Unity in Diversity as an Attribute of God

God is a complex unity--Three in One by nature--and is also one with us who believe, by adoption. He is not an absolutely simple unity, as is often taught. This false teaching comes from early efforts to make the Gospel more acceptable to the upper classes of Roman society by introducing Neoplatonist philosophy into it. But it instead destroys the Gospel by making God incapable of having any real unity with his children.

I have already shown a very simple, basic truth: We are already one with Christ and, therefore, one in Christ. All of us who have been saved through the knowledge of Christ are already one with Him: one with Him in His death, burial and resurrection; one with Him in the Spirit; and one with Him in His new life. We share in the Trinity, which is One. Because we are each individually united with Christ in this way, we are one with each other. Logically, it cannot be otherwise—we cannot each be one with Christ, yet not be one with each other. Moreover, we are united with Christ and with each other in a single Body of which He is the Head. Our oneness with Christ and with each other is a present reality from which we cannot escape. To be sure, we are also involved, individually and corporately, in a growth process in which we are learning to live out the truth of our oneness with God and with each other. We must continually choose to conform to the truth for it to have its full, intended effect in our experience. But the fact that we can decide how the truth of our oneness will affect our present experience does not make its truth depend on us. As will be explained in later chapters, when we choose to deny or neglect our oneness, it does not cease to exist. Rather, our sinful choice to deny our present oneness has real, negative consequences. So, in this sense, the choice is ours—we can either willingly conform to the truth and be blessed with growth or reject the truth and suffer the consequences. However, our choice for or against the truth does not affect the reality that Christ died to make us one with Himself and with each other. His work is done, and our oneness is a present, completed truth that should influence all of our conduct.

Unfortunately, however, this simple truth, with all of its implications for our lives, has been controversial throughout most of the history of the Church. The historical reasons for this will be addressed in detail in later posts, but, for now, can be summarized by three overarching causes:

1) A desire to make Christianity more “acceptable” to the Roman upper classes and to blunt persecution by making Christian teaching conform to Greek philosophical notions, particularly notions of God and matter;

2) A desire to increase the numerical size and political clout of the church, as a human organization, through “mass evangelism,” which implied that most of the members of the organization would lack an active friendship with Christ; and

3) A felt need to doctrinally rule out and actively suppress direct contact between common church members and God, other than through the formal church organization itself, for fear of “heresy” and in order to maintain proper church “discipline” (control).

These three motivations worked together in the same direction–greater separation of common church members (even those who actually knew Jesus) from God. They were implemented very gradually, usually without conscious design, one crisis at a time, and were generally undertaken with good motives by those directly involved. The first of the broad areas in which these changes occurred was the area which is the subject of this post–unity in diversity as an attribute of God, with its implication that we can also share in the unity of the Trinity.

The Greek philosophical school to which Christian leadership most strongly attempted to appeal was late Platonism, which merged gradually, in the Third Century, CE, into what is now known as Neoplatonism. The adoption of Neoplatonic thought into Christianity, and its effect on the efforts of the organized church to define Christian orthodoxy and heresy, appears to be generally recognized:

In the course of its history in late antiquity, Neoplatonism proved to be adaptable, fluid and dynamic, much more so than the system of the Stoics, the dominant philosophy during Hellenistic times. It appealed to the mundane literati as much as to the religious zealot, to the die-hard pagan as much as to the up-start Christian who needed a philosophical background to parse the theological fine points which would eventually distinguish the orthodox from the heretic…

Importantly, the new direction Plotinus, and presumably Ammonius Saccas before him, had given to Greek philosophy gradually acquired traction among the Greco-Roman elites. Ironically, it may have contributed to the acceptance of Christianity among the educated, thereby elevating the religious sentiments of the empire’s misfits and downtrodden to the ideology of a political system sanctified by the will of god. Evidence for the increasing Neoplatonization of Christianity is abundant: The brilliant Christian theologian Origen, some twenty years older than Plotinus, may also have been a pupil of Ammonius Saccas; the Cappadocian Fathers Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus spent their youth in philosophical study in Athens in the 4^th century, where they most certainly were exposed to Neoplatonism, while Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was intimately familiar with the writings of Plotinus and Porphyry. The cut-throat debates about transubstantiation (in the Eucharist), the hypostases of the Trinity, or the divine/human nature of Christ, could not even be followed without a thorough training in current Greek philosophical discourse.

Wildberg, Christian, “Neoplatonism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

The fundamental principle of late Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy is that all things ultimately emanate from nous–mindful consciousness. This consciousness was also called somewhat indiscriminately “the First,” “the One,” or “the Good.” This mindful consciousness that underlies everything is, however, quite impersonal–unlike the personal God of the Hebrews and of Christianity. Neoplatonism was strictly monistic–there could be only one nous that is ontologically prior to everything else, because, if there were two of them, one of the two would have to have come first. A personal God did not speak the universe into existence, and then create humans in his image. Rather, to non-Christian Neoplatonists, all things evolved gradually from the nous, as Wildberg again describes: “reality emerged from ‘the First’ in coherent stages, in such a way that one stage functions as creative principle of the next.”

Because only one radically monistic, impersonal nous was allowed in the pre-Christianized Neoplatonism, to facilitate its reconciliation with Christianity, the original Christian concept of diversity in God was replaced, over a period of a few centuries, with the doctrine called “Divine Simplicity.” This doctrine is, in fact, impossible to reconcile with the essential Christian doctrine of the Trinity–those who have tried have usually given up, calling the reconciliation of the two a “mystery” known only to God. The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity is, as William Vallicella describes in his article on the subject in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (I have deliberately chosen a neutral, secular source):

According to the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas and their adherents, God is radically unlike creatures and cannot be adequately understood in ways appropriate to them. God is simple in that God transcends every form of complexity and composition familiar to the discursive intellect. One consequence is that the simple God lacks parts. This lack is not a deficiency but a positive feature. God is ontologically superior to every partite entity, and his partlessness is an index thereof. Broadly construed, ‘part’ covers not only spatial and temporal parts (if any) but also metaphysical ‘parts’ or ontological constituents. To say that God lacks metaphysical parts is to say inter alia that God is free of matter-form composition, potency-act composition, and existence-essence composition. There is also no real distinction between God as subject of his attributes and his attributes. God is thus in some sense identical to each of his attributes, which implies that each attribute is identical to every other one. God is omniscient, then, not in virtue of instantiating or exemplifying omniscience — which would imply a real distinction between God and the property of omniscience — but by being omniscience. And the same holds for each of the divine omni-attributes: God is what he has as Augustine puts it in The City of God, XI, 10. As identical to each of his attributes, God is identical to his nature. And since his nature or essence is identical to his existence, God is identical to his existence…

DDS is represented not only in classical Christian theology, but also in Jewish, Greek, and Islamic thought. It is to be understood as an affirmation of God’s absolute transcendence of creatures. God is not only radically non-anthropomorphic, but radically unlike creatures in general, not only in respect of the properties he possesses, but also in his manner of possessing them. It is not just that God has properties no creature has; the properties he has he has in a way different from the way any creature has any of its properties. God has his properties by being them….  Unique in all these ways, God is uniquely unique. He is not unique as one of a kind, but unique in transcending the distinction between kind and member of a kind. God is unique in his very mode of uniqueness. The simple God, we could say, differs not only in his attributes, but also in his very ontological structure, from any and all created beings…

Vallicella, William F., “Divine Simplicity”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)

Note immediately that, if God is totally ontologically simple, in this sense, he cannot be composed of three persons. Jesus might still be his “son” in some remote sense, possibly in the sense Philo of Alexandria’s logos was the “son of God,” but he certainly is not one with him. And if Jesus is God, he cannot be like us in any real sense. To acknowledge the Incarnation–“God with us”–and the Trinity requires that God’s unity is unity in diversity. And if God is Three in One, there is no reason that he could not adopt us as his children and include us in his unity.

However, the truth is that God’s unity is complex. Unity in diversity, the unity of persons who appear separate, will be a dominant theme of this blog.  It should be understood that such unity is real, and starts with God himself.  Though often thought to portray God as a simple, indivisible unity, the Old Testament is ambiguous on this point, and can properly be read to portray God as a complex unity.  In the Genesis account of the Creation, for instance God created the heavens and the earth¹.  This looks like creation by an unambiguously singular Creator, until the Hebrew text is consulted.  The Hebrew shows that ‘Elohim, a grammatically plural name of God, created everything.  Indeed, according to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, this same plural noun is used 1633 times in the Old Testament to refer to the one true God. The standard explanation for the use of a plural form in this verse, is that the use of the plural for God is a “majestic plural,” intended to declare God’s majesty rather than his complexity, diversity or plurality.  This may or may not make sense as an explanation of the plural ‘Elohim, by itself—the evidence is conflicting, as the “majestic plural” may not even have been known to ancient Hebrew (see this brief discussion of the “Royal we” in Wikipedia)–but it fails to explain some other Old Testament data, and completely fails to explain the New Testament.

For example, in the very next verse after it is said that ‘Elohim created the heavens and the earth, the text says, at the time of the Creation, the Spirit of God (ruach ‘Elohim), a name that appears to refer to an entity other than simply ‘Elohim, was hovering over the waters of the creation^2,3,4. Later in the same chapter, ‘Elohim creates humans.  In creating humans, he says “let us create man in Our image, after Our likeness,” using first person plural forms.  Here, the plural indication not only appears to have God talking to himself, but telling himself (and us) that the image and likeness of God in the first humans was a plural image and a plural likeness⁵.  This impression appears to be reinforced by the narrator’s explanation—“God (‘Elohim) created man in His own image… male and female He created them.⁶.” More will be said of this male/female duality in a later post.  For now, it is sufficient to say that it appears to assert complexity in God, in that both male and female in humanity are aspects of this image.

Two chapters later, after the first couple sinned, and after God had pronounced judgment on them, the Lord God—YHWH ‘Elohim, a compound which joins the unpronounceable name of God with the plural ‘Elohim—says, apparently to himself, “the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.…⁷” God’s response to this observation was, of course, to drive Adam and Eve out of the garden, so they would not eat from the tree of life and live forever in their fallen state.  But the critical observation for the present inquiry is that the Lord God here spoke to himself in the plural. 

This is, in fact, not the only place in the Old Testament where God appears to speak to himself, or of himself, in the plural (“we” or “us”).  For instance, in the narrative of the Tower of Babel, in which sinful humans, using their unified language, attempt to build a tower to reach and, presumably, overthrow God, God says to himself, “Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” Genesis 11:7. In Isaiah 6:8, Isaiah overheard God saying to himself, ““Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And in Isaiah 41, after spending 21 verses saying what “I,” the Lord, will do to show “my” glory, in speaking to Israel’s idols, God suddenly starts speaking of himself in the plural:

“Present your case,” says the Lord.
    “Set forth your arguments,” says Jacob’s King.
“Tell us, you idols,
    what is going to happen.
Tell us what the former things were,
    so that we may consider them
    and know their final outcome.
Or declare to us the things to come,
     tell us what the future holds,
    so we may know that you are gods.
Do something, whether good or bad,
    so that we will be dismayed and filled with fear.
But you are less than nothing
    and your works are utterly worthless;
    whoever chooses you is detestable.

“I have stirred up one from the north, and he comes—
    one from the rising sun who calls on my name.
He treads on rulers as if they were mortar,
    as if he were a potter treading the clay.
Who told of this from the beginning, so we could know,
    or beforehand, so we could say, ‘He was right’?
No one told of this,
    no one foretold it,
    no one heard any words from you.”

Isaiah 41:21-26.

There are, of course, explanations of these passages which allow the complexity of God to be denied.  Still, God speaking to himself in the plural strongly suggests that he is not an ontologically simple singular God.

The Shema, God’s greatest commandment, can also be read in a way that suggests his complexity. The NASB reads: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.¹⁰.”  At first blush, this appears entirely singular, in the NASB and all other standard English translations—but not in the Hebrew.  In the first verse, the phrase translated “the Lord our God” is “YHWH ‘Eloheinu,” the same compound “YHWH ‘Elohim” we have seen before, with a personal pronoun suffix added to show he is “our” ‘Elohim.  The clause translated “is one Lord,” is “YHWH ‘echad.”  The literal sense of the whole first verse is either “Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God (‘Elohim), YHWH is one” or “Hear, O Israel, YHWH is our (‘Elohim), YHWH alone¹¹.”

YHWH is singular, but ‘Elohim is plural, and ‘echad is ambiguous. It can, and often does, mean the cardinal number one.  It is also often used to refer to simple singular referents—with the meaning that only one thing of that type is being referred to. But it can also be used, more rarely, to refer to compound unities. For example, ‘echad has precisely this meaning, a compound unity, in Genesis 2:24, where it is said that the man God created and his wife became one (‘echad) flesh.  ‘Echad is also used again in this sense in Genesis 3:22, where God says that, by eating the forbidden fruit, “the man,” referring to both Adam and Eve, “has become like one (‘echad) of us.”

The English word “one” is plagued with a similar ambiguity.  Jewish teaching dating much later than the Pentateuch advised that ‘echad in the Shema should be understood (not recited!) as if the text said yachid instead, believing yachid (“only” or “one and only”) to be less ambiguous on this point–I found one somewhat questionable source that placed this teaching as early as the late Second Century (C.E.) Palestinian Jewish Patriarch Judah I, traditionally the primary compiler of the Mishnah. And the Second of the Thirteen Fundamental Principles of the great Rabbi Maimonides in the Twelfth Century established as one of the central beliefs of Judaism, in very Neoplatonic fashion, that God is uniquely one, in a manner that nothing else is one, indivisible and not composed of elements. (See, Maimonides, “Introduction to Mishnah Tractate Sanhedrin, Chapter 10 (Perek Helek)” (Maimonides Heritage Center, Tr.)). So it has now certainly become clear Jewish teaching that ‘echad, when used in reference to God, must not be understood as referring to a compound or complex unity, bu only to a perfectly simple one.

Still, the word God actually used to refer to himself was ‘echad.  One possible reading of this verse in isolation would be “YHWH is all the gods we recognize, and YHWH is one.”  Still, the ambiguity is there—the verse at least suggests complexity in God.  This ambiguity is compounded by the next verse, which says that, because of what was said in the previous verse, each of us individually must love this God—YHWH ‘Eloheicha, again a compound of the unpronounceable name with the plural ‘Elohim, with a second-person singular pronoun suffix added, literally “YHWH your (personal) Gods”—with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.  Again, complexity is suggested.

Complexity is also suggested by Isaiah 48:16. The context of this verse is written in the first person, declaring who “I” am and what “I” have done¹³.  Many of the things said in the preceding verses could only be said by God, for instance, that “I” have declared the past from the beginning¹⁴, that “I am” the first and also the last¹⁵, and that “I” laid the foundation of the earth¹⁶.  Verse 17 actually declares that the speaker is “the Lord your God (YHWH ‘Eloheicha),” the same name of God used in the Shema. Yet, in verse 16, in the NASB, the speaker says to Israel collectively,

Come near to Me, listen to this: From the first I have not spoken in secret, From the time it took place, I was there. And now the Lord God (ՙAdonai YHWH) has sent Me, and His Spirit (his Ruach). 

Isaiah 43:16.

So the Lord God (‘Adonai YHWH) and his Spirit (the same Ruach that was present at the Creation) sent the Lord Israel’s God (YHWH ‘Eloheicha) to speak these words?  It sounds as if the three named entities can be distinguished from each other—that is, it seems as if God is complex, not simple.  The words God gave Isaiah to write have, indeed, a very Trinitarian sound.

In the New Testament, it becomes clear that the One God exists as three united in One.  In quoting the Shema¹⁷, Jesus stressed the unity of God using a Greek word (heis) which can refer to a united one, a complex plural unity¹⁸, with much the same ambiguity as the Hebrew ‘echad—where another Greek word (mono) would have implied absolute singularity.  And, just as Moses had done, in Matthew 19:5 Jesus stresses the unity of the first man and his wife in their diversity using heis, the same word he had used to describe God’s unity.  So, again, whether in Moses’ Hebrew or Jesus’ Greek, God is described using language which suggests unity in diversity rather than absolute simplicity.