Reading: The AAA Theology

We're now going to tackle that contrast that I hope will make the first theological  position I sketched clearer. And in relation to it. This is the theology that is  promoted by Augustine, entrenched by Anselm and refined by Aquinas. And  since each of their last names begin with a, in my book, I call this the triple A  theology has nothing to do with helping cars that have broken down, it's just,  these three men are the three great champions of this point of view. And they  are going to hold in contrast that God is the being with all perfections and only  perfections. And in fact, that's how Gods to be defined. That's what God is. So  they want to say God is a being that has infinite love, mercy, just knowledge,  power, these things are infinite as God possesses them. However, this seems to run into a snag. And it's one that Augustine himself recognized. All three of these guys recognize it, and they all propose the same answer to it. If you say that  God has infinite power, and you take that to mean that God can do anything. It  runs into all kinds of trouble. For example, there's the wisecrack question we get from Sunday school kids. If God can do anything, can he make a rock so big?  He can't lift it? And of course, either way, you answer that there's something God can't do. Could God make four and 4 12 and 5/8s? Can God make square  circles? The kind of thing that arises if you say God can do anything. So what  these thinkers in this line proposed, particularly Thomas Aquinas is that God can do anything that is possible. He can't do impossible things like make circle  square, or make a rock so big he can't lift it. But anything that's possible, God  can do. And by doing this, he recognizes that he has to do something with  illogical laws, the law of non contradiction. And so he includes that in the being  of God, among the perfections, then, are all of the necessary truths, the laws of  logic and mathematics are also all parts of this. Which for Plato was a separate  realm of perfections. And now for these three thinkers, all converges in God, but  they didn't want to say they didn't want put this, we'll see there are these  perfections. And now God's the being that has them all, that makes the  perfections prior to God, that means there couldn't be God unless there were  perfections. And that sounds wrong, it is wrong. And they were right to be  sensitive to this. And so what Augustine proposes right away is, it's not that God  possesses these, he just is them. He is the unity of all the perfections. We can't  conceive what that unity would be like, because we don't know what it is to say  that goodness, is the same as justice is the same as power is the same as  knowledge, same as mercy. But God, since there's only one God, all these  perfections are unified in a way we can't conceive of. In our world, and to our  intelligence, we have to break up we name them. So this is their view of the very nature of God. God's the being with all earthly perfections. Among other things,  he has perfect existence, which means he doesn't depend on anything else.  He's self existent. So they include that. And then they want to say it's not that  there's a being called God, and there are all these perfections that he didn't  create. And then he has them that would make him depend on them. But that 

God is the unity of the perfections. So it's not that the perfections exist  independently of God. God is the perfections and the perfections are God.  That's just about the reverse of the theology I skipped. Sketched over here. The  earlier ones is the one that the Greek Orthodox tradition has held ever since the  fourth century. These these are the main expositors of this view, are the  Cappadocian fathers. Saint Basil of Caesarea. Gregory of Nazianzus and St.  Gregory of Nyssa and Basil's sister Macrina and it was rediscovered the time of  the Reformation. I find this view expressed often enough in Luther and explicitly  endorsing Calvin by Calvin. But it was not followed by Protestantism generally.  Luther and Calvin risked their lives to bring reform to the church. And the  theology that of the Eastern Church, which they rediscovered was just a  sidelight as far as the Protestant movement. In general is concerned, it went for  foreword with what it saw as reforms of the church and the liturgy, and all the  rest. But they did not follow Luther and Calvin on their doctrine of God. That  doesn't mean nobody did. I mean, I'm talking about Protestantism as a  worldwide movement as a whole, the prevailing theology is still the AAA  theology. So you hear you have, yes, God has characteristics we can  understand. That's because God actually enters into creation, takes on  characteristics we can understand, deals with us in ways we can conceive of  and understand the know, in order to know the nature in which this is the way  John Calvin puts it the nature in which he is pleased to manifest himself. It's his  choice. Over here, nothing is God's choice. God just is the being with all the  perfections. And so he has to act in accordance with them. In a real sense, God  doesn't have as much free will, as you and I, on this view, because God is  compelled by the perfections, that he just is to act in the ways he does. Let's do  a little more contrast of this. Remind you that I had said before. Basil of  Caesarea, commented, if there are perfections, God created them, maybe he  was expressing doubt, and the indeed, the Cappadocians, and the other  theologians of the Eastern Church, held a conference after writing of the Nicene  Creed. And in that post conference, they commented on the Nicene Creed. And  one of the major thrusts of that was the rejection of Plato. That's not how a  Christian is to see relationship with God. It's not just that there are perfections,  and they just are God. That would say, then that God did not create everything  visible or invisible. So that's not a position where we're ever going to take. And  the Western Church, Latin speaking church, they did take exactly that. The last,  the last of the Cappadocians died in 397. Augustine lived until 430. So that  place, could place it in time for you. If remember the Nicene Creed was  completed in 325. So this is ancient stuff, but mightily important and still  powerfully expressed and maintained by the two theological traditions. I'm  hoping that this much of a contrast will make this clearer now. I'm sorry, I can't  hear you answer whether you whether it is or it isn't. But we'll come back and  we'll do a little more and we'll review it again.