God’s innate attributes are Aseity (God is self-sufficient), Infinite (without limit), Eternal (God has no beginning or end, he is timeless), Immutable (God is unchanging), Love (God is love), Holy (God is set-apart), Perichoresis (the indwelling of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit).
I would remove "love" from that list.
The Reasons Why I Would Remove "Love":
1) God is self sufficient
2) God is the first cause,
3) God is sovereign
4) Anything that has a beginning and an end is contingent (possibility)
5) Anything that is caused by something else is contingent. (possibility)
6) The attributes (essence) of God are necessary to the being (existence) of God.
Aquinas defined "contingent" synonymous with Possible. The actualization of a possibility or contingency exists according to God's Will.
I also Don't Believe this:
(a) God is love
attributes an essential property to the individual who is God, the Father, and hence that (a) entails
(b) God wills or desires that “every person be saved.”
Yikes, I may not be a Calvinist. I might be a heretic. Actually, I believe what I believe. Not certain what a "Calvinist' is exactly.
God is love is a primary/essential and core attribute of God. As Triune and Immutable its who God is as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is love before there was a creation and anything/anyone to be Sovereign over. Love precedes Sovereignty. Sovereign requires a creation, love does not.
1 John 4:10
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and
sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
The Son came from Heaven where He was with the Father before the world was created and shared the Fathers Glory. (John 17:5). It looks like the our Triune God had redemption in mind with the creation and the greatest act of love was for the Father to send the Son. This was planned before creation.
I will quote the renown Theologian and one of the greatest minds in Christianity A.W. Tozer from his book the Knowledge of the Holy,
The words “God is love” mean that love is an essential attribute of God. Love is something true of God but it is not God. It expresses the way God is in
His unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness and truth. Because God is immutable He always acts like Himself, and because
He is a unity He never suspends one of His attributes in order to exercise another.
From God’s other known attributes we may learn much about His love. We can know, for instance, that because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning; because He is eternal, His love can have no end; because He is infinite, it has no limit; because He is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity; because He is immense, His love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the loftiest eloquence retreats confused and abashed.
A man is the sum of his parts and his character the sum of the traits that compose it. These traits vary from man to man and may from time to time vary from themselves within the same man. Human character is not constant because the traits or qualities that constitute it are unstable. These come and go, burn low or glow with great intensity throughout our lives. Thus a man who is kind and considerate at thirty may be cruel and churlish at fifty. Such a change is possible because man is made; he is in a very real sense a composition; he is the sum of the traits that make up his character.
We naturally and correctly think of man as a work wrought by the divine Intelligence. He is both created and made. How he was created lies undisclosed among the secrets of God; how he was brought from no-being to being, from nothing to something is not known and may never be known to any but the One who brought him forth. How God made him, however, is less of a secret, and while we know only a small portion of the whole truth, we do know that man possesses a body, a soul, and a spirit; we know that he has memory, reason, will, intelligence, sensation, and we know that to give these meaning he has the wondrous gift of consciousness. We know, too, that these, together with various qualities of temperament, compose his total human self.
These are gifts from God arranged by infinite wisdom, notes that make up the score of creations loftiest symphony, threads that compose the master tapestry of the universe.
But in all this we are thinking creature-thoughts and using creature-words to express them. Neither such thoughts nor such words are appropriate to the Deity. ”The Father is made of none,” says the Athanasian Creed, ”neither created nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone, not made, nor created, but begotten. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and the Son: not made nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.” God exists in Himself and of Himself. His being He owes to no one. His substance is indivisible. He has no parts but is single in His unitary being.
The doctrine of the divine unity means not only that there is but one God; it means also that God is simple, uncomplex, one with Himself. The harmony of His being is the result not of a perfect balance of parts but of the absence of parts. Between His attributes no contradiction can exist. He need not suspend one to exercise another, for in Him all His attributes are one. All of God does all that God does; He does not divide himself to perform a work, but works in the total unity of His being.
An attribute, then, is a part of God. It is how God is, and as far as the reasoning mind can go, we may say that it is what God is, though, as I have tried to explain, exactly what He is He cannot tell us. Of what God is conscious when He is conscious of self, only He knows. ”
The things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.” Only to an equal could God communicate the mystery of His Godhead; and to think of God as having an equal is to fall into an intellectual absurdity.
The divine attributes are what we know to be true of God. He does not possess them as qualities; they are how God is as He reveals Himself to His creatures. Love, for instance, is not something God has and which may grow or diminish or cease to be. His love is the way God is, and when He loves He is simply being Himself. And so with the other attributes.
One God! one Majesty!
There is no God but Thee!
Unbounded, unextended Unity!
Unfathomable Sea!
All life is out of Thee,
and Thy life is
Thy blissful Unity.
Frederick W. Faber
