Truth Unites - The Foundation of Christian Theology: Divine Aseity

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

Gavin Ortlund explores the doctrine of divine aseity, God's self-existence and absolute independence, showing why it is foundational to the Christian understanding of God, deeply rooted in Scripture, and essential for understanding creation, the Trinity, and our relationship with God.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

At some point, almost every thoughtful person has this thought. If God made the world, then who made God? Where does God come from? You know, what is God doing out there? And Christianity has this fascinating answer, this intriguing idea that God is self-existent. God doesn't derive from anything external to himself. He simply is. You might say that God is from himself.

And in Christian theology, we call this divine aseity. This doctrine is absolutely fascinating. It takes us towards the very edge of reality. My hope is that as we're thinking about this, it will draw us toward worship and just give you this sense in your heart, which is, this always happens with theology. Your words fall a little bit short of what they're trying to do, but hopefully it'll give you a sense in your heart of the majesty of God, the weightiness of God, the lordship of God. And this is so foundational theologically, this doctrine of divine aseity.

You might say that this is the cornerstone of the doctrine of God. because when you think of the word God, G-O-D-C-G, among the first things that should come into your mind is that he is a-say, that is to say, from himself. So let's have a video breaking this down. First, we'll ask, basically, what does this mean? And we'll especially look at some contemporary challenges to this doctrine. Second of all, we'll try to explain why this matters. And I want to draw from the Christian tradition to show two reasons why divine asseity is so essential for in theology. Thirdly, we'll ask, is this biblical? And then fourthly, we'll ask, how does this relate

to the Nicene Creed? How does this relate to classical Orthodox trinitarianism? And the goal is, maybe in about 30 minutes or so, one-stop shop video on divine aseity. I hope this will be meaningful for you. Let's dive in. What is divine asaity? So first, we want to say that this is one aspect of what we often call classical theism, which emphasizes that God is a reality all to himself and often will involve other doctrines like divine immutability, divine simplicity, divine eternity. Actually, I've already done a video on divine simplicity, and this video is sort of a companion video to that one, focusing on Aseity. Maybe I'll do other videos on these other aspects of classical Theism as well. Asseidaeity can be defined positively,

and negatively. So positively, we can say that Aseity means God is self-existent or he is from himself. Negatively, it means that God is independent of everything else. And traditionally, this doctrine has to do not just with God's being or his existence, but with everything that he is. So if you think of this great assertion by Anselm of Canterbury, back in the Middle Ages, this gets at it in a nutshell, God is through himself, and and from himself, whatever he is. So the word whatever is very key there. All of God's attributes are, ah, say, or from himself. And so, you know, for example, there's no power or knowledge or happiness floating around there somewhere from which God derives his own power or knowledge or happiness.

So this means that this doctrine is not a technicality. This is deeply bound up with our every aspect of the whole quality of our relationship to God with our own happiness and our own desire for life and well-being. And this doctrine directs us basically in all things and always to God himself. Think of how this is put in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and think of these particular nouns that are stacked up here. God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself, and is alone, in and unto himself all sufficient,

not standing in need of any creatures which he has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting his own glory in by and unto and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. One of my goals in this video is constantly to think of pictures that can help us clear away from just generic abstractions, but help this land upon our hearts. So think of that word fountain. We're going to come back to that again and again, especially as we go through John of Damascus. Now, divine aseity is a very Catholic doctrine, lowercase C Catholic.

It's all over. Just like divine simplicity. Divine asaity has been affirmed all throughout the early and medieval church, both east and west, and then all throughout major branches of Christendom up until the modern era, including all the Protestant traditions. But in the modern era, divine asaity has come under. fresh scrutiny and some criticism. So you often have this reconstrual of the creator creation relationship so that God is in some way or another correlated with his creatures. And sometimes you have this idea that God's historical activity is constitutive of his eternal being. And the animating motivation

here seems to be that we want to avoid making God distant and cold. We want a God that's warm and dynamic and with whom we can have a genuine relationship. We want to avoid a God who's this sort of ice cube up in the sky that you can't have any relationship to, this perfection up there floating that you can't relate to or grab a hold of in any way. This seems to be the thinking. So just to recount this a little bit, let me give two examples of this, two challenges in the modern era to a seity that can help us envision what is at stake with this doctrine before we go on to defend it and push against this, these challenges. So first, consider the famous German theologian Jürgen Maltmann.

He brings up concerns related to the problem of evil and develops what is often called a theology of the cross. And I've written about this at greater length elsewhere, but essentially, Maltman wants to identify God with the suffering of Jesus. And he pushes this so far so as to redefine God in light of the earthly suffering of Christ. quote, God is not another nature or a heavenly person or a moral authority, but in fact, an event. Now, I'll leave that quote up for a second. Note the quotation marks there on the word God.

That highlights already a little bit of how drastic this is going to go, though it's disputed a little bit. So the event that Multmont is referring to here is the suffering of Christ, climatically on the cross. Think of the cry of dereliction. and the desire here is a God who identifies with us in our suffering. But then you ask, well, what kind of God is that really? Because, again, the quotation marks there under God, you're saying, what is this? If God is identified with this event, that raises questions of whether you have a personal God at all to whom we can pray.

Does God exist outside that event, for example? Now, Maltman is aware of this, and he basically, to oversimplify a little bit, he basically says, we don't have a personal God in the traditional understanding, this self-contained person in heaven, and he somewhat redefines the Trinity as the event of suffering love in which we can pray. Quote, the Trinity is no self-contained group in heaven, but an ascotological process open for men on earth, which stems from the cross of Christ. Now, just at face value, this seems to completely sweep off the table any conception of divine Aseity, because you've got God defined in relation to creaturely experience, particularly redemptive

suffering. Now, in his later writings, Maltman will still speak of the Trinity as preexisting the cross, though being changed by it. So we want to be careful here not to flatten out Maltman as though he's altogether denying the personhood of God. It's a little trickier than that. If you want a good critical analysis of Maltman, see Henri Blotchet's article in this book, engaging the doctrine of God, but whether or not Maltman collapses God totally into the event of the cross, into Jesus' suffering, he certainly makes God defined by that event. And this punctures divine aseity. Remember, Maltman's rejection of the adjective self-contained. Now, the impulse here, and by the way, if you're already getting disturbed, I'm going to argue against this,

and I'm going to try to show that a robust kind of divine aseity actually protects a genuine in relation to God. But the impulse here is that you can tell the desire here, you know, Maltman is responding to the problem of evil. And he's trying to make God closer to us in some way, make God involved in our suffering in some way. And this is a common tendency or mentality in some strands of contemporary theology. You see a similar ethos in the Lutheran theologian, Robert Jensen. So Jensen is very eager to identify the real God with his revelatory activity in history, beyond all idols and abstractions. So he wants to define God as whoever rescued us from Egypt, and then in the New Covenant era for the church, whoever raised God from the dead. So he wants to

define, he doesn't want a God you just think of. He wants a God who's really acting in history, but he goes so far as to say that God is not merely recognized. in his historical deeds, he's in some sense constituted by them. So God can no longer be said strictly to exist from himself. Quote, it is the metaphysically fundamental fact of Israel's and the church's faith that its God is freely, but just so truly self-identified by and so with contingent created temporal events. So Jensen repeatedly clarifies this by saying, he put the his meaning this way. God is not merely identified by his historical deeds. He's identified with his historical deeds. And that really does puncture divine aseity in the way it's teased out. Because

you have this situation where God's being is constituted by his work in creation, and in particular by the incarnation of Jesus and his work on the cross. Quote, God is an event. History occurs not only in him, but as his being. God is what happens to Jesus and the world. God is the event of the world's transformation by Jesus' love, the same love to which the world owes its existence. So this means that for Jensen, in some sense, God is developing. So God's eternity and impassibility have to be reconstrued then.

Now, these two examples are prominent and maybe a little more radical expressions of a kind of change that happens in the doctrine of God, but they're representative of a common anxiety in the modern era. There's often this mindset that the God of classical theology is this frozen deity far off in heaven. You can't have a genuine relationship with him. Again, I'll try to use word pictures. Think of an ice cube. God's an ice cube up in heaven.

He's a perfect ice cube, but you can't have any warm relation to him. And the impulse is we need a more dynamic account of God. So we want to make creation, covenant, and above all, the core. cross of Jesus, not just where God is revealed, but in some sense, God becomes who he is through these historical events. Now in the second section of the video, I want to push against that, and I want to defend a classical account of divine aseity, just starting softly here by just developing this a little bit from the tradition, showing a little bit of why this has been important to basically all Christian theologians prior to the modern era. And basically I want to say yes,

of course God's work in history is real and genuine, but it is not constitutive of his being. God remains fully self-contained, even while relating genuinely to creation. And I want to take a look at two ways that divine aseity has been foundational in historic theology. First, it's utterly foundation to the very idea of God, to the doctrine of God. But second, and paradoxically here, it actually protects our, having a meaningful relationship with God. It actually, this is how you don't have an ice cube. So this is how, this is the better way actually to meet the animating concern that seems to be on the table from some of these modern deologians. Put it like this. We need a God who doesn't need

us. Let's develop both of these in turn. First, Aseity is foundational to the very idea of God. If you lose divine Aseity, you really lose God altogether. You don't just reduce Scott a little bit, mitigating him down from an A-plus to an A-minus or something like that. Rather, if you lose divine Aseity, you have something that you're relating to you, you might call it G-O-D, but you're not talking about God at all. And we can start to see this in the Christian tradition by just developing a little bit of a sense of how foundational this doctrine has been. Let's start by looking at some of the older reformed dogmatic theologians. And one of the things you notice over and over is that divine Aseity is often the first attribute or

perfection of God that they will develop, and then frequently they'll argue that this attribute or perfection entails all the others. Now they often like the word independence rather than aseity for this very reason, since the word independence implies not only God's self-existence, but that all of his perfections derive from himself. So Herman Baving, for example, when he begins his treatment of the attributes of God, he begins by treating divine Osseity. He says this is the first thing we come to know about God from Scripture, and he says that all the other perfections of God flow out of this one, quote, in this asaeity of God conceived not only as having being from himself, but also the fullness of being, all the other perfections are included.

Similarly, Peter Van Maestricht, wonderful older reformed theologian, treated divine Aseity first in his treatment of God, after explicating God's existence and the knowledge of God, he first goes here. And he uses the heading of independence. And he says, quote, Aseity is the highest and chief perfection of God, which our opponents recognize, and therefore must be located in the first place because from it, the rest of his perfections flow. Okay, so from both Van Mastricht and from Bovink, you see this idea from Aseity, all the other attributes or perfections of God flow. So put it like this. God's eternity is simply his Aseity with respect to time.

He does not receive his being moment by moment externally. God's immutability is his Aseity with respect to change. He does not need any sort of development or completion or repair. God's omnipotence is his aseity with respect to power. He does not depend on any external resource for his activity. God's omniscience is his aseity with respect to knowledge. He does not learn from anything outside of himself. You can go through each of the divine perfections like this.

Looking back at the tradition, you can see this is not just unique to some of these reformed theologians. In fact, one of the things you see, let's take a look at, Anselm, whom I mentioned earlier, in his monologian, you get a wonderful example of theology proper, or the doctrine of God, and divine aseity is right there, right out of the gate, one of the first things you get. So Anselm's approach is often called perfect being theology. And if you read through the monologian, divine aseity is the initial claim that he makes. So he starts off with the first two chapters saying basically there is something that is best and greatest and supreme among all existing things. And

then the immediate corollary in the next two chapters is there is a certain nature through whom all existing things exist and who exists through himself and is supreme among all existing things. So the words there, through himself, that's divine aseity. And what you see here is that Anselm, for Anselm, God's supremacy is God and God's Aseity, that he's through himself, are just interwoven down to the very core. Anselm even argues that God's unparalleled greatness as God requires his assaity, as you can see with this passage on screen, I won't take the time to read that. But just to summarize here, because I don't want to lose people,

I've been learning, thinking about the algorithm lately, you've got to keep people interested. I'm doing my best, but I know a lot of my viewers like the deep dives here. That's why I'm recording this video, even though I haven't had a haircut in weeks, and I've been sitting at the pool all weeks, so I probably look crazy. but I would need to get one less video in before I go on vacation. This video will come out in July when I'm not checking it. I'll come back in August and take a look at the comments.

But the point just to make to summarize here is that for Anselm, divine assayi is bound up with the very concept of theism. A God who does not exist through himself would not be that perfect being who has supremacy and is the explanation of reality. And so his whole framework for God, you know, going through all the divine attributes and then to the Trinity starts with this doctrine of divine aseity. Everything flows from that. A God who's not a say or from himself simply isn't God at all. You see the same thing in the early Christian East. For example, in John of Damascus,

very similar treatment to Anselm. So toward the very beginning of his exact exposition of the Orthodox faith, John tries to prove that there's a God by dividing all, this is very similar to Thomas Aquinas' third way in his five ways. He divides all reality into two classes. You've got the created, hence the mutable class, and then you've got the uncreated and immutable class. And the basic argument is that this first class of things cannot be its own explanation. Created mutable things can't explain themselves, and so they point back to some primal, immutable source that must have created them. Here's how he puts it. Things that are created must be the work of some maker. And the maker cannot have been created. For if he had been created,

he must also surely have been created by someone and so on till we arrive at something uncreated. So those words, till we arrive there, reveal something of John's intuition, that contingent things can't explain themselves. Yet they point back to some ontologically unique source that must be uncreated or from itself. The foundation of this distinction, this two-fold vision of ontology or being, is divine asseity. All the immutable things stem from the immutable, and the immutable must not depend on anything else. It must be from itself or self-existent. Think of it like this. You've got two kinds of things. You've got one thing that is, a say, and then you've got everything else that is ab alio, or from another. So divine

asseity marks off the ontological divide between God and everything else. If God is not assay, then you're still working backward through the chain of contingency, you know, as he says, and so on until we arrive. You need some other God. You need some other source of reality that is assay. And this, of course, is the same way that Thomas Aquinas' third of his five ways works, put up a passage from this on the screen. Same thing. Divine Asseity is part and parcel with affirming God as such. So you can see why divine aseity is so crucial, not just for the contingency argument, but for theistic proofs in general. And I've said a little bit more about that one, and this objection, if you ever heard the objection to cosmological arguments,

well, have God caused everything, what caused God? I've said more about all this. In this video. One of my lesser viewed videos, but I enjoyed working on it, but you can see how Aseity is really the key to this, right? So we can just summarize like this. We can say that Aseity functions for these various theologians and for classical Christian theology in general as just absolutely foundational to the doctrine of God. It's one of the first qualifications of just what you mean by the word God, and everything else you say by that word flows out of this fountain. Let's call it that. Divine Aseity is. is not a limb on the tree that you could lop off and the tree would still exist. Rather,

divine asaity is part of the trunk. This is just part of what we mean by God. By the way, when Peter Van Maestricht criticized those who rejected the independence or aseity of God, he called them atheists or said they participate in atheism because to reject this is you're rejecting the very idea of God. So that's one reason why divine asaity is so important. Here's a second, and this is the paradoxical point. Actually, Aseity grounds the creator-creation relationship. And here we want to push against the mentality that we saw reflected in Maltman and Jensen and in much contemporary theology where a god whose A-Sae is perceived as this frozen static deity,

this ice cube up in heaven that you can't relate to. And actually, as you look at Aseity in the pre-modern tradition, and it's much more subtle and paradoxical, and it's actually routinely used to ground a lively dynamic relation to God. John of Damascus, for example, right after he affirms divine Osseity, uses this to ground God's role as the source of goodness and life in creatures. Quote, being himself very light and goodness and life and essence, in as much as he does not derive his being from another, that is to say, of those things that exist, but being himself the fountain of being to all that is of life to the living, of reason to those that have reason

to all the cause of God. So there again you see that word fountain. That's the phrase there, fountain of being. So you know what a fountain is. I think of a fountain shooting up water. So God is the fountain of being itself. And so what's clear here is that for John, as Aseity does not remove God in distance from creatures as though because he's Asei, He's really, really, really far away on the other side of the football field. Rather, God becomes the source of all that is and of whatever is good, you know, light and reason and so forth. You saw him mention there. Or consider the account of Aseity and Peter Van Maestricht, wonderful theologian, neglected theologian I mentioned earlier, who calls God the essensor.

Okay? So I'll just read this. Quote, Acts 17 is referenced here, which we'll come back to. God is not only for himself, but also for us. He is not only preeminently essence, but also the essensor, to speak barbarously, for in him we live, move, and are, and by him we are, whatever we are. What you see in Van Maestricht with this idea of God as pure being and essence, but then he's the essensor.

That's another way of saying, fountain of being. He's the one in whom we live, from whom we derive everything. He is undereved, but we derive from him in all things, is this sense of how Asseides interwoven with every aspect of our relationship to God. Every breath is a gift from him. Every thought you've ever had is following in his divine intellectual footprints, so to speak. God's thought, whatever you've thought before you, the first time you ever realized that seven plus nine equals 16, oh, God has already thought of that from eternity past, right?

everything is derived from God. Every moment of time is a gift from him. You know, just think about this. Like right now, the way you can hold an orange in the palm of your hand, so God holds us. He sustains us. Not one blink of our eyelids, not one beat of our hearts has ever been self-generated. Ultimately, all of this comes like a waterfall flowing from God. He's the font of being.

He's the essensor. And so when we stand before God, we stand in this position of complete vulnerability. and dependence and need, and a humble recognition of this fact is a part of proper relation to God. This is why we've got to, how to say this, this doctrine should drive us to our knees with the sense of, you know, what else can I say except to say the words like this? You are God. You know, at a certain point, words break down beyond saying like this. But the point is to see that Peter Van Maestricht and John of Damascus and pre-modern theological instincts in general. Don't think of a God who is as ase as an ice cube that's distant and frozen.

No, this is actually the very ground of God as our source. Or another way you can see this. Look at the early church and how divine aseity functioned for the early Christian apologists as they're trying to demarcate the one true god from the false gods in this polytheistic culture. and they use divine asseity to make this point. So, for example, Athenagoras in the second century is writing to the Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius, and Lucius Commodus, and he basically is using divine asseity to explain why Christians don't offer sacrifices. Quote, as to are not sacrificing, the framer and father of this universe does not need blood,

nor the odor of burnt offerings, nor the fragrance of flowers and incense, for as much as he, himself is perfect fragrance, needing nothing either within or without. So the idea of God not needing anything is baked into the concept of aseity, and one perfectly reasonable expression of that is God doesn't require sacrifices in the way that this pagan culture assumed. Justin Martyr makes this same point as well. He's refuting the charge of atheism against Christians, and he's specifying how the one true God is to be served, and he says, God does not need the material offerings which men can give, seeing indeed that he himself is the provider of all things. So to think of Athenagoras, I'm trying to help you feel how colorful and dynamic is the

account of Aseity in classical theology. Because if you can get that, I don't think you're ever going to go down the pathway with Maltman and Jensen and think you need to improve upon this. A God who is perfect fragrance, a God who is font of being. that John calls light and goodness, source of all light and reason and goodness, a God who is essenser like Peter Van Maestrick will speak of. This suggests a more interesting account of divine Aseity than you'll often get in contemporary academic portrait. In classical theology, aseity was a very practical doctrine, essential to a coherent defense of theism. It's closely related to the doctrine of creation. You're using this in the context of evangelism,

explaining who this particular God is, and it doesn't make God distant or frozen or static. Paradoxically, this actually grounds how we can relate to God. And it protects the graciousness of God in his revelation to us. Think about it like this. If God needs us, then creation becomes God's self-therapy. Redemption is somehow filling in a lack. Now God is who He really is. but if God is Asse, then creation and redemption are sheer grace.

So that gives us a little bit of a flavor of some of the concerns in the historic Christian tradition of why this doctrine has been so foundational. Now let's ask the third section of this video, is this doctrine biblical? Now, on the one hand, divine asciety is not self-consciously articulated in the scripture in the way that it would be in the later tradition. You know, the Bible doesn't use philosophical language. it tends to use its own more concrete idiom. So there's no verse that says God is self-existent or something like that, though some argue

for something like that from Exodus 3 and the divine name there, which will come to. But I would argue more basically divine aseity is assumed throughout and entailed by the entire biblical story. It would be difficult for divine aseity not to emerge simply from these two points, monotheism and creation acts nihilo, so that there is one God and that God created from nothing. If you've got that, it seems to entail something like Aseity, because you just think about this, if there's only one God, and he exists before the world and drew it into being out of nothing, then whom or what could there be for him to derive his existence from them?

In order to have something like that, you'd have to posit what that would be, other than God and gods and creation, what else is out there that God could derive from. God's existence as ah say, as from himself, seems implied all throughout the scripture by his role as the unique transcendent creator who brought all things into being from nothing and who therefore owns and governs all creation with unqualified prerogative. You think of how often in the Psalms you find that refrains like in Psalm 24, the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. All throughout the Bible, God is portrayed as not needing anything or deriving anything from the world

he has made. Rather, the world is simply his possession. So think of God's climactic speech to Job, for example, where God declares, who has first given to me that I should repay him? Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine. Or consider how Paul quotes this passage in Job when he's exploring God's sovereign purposes in the election and hardening of Israel. And he concludes, for from him and through him and to him are all things. So here God is both the source and the end of everything else. Now, put it like this. Some of these passages are, I'm going to cover in just a moment, are speaking in more covenantal terms. Nonetheless, they have implications for these larger philosophical questions. So, for example, we can say that it's basic to a biblical outline.

that Creator and creation don't stand in a mutual give-and-take relationship. God and the world are not like Yin and Yang, that each sort of entailed the other. Rather, God has transcended over the world. So, for example, in Acts 17, which we saw Van Maestricht quote earlier, this is an important text where Paul is confronting misunderstandings about God and the idolatry that exists in the world. And he's very clear that God doesn't need anything from us. he himself supplies us with everything. Quote, the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth,

does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself, note this phrase, gives to all mankind, life and breath, and everything. Or we think of the language in the Psalms where God rebukes people for thinking that their sacrifices could possibly contribute to any need in him. He says, I own the cattle on a thousand hills.

Now again, it's fair to say that these passages are treating the relationship between God and creatures in moral categories and in covenantal categories. Nonetheless, they have implications for Aseity in the metaphysical sense as well. For example, just think of Paul's language there is giving us life and breath and everything. And that's especially the case when you read these passages against the backdrop of creation X-Nihalo, creation from nothing. Divine aseity is also entailed throughout God's dealings with the nation of Israel and his frequent language of his own unrivaled supremacy. You know, he alone is capable of saving his people. This is a theme in the prophet Isaiah. I'll put up some passages here.

These are paradigmatic for a theme that you'll also find in a few other books of the Old Testament. So you've got God's position as unrivaled and as the first and the last. this kind of language suggests divine aseity because it suggests the absence of anything else from which God could derive, to claim to be the first and the last, appears to be a claim to be endless and to have a sort of eternal life that spans around and surrounds the life of every other creature. Now, sometimes the monotheistic interpretation of these passages is challenged. If that's of interest to you, I have a whole video on that that I worked very hard on. You can see the thumbnail there.

I'll link to that below in case you want to chase that down. But we need to just say one thing before moving on about Exodus 3 and God's self-designation to Moses as I am who I am. Because this text has been challenged by modern biblical scholarship, and yet from the Church Fathers through Thomas Aquinas, through the Puritans, and all the early Protestants, this passage has been understood as the definitive biblical expression of the divine essence. John of Damascus called this phrase the most proper of all the names given to God, because God keeps all being in his own embrace like a sea of essence, infinite and unseen.

Now, we have to concede that at times people have derived too much from this passage. In context, the import of this text has more to do with God's covenant faithfulness to his people. nonetheless, even if divine aseity in the metaphysical sense is not the primary emphasis of Exodus 314, it is still implied by it. And if you want a good case for that, Stephen Duby's book, God in Himself is a good treatment of that if you want to do a little deeper dive on that. What I want to note here, though, is that in the New Testament, Jesus also applies the I Am formula to himself. And this is what draws charges of blasphemy from the Jewish leadership. Fascinatingly, Jesus' divinity is manifested in the fact that, like the Father, he has life in himself.

Think of this statement that our Lord is saying, John 526, for as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself. Both Calvin and Augustine have a lot to say about that, about Aseity there in John 526. And then, of course, we have some of the same biblical rhetoric applied to Jesus that we saw in the Old Testament for God and his unique supremacy. Think of at the very end of Revelation, Jesus saying, I am the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Well, this amounts to the same kind of claim of exclusive, all-encompassing life that we saw in Isaiah. And to possess that life implies an existence that is, ah, say, Because if you're the first and the last, the beginning and the end, you would then lack any correlate from which you could derive anything.

So I'm trying to show how divine aseity just leaps off the biblical text from even though it is not stated in philosophical categories. Now, since we've brought Jesus into this discussion here, Jesus is also Asse. The Son of God has life Ase. That leads to a discussion of the Trinity to finish this video and hang with me for this part, because this is the the best part where we'll draw from John Webster, and this will hopefully lead us into worship. We can start with the language of the Niceneo-Constantan-Polyton creed. I'll just call it the Nicene Creed for here. And this language of light of light, very God of very God, this is my favorite part of the creed. Of course, we also have the famous Homo Ucian Clause here, which we could derive

a lot from. But even just from this language, light of light, God of God, we can envision already a little bit about what people like Calvin and Augustine are going to get from John 526, namely that the Son of God is equally Ase as the Father with respect to his divine being. The words of God and of Light highlight the Son's derivation from the Father with respect to his relation of origin. But the fact that He's God of God and Light of Light reminds us he possesses the very self, same self-existence as the Father does. And we can also consider the words of the Creed for the Spirit as the Lord and Giver of Life to make a similar point. That phrase, giver of life is very significant. This should draw our minds to John of Damascus's label

for God as the fountain of being, who receives from none, but he gives life and being to all. He gives light and goodness to all. So also we should say of the Holy Spirit. He is the one who gives life to all. All life is from the Holy Spirit. For more on that point, and actually the point about the God of God, light of lights as well, see my video on the Nicene Creed where I say just a bit more about that.

But here's the Trinitarian question I want to focus on for this video, and that's how might the Trinity help us envision divine aseity more accurately? And here I want to draw to conclude from the wonderful theologian John Webster. amazing, more recent theologian, who helps us on this. John Webster construed divine aseity in terms of the Trinity to avoid a strictly negative, functional account of divine aseity, defined simply as a point of contrast to creaturely contingency. So Webster noted that this is often how it is done, where aseity is reduced to predicating of God what must be true of him in order to serve as the ground of contingency,

as though God's aseity mainly consistent just being a contrast to the world. So this is kind of unfortunate because then in our minds what we're conjuring up is God Asse and the world Abolio, God from himself, the world from another, and they're sort of both there together. And it almost, it's like you can't picture one without the other, right? So as a corrective to that, Webster proposes to define aseat, in terms of the fullness of life that characterizes the relations of the Trinity. Quote, Aseity is not merely the quality of being, in contrast to contingent reality undarived,

it is the eternal, lively plenitude of the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, and the Spirit who proceeds from both. So for Webster, a Trinitarian conception of Aseity gives you, on the one hand, this sort of materially richer account of the doctrine. but also even more than that, it demonstrates why this is essential for the creator creation relationship, which is the great interest of my heart in this video. So, for example, he speaks of Ossity as having two dimensions. First, it means that the glory and plenitude of the life of the Holy Trinity in its self-existent

and self-moving originality, its undereved fullness, that's the first implication. second, it implies God's originality and fullness constitute the ground of his self-communication. So the idea here is that because God's underived life, his life, ah, say, from himself, is not just an alternative to our creaturely dependence, of course, it's also that. But because he's construing it in terms of the Trinity and the relationships and the Godhead, it signals the graciousness of God's turn to his creation. God's relation to everything that is not God in creation and redemption is a gracious self-giving.

As Webster puts it, God's aseity, although it marks God's utter difference from creatures, does not entail his isolation. For what God is and has of himself is life. And this life includes a self-willed movement of life, end quote. Now, this is not to make God dependent on creatures in any way. We can think of this as, you know, this, this, this, this is entirely gracious and unnecessary. God's giving of his life to his creatures. Think of it as this generous extension or spilling over of the life of God to his creation

by his own choice. Nothing. This is not constitutive of his being. This is his own gracious turn to his creatures, inviting them into the very life of God, the very glory of the Holy Trinity. So God's perfect fullness of life is not an ice cube. This is not a trap. This is not a shroud of darkness.

Rather, this is that life that overflows into the supreme generosity of creation and redemption. God's Aseity is not a threat to a genuine relationship with him. It is the ground of that relationship. Otherwise stated, we need a God who does not need. us. So I'll give Webster the last words here, but allow this beautiful, amazing thought to move you to worship, that this simply is. This is reality, and by grace, we get to even know of this, and Lord willing, participate in it one day. Quote, in this perfect circle of paternity, filiation, and spiration, God is who he is.