What is God?

Seldom are we offered the opportunity to experience what it would be like to, say, sit under Francis Schaeffer’s teaching on Romans in a student flat in Lausanne, or hover nearby while C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien discuss theology, literature and campus politics in Oxford. In his volume on the attributes of God, intriguingly entitled What Is God rather than Who Is God, Dr. Robert Reymond of Knox Theological Seminary affords us the vicarious experience of attending the seminary’s weekly chapel address for eleven weeks while he unpacks “the perfections of God’s nature.” Dr. Reymond’s addresses have been printed substantively unchanged from their initial delivery at Knox, and I for one am thankful. Throughout the volume Dr. Reymond’s passion, precision and pleading come through unadulterated, and the authenticity of the author’s tone aids in the process of ingesting this relatively scholarly text.

All writers who tackle the attributes of God organize their material in a way that seems best to them, rightly realizing that no matter how much is written or how it is organized, mere words are but a drop in a bucket when approaching the subject of who God is and what He is like. In these eleven addresses of roughly thirty pages apiece, Dr. Reymond chooses to use the Westminster Shorter Catechism as a grid through which to approach God’s attributes of spirit, infinitude, eternality, immutability, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth, and tri-unity.

The book is prefaced by the presupposition that “no one needs to have God’s existence proven to him” (Romans 1:21). Hence the title’s question ‘what’ rather than ‘who.’ Other non-negotiables include the necessity of knowing God only to the extent He has made himself known in the Bible, and most notably, the mind-boggling tension between God being unapproachable and at the same time, personal. Significant print is also spent on Christ the Son as the revealer of the Father’s attributes; in Reymond’s own rendering of John 1:18, “the only Exegete of God the Father.” To avoid a spoiler, I will simply say that Reymond makes a compelling case of how God, even in His timelessness, experiences ‘before’, ‘during’ and ‘after.’ In both the chapters on God’s immutability and his goodness, God’s love is expounded in a warm and tender way often unparalleled, in my experience, among Reformed works.

Undeniably Reymond has his idiosyncrasies, which are on full display in these chapel addresses published verbatim. He is unafraid of challenging his contemporary Reformed colleagues in academia, and no less bashful about broaching issues in theologians some might consider untouchable. He has his pet authors, as we all do, and his enmity towards the contemporary worship scene is evident. And you are advised to keep both a regular dictionary and a theological reference dictionary handy at all times.

Nevertheless, these issues are merely side notes in what is a commanding work. Since it was not designed to compete with Stephen Charnock’s The Existence and Attributes of God or vie with either A.W. Pink or A.W. Tozer as a devotional on God’s varied perfections, we are left with a hybrid of the two forms: a solidly doctrinal while clearly applicable exposition of God’s attributes, suitable either for the academic or the thoughtful layperson, per the publisher’s description. I highly recommend it for these two groups.