Divine Aseity
The word aseity comes from the two Latin words for “from” (a) and “self” (se). So to say that God is a se is to say that he is of Himself. To say “from himself” may communicate that incorrect notion that God is his own cause. That would be false. Rather, we want to say, with the Westminster Confession, that “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 hath made” [1]. The whole reason for God is in God. There can be no appeal to something “deeper” than God, even if we suppose that this “other” is somehow “in” God.
In guarding against the notion that any one thing, or set of things, is to be considered more foundational in God than other things, classical theologians reached back into Aristotle’s distinction between substance and accidents. The substance of a thing is that which it is essentially. Take away the substance of a thing and that thing ceases to exist. On the other hand, remove an accident from a thing (say, shaving off one’s brown hair) and the essence of the thing remains. In God, there can be no accidents because there can be no addition or subtraction from who he is. To review from our treatment of divine simplicity, to speak of God’s relationships to things outside of himself is to use the figurative language of change and motion and so forth.
Theologians use two Latin terms to describe the difference between what is proper to speak of God’s essential being as opposed to the works of God. All that is in God is what we call ad intra, referring to the inner life of the triune God; whereas when we speak of things in relation to God, whether his work of creation or redemption or restoration, we are speaking ad extra, or “to the outside” of God’s essence. Without this distinction the doctrine we are about to examine, namely divine aseity, would be undermined.
The Biblical Logic of Divine Aseity
God’s independence is absolute. That is true both of his being and his operations, as one Reformed Scholastic put it, “his essence, subsistence and actions depend on no external cause, inasmuch as he is from himself” [2].
The passage from Exodus 3:14 already examined, in particular argued Dabney, “means self-existence and independence” [3]. We may classify biblical texts on the aseity of God by different ways in which God is not dependent. In general we are told that God is in need of nothing (Acts 17:25), and that he is indebted to no one (Rom. 11:35) . But can we be more specific as to God’s attributes or ordinary activities? This is all very personal in the book of Job, because the whole debate was whether Job could be in the right, given his suffering.
If you are righteous, what do you give to him? Or what does he receive from your hand? (35:7)
Who has first given to me, that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine (41:11)
God has all life in himself, as Jesus says verbatim in John 5:26. This means all resources of being are in himself. He says it in a very poetic, understated way in the Psalm, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine” (50:12). In other words, even of those things that are ours, even these are really his. When God gives, he does not deplete himself. When they are gifted, God still owns it entirely. There is no addition of resources because there is no addition of being. An addition of resource would be an addition of capacities (power).
God’s knowledge is grounded in himself: “Whom did he consult, and who made him understand? Who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding?” (Isa. 40:14) As Dolezal said it, “every time a Puritan says ‘of himself,’ he is expressing aseity” [4]. Much the same could be said of the various and simple ways that Scripture is getting at this attribute.
Implications of Divine Aseity
Note first of all the implications running both ways from simplicity to aseity and then from aseity back to simplicity. First, from the premise of simplicity we conclude aseity because since God is all that He has, therefore God has all of his attributes of himself. Second, from the premise of aseity we conclude simplicity because since the First Cause must be independent, therefore there can be no “whole” in God depending on any part. In short, divine simplicity and aseity stand in a logically equivalent relationship. They imply each other.
To say all of this one more way: Aseity cannot be false for the same reason that self-creation cannot be true. The First Cause cannot be its own cause.
Divine aseity implies that there can be no cause for which anything in God is properly an effect. This is true of both efficient (first) and end (final) causes: “For from him and through him and to him are all things” (Rom. 11:36). As a corollary to this, it also implies that there is no deficiency in God for which the acts of creation or redemption or restoration may be conceived to supplement or fulfill. We maintain that God’s love is a se, so that he did not need to create in order to have his love fulfilled. Moreover, God’s wisdom is a se, so that he did not exercise wisdom is such a way that ever “caught up” to the flow of human action or natural consequences. In other words we do not say that God is “wise” because of how he “reacted,” since his counsel and decrees can be no such thing.
And what will seem paradoxical to some is that God’s freedom is a se, so that his choices are always unbound by anything outside of himself and yet always determined by his whole simple nature.
God’s justice is a se, so that the Euthyphro dilemma has absolutely no force here. It is the case both that what is right is right because God says so and that whatever he commands really is right by the most objective standard—namely, himself. As a last example, God’s eternity is a se. He is not “in” it, as if the essence of eternity were endless duration of events or experience. Rather it is first a quality of the divine life in himself.
Returning to the Scriptures, divine aseity must shape the way that we understand passages that seem to suggest God responding to the creature as an initiating force: “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (Jam. 4:8); or again, “if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land” (2 Chr. 7:14).
Both the human drawing near and the human repentance are acts decreed and empowered by God, the following consequence being both conditionally prescribed to us and necessarily determined by the divine decree. How these are reconciled is a subject to which we shall return. For now we only insist that God’s designs in prayer and all other personal relationship to God flow out of him and never activate any potential in him. The cause and effects, conditions and consequences, belonging to secondary causes and those set forth in the prescriptive will of God, are in no way meant to give us the idea of a God whose being or acts arise from beyond himself.
Misgivings and Priorities
It is not typical of professing Christians to object to divine aseity. Perhaps it will go under the other names of independence, self-sufficiency, or self-existence, as aseity strikes one as “too Latin.” But no one who is even a monotheist would seem to object to the principle. More likely, then, the doctrine will be undermined through the “side door” and in an unwitting manner.
For example, theistic personalists who more overtly criticize the doctrine of simplicity are also really undoing aseity when they insist that God can “sovereignly” choose to be moved from outside of himself. This may especially be thought about prayer. Of course we are not lending wisdom to God or changing his mind, but he wills that our prayers affect him nonetheless. This is very sloppy talk at best. We will see a concrete case of this with respect to divine impassibility.
Calvin sounded a particular note that affirmed that the Son is autotheos—God of himself, God in himself. Some late medieval teaching taught that the Father communicated his essence to the Son. For example, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and Council of Florence (1442) began to assert this. The idea was that the Father is principle without principle (fontas divinitas), whereas the Son is a principle of a principal, and simultaneously the same of the Spirit.
Calvin pushed back against this along these lines: that if the Son is God, then he must be God a se. The Son, as homoousion or consubstantial, must have all of the attributes that belong to the divine essence.
Not everyone followed Calvin on this emphasis. Zanchi, for example, in his Confession of Christian Religion [2.2], said, the Father by himself is “true and perfect” God, whereas the Son by himself, and Spirit by himself are also God.
The Reformed continued in agreement with the Fathers on divine aseity, but began to use the word independence. Bavinck explained that this is because it “has a broader sense and implies that God is independent in everything: in his existence, in his perfections, in his decrees, and in his works.” This aseity implies “the fullness of being, all other perfections are included” [5]
In discussing any of the incommunicable attributes, there is the matter of what ought to be treated as God’s “leading attribute.” This is not a question of what is more fundamental (as mentioned above) but rather what is more useful as a conceptual grounding. Simplicity is favored by Thomists. Holiness is brought up by others. Some, like Stephen Myers, believes it is aseity [6]. For one reason, aseity is centrally implied by the name revealed in Exodus 3:14, even if one takes the Thomistic rendering of that revelation about God’s being. Calvin would seem to agree with this priority (Institutes, I.14.3), and Mastricht takes a similar approach (TPT, II:84).
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1. Westminster Confession of Faith, II.2
2. Rijssen, Summa, III.13, quoted in Muller, PRRD, III:238.
3. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 145.
4. Dolezal, “Theistic Personalism and the Erosion of Classical Christian Theism,” 18:00-19:00
5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:152.
6. Stephen Myers, Lecture 5, “Theology Proper,” February 18, 2021 at Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary.
