Classifying God's Attributes

Theological scholars have crafted different methods of classifying God’s attributes. The two most commonly used classification are the incommunicable and communicable attributes of God. The communicable attributes of God are those God shares or “communicates” with us like love (God is love, and we can love as well), knowledge (God has knowledge, and we are able to have knowledge as well), mercy (God is merciful, and we are able to be merciful too), or justice (God is just and we, too, are able to be just). The incommunicable are those attributes that God does not share or “communicate” to others like God’s eternity (God has existed for all eternity, but we have not), unchangeableness (God does not change, but we do), or omnipresence (God is

There is no attribute of God that is completely communicable, and there is no attribute of God that is completely incommunicable! For example, God’s wisdom is a communicable attribute, because we also can be wise. However, we will never be infinitely wise as God is. His wisdom is to some extent shared with us, but it is never fully shared with us. We can imitate God’s love and share in that attribute to some degree, but we will never be infinitely loving as God is. It is better to say that those attributes we call “communicable” are those that are more shared with us. Those attributes we call “incommunicable” are better defined by saying that they are attributes of God that are less shared by us. [1] All attributes of God have some likeness in the character of mankind. For example, God is unchangeable, while we change. But we do not change completely, for there are some aspects of our characters that remain largely unchanged: our individual identities, many of our personality traits, and some of our long-term purposes remain substantially unchanged over many years even when we transition into the presence of God

This attribute of God’s greatness has been most reflected in the question: can God change? For most classical Christian theists (including many Protestants in the Reformed tradition), God is great beyond ability to change; any change whatever—including responsive feelings—must be a sign of imperfection and therefore cannot be true of God. Any change in God is only change according to our finite perception. [8] Dutch theologian Hendrikus Berkhof calls God’s immutability his “changeable faithfulness” and emphasizes God’s covenant partnership with humanity. German theologian Jürgen Moltmann emphasizes both God’s futurity in relation to the world and the suffering of God based on God’s self-limitation (kenosis). All of these theologians affirm that God is not changed by anything outside himself and that he is constant and faithful. However, both the nineteenth-century German mediating theologian I. A. Dorner and twentieth-century Karl see God as personal and therefore open to some kind of change. They believed God is life and movement and not Aristotle’s “unmoved mover” who is also “thought thinking itself.” God is not altered or changed by his history with the world, but neither is he immobile or static