How do I, as an Evangelical Calvinist approach the doctrine of Divine Simplicity? Given the Evangelical Calvinists’ commitment to The Holy Trinity [as] the Absolute Ground and Grammar of All Epistemology, Theology, and Worship how would this impact the way that we would attempt to parse out a doctrine of simplicity from this multiplied commitment to thinking God from His threeness to His oneness / His oneness to His threeness? Contra Sonderegger, and the resurgence of monadic pure being theology, derived from the via negativa and apophatic tradition in the church, I as an Evangelical Calvinist repudiate that and can only affirm the via positiva and kataphatic tradition; the tradition that thinks God, without remainder, from His Self-exegesis and revelation in Jesus Christ. Paul Hinlicky in his book Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics details how an Evangelical Calivinist might frame the way we articulate the way we think about simplicity, and how that is given shape from the multiplicity of God in and from the antecedent but revealed triune life. He writes:

Refining Jenson’s position, then, Gunton argues that a theological account of divine nature by a consideration of the attributes of the God of the gospel requires, not doing away with attribution, but what he calls a positive rather than a negative derivation of divine attributes. He is not simply preferring the philosophical way of eminence to the way of negation. The way of eminence in a “positive” account learns what God is from who God is; it is an exercise in revealed theology. By contrast, a “negative” account achieves by way of natural theology a definition of God by negation of worldly attributes (as also the philosophical way of eminence, by removing imperfections to come to God’s perfection, is also an eliminative—that is, a negative way—in natural theology). So if Christ is the power of God, and the wisdom of God, and the righteousness of God, and so on, the theological problem of attribution in a positive account becomes the question of how to conceive the relation of these multiple divine attributes to one another in view of the unity or simplicity of God as one subject. The problem is not now our earthly language attributes to God as in natural theology; it now becomes how various attributions to God cohere with one another as a single or at least unified subjectivity. Gunton comes to this formulation of the problem of positive attribution from statements of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics (CD II/1, 327–28), where Barth maintained that “the very unity of [God’s] being consists in the multiplicity, individuality and diversity of His perfections” (31). A via negativa that would regard the attributions as merely human ways of speaking corresponding to nothing real in God in “pure simplicity” is “rightly” rejected by Barth, so Gunton argues, in favor of a “positive” articulation of the God who gives and communicates Himself (32) in the unity of His multiple perfections.

The “real” problem is thus intensified. Indeed, if we wish to “hold on to a doctrine of the unity and coherence of the divine being, . . . our question remains, How are the various attributes related to one another, and to their common centre in the being of God?” (32). We do, Gunton presumes, want to hold on to the unity and coherence of the divine being. Divine simplicity, then, is to be affirmed. But it is to be affirmed positively rather than negatively—that is, not by the protological definition of perfect being as indivisible (by the “absence of composition”) but rather as the theological qualification of the revealed God as unified in the diversity of His attributions. Divine simplicity in this sense safeguards in principle the irreducibility of God not in spite of but in accounting for God’s relations to His creation.[1]

For the Evangelical Calvinist (of the sort inspired by folks like Karl Barth, Thomas Torrance et al.), God is never thought of in abstraction from His givenness for us in Christ. It is from Christ that attribution of God has the possibility and epistemic capacity to think who God is in Himself. It is the who (i.e. subject) of God that shapes our understanding of the what (i.e. object) of God, not vice versa. Classical Calvinism does its work on a doctrine of God, at fundamentum, from the speculative, discursive, philosophical and negative ground that Thomas Aquinas and a host of others prior to and following thought God from. We are a non-speculative, Scripture Principle based way of thinking, doing, and living theology. We major on a theology of the Word (as Luther, early on was doing), and allow the ministry of God’s Word to inform and shape how we attempt to think theologically. We find our raison d’être for theological life in Christ alone; and as we find our reason for existence in Christ alone, we just happen to find that this participation in His life brings us into the interior of God’s eternal and triune life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because of this we don’t have to posit mechanical decrees, or what TFT would call logical-causal necessitarian modes of thinking, when we attempt to understand how God relates to the world, to us. No, we have an immediate contact with the living God, through the personal agency of the Son of God made flesh for us. This is a constant, ongoing, ever afresh and anew contact that we are ministered in-to by the comforting work of the Holy Spirit. He makes sure that we are participatio Christi, not by our might, nor by our power, but, indeed, this contact with God is by the hovering work of the Spirit of the living God.

Hinlicky’s engagement with Gunton, Jenson, Barth is just the sort of engagement an Evangelical Calvinist is interested in making when attempting to think these things into the theologies on offer in the history of the church’s ideas. If Hinlicky wasn’t already a Lutheran he’d make a wonderful Evangelical Calvinist. His mode, and ours, is a constructive one that works catholicly with the good material that the Church of Jesus Christ has produced in the past, and into the present. We do not limit our theological work, except to the absolute delimitation that Jesus Christ presents the theologian with, insofar as He is exhaustively regulative of a genuinely Christian theological endeavor. We will leave with a word from TFT (a word I’ve shared before), as he summarizes Barth’s method; it encapsulates what we have been observing in this post quite well:

Because Jesus Christ is the Way, as well as the Truth and the Life, theological thought is limited and bounded and directed by this historical reality in whom we meet the Truth of God. That prohibits theological thought from wandering at will across open country, from straying over history in general or from occupying itself with some other history, rather than this concrete history in the centre of all history. Thus theological thought is distinguished from every empty conceptual thought, from every science of pure possibility, and from every kind of merely formal thinking, by being mastered and determined by the special history of Jesus Christ.[2]

[1] Paul R. Hinlicky, Divine Simplicity: Christ the Crisis of Metaphysics (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2016), 14.

[2] Thomas F. Torrance, “Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910-1931,” 196.