2. The simplicity of God. (Simplicitas Dei.)
By the simplicity of God we understand the characteristic according to which every kind of composition or the assumption of parts in God is to be rejected, because infinity belongs to God and infinity excludes all parts. It has been objected against the simplicity of God that the Scriptures ascribe to God members: eyes, mouth, hands, feet, and so on. This is certainly the case. Ps.. 139:16: "Your eyes saw me while I was still unprepared"; Is. 55:11: The word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall not return void; Ps.. 119:73: "Thy hand hath made me"; Matt. 5:36: "The earth is the footstool of his feet." But Scripture itself forces us to understand these expressions figuratively, as a condescension to human ideas ("anthropopathic"), when, in contrast to the external and corporeal, it says John 4:24: πνεύμα δ ϑεός. Augustana, Art. I: "Without parts, incorporeus, impartibilis." To be rejected, therefore, is the
1368) St. L. XX. 806.
539 ><w:t xml:space="preserve">The doctrines of God. [English ed. pgs 439-440]
Anthropomorphism, as far as it transfers human corporeality to God.1369) The idea of newer theosophists (Ötinger, † 1782) of a spiritual body of God, which has condensed outward with the creation and through the creation of the world, is also to be rejected.1370) Against the simplicity of God it must not be objected the multiplicity of the qualities, which the scripture ascribes to God, as: God is righteousness, God is mercy, God is omnipotent, etc. Of course, we men have to think of righteousness, mercy, omnipotence, etc. in God in succession and side by side. But we have already seen that in this way God divides Himself in His word-revelation, as it were, into "parts" or "matters" propter intellectus nostri imperfectionem, because we men can have no conception at all of a simple and infinite Being, "if we wanted to tear ourselves apart at once," as Luther says. This is the "piecemeal" knowledge (εκ μέρους) of which the apostle addresses 1 Cor. 13. But in God, the aforementioned and all attributes are the one indivisible divine essence itself. — With the unity and simplicity of God finally also the Trinity of the persons in God does not dispute, as all old and newer Unitarians claim. According to Scripture, the essence of God is not divided according to the three persons, but the whole Godhead is without division and multiplication, as in the Father, so also in the Son (Col. 2:9) and in the Holy Spirit (Acts 5:3-4). — If one further objects that the difference between the persons in God is not merely a conceptual but a real difference, and that therefore the unity and simplicity of God appears to be abolished by the difference of the persons, then it must be said that we stand here before the mystery of the holy Trinity. We believe on the basis of the testimony of Scripture, that is, on the basis of self-revelation
1369) Luther (1, 487) about the anthropomorphites: "If the thoughts of the anthropomorphites have been so coarse" ("that they have given the divine majesty the form of a man"), "then they have been rightly condemned; for there is a manifest error in it. 'For a spirit [which is God according to John 4:24] hath not flesh and bones.' But I am rather of opinion that I hold that the anthropomorphites thought how. they would like to pretend the doctrine to the simple in a simple form. For God is in his substance and essence quite unknowable and incomprehensible. Nor can we actually say what he is, if we wanted to tear ourselves apart right away."
1370) Cf. the quotation in Baier-Walther II, 18. 19. Here the pantheistic conception of an emanation of the world from the being of God is present with the theosophists.
540 ><w:t>The Doctrine of God. [English ed. pgs. 440]
God in His Word, both the unity of God and the Trinity of persons (1 Cor. 8:4-6; Matt. 28:19). The subordinatians, however, insofar as they let the Son be less than the Father and the Holy Spirit less than the Father and the Son and speak of a God in the second and third sense of the word, abolish the unity and simplicity of the essence of God and fall into polytheism.