Turretin: The Simplicity of God, Continued

The following is an excerpt from the Institutes of Elenctic Theology, III. vii. vi-vii.

Seventh Question: The Simplicity of God

Is God most simple and free from all composition? We affirm against Socinus and Vorstius.

VI.  But as God rejects all composition in himself, so his simplicity hinders him also from being compounded with any created things so as to hold the relation of some part either of matter or form (against the opinion of the Platonists who supposed God to be the soul of the world; and of the Manicheans who held that all creatures were propagated from the essence of God).  This is so both because he is altogether diverse from creatures, and because he is immutable and incorruptible (he cannot coalesce in one with any mutable and corruptible created thing).  For all composition infers mutation by which a thing becomes part of a whole, which it was not before.

VII.  If all things are said to be of God (Rom. 11:36), this must be understood not hylikos (“belong to matter”) and materially, but demiourgikos (“formatively”) and efficiently.  We are called the race and offspring of God (Acts 17:28), not by a participation of the same essence, but by similarity of likeness; efficiently not essentially, as also he is called the “Father of spirits” (Heb. 12:9) with reference to creation, not to composition.  The Son of God is God-man (theanthropos) not by composition properly so-called, but by hypostatical union (by which the Word [logos] indeed assumed human nature in one hypostasis, but was not compounded with it as part with part; but stood to it in the relation of perfecter and sustainer to make perfect and sustain an essential adjunct, so that the human nature indeed did thence receive perfection, but nothing was added by it to the divine nature).