Is God Perfect?

“Has God forgotten to be gracious?” I love that question in Psalm 77. Like so many verses from the Psalter, it runs right along the edge of blasphemy. This one reminds me of Elijah mocking the Prophets of Ba’al: maybe your god is meditating, or traveling, or sleeping? Theologically, it takes us to the question of divine attributes. Do words like omnipotent (all powerful) and omniscient (all knowing) describe God? The questions about appropriate adjectives for God come together in the big question of divine perfection.

Is God Perfect?

A large helping of 20th century theology rejected those omni-attributes. They called them Greek philosophical imports to the Bible’s Hebrew way of speaking of God. But I think that was a mistake. I think that confuses the personal and confrontational style of the Old Testament—which certainly is unlike what you’ll read in Aristotle, say—with the implied theology. 

The question about whether or not God has forgotten to be gracious sounds to me like it’s implying a God who is perfect memory and goodness and power. I hear it like this: I’ve always assumed your goodness is without limit, as is your knowledge. I’ve also assumed you are not lacking in ability to exercise that goodness. Was I wrong? Have you forgotten? Or have you reached the limit of your own grace? Perhaps you simply cannot help.

The next line expands the theodicy—a word meaning “God on trial”—into the attribute of divine immutability: “And I say, ‘It is my grief that the right hand of the Most High has changed.’” 

To me, that sounds like a faith that comes to grief precisely because it does insist that God is omnipotent and the rest. There would be no crisis here if the Psalmist had always believed that God changes from gracious to not-gracious. But there is a crisis, and that’s because the writer challenges God for not being what Hebrew theology insists God is. The Elohim of Abraham is perfect in grace, power, memory, and unchanging faithfulness. 

Is God Simple?

This is a classically Christian way of talking about God too, though the oldest theologians don’t name the “omni-” categories quite like I have here. Instead, they begin with divine simplicity. 

“Simple” may seem a strange thing to say about God. It’s not a compliment, generally, when we use it to refer to other creatures. Amoebas are simple; human toddlers have comparatively simple brain-wiring. Complexity is the benchmark of our evolution. We can do so many things—make dinner, read spreadsheets, draw pictures—because we are complex beings.

God, though, is not a complex being. We get at something like this in our language when we name the beauty of a simple plan, or of an uncluttered space. God is goodness unmixed with malice, John of Damascus says, and that’s precisely why we can never fully comprehend God. All our goodness is mixed. God is knowledge beyond learning and forgetting. That’s something we only ever can glimpse, through our complicated way of knowing. 

Divine simplicity: God is not part knowing and part forgetting, part power and part weakness, part constancy and part change. God is knowing, power, and consistency itself. Those terms don’t define God; rather, the simple being of God is the definition of each word.

When 1 John says God is love, I hear this simple perfection. God is love itself, unmixed with hate or indifference. God is an unlimited eternal act of loving that knows all things there is to know and desires all there is to desire. (There’s a question lurking in there about whether or not God knows and loves evil, but that one will have to wait.)

Why Does God Seem Imperfect?

The Psalm, then, is not really suggesting that God is not perfect love or graciousness. Instead, it names the frustration of being people who trust in divine simplicity but don’t experience it. The limit here is all on my side. When the verses go on—all the way through Psalm 78—to recount God’s gracious deeds among the ancestors, it is saying that God has not, in fact changed. The moment when I don’t experience God’s unmixed grace is a moment that invites me to expand my capacity for grace. The Psalm challenges me to become a person who can receive the ever stranger grace of the perfectly gracious God. 

Said differently, all this perfection lies for us on a diagonal line. God is the eternally perfect act of loving that I, being a bear of very little brain, must approach on a gentle slope. God’s presence will be tempered, for me, with what for all the world feels like distance. God’s power will be mixed with gaps that seem like weakness. Divine knowing will seem like forgetting. 

This will be the case not because the attributes are untrue. It will be the case because God offers me only as much of God’s perfect grace as I can receive. A healthy meal nourishes, but overeating puts me in a coma. So too, a tiny bit of grace opens my eyes and sends me looking, as in the Psalm, to other acts of grace that I might have missed.

God’s perfection lies in the beauty of simplicity. Its apparent limits are invitations to slope our complex beings toward God’s simple being. They are calls to receive the care of a God whose graciousness is so perfect as to lie always just beyond our naming.