Being God

I recently fielded a question about the being of God. The question was at the level of asking if God is a being, or has being, or if we know what we’re talking about when we use being language. I think the reason this kind of question comes up (and it does!) is not that people are wondering about whether there is a God, or whether God exists. It’s specifically about that word being, or any of its semi-synonyms.

It gets sticky because in any given setting, people might be confused or distracted about any word that can be used to pick out being: nature, being, essence, substance, etc: anything that rises to the level of metaphysics or ontology. It’s further entangled in the fact that be-ing is a verb form (one who be-s), or it can mean being itself (anything which is), or it can mean a particular being (one of the things which is). And it’s further further entangled by the fact that down through the ages various thinkers have tried to enforce various distinctions (“nature is the way a being has its essence, but essence is the substance of the being’s nature” or other overloaded claims that induce semantic saturation and a burned-over feeling). Oh, and they do it in different languages, and some of them do it subversively on purpose to start a whole new project (that’s kind of an in-joke, but as with all Heidegger jokes, you had to “be there”).

So for ordinary usage I sometimes describe God’s being as Godness, or Godhood, or as what makes God God. This has the disadvantage of sounding not-especially-thoughtful, but it has several advantages.

First, it helps avoid the tangle of tracing all those be-ing words across multiple roots and varying usages. It’s basically just taking the word ‘God’ and making an abstract noun out of it, like “deity” from deitas or maybe “divinity” from divus/divinus.

Second, It is pretty close to the biblical usage:
Divinity, theiotes, θειότης, Rom 1:20;
Deity, theotes, θεότης, Col 2:9;
but see also the NT use of nature, physis, φύσις, Gal 4:8; 2 Pet 1:4.

Third, it might helpfully remind people of the old-fashioned language of Godhead, which was just KJV for Godhood, but made its way into lots of books and hymns.

Finally, calling God’s being his Godhood helps people see a certain kind of divine simplicity: God isn’t put together from anything else, not even from some kind of “being” that is anything but himself. I’m not trying to sneak in any stronger unwarranted claims about simplicity here; I just mean that if you say God has being, the hearer might wonder where he got that being, but if you say God has Godness, they’re less likely to be peeking behind him to see where he got it. They can tell that God’s Godness is God. What else would it be?