Necessity and Other Divine Properties

I have been intrigued recently by the doctrine of the Trinity and its relation to God's necessary attributes. Simply expressed, orthodox Christianity teaches that God is one in essence (ousia) and three in person (hupostaseis). Now, whatever can be said about God can be said either about only one person or else about all three. For example, by "omnipotence" Christians understand the property of being all-powerful. This property is predicated of all three persons. God the Father is all-powerful, and so is the Son and the Holy Spirit. Omnipotence, moreover, is predicated of God necessarily; God cannot fail to be omnipotent, in any possible world. Some properties, however, (such as being incarnate) are predicated of only one person. Many of these characteristics are metaphysically contingent; the proposition "the universe exists" isn't a necessary proposition (since God didn't have to create the world) and thus God's workings in spacetime are themselves contingent. It may very well have been that God decided not to create the world, or perhaps He may have created the world, but instead of filling it with free agents, he decided to fill it with robotic, non-rational beings who sang his praises day and night. Such a world would, of course, not experience a Fall and therefore would not require restoration. It follows that if things could have been this way, or at least something like this (i.e. there is at least one possible world in which God didn't create the universe, or in which He did but it didn't require redemption), that the Incarnation and the Atonement are both contingent events. The individual properties of being Incarnate and dying an atoning death for humanity are thus also contingent. That is to say, the Son of God, does not necessarily predicate those attributes. Similarly, the Father's relations to Israel in the Old Testament weren't necessary in the philosophical sense. Surely it could have been otherwise; God could have chosen the Egyptians as His people if He had so wished.


Well, what exactly does this tell us and why does it really matter? First, I think it is important to realize that on a theological level, it is tempting to try to extend God's necessity to all aspects of His Being, an extension that seems to me quite unwarranted. When I was first pondering this issue, for example, the idea that God might predicate certain attributes only contingently seemed to me repugnant; how can it be that the Foundation of reality exists in any way but in complete and brute necessity? I was seeing the scope of possible worlds and thinking, "if God doesn't exemplify the same attributes in each and every possible world, then He is inconsistent." But, is this really true? That each person of the Trinity predicates properties contingently actually speaks to God's freedom, sovereignty, and benevolence. If I were to posit, for example, that the Son necessarily predicates the attribute being Incarnate at time t1, I would be limiting God's freedom. That God might have done otherwise is a necessary condition for His being perfectly free (that is, being an agent with freedom of the will). Are we to say that God must have done as he did? Certainly not! Indeed, insofar as this notion relates to the Atonement, isn't it a wonderful thought that out of all the possible worlds, God actualized the one in which His Son was given over to death for out transgressions? As far as I see it, if it is true (as I have argued here) that the individual persons of the Trinity predicate many attributes only contingently (particularly those attributes that are relational or external), then we as Christians have all the more reason to rejoice!