Does God Save Us for His Glory or Because of His Love?

Overly complicating who God is, what God wills, and what God does creates problems—but the solution is simple.

The more pious a statement sounds, the more misleading it can be. Recently, I saw someone say, “Jesus did not primarily die for you because He loves you. He primarily died for His own glory.” At first, this point might ring as one of those prophetic words of God-centered theology that bristles our natural inclinations, but that we still need to hear. We have trained to push back against man-centered teaching that makes the Bible an ancient handbook of self-help, so we cheer, “Bingo!” The idea that God’s glory is more primary than His love impresses us as radically rebuking our man-centered impulses. Our culture, after all, has corrupted biblical love, turning “God is love” into “Love is God.”

For all that this statement has going for it, it has one drawback: it isn’t true.

It distorts the Bible’s teaching about who God is (his nature), what God wills, and what God does. The Bible teaches us that none of God’s attributes competes with another. All of God’s attributes are all of God, all of the time. God is simple, meaning he has no parts, no divisions, no competition between components of Himself. This is the stunning biblical doctrine of divine simplicity.

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

God is all of God, all the time. As Thomas Aquinas said, “All that is in God is God.” Meaning, God is fully love, fully power, fully wisdom, fully holiness, fully Himself. His attributes are full, complete, eternal, and infinite. They aren’t partial aspects of God, but perfections of God. God has no “parts.” If he had parts, then those things would be able to make God less God or more God.

I know this is mind-bending stuff, but let’s keep going.

God is one (Deut. 6:4). He is “I Am” (Ex. 3:14). If he had parts, then he could be two, or more, separated into multiple sections. But he simply IS, no assembly required. The trinitarian persons aren’t parts, but full personal possessors of the one divine nature. Simplicity actually provides the basis for the Trinity, because if the Father, Son, and Spirit are all God, then they can’t be parts of God or partially God. They must each be, simply and fully, God. God is Father, Son, and Spirit, and Father, Son, and Spirit will and work together singly and inseparably (John 5).

I know it’s challenging, but the doctrine of divine simplicity was a basic point of Christian theology for most of the church’s life. It gave folks like Athanasius a basis for defending the Trinity in the 4th century, it was taught by Augustine in the 5th century, Aquinas in the 13th century, and the Westminster Confession in the 17th century.

Unfortunately, modern theology pushed back against the doctrine of divine simplicity, for a variety of reasons. This pushback affected evangelicals. Here’s just one example. I was teaching an undergraduate theology class several years ago. At this particular school, I was assigned a syllabus as an adjunct professor, with the required textbook being a classic of modern evangelical theology, Christian Theology by Millard Erickson. In less than one page out of one-thousand, Erickson tries to maintain some key points of the teaching, but ultimately dismisses divine simplicity as one taught by “older theologies” and a “problematic attribute.”

Erickson pinpoints that the doctrine is difficult to comprehend. Yes—big time! We’ve already experienced a challenging sample of this teaching. As someone once quipped, “If this is God’s simplicity, I’d hate to think of his complexity.” But we don’t seek to comprehend doctrines, wrapping our minds around them and mastering them. Instead, we seek in faith to understand them, to “stand under” them, submitting to them in humble faith.

God is One. He is, “I Am.” So we don’t have to put his attributes or actions in competition with one another. His glory and his love don’t compete for first place. All of God is completely first, all of the time. All of God is primary.

The Stunning Reality of the Simple God

A friend once helpfully described how some Christians read the Bible. He said, “Imagine that the doctrine of God’s sovereignty (or holiness) is blue and the doctrine of God’s love is red. Some Christians see everything in the Bible as tinted blue, everything is about God’s sovereignty and holiness. Others see everything in the Bible as tinted red, everything is about God’s love.” (We could think of many colors for many Christians’ favorite theological/biblical hobby horses).

The doctrine of divine simplicity teaches us that we don’t have to choose. Instead, the Bible teaches us the Bible isn’t either blue or red. It’s like purple—it's both. Of course, God is infinitely more than this small analogy. God’s attributes are more like white light, encompassing every color at once. We might catch glimpses of a more bluish tone, or a more reddish hue at one moment or another, like a single diamond refracts light in multiple colors.

I know these analogies of divine simplicity fail, and we can’t comprehend it fully. But we can still seek to understand it humbly. We can stand in humble faith seeking the knowledge of God, fully holy and fully love (and fully all that He is, all of Him, all of the time).

I wonder if we need to seek more childlike faith. My kids got this point better than many of us theologian-types. I asked them, “Does God save us for his glory? Or does he save us because he loves us?”

All three said, almost in unison, “Both.”

Is God more holy or more love?
Is God more just or more merciful?
Is God more powerful or more wise?

The answer is, “Yes.”