from Owen C. Thomas and Ellen K. Wondra, Introduction to Theology. 3rd ed. (2002)

     

God as Personal

Dr. Thomas

Dr. Wondra

An immediate implication of the foregoing is that God is personal, since personhood or selfhood is involved in spiritual life, or is identical with spiritual life, looked at from one point of view. Nothing comes through more clearly in the Bible than that God approaches humanity in a personal way in the divine words and acts. In revelation, God confronts us as an "I." Brunner has pointed out that more than one thousand sentences of the Bible begin with the divine "I." The personal character of God is underlined by the ideas of the name and face of God. God's personal approach to humanity culminates in the divine approach through the man Jesus. But, in this analogy, elements of finiteness in human personhood, such as birth and death, cannot be applied to God. This raises the difficult problem of conceiving of nonfinite or infinite personal reality. The only personal reality we know directly is finite. Because of this difficulty, some theologians have asserted that God is suprapersonal (beyond personhood). But others have responded that all concepts claimed as suprapersonal are in fact subpersonal or impersonal. Gollwitzer states, "The personal way of speaking is unsurpassable for Christian talk of God ... There exists alongside the personal way of speaking only the impersonal and sub-personal way, but not a supra-personal one."⁵

            The theological issue here is that God is self-revealed as personal, and yet God is not a finite object, limited by space and time, but rather non-finite or infinite. Thus any attempt to state the infinite personhood of God must not stress the infiniteness in such a way as to fall into subpersonal categories.

            The concern to transcend the personal often derives from the presupposition that the more abstract a concept is, the more spiritual it is, and the more concrete or personal, the less spiritual. From the point of view of the Bible, the opposite is true, as we have seen above. The concrete, anthropomorphic, personal way of speaking about God is sometimes said to be primitive and naive, but it is the only way personal reality can be spoken about, and it is therefore a necessity in our language about God.

            If it is objected that analogical application of the term personal to God is too anthropomorphic, one can reply that application of the term personal to humanity is too theomorphic. Only God is truly personal, truly free and responsible, whereas human beings are personal only by way of analogy to God's personhood. Our personhood is only a reflection or image of the divine personhood, and we come to realize our true personhood only through our relation to God.⁶

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5. Gollwitzer, Existence of God, 188f.
6. Ibid., 196f.; Barth, C.D.. II/1: 248ff.