Wednesday, November 18, 2009

What God Cannot Do and a Few Other Lists

From John Frame's The Doctrine of God:

Six kinds of actions that God cannot perform:
  1. Logically contradictory actions - such as making a round square or ultimately saving and condemning the same person
  2. Immoral actions - such as lying, stealing, or coveting
  3. Actions only appropriate to finite creatures - like taking medicine for a cough
  4. Actions denying His own nature as God - such as abandoning His own attributes
  5. Changing His eternal plan - what has been decreed by God will happen
  6. Making a stone so large He cannot lift it - falls under several categories above (1, 3, and 4)


Ways in which Scripture tells us God is unchanging:
  1. In His Essential Attributes - Hebrews 10:1-12
  2. In His Decretive Will - Psalm 33:11
  3. In His Covenental Faithfulness - Psalm 89:34-37
  4. In the Truth of His Revelation - Isaiah 46:8-10


Conclusions on God's Incorporeality:
  1. God is not to be identified with any physical being, for he is transcendent over space and time.
  2. If God is simple, it is hard to imagine how he can be physical.
  3. If he is omnipresent he cannot be a particular physical being.
  4. If God had a physical existence, his body would have to be the entire universe; this is pantheism.
  5. Nor should we think of the world as part of God's being; this is panentheism.
  6. Nevertheless, God is present in the world he has made.

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