I want to reflect a bit on Divine Aseity. I just recently wrote on Facebook “God’s aseity has been given a face in Jesus Christ.” As I was at work under the stars (I work for the railroad as a switchman/remote control locomotive operator), as I am oft to do, like the Psalmist I looked up and thought “what is man that thou art mindful of Him, Oh LORD?” As I was gazing at the blackened sky bejeweled with the sparkling stars here and there, my thought progressed further; as it often does. The immensity of the heavens above with its embassies of light served as the source of deep reflection about the vastness, indeed, the ineffableness of the living God. It led me to ponder God’s a se life. When I think about Divine Aseity it clearly comes from a particular vantage point; it is conditioned by my relationship to God through His Self-revelation of Himself for me in Jesus Christ. So, I don’t think of divine aseity out of an abstraction, but instead I do so from within a dialogical framework that gives me great confidence to pursue the depths of my God with vigor of the sort that finally can only break off into doxological upheaval of the soul. This is what happened last night. Divine Aseity used to cause me some serious mental and intellectual angst. If we attempt to think God, particularly about His inner-life, from purely rationalist opera, we will go mad. Nevertheless, from within the dialogical framework I’ve been given through God in Christ, there is a Spirit formed capacity to think about such things without fully being overcome by the ends of our minds.

The thought that staggers me most is that God is an eternally self-existent being. We can only fully appreciate that, insofar as we can, from a posture of humility and the recognition that we are merely creatures. In other words, if we attempt to think about divine aseity from a purely isolated and self-possessed incurved self, we will either go mad or we will simply reject the concept itself in order to preserve our own sense of self-divinity. More positively though, it is this thought of aseity that puts me in my place, and allows me to think rightly about where I stand in the economy of God’s ordered creation. But it is, for me, at least when I contemplate as I was, to attempt to come to the point that my puny little mind is absolutely blown to smithereens by the fact that God has just always been. Even as I type this my mind starts to do circles. As creatures we have no analogy for conceptualizing a being such as God; all we have, clearly, is our human perspective. Our human perspective, of course, is bounded by space, time, and our physical-mental bodies; as such, to attempt to contemplate how there could be a being that just has always been is not something even remotely conceivable. And yet, as Christians, we know that this is the reality.

What I am wanting to press is the idea of the utter immensity of God. But I am wanting to do that in such a way that there is an existential sense of awe that overcomes us as we attempt to contemplate the reality of God’s aseity; as we attempt to reflect upon the reality that God just is. But then I am also wanting to provide an end to any sort of abstract reflection about this, and, as I noted previously, I want to emphasize how God’s aseity, for the Christian, becomes a personal and dialogical source of worship as it is ‘faced’ in Jesus Christ. I am hoping to point out that my view towards aseity only really has any gravitas just at the point that I by the Spirit call Jesus Lord (cf. I Cor 12.3). It is within this relational and Triune nexus that I have the wherewithal to really even contemplate God’s aseity to begin with. It is here that the rationalist loop, or the philosophical knot is contravened as it is confronted by the reality that there isn’t ultimately an abstract sense of God’s aseity to begin with. In other words, for the Christian, our only knowledge of God’s inner-life, and His a se life, comes from His outer life, or ad extra life, as that is given for us in the elect humanity of Jesus Christ. It is because I am in concrete relationship with the living God, through the risen Christ, that I am forced to seriously contemplate the mysterium tremendum, and ineffable ultimacy that God just is. So, my contemplation of God’s aseity is never an unpopulated contemplation that is bereft of God’s personal voice for me; to the contrary, my contemplation of God’s inner and a se life is only ever come to precisely because this God, this God of eternal Life, has confronted me as my Father, as I’ve become co-heir with the Son, by the grace of adoption, through this very eternal Life that I can only push up against at the very nether reaches of my mind’s eye.

Hopefully what I have just written has some sort of coherence to it. It is simply a bloggy reflection, clearly, of a huge reality that cannot be fully grasped; or even partially. But what I’m hoping is coming through is the realization that, as Rahner emphasized, God’s immanent Triune Life is His economic Triune Life as revealed and understood through participation and union with Jesus Christ. I am hoping that a doctrine like aseity, at least from my point of view, is only something that the Christian can only genuinely have knowledge of just because they are a Christian. And I want to impress this point, because I think we need to have our minds properly mortified by the conditioning that can only come through the repentant thinking that Christ has accomplished for us before the Father. In other words, as Christians, we are immediately invited into the banqueting table of mind-blowing realities, but never in such a way that those realities have any reality outside of their givenness for us in Christ. If this is true, even the doctrine of aseity can only have a Christ concentration to it. So, while we’re having our minds blown by concentrating on God’s immensity, we will never really be doing that outwith a personal dialogical frame wherein we are talking with and praising this same God we are being pushed up against. This is the telos or purpose of being pushed up against the ineffability of God; it puts us in our place, by pushing us to the ground in a posture of utter worship and undoness before a Holy God, who is our Father, Brother, and Comforter.