(3) The Beauty of Divine Simplicity

One of the best questions we can ask about God comes from the Westminster Shorter Catechism. "What is God?" (Q/A 4). As the church has tried to answer that question from Scripture it has consistently used a surprising word to help describe the divine Being: simplicity. God is simple. Not in the sense of "easily understood," but as "being free from division into parts, and therefore from compositeness."

Like the word trinity the word simplicity cannot be found in Scripture. But reformed confessions of faith teach the doctrine because it is biblical. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530) affirms that "there is one Divine Essence which is called and which is God: eternal, without body, without parts" (Art. 1). In the Belgic Confession (1571) the Dutch Reformed churches confess the same thing: "There is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God" (art. 1). In the English reformation tradition divine simplicity is taught in the Thirty-nine Articles (1571), "There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions" (Art. 1). The Westminster Assembly, which originally convened to modify these articles, but then chose to replace them, significantly retained the exact language of the Anglican church (WC 2.1). English Baptists did likewise (LBC, 2.1).

Divine simplicity is firmly embedded in the reformed confessional tradition. If we understand what it is we may come to appreciate why the doctors of the church so treasured this doctrine, and why we should too.