How Many Attributes in God? “Cambridge Attributes” and the Analogy of Symmetry Breaking

Every semester in systematic theology courses, professors teach students about theology proper, including God’s attributes. Every Sunday in churches, preachers exegete and proclaim truth from God’s Word, including the truth about his attributes. When the many biblical attributes are considered together, differing traditions categorize God’s attributes in various ways: communicable and incommunicable, goodness and greatness, negative and positive, absolute and relative, ad intra and ad extra, and not a few others. Some, perhaps most, consider all taxonomies, unsatisfactory. While this paper does not intend to propose a new taxonomy or support a best one, the diversity of taxonomies reveals at least two concerns. First, multiple attributes that need a taxonomic structure raise the issue of how God’s attributes relate to each other. For example, it is disorienting that God who is love also exhibits wrath. Is wrath an attribute? Such “attributes” do not seem to fit well in any taxonomy. Second, taxonomies of God’s attributes necessarily affirm a plurality of attributes, but this seems to be at odds with God’s simplicity, an historic and biblical affirmation which asserts and preserves the creator-creature distinction. First, and as a preliminarily, this paper intends to display the biblical asymmetry between love and wrath as an example of what is properly attributed to God, eternally, and what is rightly perceived of God, temporally, in creation. Following James Dolezal regarding God’s simplicity, God’s plural attributes, rightly discerned in Scripture are not properly attributed to the creator in their multiplicity. They might be called, “Cambridge Attributes,” arising from a change in the creature. Such an understanding may help us correctly affirm God’s wrath. Second, having established simplicity as fundamental, so that God does not properly “have” multiple attributes, this paper will suggest that an analogy exists in general revelation, symmetry breaking, which may prove helpful regarding our understanding of the multiplicity of God’s attributes. In physics, what is a singular and fundamental force, symmetric, prior to creation, is “broken” into four forces in creation, properly distinct in our universe as it expands and cools. Such symmetry breaking in nature may be a creation analogy which helps us understand God’s attribute(s).