The church has historically sought to understand God by studying and meditating on his attributes. These are numerous varying. These include, but are not limited to his independence, immutability, unchangeableness, infinity with respect to time (eternity), infinity with respect to space (omnipresence), knowledge (omniscience), wisdom, truthfulness, goodness, love, mercy, holiness, righteousness, power (omnipotence), perfection, and glory. While we will not try to deal with all his attributes, we will try to include those that have come under the most scrutiny over time. Most of the church’s understanding of the attributes of God comes from its Jewish roots.
Much of the church’s understanding and discussion of God’s attributes reflected heavily on the prevailing philosophies of the day. Today, there is a movement underfoot to divorce the discussions and attitudes regarding divine attributes from these earlier Greek philosophies. Unfortunately, our own philosophical views then enter the discussions. An example of this would be both Process and Liberation Theology.[1]
It is interesting to note that in the New Testament we do not find Jesus or the apostles engaging in lengthy descriptions of God or detailed explanations of what he is like. The assumption was that the church’s understanding of God came from its Jewish roots. There are, however, a number of passages where his attributes are mentioned.
1. Jesus’ call for perfection was based on God’s own perfection (Matt 548).
2. Jesus called for his followers to ”be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 636).
3. Jesus also called attention to the goodness of God (Mark 1018) and divine omnipotence (Matt 1926).
4. The apostle Paul wrote and discussed much concerning the attributes of God:
a. God’s wrath (Rom 118).
b. His kindness, tolerance, and patience ((Rom 24).
c. Righteousness (Rom 321).
d. Grace (Rom 323-24).
e. Wisdom and knowledge (Rom 1133).
f. Faithfulness (1 Cor 19).
g. Blessedness (1 Tim 111).
h. And self-sufficiency Acts 1724-25).
5. James focused on the immutability of God (Jas 117).
6. John affirmed God’s divine omniscience (1 John 320) and love (1 John 48).
The early church fathers wrote much concerning the attributes of God.
1. Infinity: This deals with God’s eternity.
a. Isaiah says “Yahweh is the everlasting God.” (Isa 4028)
b. Solomon claims in 1 Kings that “the heavens, even the highest heaven, cannot contain you”. 1 Kings 827
c. Aristides wrote, “God is not born, not made, an eternal nature without beginning and without end, immortal, perfect, incomprehensible. Now when I say that he is ‘perfect,’ this means there is no defect in him, and he is not in need of anything but all things are in need of him . . . .[2]
d. In his, Against Marcion, Tertullian offered a “definition” of God. “So far as a human being can form [write] a definition of God, I adduce [present] one that the conscience of all men will also acknowledge Ē that God is the great supreme, existing in eternity, unbegotten, unmade, without beginning, without end.” [3]
2. Omnipotence: refers to him being "all powerful".
a. Origen acknowledged that “nothing is impossible for the Omnipotent,”[4] he also warned not to take this too far. To do so could lead to affirming absurd things about God. “God can do everything which it is possible for him to do without ceasing to be God, and good, and wise. . . . [S]o neither is God able to commit wickedness, for the power of doing evil is contrary to his deity and omnipotence . . . . Thus we do not back ourselves into a most absurd corner, saying that with God all things are possible.”[5]
b. Augustine writes, “. . .if there is anything that he [God] willed to do and did not do, or, what were worse, if he did not do something because man's will prevented him, the Omnipotent, from doing what he willed. Nothing, therefore, happens unless the Omnipotent wills it to happen. He either allows it to happen or he actually causes it to happen.”[6]
3. Omnipresence: While Scripture speaks of God dwelling in heaven, the fact is God is present everywhere.
a. In Psalm 1398, David affirms, “ If I ascend to heaven, Thou art there; If I make my bed in Sheol, behold, Thou art there . . .“ (Cf. Psalm 1398-10)
b. Theophilus wrote, “But this is the attribute of God, the Highest and Almighty, and the living God, not only to be everywhere present, but also to see all things and to hear all, and by no means to be confined in a place; for if He were, then the place containing Him would be greater than He; for that which contains is greater than that which is contained. For God is not contained, but is Himself the place of all.”[7]
c. Clement of Alexandria explains further that God is not constrained by special limitations. “For God is not in darkness or in place, but above both space and time, and qualities of objects. Wherefore neither is He at any time in a part, either as containing or as contained, either by limitation or by section. "For what house will ye build to Me?" saith the Lord? Nay, He has not even built one for Himself, since He cannot be contained. And though heaven be called His throne, not even thus is He contained, but He rests delighted in the creation.”[8]
d. Origen says, The illustrious Celsus, taking occasion I know not from what, next raises an additional objection against us, as if we asserted that "God Himself will come down to men." He imagines also that it follows from this, that "He has left His own abode;" for he does not know the power of God, and that "the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world, and that which upholdeth all things hath knowledge of the voice." Nor is he able to understand the words, "Do I not fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord." (Jer 2324) Nor does he see that, according to the doctrine of Christianity, we all "in Him live, and move, and have our being," as Paul also taught in his address to the Athenians (Acts 1728); and therefore, although the God of the universe should through His own power descend with Jesus into the life of men, and although the Word which was in the beginning with God, which is also God Himself, should come to us, He does not give His place or vacate His own seat, so that one place should be empty of Him, and another which did not formerly contain Him be filled. But the power and divinity of God comes through him whom God chooses, and resides in him in whom it finds a place, not changing its situation, nor leaving its own place empty and filling another: for, in speaking of His quitting” [9]
4. Omniscience: deals with what God knows. The term literally means “all-knowing”, understanding God’s knowledge to be exhaustive of the past, present, and future.
a. The Apostle John affirms this when he wrote “in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart, and knows all things.” (1 John 320)
b. The writer of Hebrews says, “. . . there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him with whom we have to do.” (Heb 413)
c. “For God knows all things -- not those only which exist, but those also which shall be -- and how each thing shall be.”[10]
d. Tatian even went so far as to affirm that God knows future events, even those that depend on man’s free-will. “And the power of the Logos, having in itself a faculty to foresee future events, not as fated, but as taking place by the choice of free agents,”[11]
5.
Impassability:
God does not experience, and is not affected, by human feelings. This was
the position of the early church.
a. Iranaeus complained that false teachers made a mistake on this point: “They endow him [God] with human affections and passions. But if they had known the Scriptures, and had been taught the truth, they would have known, beyond doubt, that God is not as men are; and that his thoughts are not like the thoughts of men. For the Father of all is at a vast distance from those affections and passions which operate among men.”[12]
b. This means that God does not feel sadness. Origen states, “We will not serve God as though he stood in need of our service, or as though he would be unhappy if we ceased served him.”[13]
c. Indeed, even our salvation is not an issue. “our salvation is not necessary to him, so that he would gain anything or suffer any loss, if he either made us divine, or allowed us to be annihilated and destroyed by corruption.[14]
d. By the middle of the Second century, the heresy of Patripassionism (lit. “the Father suffered”), which believed that God the Father was crucified on the cross. Divine impassability was the basis of rejection and Tertullian was the church’s spokesman. He claimed, “But how absurd they are even in this foolishness! For what is the meaning of ‘fellow-suffering,’ but the endurance of suffering along with another. Now if the Father is incapable of suffering, he is incapable of suffering along with another.” [15]
e. Augustine wrote extensively on the attributes of God. Regarding God’s impassability Augustine worked hard to affirm certain attributes of God while denying that God suffers any emotion. In his sermon On Patience, he wrote, “We cannot think of patience Ē or God’s jealousy, wrath, and so forth Ē as it is in us, for it is not that way in God. That is, we cannot feel any of these without disturbance. But far be it from us to imagine that the impassable nature of God is subject to any disturbance! But just as God is jealous without any darkening of spirit, wrathful without any perturbation, merciful without any pain, repentant without any wrong in him to be set right Ē so God is patient without any passion.”[16]
Not much changed in the middle ages of the church. They continued to affirm the traditional attributes of God and developed philosophical and systematic discussions of them.[17]
1. Anselm (1033-1109AD) affirmed the impassability of God. His understanding of the atonement was based on impassability. “We say that the Lord Jesus Christ is true God and true man, one person in two natures and two natures in one person. In view of this, when we say that God is suffering some humiliation or weakness, we do not understand this in terms of the exaltedness of his non-suffering [divine] nature, but in terms of the weakness of the human nature he took upon himself.”[18]
2. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian. His view of the attributes of God became known as via negative, or method of negation. His approach states that all attributes that do not belong to God are denied in the search for knowledge about God. “The more we can negatively differentiate it, or the more attributes we can strike from it in our mind, the more we approach a true knowledge of it.”[19] Aquinas made an important contribution in distinguishing between the divine attributes that have no likeness in human beings and those that do have a likeness.
“Because God gives to creatures all
their perfections … he has with all creatures a likeness, and an unlikeness at
the same time. For this point of likeness, however, it is more proper to say
that the creature is like God than that God is like the creature. For that is
said to be like a thing, which possesses its quality or form. Since then that
which is found to perfection in God is found in other beings by some manner of
imperfect participation, the said point of likeness belongs to God absolutely,
but not so to the creature. And thus the creature has what belongs to God: but
it cannot be said that God has what belongs to the creature, nor is it fitting
to say that God is like the creature; as we do not say that a man is like his
picture, and yet his picture is rightly to be pronounced to be like him.”[20]
God is both truthful and merciful and people can be both truthful and merciful, but these are not completely the same nor completely different. “Things said to be alike of God and of human beings are not said either in quite the same sense, or in a totally different sense, but in an analogous sense.”[21]
Unlike many of the issues debated during the Reformation, the attributes of God were not an issue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Church.
1.
The Augsburg Confession offers the following
definition of God: “there is one Divine Essence which is called and which is
God: eternal, without body, without parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness,
the Maker and Preserver of all things, visible and invisible; and yet there are
three Persons, of the same essence and power, who also are coeternal, the
Father the Son, and the Holy Ghost…. ”[22] The
Augsburg Confession was followed by the Anglican Church’s Thirty-nine
Articles: “There
is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions [italics are mine]; of
infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things
both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three
Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Ghost.” This definition of God was acceptable to Christians, whether
Protestant or Catholic.
2.
John Calvin (1509-1564) was one of the most
influential theologians of the Reformation period. He was the principle figure
in the development of the system of Christian Theology later called Calvinism.
Speaking of God’s attributes Calvin wrote in his Institutes of Christian Religion the following: “It is as if he had
been said to be of infinite greatness or loftiness, of incomprehensible
essence, of boundless might, and of eternal immortality. But while we hear
this, our thought must be raised higher when God is spoken of, lest we dream up
anything earthly or physical about him, lest we measure him by our small
measure, of conform his will to our emotions.”[23] Allison
picks up on this and says, “Clearly, Calvin was concern that people not reduce
or limit God by their own imagination and desire. Human beings as finite and
sinful creatures are far too disposed and adept at remaking God in their
image.”[24]
3.
The post-Reformers expanded on the
discussions of the divine attributes while exposing the false teaching put
forward by heretical groups such as the Socinians. Both
Luther’s and Calvin’s followers rejected the Socinian view that God’s
foreknowledge was incompatible with man’s free will. The Socinians held this
view since it left the human will free from all causal conditions that might
influence it in one direction or another.
4.
Divine foreknowledge and its determining
effect on free will was a major source of concern for many philosophers during
the post-reformation period. Fatalism is the thesis that human acts
occur by necessity and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis
that infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence
unfree. If there is a being who knows the entire future infallibly, then no
human act is free.
5.
Francis Turretin developed a biblical case
(John 2117, 1 John 320) that affirmed the perfect
knowledge of God.[25] He also
appealed to many prophesies in Scripture as evidence of God’s infallible
Knowledge of the future.[26]
The
general view of the church regarding the Attributes of God in the Reformation
and Post-Reformation was consistent with the views of both the early church and
the church of the middle ages.
The modern period brought a considerable rise in the number of attacks on the cardinal doctrines of Christianity, and the attributes of God were no exception.
1. Among those critical of the church’s position on the attributes of God was Friedrich Schleiermacher. One of his main concerns was the church’s historical approach to listing and defining the attributes of God: “If the list of these attributes is regarded as the complete summary of definitions to be related to God himself, then a complete knowledge of God must be derivable from conceptions, and an explanation in due theoretic form would take the place of that divine ineffability of the divine being.”[27] The response to this is that no theologian or church leader ever claimed to his list was even close to being an exhaustive discussion of the divine attributes. By claiming that the attributes we ascribe to God denote nothing special in God, but only something special in the way we relate to Him,[28] Schleiermacher open the door to an entirely new approach to the discussion of the attributes of God.
2. Perhaps the most common in modern theology was to elevate the attribute of love above all the other attributes of God. Albert Ritschl asserted, “There is no other conception of equal worth besides this which needs to be taken into account.”[29] The consequence of this for Ritschl was that any other attribute that seemed contrary to God’s love was obviously not real: “According to the New Testament, God’s wrath signifies his determination to destroy those who definitively set themselves against redemption and the final end of the Kingdom of God…. From the point of view of theology, therefore, no validity can be assigned to the idea of the wrath of God and his curse upon sinners.”[30]
3. Other theologians, rather than throw out the entire retributive aspect of God’s character, moved to relax the idea of divine justice. The traditional church’s conception of how the love of God and his justice hold together may be stated, “The conviction arose that the divine righteousness and the divine love are logically opposed to each other and that the real genius of Christianity lies in the way in which this opposition was overcome in the interest of the divine love. Righteousness, it was argued, implies distributive justice, and distributive justice forbids any departure from the strict law of reward and punishment as determined by what one deserves. There can, therefore, be no forgiveness of sins until the demands of justice have been met. These demands were, however, met by the death of Christ, and thus a new era of divine grace was inaugurated.”[31] While admitting some truth to this concept, Knudson claimed that God is not indifferent to moral distinctions and does not treat the upright and the wicked alike. But to say that his righteousness requires him to mete out rewards and punishment to men in exact proportion to what they deserve is quite another thing. [32]
4. William G. T. Shedd was one of those who stood up against the destructive development of modern theology. For example, consider his stand against pantheism and panentheism [33]
The infinite cannot be the perfect if the pantheistic postulate is true. For if the finite being is passing from the lower to higher modes of existence and of consciousness, as finite being is, absolute and immutable perfection cannot be attributed to him. Moreover, since evolution may be from the more perfect to the less perfect, as well as from the less perfect to the more perfect, it follows from the pantheistic theory that the infinite being may tend downward and become evil.[34]
Several modern theologians contended that happiness was the greatest purpose and good of humanity. Shed countered that saying, “The happiness of the creature cannot be the final end of God’s action. There would be no wisdom in this case, because the superior would be subordinated to the inferior. This would be folly, not wisdom.”[35]
5. Many theologians had become disenchanted with the traditional understandings regarding God—perfect, immutable, impassable, removed from the world he had created. Process theology started a firestorm regarding the doctrine of God. Existentialism became the key word of the nineteenth century. The philosophical thinking of men such men as Soren Kierkegaard challenged the traditional view of God and man’s existence. For Kierkegaard existence emerges as a philosophical problem in the struggle to think the paradoxical presence of God; for Friedrich Nietzsche it is found in the reverberations of the phrase “God is dead,” in the challenge of nihilism.
6. Process theology’s major concepts:
a. God is not omnipotent in the sense of being coercive. The divine has a power of persuasion rather than coercion. Process theologians interpret the classical doctrine of omnipotence as involving force, and suggest instead a forbearance in divine power. "Persuasion" in the causal sense means that God does not exert unilateral control.[36]
7. Karl Barth was a major influence in the nineteenth century. One of his two signature contributions was that God gives himself to human beings: “he does not will to be God for himself nor as God to be alone with himself. He wills as God to be for us and with us who are not God.”[39] Barth uses God’s triune nature to base this on: “He is Father, Son and Holy Spirit and therefore alive in his unique being with and for and in another….He does not exist in solitude but in fellowship. Therefore what he seeks and creates between himself and us in fact nothing else but what he wills and completes and therefore is in himself.”[40] This love is unconditional; it is not conditioned by any reciprocity of love, or worthiness of the one being loved. Furthermore, Barth says, “God loves because he loves; because this act is his being, his essence and his nature.”[41]
8. One of the newest movements to question the classical views of God came from within the ranks of evangelical themselves. Evangelical such as Clark Pinnock, John Sander, and Gregory Boyd promoted the movement known as “open theism.”[42] An example of the issues under consideration is their view of divine omniscience or the full knowledge of God.
a. John Sanders believed that God’s knowledge should be called present knowledge, which “affirms omniscience but denies exhaustive foreknowledge. Although God’s knowledge is coextensive with reality in that God knows all that can be known, the future actions of free creatures are not yet reality, and so there is nothing to be known.”[43]
b. A key belief at the heart of this is human freedom. Open theists subscribe to the idea that humans enjoy the divine gift of libertarian free will, or freedom even to contradict the will and directing influence of God. Thus God does not and cannot know the future actions of human beings.[44] This is based on a variety of texts showing God’s changing has mind based on human actions and decisions.[45]
c. Probably the most notable evangelical to confront the open theists’ position was Bruce Ware. His critique of the biblical basis for open theism resulted in a finding of major problems with both “divine growth-in-knowledge texts and divine repentance texts.”[46] As for the first set of texts, Ware agreed that a basic hermeneutical principle is to take biblical passages literally. However, he objected that applying that interpretive principle to the divine growth-in-knowledge passages failed miserably.[47] As for the second set of texts, he argued that these should be understood anthropomorphically.[48] Since Scripture elsewhere clearly attributes to God that he is not capable of repenting.[49]
9. This implies two things:
a. Either Scripture is wrong when it makes statements such as God will not change his mind or this is anthromorphism[50]. Anthromorphism is used throughout Scripture to express God’s human interaction and connection. Consider Deut 332,3. But to say that God has hands or feet or other body parts would be to deny the very Spirit of God which we know is not physical.
b. This same issue comes into account when considering repentance. This requires a change of state in humanity that God was not aware of prior to it happening. The change then caused God to rethink his position. In other words, God does not have divine foreknowledge. He does not know all things. Open theist’s claim that God’s knowledge is limited to all things except libertarian free will.
10. The works of Ware and others was so influential that the Southern Baptist Convention , in its rewrite of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message, changed the wording of its doctrine of God with the addition of one sentence affirming exhaustive divine foreknowledge: “He is all powerful and all knowing; and his perfect knowledge extends to all things, past, present, and future, including the future decisions of his free creatures.”[51]
[1] For a brief description of both see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology
[2] Aristides, The Apology of Aristides, 1: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/aristides-kay.html. Also in ANF, 10:263-264.
[3] Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.3: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/03121.htm. Also in ANF, 3:273.
[4] Origen, First Principles, 3.6.5: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04123.htm. Also in ANF, 4:346
[5] Origen, Against Celsus, 3.70 and 5.23 http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04163.htm. Also in ANF, 4:492, 553.
[6] Augustine, Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love, XXIV:95: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/pearse/morefathers/files/augustine_enchiridion_02_trans.htm
[7] Theophilus, To Autolycus, 3: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/theophilus-book2.html, Also in ANF, 2:95.
[8] Clement, Stromata, 2:2: http://www.gnosis.org/library/strom2.htm
[9] Origen, Against Celsus, 4.5: http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/fathers/origen/contra-celsum-2.asp?pg=20
[10] Clement, Stromata, 6.17: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/clement-stromata-book6.html
[11] Tatian, Address to the Greeks, 7: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/tatian-address.html
[12]
Iranaeous,Against Heresies, 2.13.3, http://wesley.nnu.edu/sermons-essays-books/noncanonical-literature/irenaeus-against-heresies-book-ii,
in ANF, 1:374.
[13] Origen, Against Celsus, 8.8, http://books.google.com/books?id=BNzrOWhEVjYC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
[14] Arnobius, Against the Heathen, 2.64, http://mb-soft.com/believe/txua/arnobiu2.htm, in ANF, 4:642.
[15]
Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 29: in ANF, 3:626. Patripassionism comes from pater
(= father) and passio (= suffer) Ē
it was the
Father who suffered. Praxeas’s position was the Jesus Christ is God the Father
almighty. So, it was the Father who was crucified, suffered, and died. The
argument went, if the Father and the Son are one and the same, then logic
dictates that if Christ suffered, the Father suffered.
[16] Augustine, On Patience, 1: The text has been rendered clearer.
[17] Allison, p.215
[18] Anselm, Why God Became Man, 1:8 (no online copy available)
[19] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 1.14 (no online copy available)
[20] Ibid, 1.29
[21] Ibid, 1.34
[22] Augsburg Confession, 1: http://carm.org/augsburg-confession
[23] John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, 3.20.40: http://www.vor.org/rbdisk/html/institutes/3_20.htm#3.20.40
[24] Allison, p.219.
[25] Francis Turretin, Institute of Elenctic Theology, ed. James T. Dennison Jt., trans. George Musgrave Giger, 3 vols. In 1 (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R, 1997), 3 topic, 12th q. , sec. 7, 1:208 (not available online)
[26] Ibid., sec. 14, 1:209-210 E.g., he referred to Isaiah 4610 and 4123 to demonstrate that one mark of the one and only true God, over and against false gods, is his perfect knowledge of the future.
[27] Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1928), 196.
[28] Ibid, 194
[29] Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, (Clifton, N.J.: Reference Book Publishers, 19966), 273
[30] Ibid. 323
[31] Allison, 223.
[32] Albert C. Knudson, The Doctrine of God, (New York: Abingdon, 1990), 342.
[33] Panentheism (from Greek ðᾶí (pân) "all"; ἐí (en) "in"; and èåüò (theós) "God"; "all-in-God") is a belief system which posits that God personally exists, interpenetrates every part of nature and timelessly extends beyond it. Panentheism is differentiated from pantheism, which holds that God is not a distinct being but is synonymous with the universe.[1]
[34] William G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 3.5, in Dogmatic Theology, ed. Alan E. Gomes, 3rd ed. (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P & R, 2003), 282.
[35] Ibid., 288
[36] Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York, 1984), 20-26.
[37] John Cobb and David Griffin, Process Theology: An Introductory Exposition (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976), 14-16, chapter 1.
[38] Hartshorne, 32-36.
[39] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, 257.
[40] Ibid., 275
[41] Ibid., 279
[42] Open theism is a recent theological movement that has developed within evangelical and post-evangelical Protestant Christianity as a response to certain ideas that are related to the synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. Several of these ideas within classical theism (a designation which is not to be taken as inclusive of all of orthodox theism) state that God is immutable, impassible, and timeless.
[43] John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1998), 198-99.
[44] Allison, 278.
[45] Consider this sampling: Gen 66-7, Exod 327-4, Isa 381-5
[46] Bruce A. Ware, God’s Lesser Glory: The Diminished God of Open Theism (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000), 65.
[47] Ibid., 67-86.
[48] Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.
[49] Num 2319, 1 Sam 1519
[50] Anthropotheism is ascribing human form and nature to gods, or the belief that gods are only deified human beings. Associated with classical Greek and Roman beliefs, a type of anthropotheism finds a modern expression in the Mormon world-view of eternal progression.
[51] Baptist Faith and Message (1925, 1963), 2.