Forgotten doctrine

Stephen Charnock on the goodness of God

If I asked you to jot down a list of God’s characteristics, what would you write?

Righteous. Truthful. Gracious. I suspect those three might make the list. So too would God’s love, mercy, and patience. And, if you know a bit about classical theology, perhaps you would also add things like his omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.

But one attribute that you probably wouldn’t mention is God’s goodness. In some ways, this isn’t surprising. If you search online for books about the goodness of God, you won’t find many. And those that are available are almost all focussed on just one particular issue - suffering. As if God’s goodness is only relevant to that single, though admittedly significant, area of the Christian life.

When you turn to the larger theology books, things aren’t much different. In most of the major works on systematic theology, this aspect of God’s character normally receives only brief attention. Indeed, in what is commonly regarded as one of the finest works of theology of the last 150 years - Hermann Bavinck’s 4-volume Reformed Dogmatics - the goodness of God is dealt with in no more than a handful of pages. Whether in the lecture hall or the pew, this aspect of God’s character appears to have been forgotten.

Whilst in some ways this unsurprising, in other ways it is strange. It is strange because of how frequently the Bible refers to the theme. And it is also strange because of how important the idea of God’s goodness has been in Christian theology down the centuries. So, for example, when the 151 members of the Westminster Assembly met to draft it’s famous Confession of Faith in the 1640s, one of the characteristics they chose to repeatedly emphasise in their description of God was his goodness. As the Assembly put it in one place,

God hath all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of himself.

A painting by John Rogers Herbert in 1847 of the Westminster Assembly.

Unsurprisingly strange

So it’s perhaps no surprise that, when Stephen Charnock sat down to write on the attributes of God, he didn’t make the mistake many of us do today of overlooking goodness. In fact, he did the very opposite. Out of his discussions on divine existence, immutability, wisdom, power, holiness, and patience, it was on God’s goodness which Charnock spent most time.

And, oh boy, did he spend a lot of time! In the most recent edition of Charnock’s writings on the character of God, his reflections on God’s goodness extend to just shy of 200 pages. Yes, you read that right. 200 pages. That’s 40 times the number Hermann Bavinck used. Indeed, that’s longer than the entire length of most contemporary Christian books.

What possessed Charnock to spill so much ink on one aspect of God’s character? Well, over the coming weeks, I want show you. By providing some excerpts from key parts of Charnock’s discourse on the goodness of God, I hope to give you a flavour of what Charnock discussed in this most remarkable of chapters. Because, as one pastor and theologian recently commented, reading Charnock on the goodness of God can be a life-changing experience. Whilst I can't have such grand aims for this little series of newsletters, if they help you to see the importance of this neglected doctrine for your faith, my efforts will have been worth it.

Deceptive and difficult

One of the consequences of spending time with young children is that you can often find yourself being asked the meaning of words. And every once in a while you start to give your answer only to realise that there some everyday words that are deceptively difficult to explain. ‘What does deep mean, daddy?’ ‘Mummy, what is time?’ ‘Auntie, where is your mind?’ Easy to use. Challenging to define. And if someone has ever asked you what the word good means, you will have probably had a similar experience.

At the beginning of his discussion on the goodness of God, Charnock explained that there are numerous ways to think about this attribute:

There is a goodness of being, which is the natural perfection of a thing. There is the goodness of will, which is the holiness and righteousness of a person. There is the goodness of the hand, which we call liberality or beneficence, a doing of good to others.

Charnock went on to point out that God is good in the first sense because his nature is infinitely perfect. In other words, he has everything within himself for the completion of a most perfect being. He doesn’t need to go looking anywhere else. Or, as Charnock beautifully put it,

All good meets in his essence, as all water meets in the ocean.

Righteous and good

Yet, having described the goodness of God’s nature, Charnock acknowledged that it is not in this first sense that Scripture uses the term goodness. Rather, it refers to

a perfection of God’s nature as related to us and that he pours forth upon all his creatures, as goodness that flows from this natural perfection of the Deity.

Charnock was saying that, in the Bible, the goodness of God is not so much a description of God’s nature but the way he relates to his creatures. In developing this point, Charnock drew on the comparison the Apostle Paul makes in Romans 5:7 between righteousness and goodness. ‘Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person’ wrote the Apostle, ‘though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.’ Charnock highlighted the implication of the contrast:

For an innocent man, one as innocent of the crime as himself, would scarce venture his life, but for a good man, a liberal, tender-hearted man, who had been a common good in the place where he lived or had done another as great a benefit as life itself amounts to, a man out of gratitude might dare to die.

For Charnock, then, the difference between a righteous person and a good person was a kind of generosity. Whereas the first person is righteous because he is innocent, the latter is good because he has shared what he possesses with others.

When it comes to God, as well as being good in and of himself, God is also good because he shares his goodness with others. God delights in his creatures and is beneficial to them. As Charnock continues,

God is the highest goodness, because he does not act for his own profit but for his creatures’ welfare and the manifestation of his own goodness. He sends out his beams without receiving any addition to himself or substantial advantage from his creatures.

Love and desire

For Charnock, understanding God’s goodness primarily in terms of the relationship that God has with his creatures had two significant implications for the rest of Charnock’s theology.

Firstly, it caused Charnock to see God’s goodness as the most pleasant of all of God’s attributes. Charnock described this in the following way:

[God’s] creating power amazes us; his conducting wisdom astonishes us; his goodness, as furnishing us with all conveniences, delights us and renders both his amazing power and astonishing wisdom delightful to us.

Charnock then looked to the natural world for an illustration:

As the sun, by effecting things, is an emblem of God’s power; by discovering things to us, is an emblem of his wisdom; but by refreshing and comforting us, is an emblem of his goodness; and without this refreshing virtue it communicates to us, we should take no pleasure in the creatures it produces, nor in the beauties it discovers.

A generic stock image of the sun’s rays warming a person’s face. (Though, the cliché of the image wouldn’t have detracted from the sensation for the woman in the photo.)

And so with characteristic flair, Charnock concluded his point with these words:

As God is great and powerful, he is the object of our understanding, but as good and bountiful, he is the object of our love and desire.

Conductor and captain

This brings us to the final point which Charnock made in his opening section on God’s goodness: God’s goodness enables us to comprehend all his attributes. Charnock recalled that, when Moses asked God to show him his glory in Exodus 33, God responded by telling Moses that he would pass his goodness in front of him. And then when God came down in the cloud and stood with Moses, what was it that God said? God proclaimed his compassion and grace, his love and faithfulness (Exodus 34:6).

This leads Charnock to write perhaps the most striking words that I have quoted today. He said,

All are streams from this one fountain; he could be none of this were he not first good. When it confers happiness without merit, it is grace; when it bestows happiness against merit, it is mercy; when he bears with provoking rebels, it is long-suffering; when he performs his promise, it is truth; . . . when it soothes a distressed person, it is pity; when it supplies a destitute person, it is bounty; when it helps an innocent person, it is righteousness . . .—all summed up in this one name of goodness (my emphasis).

If you ask most Christians what God is like they are more likely to say that he is gracious or merciful or patient or truthful or righteous than that he is good. But, for Charnock, if it were not for God’s goodness, none of these other attributes would be known to us. For like a conductor of an orchestra, or the captain of a military unit, it is the goodness of God that leads the rest to act. As Charnock finished the first main section of his discourse on God’s goodness, he said

This is the complement and perfection of all his works; had it not been for this, which set all the rest on work, nothing of his wonders [would have] been seen in creation, nothing of his compassions [would have] been seen in redemption.

Dear reader, do you think of God as good? Do you know of God as good? Do you speak of God as good? Because it may be that God’s goodness is far more important than you ever realised. Far more important to your understanding of things like his creation and redemption, and far more important to your enjoyment of them too.

Join me again next week as Charnock begins to help us with how we see God’s goodness in those wonders.