Dr Paul Allen

Q: What are God’s attributes and why have I never heard of them before? A: The attributes of God are the characteristics that describe what he is like. The word is used by theologians but is not often heard outside the classroom, so most people are unfamiliar with it. But that does not mean that we are unaware of what the divine attributes are. Everybody knows that God is invisible, immortal, and all-powerful (omnipotent). Invisibility, immortality, and omnipotence are his attributes, and they remain the same because God’s nature does not change. One reason that we do not often talk about them is that we usually agree about them already. Nobody is going to argue that God is visible, so the attribute of invisibility is seldom if ever discussed. Then too, if God could be seen, he could be described; but because he is invisible, it is impossible to say what he is like. He is not tall or short, black or white, fat or thin—these descriptions simply do not fit with what he is. But because we...

Our doctrine of Scripture as the word of God depends on our view of who God is and what he does. Here the temptation to focus on a single mode of God’s nature must be resisted.  God is both creator (implying his presence among his people and his fellowship with humans) and king (implying God’s authority over history and human dependence), both transcendent Lord (implying God’s omniscience and omnipotence and human finiteness) and ever active Father (implying God’s love for his children and his acceptance of humans in virtue of his own nature), both perfect (implying God’s total integrity and humanity’s call to holiness) and merciful (implying God’s forgiveness of wrongdoing and humanity’s confidence of being accepted).  A biblical doctrine of Scripture needs to take all these elements into account. A fundamental description of the nature of God as related to the nature of Scripture includes the following: 1. God is a person, i.e. he communicates, he speaks, he wills. When he ...