Over the last year, went went over arguments for and against the existence of God. We will now turn our attention to describing and defining what the one true God is like using Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology.
These are commonly known as God’s attributes which are classified in two categories, communicable and incommunicable. Last week we went over God’s names in scripture. This week we’ll cover what anthropomorphic language means when describing God, and then move on to the incommunicable attributes in subsequent blogs:
The second reason for mentioning this long list is to show that all that we know about God from Scripture comes to us in terms that we understand because they describe events or things common to human experience. Using a more technical term, we can say that all that Scripture says about God uses anthropomorphic language—that is, language that speaks of God in human terms. Sometimes people have been troubled by the fact that there is anthropomorphic language in Scripture. But this should not be troubling to us, for, if God is going to teach us about things we do not know by direct experience (such as his attributes), he has to teach us in terms of what we do know.
This is why all that Scripture says about God is “anthropomorphic” in a broad sense (speaking of God either in human terms or in terms of the creation we know). This fact does not mean that Scripture gives us wrong or misleading ideas about God, for this is the way that God has chosen to reveal himself to us, and to reveal himself truly and accurately. Nonetheless, it should caution us not to take any one of these descriptions by itself and isolate it from its immediate context or from the rest of what Scripture says about God. If we did that, we would run the risk of misunderstanding or of having an imbalanced or inadequate picture of who God is. Each description of one of God’s attributes must be understood in the light of everything else that Scripture tells us about God. If we fail to remember this, we will inevitably understand God’s character wrongly.
For example, we have an idea of love from human experience. That helps us to understand what Scripture means when it says that God is love, but our understanding of the meaning of “love” when applied to God is not identical with our experience of love in human relationships. So we must learn from observing how God acts in all of Scripture and from the other attributes of God that are given in Scripture, as well as from our own real-life experiences of God’s love, if we are to refine our idea of God’s love in an appropriate way and avoid misunderstanding. Thus, anthropomorphic language about God is true when it occurs in Scripture, but it can be understood rightly only by continual reading of Scripture throughout our lives in order that we may understand this language in the context of all of Scripture.
Grudem, W. A. (2004). Systematic theology: an introduction to biblical doctrine (pp. 158–160). Leicester, England; Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press; Zondervan Pub. House.