¶1At some point, almost every thoughtful person has this thought. If God made the world, then who made God? Where does God come from? You know, what is God doing out there? And Christianity has this fascinating answer, this intriguing idea that God is self-existent.
¶2God doesn't derive from anything external to himself. He simply is. You might say that God is from himself. And in Christian theology, we call this divine aseity. This doctrine is absolutely fascinating.
¶3It takes us towards the very edge of reality. My hope is that as we're thinking about this, it will draw us toward worship. And just give you this sense in your heart, which is This is always happens with theology. Your words fall a little bit short of what they're trying to do. But hopefully, it'll give you a sense in your heart of the majesty of God, the weightiness of God, the lordship of God.
¶4And this is so foundational theologically. This doctrine of divine aseity. You might say that this is the cornerstone of the doctrine of God. Because when you think of the word God, G O D, capital G, among the first things that should come into your mind is that he is ah say, that is to say from himself. So, let's have a video breaking this down.
¶5First, we'll ask basically, what does this mean? And we'll especially look at some contemporary challenges to this doctrine. Second of all, we'll try to explain why this matters. And I want to draw from the Christian tradition to show two reasons why divine aseity is so essential for Christian theology. Thirdly, we'll ask, is this biblical?
¶6And then fourthly, we'll ask, how does this relate to the Nicene Creed? How does this relate to classical orthodox trinitarianism? And the goal is maybe in about 30 or minutes 30 minutes or so, one-stop shop video on divine aseity. I hope this will be meaningful for you. Let's dive in.
¶7What is divine aseity? So first, we we want to say that this is one aspect of what we often call classical theism, which emphasizes that God is a reality all to himself, and uh often will involve other doctrines like divine immutability, divine simplicity, divine eternity. Actually, I've already done a video on divine simplicity, and this video is sort of a companion video to that one focusing on aseity. Maybe I'll do other videos on these other aspects of classical theism as well. Aseity can be defined positively and negatively.
¶8So, positively, we can say that aseity means God is self-existent, or he is from [snorts] himself. Negatively, it means that God is independent of everything else. And traditionally, this doctrine has to do not just with God's being or his existence, but with everything that he is. So, if you think of this great assertion by Anselm of Canterbury back in the Middle Ages, this gets at it in a nutshell. God is through himself and from himself whatever he is.
¶9So, the word whatever is very key there. All of God's attributes are ase, or from himself. And so, you know, for example, there's no power or knowledge or happiness floating around there somewhere from which God derives his own power or knowledge or happiness. So, this means that uh this doctrine is not a technicality. This is deeply bound up with our every aspect of the whole quality of our relationship to God, with our own happiness, and our own desire for life and well-being.
¶10And this doctrine directs us basically in all things and always to God himself. Think [snorts] of how this is put in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and think of these particular nouns that are stacked up here. God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and of himself, and is alone in and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which he has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in, by, and unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. One of my goals in this video is constantly to think of pictures that can help us clear away from just generic abstractions, but help this land upon our hearts.
¶11So, think of that word fountain. We're going to come back to that again and again, especially as we go through John of Damascus. Now, divine aseity is a very Catholic doctrine, lowercase c Catholic, it's all over. Just like divine simplicity. Divine aseity has been affirmed all throughout the early and medieval church, both East and West, and then all throughout major branches of Christendom up until the modern era, including all the Protestant traditions.
¶12But, in the modern era, divine aseity has come under fresh scrutiny and some criticism. So, you often have uh this re-construal of the creator-creation relationship, so that God is in some way or another correlated with his creatures, and sometimes you have this idea that God's historical activity is constitutive of his eternal being. And the animating motivation here seems to be that we want to avoid making God distant and cold. We want a God that's warm and dynamic and with whom we can have a genuine relationship. We want to avoid a God who's this sort of ice cube up in the sky that you can't have any relationship to, this this perfection up there floating that you can't relate to or grab a hold of in any way.
¶13This seems to be the thinking. So, uh just to recount this a little bit, let me give two examples of this, two challenges in the modern era to aseity that can help us envision what is at stake with this doctrine before we go on to defend it and push against this these challenges. So, first, consider the famous German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. He uh brings up concerns related to the problem of evil and develops what what is often called a theology of the cross. And I've written about this at greater length elsewhere, but essentially Moltmann wants to identify God with the suffering of Jesus.
¶14And he pushes this so far so as to redefine God in light of the earthly suffering of Christ. Quote, "God is not another nature or a heavenly person or a moral authority but in fact an event." Now, the the uh I'll leave that quote there for a second. Note the quotation marks there in on the word God. That highlights already a little bit of how drastic this is going to go, though it's disputed a little bit. So, the event that Moltmann is referring to here is the suffering of Christ climactically on the cross.
¶15Think of the cry of dereliction. And the desire here is a God who identifies with us in our suffering. But then you ask, "Well, what kind of God is that really?" Because again, the quotation marks there under God, you're saying, "What is this?" If God is identified with this event, that raises questions of whether you have a personal God at all to whom we can pray. Does God exist outside that event, for example? Now, Moltmann is aware of this and he basically to to to collect to oversimplify a little bit, he basically says we don't have a personal God in the traditional understanding.
¶16This self-contained person in heaven. And he somewhat redefines the Trinity as the event of suffering love in which we can pray. Quote, "The Trinity is no self-contained group in heaven, but an eschatological process open for men on earth which stems from the cross of Christ." Now, on on just at face value, this seems to completely sweep off the table any conception of divine aseity because you've got God defined in relation to creaturely experience, particularly redemptive suffering. Now, in his later writings, Moltmann will still speak of the Trinity as pre-existing the cross, though being changed by it. So, we want to be careful here not to flatten out Moltmann as though he's altogether denying the personhood of God.
¶17It's a little trickier than that. If you want to good critical analysis of Moltmann, see Henry Blocher's article in this book, Engaging the Doctrine of God. But whether or not Moltmann collapses God totally into the event of the cross, into Jesus' suffering, he certainly makes God defined by that event. And this punctures divine aseity. Remember Moltmann's rejection of the adjective self-contained.
¶18Now, the impulse here, and in by the way, if you're already getting disturbed, I'm going to argue against this and I'm going to try to show that a robust account of divine aseity actually protects a genuine relation to God. But the impulse here is that we're trying You can tell the desire here, you know, Moltmann is responding to the problem of evil, and he's trying to to make God closer to us in some way, make God involved in our suffering in some way. And this is a common tendency or mentality in some strands of contemporary theology. You see a similar ethos in the Lutheran theologian Robert Jenson. So, Jenson is very eager to identify the real God with his revelatory activity in history, beyond all idols and abstractions.
¶19So, he wants to define God as whoever rescued us from Egypt, and then in the new covenant era for the church, whoever raised God from the dead. So, he wants to define He He doesn't want a God you just think of. He wants a God who's really acting in history, but he goes so far as to say that God is not merely recognized in his historical deeds, he's in some sense constituted by them. So, God can no longer be said strictly to exist from himself. Quote, it is the metaphysically fundamental fact of Israel's and the church's faith that its God is freely, but just so, truly self-identified by and so with contingent created temporal events.
¶20So, Jensen repeatedly clarifies this by saying P He puts his meaning this way, God is not merely identified by his historical deeds, he's identified with his historical deeds. And that really does puncture divine aseity in the way it's teased out. Because you have this situation where God's being is constituted by his work in creation and in particular by the incarnation of Jesus and his work on the cross. Quote, God is an event. History occurs not only in him, but as his being.
¶21God is what happens to Jesus in the world. God is the event of the world's transformation by Jesus's love, the same love to which the world owes its existence. So, this means that for Jensen, in some sense, God is developing. So, God's eternity and impassibility have to be re-construed then. Now, these two examples are prominent and maybe a little more radical expressions of a kind of change that happens in the doctrine of God, but they're representative of a common anxiety in the modern era.
¶22There's often this mindset that the God of classical theology is this frozen deity far off in heaven you can't have a genuine relationship with him. Again, I'll try to use word pictures. Think of an ice cube. God's an ice cube up in heaven. He's a perfect ice cube, but you can't you can't have any warm relation to him.
¶23And the impulse is we need a more dynamic account of God. So, we want to make creation, covenant, and above all, the cross of Jesus. Not just where God is revealed, but in some sense, God becomes who he is through these historical events. Now, in the second section of the video, I want to push against that, and I want to defend a classical account of divine aseity. Just starting softly here by just developing this a little bit from the tradition, showing a little bit of why this has been important to to basically all Christian theologians prior to the modern era.
¶24And basically, I want to say, yes, of course God's work in history is real and genuine, but it is not constitutive of his being. God remains fully self-contained even while relating genuinely to creation. And I want to take a look at two ways that divine aseity has been foundational in historic theology. First, it's utterly foundation to the very idea of God, to the doctrine of God. But second, and paradoxically here, it actually protects our having a meaningful relationship with God.
¶25It actually This is how you don't have an ice cube. So, this is how This is the better way actually to meet the the animating concern that seems to be on the table from some of these modern theologians. Put it like this, we need a God who doesn't need us. Let's develop both of these in turn. First, aseity is foundational to the very idea of God.
¶26If you lose divine aseity, you you you really lose God altogether. You don't just reduce God a little bit, mitigating him down from an A+ to an A- or something like that. Rather, if you lose divine aseity, you have something that you're relating to, you might call it G-O-D, but you're not talking about God at all. And we can start to see this in the Christian tradition by just developing a little bit of a sense of how foundational this doctrine has been. Let's start by looking at some of the older reformed dogmatic theologians.
¶27And one of the things you notice over and over is that divine aseity is often the first attribute or perfection of God that they will develop. And then frequently they'll argue that this attribute or perfection entails all the others. Now they often like the word independence rather than aseity for this very reason since the word independence uh implies not only God's self-existence but that all of his perfections derive from himself. So Herman Bavinck, for example, when he begins his treatment of the attributes of God, he begins by treating divine aseity. He says this is the first thing we come to know about God from scripture.
¶28And he says that all the other perfections of God flow out of this one. Quote, "In this aseity of God conceived not only as having being from himself but also the fullness of being all the other perfections are included." Similarly, Peter Van Mastricht, wonderful older reformed theologian, treated divine aseity first in his treatment of God. After explicating God's existence and the knowledge of God, he first goes here. And he uses the heading of independence. And he says, quote, "Aseity is the highest and chief perfection of God which our opponents recognize and therefore must be located in the first place because from it the rest of his perfections flow." Okay, so from both Van Mastricht and from Bavinck, you see this idea.
¶29From aseity all the other attributes or perfections of God flow. Uh so put it like this. God's eternity is simply his aseity with respect to time. He does not receive his being moment by moment externally. God's immutability is his aseity with respect to change.
¶30He does not need any sort of development or completion or repair. God's omnipotence is his aseity with respect to power. He does not depend on any external resource for his activity. God's omniscience is his aseity with respect to knowledge. He does not learn from anything outside of himself.
¶31You can go through each of the divine perfections like this. Um [snorts] looking back at the tradition, you can see this is not just unique to some of these reformed theologians. In fact, one of the things you see, let's let's take a look at Anselm, whom I mentioned earlier. In his Monologion, you get a wonderful example of theology proper or the doctrine of God, and divine aseity is right there, right out of the gate, one of the first things you get. So, Anselm's approach is often called perfect being theology.
¶32Uh and if you read through the Monologion, divine aseity is the initial claim that he makes. So, he starts off with the first two chapters saying basically there is something that is best and greatest and supreme among all existing things. And then the immediate corollary in the next two chapters is there is a certain nature through whom all existing things exist and who exists through himself and is supreme among all existing things. So, the words there through himself, that's divine aseity. And what you see here is that Anselm for Anselm, God's supremacy as God and God's aseity, that he's through himself, are just interwoven down to the very core.
¶33Anselm even argues that God's unparalleled greatness as God requires his aseity as you can see with this passage on screen. I won't take the time to read that, but just to summarize here cuz I don't want to lose people. I've been learning thinking about the algorithm lately. Uh you got to keep people interested. I'm doing my best, but I know a lot of my viewers like the deep dives here.
¶34That's why I'm recording this video even though I haven't had a haircut in weeks and I've been sitting at the pool all week, so I probably look crazy. But, I would needed to get one last video in before I go on vacation. This video will come out in July when I'm not checking it. I'll I'll come back in August and take a look at the comments. But, the point just to make to summarize here is that for Anselm, divine aseity is bound up with the very concept of theism.
¶35A god who does not exist through himself would not be that perfect being who has supremacy and is the explanation of reality. And so, his whole framework for the god, you know, going through all the divine attributes and then to the Trinity starts with this doctrine of divine aseity. Everything flows from that. A god who's not a se or from himself simply isn't god at all. You see the same thing in the early Christian East.
¶36For example, in John of Damascus, very similar treatment to Anselm. So, toward the very beginning of his exact exposition of the Orthodox faith, John tries to prove that there's a god by dividing all This is very similar to Thomas Aquinas's third way in his five ways. He divides all reality into two classes. You've got the created, hence the mutable, class, and then you've got the uncreated created and immutable class. And the basic argument is that this first class of things cannot be its own explanation.
¶37Created mutable things can't explain themselves, and so they point back to some primal immutable source that must have created them. Here's how he puts it. Things that are created must be the work of some maker, and the maker cannot have been created. For if he had been created, he must also surely have been created by someone, and so on till we arrive at something uncreated. So, those words, till we arrive there, reveal something of John's intuition that contingent things can't explain themselves.
¶38Yet, they point back to some ontologically unique source that must be uncreated or from itself. The the the foundation of this distinction, this twofold vision of ontology or being is divine aseity. The all the immutable things stem from the immutable and the immutable must not depend on anything else. It must be from itself or self-existent. See, think of it like this, you've got two kinds of things.
¶39You've got one thing that is ah say and then you've got everything else that is ab alio or from another. So, divine aseity marks off the ontological divide between God and everything else. If God is not ah say, then you're still working backward through the chain of contingency, you know, as he says, "And so on until we arrive." You need some other God. You need some other source of reality that is ah say. And this, of course, is the same way that Thomas Aquinas's third of his five ways works.
¶40Uh put up a passage from this on the screen. Same thing. Divine aseity is part and parcel with affirming God as such. So, you can see why divine aseity is so crucial, not just for the contingency argument, but for theistic proofs in general. And uh I've said a little bit more about that one and this objection, have you ever heard the objection to cosmological arguments, "Well, if God caused everything, what caused God?" I've said more about all this in this video.
¶41One of my lesser-viewed videos, but I really enjoyed working on it. But, you can see how aseity is really the key to this, right? So, we can just summarize like this. We can say that aseity functions for these various theologians and for classical Christian theology in general as just absolutely foundational to the doctrine of God. It's one of the first qualifications of just what you mean by the word God.
¶42And everything else you say by that that flows out of this fountain. Let's call it that. Divine [snorts] aseity is not a a limb on the tree that you could lop off and the tree would still exist. Rather, divine aseity is part of the trunk. This is just part of what we mean by God.
¶43By the way, when Peter van Mastricht criticized those who rejected the independence or aseity of God, he called them atheists or said they participate in atheism because to reject this is you're rejecting the very idea of God. So, that's one reason why divine aseity is so important. Here's a second and this is the paradoxical point. Actually, aseity grounds the creator-creation relationship. And here we want to push against the mentality that we saw reflected in Moltmann and Jensen and in much contemporary theology where a God who is ase is perceived as this frozen, static deity, this ice cube up in heaven that you can't relate to.
¶44And actually, as you look at aseity in the pre-modern tradition, it's much more subtle and paradoxical and it's actually routinely used to ground a lively, dynamic relation to God. John of Damascus, for example, right after he affirms divine aseity, uses this to ground God's role as the source of goodness and life in creatures. Quote, "Being himself very light and goodness and life and essence inasmuch as he does not derive his being from another, that is to say, of those things that exist, but being himself the fountain of being to all that is, of life to the living, of reason to those that have reason, to all the cause of God." So, there again, you see that word fountain. That's the phrase there, fountain of being. So, you know what a fountain is.
¶45We think of a a fountain shooting up water. So, so God is the fountain of being itself. And so, what what's clear here is that for John, aseity does not remove God in distance from creatures as though because he's ase, he's really, really, really far away on the other side of the football field. Rather, God becomes the source of all that is and of whatever is good, you know, light and reason and so forth you saw him mention there. Or consider the account of aseity in Peter Van Mastricht, wonderful theologian, neglected theologian I mentioned earlier, who calls God the essencer.
¶46Okay? So, yeah, I'll just read this. Quote, Acts 17 is referenced here, which we'll come back to. God is not only for himself, but also for us. He is not only preeminently essence, but also the essencer, to speak barbarously.
¶47For in him we live, move, and are and by him we are whatever we are. What you see in Van Mastricht is this with this idea of God as as pure being and essence, but then he's the essencer. That's another way of saying fountain of being. He's he's the one in whom we live, from whom we derive everything. He is underived, but we derive from him in all things.
¶48It's this sense of how aseity is interwoven with every aspect of our relationship to God. Every breath is a gift from him. Every thought you've ever had is following in his divine intellectual footprints, so to speak. God's thought, whatever you thought before you the first time you ever realized that 7 + 9 = 16, oh, God has already thought of that from eternity past, right? Everything is derived from God.
¶49Um every moment of time is a gift from him. You know, just think about this like right now, the way you can hold an orange in your in the palm of your hand, so God holds us. He sustains us. Not one blink of our eyelids, not one beat of our hearts has ever been self-generated. Ultimately, all of this comes like a waterfall flowing from God.
¶50He's the font of being. He's the essencer. and so when we stand before God, we stand in this position of complete vulnerability and dependence and need. And and a humble recognition of this fact is a part of proper relation to God. This is why we've got to how to how to say this?
¶51Um this doctrine should drive us to our knees with the sense of you know, how how how what else can I say except to say the words like this? You are God. You know, that at a certain point words break down beyond saying like this, but point is to see that Peter Van Mastricht and John of Damascus and pre-modern theological instincts in general don't think of an a God who is ah say as an ice cube that's distant and frozen. No, this is actually the very ground of God as our as our source. Or another way you can see this.
¶52Look at the early church and how divine ah say at it functioned for the early Christian apologists as they're trying to demarcate the one true God from the false gods in this polytheistic culture. And they use divine ah say at it to make this point. So, for example, Athenagoras in the 2nd century is writing to the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Commodus uh and he basically is using divine ah say at it to explain why Christians don't offer sacrifices. Quote, as to our not sacrificing, the framer and father of this universe does not need blood nor the odor of burnt offerings, nor of flowers and incense. For as much as he himself is perfect fragrance.
¶53Needing nothing either within or without. So, the idea of God not needing anything who is is baked into the concept of ah say at it and one perfectly reasonable expression of that is God doesn't require sacrifices in the way that this pagan culture assumed. Justin Martyr makes this same point as well. He's refuting the charge of atheism against Christians and he's specifying how the one true God is to be served and he says, "God does not need the material offerings which men can give, seeing indeed that he himself is the provider of all things." So, to think of Athenagoras, I'm trying to help you feel how colorful and dynamic is the account of aseity in classical theology. Because if you can get that, I don't think you're ever going to go down the pathway with Moltmann and Jensen and think you need to improve upon this.
¶54A God who is perfect fragrance, a God who is font of being, uh that John calls uh light and goodness, source of all light and reason and goodness, a God who is essencer, like Peter Van Mastricht will speak of. This suggests a more interesting account of divine aseity than you'll often get in contemporary academic portrait. In classical theology, aseity was a very practical doctrine, essential to a coherent defense of theism. It's closely related to the doctrine of creation. You're using this in the context of evangelism, explaining who this particular God is, and it doesn't make God distant or frozen or static.
¶55Paradoxically, this actually grounds how we can relate to God. And it protects the graciousness of God in his revelation to us. Think [snorts] about it like this. If God needs us, then creation becomes God's self-therapy. Redemption is somehow filling in a lack.
¶56Now God is who he really is. But if God is ase, then creation and redemption are sheer grace. So, that gives us a little bit of a flavor of some of the concerns in the historic Christian tradition of why this doctrine has been so foundational. Now, let's ask the third section of this video, is this doctrine biblical? Now, on the one hand, divine aseity is not self-consciously articulated in the scripture in the way that it would be in the later tradition.
¶57You know, the Bible doesn't use philosophical language. It tends to use its own more concrete idiom. So, there's no verse that says God is self-existent or something like that, though some argue for something like that from Exodus 3 and the divine name there, which we'll come to. But, I would argue more basically divine aseity is assumed throughout and entailed by the entire biblical story. It would be difficult for divine aseity not to emerge simply from these two points, monotheism and creation ex nihilo.
¶58So, that there is one God and that God created from nothing. If you've got that, it seems to entail something like aseity cuz you just think about this. If there's only one God and he exists before the world and made it into being out of nothing, then who more what could there be for him to derive his existence from them? Uh in order to have something like that, you'd have to posit what that would be other than God and gods and creation. What else is out there that God could derive from?
¶59God's existence as a se, as from himself, seems implied all throughout the scripture by his role as the unique transcendent creator who brought all things into being from nothing and who therefore owns and governs all creation with unqualified prerogative. You think of how often in the Psalms you find refrains like in Psalm 24, "The earth is the Lord's and everything in it." All throughout the Bible, God is portrayed as not needing anything or deriving anything from the world he has made, rather the world is simply his possession. So, think of God's climactic speech to Job, for example, where God declares, "Who has first given to me that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine." Or consider how Paul quotes this passage in Job when he's exploring God's sovereign purposes in the election and hardening of Israel, and he concludes, "For from him and through him and to him are all things." So, here God is both the source and the end of everything else. Now, put it like this.
¶60Some of these passages are I'm going to cover in just a moment are speaking in more covenantal terms. Nonetheless, they have implications for these larger philosophical questions. So, for example, we can say that it's basic to a biblical outlook that creator and creation don't stand in a mutual give-and-take relationship. God and the world are not like yin and yang that each sort of entailed the other. Rather, God is transcendent over the world.
¶61So, for example, in Acts 17, which we saw of Anne Maystrek quote earlier, this is an important text where Paul is confronting misunderstandings about God and the idolatry that exists in the world. And he's very clear that God doesn't need anything from us. He himself supplies us with everything. Quote, "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself, note this phrase, gives to all mankind life and breath and everything." Or we think of the language in the Psalms where God rebukes people for thinking that their sacrifices could possibly contribute to any need in him. He says, "I own the cattle on a thousand hills." Now again, it's fair to to say that these passages are treating the relationship between God and creatures in moral categories and in covenantal categories.
¶62Nonetheless, they have implications for aseity in the metaphysical sense as well. For example, just think of Paul's language there is giving us life and breath and everything. And that's especially the case when you read these passages against the backdrop of creation ex nihilo, creation from from nothing. Divine aseity is also entailed throughout God's dealings with the nation of Israel and his frequent language of his own unrivaled supremacy. You know, he alone is capable of saving his people.
¶63Uh this is a theme in the prophet Isaiah. I'll put up some passages here. These are paradigmatic for a theme that you'll also find in a few other books of the Old Testament. So, you've got God's position as unrivaled and as the first and the last. This kind of language suggests divine aseity because it suggests the absence of anything else from which God could derive.
¶64To claim to be the first and the last appears to be a claim to be endless and to have a sort of eternal life that spans around and surrounds the life of every other creature. Now, sometimes the monotheistic interpretation of these passages is challenged. If that's of interest to you, I have a whole video on that that I worked very hard on. Uh you can see the thumbnail there. I'll link to that below if in case you want to chase that down.
¶65But, we need to just say one thing before moving on about Exodus 3 and God's self-designation to Moses as I am who I am. Because this text has been challenged by modern biblical scholarship and yet from the church fathers through Thomas Aquinas through the Puritans and all the early Protestants, this passage has been understood as the definitive biblical expression of the divine essence. John of Damascus called this phrase the most proper of all the names given to God because God keeps all being in his own embrace like a sea of essence infinite and unseen. Now, we have to concede that at times people have derived too much from this passage. In context, the import of this text has more to do with God's covenant faithfulness to his people.
¶66Nonetheless, even if divine aseity in the metaphysical sense is not the primary emphasis of Exodus 3:14, it is still implied by it. And if you want a good case for that, Steven Duby's book God in himself is a good treatment of that if you want to do it little deeper dive on that. What I want to note here though is that in the New Testament, Jesus also applies the I am formula to himself. And this is what draws blasphemy from the Jewish leadership. Fascinatingly, Jesus's divinity is manifested in the fact that, like the Father, he has life in himself.
¶67Think of this statement that our Lord is saying, John 5:26, "For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself." Both Calvin and Augustine have a lot to say about that about aseity there in John 5:26. And then of course we have some of the same biblical rhetoric applied to Jesus uh that we saw in the Old Testament for God and his unique supremacy. Think of at the very end of Revelation, Jesus saying, "I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." Well, this amounts to the same kind of claim of exclusive all-encompassing life that we saw in Isaiah. And to possess that life implies an existence that is ase because if you're the first and the last, the beginning and the end, you would then lack any correlate from which you could derive anything. So I'm I'm trying to show how divine aseity just leaps off the biblical text from uh e- even though it is not stated in philosophical categories.
¶68Now since we've brought Jesus into this discussion here, Jesus is also ase, the Son of God is has life ase. That leads to a discussion of the Trinity to finish this video and hang with me for this part cuz this is the best part where we'll draw from John Webster and this will hopefully lead us into worship. We can start with the language of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. I'll just call it the Nicene Creed for for for for here. And this language of light of light, very God of very God.
¶69This is my favorite part of the Creed. Of course, we also have the famous homoousion clause here, which we can derive a lot from. But even just from this language, uh light of light, God of God, we can envision already a little bit about what people like Calvin and Augustine are going to get from John 5:26. Namely, that the Son of God is equally aseity as the Father with respect to his divine being. The words of God and of light highlight the Son's derivation from the Father with respect to his relation of origin.
¶70But the fact that he's God of God and light of light reminds us he possesses the very self same self-existence as the Father does. And we can also consider the words of the Creed for the Spirit as the Lord and giver of life to make a similar point. That phrase giver of life is very significant. This should draw our minds to John of Damascus's label for God as the fountain of being who receives from none, but he gives life and being to all. He gives light and goodness to all.
¶71So also we should say of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who gives life to all. All life is from the Holy Spirit. For more on that point, and actually the point about the God of God, light of lights as well, see my video on the Nicene Creed where I say just a bit more about that. But let's Here's what Here's the Trinitarian question I want to focus on for this video, and that's how might the Trinity help us envision divine aseity more accurately?
¶72And here I want to draw like conclude from the wonderful theologian John Webster. Amazing more recent theologian. Uh who helps us on this. John Webster construed divine aseity in terms of the Trinity to avoid a strictly negative functional account of divine aseity. To find simply as a point of contrast to creaturely contingency.
¶73So Webster noted that this is often how it is done where aseity is reduced to predicating of God what must be true of him in order to serve as the ground of contingency. As though God's aseity mainly consist in just being a contrast to the world. So so that this is kind of unfortunate because then in our minds what we're what we're conjuring up is God ase and the world ab alio. God from himself, the world from another and they're sort of both there together. And it almost it's like you can't picture one without the other, right?
¶74So as a corrective to that, Webster proposes to define aseity in terms of the fullness of life that characterizes the relations of the Trinity. Quote, "Aseity is not merely the quality of being in contrast to contingent reality underived. It is the eternal lively plenitude of the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, and the Spirit who proceeds from both." So for Webster, a Trinitarian conception of aseity gives you on the one hand this sort of materially richer account of the doctrine. But also, even more than that, it demonstrates why this is essential for the creator-creation relationship. Which is the great interest of of my heart in this video.
¶75So for example, he speaks of aseity as having two dimensions. First, it means that the glory and plenitude of the life of the Holy Trinity in its self-existent and self- moving originality, its underived fullness. That's the first implication. Second, it implies God's originality and fullness constitute the ground of his self-communication. So, the idea here is that because God's underived life, his life ah say from himself, is not just an alternative to our creaturely dependence.
¶76Of course, it's also that. But, because he's construing it in terms of the Trinity and the relationships in the Godhead, it signals the graciousness of God's turn to to his creation. God's relation to everything that is not God in creation and redemption is a gracious self-giving. As Webster puts it, God's aseity, although it marks God's utter difference from creatures, does not entail his isolation. For what God is and has of himself is life, and this life includes a self-willed movement of life.
¶77End quote. Now, this is not to make God dependent on creatures in any way. We can think of this as the you know, this this uh this is entirely gracious and unnecessary. God's giving of his life to his creatures. Think of it as this generous extension or spilling over of the life of God to his creation by his own choice.
¶78Nothing This is not constitutive of his being. This is his own gracious turn to his creatures, inviting them into the very life of God, the very glory of the Holy Trinity. So, God's perfect fullness of life is not an ice cube. This is not a trap. This is not a shroud of darkness.
¶79Rather, this is that life that overflows into the supreme generosity of creation and redemption. God's aseity is not a threat to a genuine relationship with him. It is the ground of that relationship. Otherwise stated, we need a God who does not need us. So, I'll give Webster the last words here, but allow this beautiful, amazing thought to move you to worship that this simply is.
¶80This is reality, and by grace we get to even know of this and uh Lord willing participate in it one day. Quote, "In this perfect circle of paternity, filiation, and spiration, God is who he is."