According to one way of understanding God’s attributes it is best to conceive of the divine attributes as God’s nature rather than a collection of separate properties that compose God’s nature. This account of divine attributes is an entailment of one version of divine simplicity. Accordingly, God is his love, holiness, power, etc. Furthermore, we ought to say that when God acts, God does not act out of separate attributes, i.e., some act of God is done in love but not justice, in veracity but not holiness. All of God’s acts are done out of all that God is. Assuming this understanding of divine simplicity has implications for the doctrine of atonement.
In recent literature it has been common to point out that divine simplicity prevents atonement theorists from pitting the attributes of love and justice against one another. The underlying logic is that all of God’s attributes are at work in the act of atonement. If this is true then we ought to be able to speak of atonement from the perspective of any divine attribute. This paper argues that divine simplicity enables us to speak of atonement through the perspective of divine beauty. Towards this end, this paper proceeds as follows. First, I define the divine attribute of beauty. Second, I demonstrate what role beauty plays in the atonement accounts of Anselm and Jonathan Edwards. Third, I show the constructive possibilities of taking beauty seriously in our doctrine of atonement. I conclude by arguing that “beauty in atonement” is just one example of what a robust research program that examines atonement through the lens of each divine attribute might look like.