What do you do if your 8-year-old son looks at you and says, “Dad, if God is eternal, and if being eternal for him means that he had no beginning or end, and Jesus gives us eternal life, but we do have a beginning, does that mean he is more eternal than us?” (2). If you’re Samuel Parkison, associate professor of theological studies at Gulf Theological Seminary, you write a little book called The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God.
OK, that’s probably not why Parkison wrote it, given it also happens to be the opening volume in the Contemplating God series. But it is how he frames his discussion of God’s aseity (i.e., his eternal, unoriginated self-existence). And Parkison invites us to ponder this question with the spirit of a child, “asking a question for the sheer joy of getting its answer” (6).
Parkison reminds us, in a refreshingly accessible way, that “God the Trinity—the eternal fire of vitality, love, and radiance that ever burns as Father, Son, and Spirit—is eternal life. God is life in himself. And what he is by nature, he grants us to share by grace” (5). Even those who have never heard of aseity will appreciate this biblically saturated and devotionally rich book on what some might assume is an abstract topic.
Aseity’s Biblical Roots
So how do the Scriptures teach God’s aseity?
Negatively, Scripture presents God as standing in need of nothing (1 Chron. 29:14, 16; Job 22:2; Acts 17:24–25). This is implied in Scripture’s opening sentence (Gen. 1:1). For if God made all things, then all things are dependent on him for their existence. But since no one made God or gave him life, he’s clearly not dependent on anyone or anything for life—ergo, he’s self-existent.
The positive side of God’s aseity is that “he needs nothing because he is the plenitude of life” (19). Parkison explores this positive vision through God’s revelation to Moses at the burning bush. As he narrates well-known scenes from Scripture, Parkison displays a knack for telling Bible stories in a way that sneaks past the watchful dragons of familiarity and helps us see what’s really there.
Parkison displays a knack for telling Bible stories in a way that sneaks past the watchful dragons of familiarity and helps us see what’s really there.
He reminds us of how little Scripture Moses possessed at that time (i.e., none), and therefore how much of Scripture’s vision of God is downstream from that encounter. For as Moses contemplated this revealed divine name, he would’ve rightly concluded that “for God to be ‘I AM’ means he is absolute, incomprehensible, unbounded Being. He never became, nor is he becoming—he simply is” (28). We can quickly see from this how a right understanding of God’s aseity also bleeds into his immutability and simplicity.
Aseity’s Trinitarian Texture
The book’s latter portion shifts its focus to John’s Gospel to explore the triune aspect of God’s self-existence. Meditating on John’s prologue (1:1–18), Parkison creatively imagines how a first-century Jew, dedicated to the worship and existence of only one God, would’ve been stunned by this new wrinkle. For “the Word” described in verses 1–3, despite being “personally distinct from God,” also clearly falls on the God side of the Creator-creature divide (36–38).
The Word “from [whose] fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” is himself the self-existent fountain of all life (John 1:16; see 1:4). “He grants eternal life because eternal life is his to give” (41).
This leads into an exemplary discussion of the eternal relations of origin within the Trinity, namely, the Son’s eternal generation from the Father and the Spirit’s eternal spiration from the Father and Son. Theologian Fred Sanders describes these eternal relations as “the happy land of the Trinity”—emphasis on the word “happy.”
For it’s precisely these eternal relationships of love within the One divine being that constitute his infinitely happy “life in himself” (51). It’s why he was never lonely and therefore never created anything out of need. And it’s the same happy life he shares with us by grace when he saves us.
It’s precisely these eternal relationships of love within the One divine being that constitute his infinitely happy ‘life in himself’
Creatively using John as a Virgil-like tour guide, Parkison invites us to “come and see” God’s aseity in the ministry of Jesus in John’s Gospel (see John 1:46). Here we finally encounter the classic proof text of divine aseity: “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (5:26).
As Parkison rightly notes, Jesus here claims not only to possess the same aseity as his Father but also to possess that aseity as an eternal grant from his Father, making it a testimony both to the Son’s equality with the Father and to his eternal generation from the Father (65–66).
Thus, our Savior teaches us that God’s triune life isn’t a dry stream or a barren tree but, as Parkison joyfully puts it, “a boundless, ineffably wonderful fecundity—dynamic in his splendor and majesty . . . a bottomless ocean of vitality—spilling forth as a plenitude of life, light, and love” (67).
Aseity as Good News
In answer to his son’s question—Is God more eternal than us?—Parkison responds simply: “Yes, God is more eternal” (75). We’re given “eternal life” and even said to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). But we can never have “life in ourselves” the way God does, because, unlike the Father, Son, and Spirit, we’ll always receive life from outside ourselves as creatures.
And yet lest, like Lucifer, we experience this news as a “letdown,” we should instead rejoice that we’ll be made as much “like God” as a creature can be (75). Even God can’t create self-existent beings who had no beginning, just as he can’t tell a lie or create a square circle. But he can give us life, light, and love that will last forever, eternally spiraling “further up and further into” the divine life. And that’s exactly what he has promised to do in the gospel.
Parkison is correct when he writes, “There is nothing more practical than contemplating God, since this is the very thing we were created for as human beings” (7). The Fountain of Life is a creative and engaging invitation to worship God more fully by better understanding his self-existent nature.
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