AW Tozer opens his book, The Knowledge of the Holy, with a sentence that has never lost its edge: what comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. This is no pious exaggeration. Everything else we believe sits downstream of it. How we pray, how we read our Bible, how we face a diagnosis or a bereavement—all of it’s shaped by the God we think we’re talking to.

Here’s the difficulty. Most of us assemble a picture of God the way we assemble a picture of someone we’ve never met: from scattered impressions, a few favourite verses, and a surprising amount of quiet projection. The result is a God who is big but blurry, kind but unpredictable, powerful but somehow on the back foot.

Scripture refuses to leave us there. It tells us who God is, in His own words, with startling precision. The church has gathered that teaching under one heading: the attributes of God. This article explains what an attribute actually is, how the church has sorted these attributes into two families—communicable and incommunicable—and why that old distinction is still worth our attention.

What an Attribute Is—and What It Isn’t

The English word “attribute” carries a small danger. In everyday speech, an attribute is something a person has. My neighbour has patience. Tomorrow he may have less of it. Transfer that habit of speech to God and we quietly turn Him into a container holding a set of qualities, some fuller than others.

Classical Christian theology resists this. Francis Turretin, the 17th-century Genevan theologian, preferred the word perfections. Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch dogmatician, complained that “attribute” hints at something bolted on to God from outside. These aren’t add-ons. They’re God Himself, described from different angles, because our small minds cannot take Him in at a single glance.

Think of sunlight through a prism. The light is one; the prism spreads it into colours so the eye can see what was there all along. The attributes aren’t 20 separate pieces of God. They’re the one undivided God, shown to us in portions we can carry.

That single grammatical observation does more work than anything else in this article. So let’s hold on to it.

Truly Known, Never Fully Comprehended

Can a creature know God at all? Yes—but the knowing has a particular shape.

Franciscus Junius, a 16th-century theologian at Leiden, drew a distinction that has served the church ever since. God’s knowledge of Himself is archetypal: original, complete, immediate. Our knowledge of God is ectypal: a copy, faithful to the original but cut down to creaturely size, and possessed only because He chose to hand it over to us.

John Calvin said it more homely. In the Institutes he wrote God lisps with us the way nurses do with infants. So when Scripture speaks of God’s arm, His eyes, His nostrils, His relenting, it’s not filing an anatomical report or an update on His mood swings. It’s God using baby-talk so we can follow Him.

Cornelius Van Til, the 20th-century apologist, turned this into a working rule: our knowledge of God is analogical. It truly corresponds to what God is, but it never stands on the same level as His own self-knowledge. There’s a ditch on either side of that road. In one lies the assumption that God is simply a larger, tidier version of ourselves. In the other lies the despair which says God is unknowable, so nothing we say of Him ever means much. Scripture walks between: real knowledge, never exhaustive knowledge.

The Incommunicable Attributes

Now the traditional division. The incommunicable attributes are those perfections in which the creature has no share and of which the creature offers no parallel. They draw the line between the Creator and everything else. Louis Berkhof called them the attributes of God’s absolute being: God as He is in Himself, apart from any creature at all.

• Aseity, or self-existence. God is a se—”from Himself”. He has no cause, no source, no supplier. I AM WHO I AM, He tells Moses (Exodus 3:14). For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself (John 5:26). Paul tells Athenians God isn’t served by human hands as though he needed anything (Acts 17:25). Every other thing that exists is on loan. God isn’t.
• Simplicity. This is the most neglected item on the list and quietly the most load-bearing. Simplicity doesn’t mean God is easy to understand. It means God isn’t assembled. He has no parts, no ingredients, no proportions. His justice isn’t a separate department from His love, competing for floor space. Scripture doesn’t say God has love; it says God is love (1 John 4:8). Deuteronomy 6:4 confesses Him as one—not merely one in number, but one in being.
• Immutability. For I the LORD do not change (Malachi 3:6). With whom there is no variation or shadow due to change (James 1:17). This isn’t the immobility of a statue. Nothing in Him was ever waiting to be developed, nothing was left to become.
• Eternity. God is infinity with respect to time. From everlasting to everlasting you are God (Psalm 90:2). Isaiah calls Him the one who inhabits eternity (Isaiah 57:15). Boethius defined eternity as the complete and simultaneous possession of endless life. God doesn’t experience His existence as a queue of moments the way we do.
• Immensity and omnipresence. God is infinity with respect to space. Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you (1 Kings 8:27). Immensity means God is not held by space at all. Omnipresence means that within space he is wholly present at every point—not spread thin, not partly here and partly there (Psalm 139:7-10; Jeremiah 23:23-24).
• Unity. There’s one God, and that one God is undivided within Himself. Israel and the church confess Deuteronomy 6:4 alike.

Notice what these six have in common. None of them can be scaled down and handed to a creature. There’s no small aseity, no junior eternity, no partial simplicity. To possess any of them in any degree would have to be God.

The Communicable Attributes

The communicable attributes are those of which the creature, made in God’s image, carries a faint, finite echo. We can be truthful, wise, just, loving. We can never be infinitely, eternally and unchangeably so. The echo is real; it’s also very quiet.

A few of these deserve a closer look.

• Omniscience. God knows all that is and all that could be. Older theologians distinguished His necessary knowledge—of everything possible—from His free knowledge of everything actual, which rests on His own decree. Confessional theology has consistently rejected the idea of a “middle knowledge” by which God learns what free creatures would do independently of Him. That scheme makes God’s knowledge depend on the creature, and dependence is exactly what aseity rules out.
• Goodness, and its branches. Grace is goodness shown to those who deserve the opposite (Ephesians 2:8-9). Mercy is goodness shown to the miserable (Ephesians 2:4). Patience is goodness that holds back deserved judgement and gives room to repent (Romans 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9). Love is the most familiar and the most misread: God’s love didn’t begin with us. The Father loved the Son before the foundation of the world (John 17:24).
• Holiness. Isaiah hears it sung three times over (Isaiah 6:3), the only attribute Scripture raises to that pitch. RC Sproul wrote a whole book to observe the seraphim don’t cry “love, love, love”. Holiness means both moral purity and sheer otherness—God isn’t a bigger us.
• Justice and wrath. Wrath isn’t divine temper. It’s settled, holy, judicial opposition to evil (Romans 1:18; Nahum 1:2-3). A God who only shrugs at cruelty wouldn’t be more loving; He’d be less good.
• Sovereignty and will. Who works all things according to the counsel of his will (Ephesians 1:11). The tradition distinguishes God’s decretive will—His hidden purpose, which always comes to pass—from His preceptive will, the commands He reveals and which we break daily. Deuteronomy 29:29 is the hinge: the secret things belong to God, the revealed things to us.
• Blessedness. God is infinitely happy in Himself. Paul twice calls Him the blessed God (1 Timothy 1:11; 6:15). He didn’t create out of loneliness or need. He created out of fullness.

Where the Old Division Strains

It would be dishonest to present this two-part scheme as though it were airtight. The best writers never did. Herman Bavinck kept the division but warned it can mislead in both directions at once.

So the division teaches scaffolding, not a fence running through the nature of God. Other schemes serve just as well: absolute and relative, negative and positive, greatness and goodness. We may use whichever helps us see. But we’re never to mistake the map for the country.

“Without Body, Parts, or Passions”

The Westminster Confession describes God as without body, parts, or passions (2.1). That last word provokes more resistance than anything else in this article, so it’s worth slowing down.

Impassibility doesn’t mean God is cold, distant or unfeeling. It means God is never acted upon from outside. Nothing catches Him off guard. Nothing knocks Him sideways. His love for His people isn’t a mood that rises and falls with their performance this week. When Scripture speaks of God grieving, or burning with anger, or delighting in His people, the language is true and it’s not empty—but it describes God’s unchanging disposition as it meets changing creaturely conditions, not a change inside God Himself.

Consider a block of ice moved into sunlight. It melts. The change is entirely in the ice; the sun didn’t decide to become hotter. In something along those lines, the sinner who repents genuinely moves from wrath to favour, while God remains what He always was.

The alternative is bleaker than it sounds. Jürgen Moltmann and the process theologians offer a God who suffers and changes along with us, and many readers find that moving. Even appealing. But a God who can be destabilised by His creatures might one day be defeated by them, and His promises are then only as secure as His current frame of mind. James Dolezal has coined the phrase “theistic mutualism” for the softer version of this drift now common in evangelical writing. The comfort of an unchanging God isn’t that He is unmoved by us, but that His commitment to us cannot be moved by anything at all.

One Essence, Three Persons

Everything said so far belongs to the one divine essence—which Father, Son and Holy Spirit possess. Wholly and equally. This needs saying plainly, because a common instinct divides the attributes among the persons: the Father is the powerful one, the Son the loving one, the Spirit the mysterious one.

That instinct is wrong. The Son isn’t any less eternal than the Father; the Spirit isn’t less omniscient than the Son. Scripture does appropriate particular works to particular persons for our understanding—creation to the Father, redemption to the Son, sanctification to the Spirit—but appropriation isn’t a division of labour.

Where the Attributes Meet: The Cross

If we want to see the attributes of God together, in one place, without any of them being softened to make room for the others, look at Golgotha.

Every attempt to ease the tension between God’s justice and His mercy by trimming one of them fails. If God simply overlooks sin, His justice is a fiction. If He punishes without remedy, His mercy is a rumour. Paul’s answer in Romans 3:25-26 is that at the cross God demonstrates His righteousness so He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Justice isn’t waived; it’s satisfied. Mercy isn’t sentimental; it’s costly. Wisdom devises what no creature could have imagined. Love goes to the grave and comes back.

This is also why the attributes aren’t finally an abstract topic. Hebrews 1:3 calls the Son the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. In Christ, Paul writes, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 2:9). The doctrine of God isn’t a preface to the gospel. It’s the gospel, seen from its source.

What Changes on Monday Morning

• Prayer. We’re not lobbying a moody sovereign. We’re addressing a Father whose disposition towards us was settled before the world began.
• Suffering. An unchanging God isn’t indifferent to our pain. He simply cannot be blown off course by it, and His promise will still be standing when our feelings aren’t.
• Assurance. If God’s love for us were a mood, it could cool. Because it’s His own unchanging nature turned towards us in Christ, it cannot.
• Worship. The right response to all this isn’t a completed checklist but a quieter voice, as Paul ends his own long argument: Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! (Romans 11:33).

Know Him truly. Do not expect to finish.

Related Reads

• The Nature of God in Christian Doctrine: Attributes of Perfection
• Can We Really Know God? Understanding Divine Incomprehensibility
• Can God ‘Feel’? Harmonising Impassibility with Divine Emotion
• Near Yet Far: How Can God Be Both Transcendent and Immanent?
• The Terror of Meeting God: What Isaiah 6 Reveals About Divine Holiness
• The Names of God and What Each One Really Means