multitude and is always potential, from the infinity of God, the unlimitedness of subsisting being itself (Summa Theologiae I, q. 7). Volume Five of the series develops the distinction: God's infinity is actual, a positive fullness of being that no limit touches; ours is potential, the endlessness of an operation, so that after every number there is another and no counting ever arrives at all. The two differ in kind, as act differs from potency.

Mullins presses the objection that the classical God of pure act cannot be coherently conceived, since we cannot form a working idea of a life complete without succession. The strain he describes is real. It is also what a difference in kind predicts: a finite mind meeting an actual infinite will find it exceeds every concept that mind can complete. And because a being that exists of itself is bounded by nothing outside it, there can be only one actual infinite, which is God. Unintelligibility from inside our frame is what the difference in kind predicts, not evidence of incoherence in God.

Volume Five works out the mathematics of infinity; follow its progress.

Which attributes of God do we share?

Goodness, holiness and love are the attributes of God most often called communicable. "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isaiah 6:3). "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love" (1 John 4:8). We are called to be holy and to love, and we can, in our own measure.

Power, knowledge and wisdom sit on the border. We have each of them truly, yet so far below God's that some theologians list them as incommunicable. The psalmist praises God as "mighty in power" and says "his understanding has no limit" (Psalm 147:5): power and understanding are words we also use of ourselves, and the praise lies in the absence of the limit. The table above places them as shared in finite measure.

The communicable and incommunicable split among the attributes of God is useful, and there is a reason it holds. On this account every attribute of God exists in an absolute mode in Him. Some have a finite counterpart we live in: we love, choose, know and act, finitely. Others have no finite instance anywhere in our experience. We can define immutability, reason about it and confess it of God, but nothing we ever perceive is immutable, since whatever we watch long enough, we watch change. Those are the incommunicable attributes: concepts our minds can hold and our perception can never find. The classification therefore marks a real boundary, the line between what a creature can be in finite measure and what a creature can only confess.

The same indexing governs goodness. Volume Two argues that "good" and "evil" are frame-indexed in the same way, so that evil is real and finite in our frame and never impugns the absolute goodness of God. That is the deepest form of the question of why God allows suffering.

Volume Two takes up goodness and evil in full; see Volume Two.

How do the positions on God's attributes compare?

Frequently asked questions

How many attributes does God have?

There is no fixed number of attributes of God. John of Damascus listed eighteen, Aquinas focused on eight, and the Westminster Confession names about a dozen in a single sentence. Popular lists run from seven to fifteen or more, often mixing attributes with names and titles. The order is more telling than the count: aseity at the root, simplicity from aseity, and eternity, immutability and impassibility from simplicity, with the "omni" attributes describing how this God stands to what He has made.

Is God outside of time?

On the classical view, held by Augustine, Boethius and Aquinas, yes: God possesses His whole life at once, with no past to lose and no future to wait for. William Lane Craig holds that God is timeless without creation and temporal since creation, because a real relation to a temporal world seems to require it. FICT holds that God is timeless in His own frame while time genuinely flows in ours, and that He holds both frames at once without entering the sequence.

If God knows the future, do I have free will?

Yes. God's knowledge of your free choice is grounded in the choice, as an accurate reading is grounded in what it reads, so His knowing it never forces it. Certainty in God's frame does not become necessity in yours. Volume One argues that full libertarian freedom and exhaustive divine sovereignty are both true, each indexed to its own frame, and it is free.

What is the difference between classical theism and theistic personalism?

Classical theism holds God to be simple, timeless, immutable and impassible, the ground of being rather than one being among others. Theistic personalism treats God as a personal agent in nearly the sense we are persons, and often revises the classical attributes of God to keep His relationship with us. FICT holds that the first describes God as He is in His own frame and the second describes how we meet Him in ours.

What are the communicable and incommunicable attributes of God?

Communicable attributes, such as goodness, holiness, love and wisdom, are perfections creatures can share in finite measure. Incommunicable attributes, such as aseity, simplicity, eternity and immutability, belong to God alone: we can define them and confess them, but we never meet an instance of them in creation. The distinction is common in Reformed theology, and where power and knowledge fall is contested.

Where to go from here

Each modern objection on this page proves something true about creatures. A real relation, for us, does require change; knowing "now," for us, does require standing in time; feeling, for us, is something that happens to a heart. None of those truths was ever about God. The classical attributes of God were never in competition with our freedom or with a real relationship; they only looked that way when our frame was made the measure of His. The pages linked in each section take every attribute further, and Volumes Three, Four and Five hold the full arguments for eternity, immutability and infinity.

Start where the series starts: Volume One, Resolving the Free Will Dilemma, is free.