Attributes of God: meaning and list in the Christian tradition

«Attribute» comes from the Latin attribuere, «to assign, to ascribe»: an attribute is what is predicated of a subject. To speak of «attributes of God» means, literally, to state what is affirmed of him — omnipotent, eternal, holy. The tradition also calls them divine perfections.

Here a delicate question immediately lurks. The Hebrew Scripture rarely formulates abstract attributes: it does not say «God is omniscient» as a definition, but shows him in action — God who sees, remembers, forgives. The key text, Exodus 34:6-7, offers not concepts but a proclamation: «YHWH, YHWH, a God merciful and gracious (rachum we-channun), slow to anger and great in love...». The Jewish tradition counts here the «thirteen middot», the thirteen «traits» or «measures» of divine mercy.

The philosophical vocabulary — omni-potence (from Latin omnis + potentia), omni-science, omni-presence — is a later reworking, useful but not biblical in form. The Hebrew word remains concrete: middah, «measure», names a God who describes himself by acting, not an essence defined at a desk.

The Bible distributes the attributes throughout the whole narrative, always tying them to an experience. Omnipotence is the God for whom «nothing is impossible» (Gen 18:14; Luke 1:37) and «El Shaddai», the Almighty God of the patriarchs (Exod 6:3). Omniscience is sung in Psalm 139: «Lord, you search me and know me... you know my word before it is on my tongue». Omnipresence is the same psalm: «Where can I go far from your spirit? If I ascend to heaven, you are there» (Ps 139:7-8).

Eternity is the God «from everlasting to everlasting» (Ps 90:2); immutability, «I, the Lord, do not change» (Mal 3:6). Holiness is the threefold cry of the seraphim, «Holy, holy, holy» (Isa 6:3), and the refrain of Leviticus, «Be holy, for I am holy» (Lev 19:2). Love culminates in the Johannine affirmation «God is love» (1 John 4:8).

The guiding thread remains Exodus 34:6-7: mercy and justice held together. Scripture does not isolate the attributes: it interweaves them, because they describe the one living God in relationship with his people.

In the worship of Israel the attributes are not speculation but prayer. The «thirteen middot» of Exodus 34 become a liturgical formula of mercy, recited on days of penitence: God is invoked by enumerating his traits of clemency in order to ask his forgiveness. The attribute is here performative — it is said in order to entrust oneself, not to define.

When Christian thought encounters Greek philosophy (from the 2nd century onward), the language becomes more abstract: the terms immutability, impassibility, divine simplicity arise. It is a gain and a risk together: a gain in precision, a risk of turning the living God of Exodus into a concept. The great Eastern patristic tradition therefore remains anchored to Scripture and to worship, reading the attributes within the liturgical experience of the Church.

In the Latin West, later, the scholastics would systematize the attributes in ordered treatises. It is a legitimate approach, but it should not be taken as the norm: the Eastern tradition has preserved another way, less definitional and more adoring, that is worth knowing alongside it.

The Orthodox tradition reads the attributes first of all by the apophatic way (from the Greek apophasis, «negation»): God is better known by what he is not — not finite, not changeable, not circumscribed — than by what he is. The positive (cataphatic) affirmations remain true but are always surpassed by the mystery: to call God «good» or «wise» is to say something real, knowing that his goodness infinitely exceeds ours. Apophaticism is not agnosticism: it is reverence that safeguards transcendence.

To this is linked a distinction dear to the Eastern tradition, formulated in the context of the hesychast controversy of the 14th century (Palamite tradition): between the essence of God, wholly inaccessible, and his energies, by which he really communicates himself and lets himself be participated in. Presented as tradition — not as a universally shared dogma — it offers a way to state that God is both absolutely transcendent and truly present.

The Hebrew root safeguards the same balance: the thirteen middot say how God acts (merciful, slow to anger), not what he is in himself. The Name itself, unpronounceable, signals that the essence remains veiled while the action is revealed. Orthodox apophaticism and Hebrew reticence converge: of God one is silent about the essence and sings the mercy.

The most frequent loss is to reduce the attributes to a textbook list — omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence — detached from the living God who manifests them. Learned as a list, the list says little; restored to the narrative (Exod 34, Ps 139, Isa 6), it becomes the face of a God who forgives, searches with love, is three times holy. It is not an error to have a list: it is a loss to stop at the list.

The second loss is to forget apophaticism. When the attributes are treated as exhaustive definitions, God becomes a measurable object, and one ends up opposing them to one another — «either he is omnipotent or he permits evil» — as if they were gears of a mechanism. The Eastern tradition recalls that every affirmation about God must be held within the reverence of the mystery that exceeds it.

It must be said honestly that the Latin scholastic systematization, though precious, is not the only legitimate way: presenting it as the doctrine of the attributes obscures the Eastern apophatic way and the Hebrew reticence about the essence. Recovering these does not impoverish faith — it brings it back where it was born: into the liturgical proclamation «merciful and gracious», more sung than defined.