Self-Existence of God

QUESTION: Self-Existence of God – What Have Theologians Said?

ANSWER:

“He has the ground or His existence in Himself...God is independent in His Being, but also… He is independent in everything else; in His virtues, decrees, works, and...causes everything to depend on Him.”¹ – Berkhof

“’Aseity’ comes from the Latin aseite, meaning literally “of oneself.” Used by God, it denotes that He exists in and of Himself, independent of anything else. He is self-existent… The biblical basis for God’s aseity is found in the facts that 1) He existed prior to and independent of creation and that 2) He brought into and sustains in existence everything else that is.”² – Geisler

“God is Absolute Being and, therefore, all other being that is relative was made by Him. No being that was made from nothing could be on a par with God, nor could it even be at all, were it not made by Him.”³ – Augustine

“Almighty God, just because He is almighty, needs no support. The picture of a nervous, ingratiating God fawning over men to win their favor is not a pleasant one; yet if we look at the popular conception of God, that is precisely what we see. Twentieth century Christianity has put God on charity. So lofty is our opinion of ourselves that we find it quite easy, not to say enjoyable, to believe that we are necessary to God. But the truth is that God is not greater for our being, nor would He be less if we did not exist. That we do exist is altogether of God's free determination, not by our desert nor by divine necessity.”⁴ – Tozer

“Children sometimes ask, ‘Who made God?’ The clearest answer is that God never needed to be made, because he was always there. He exists in a different way from us: we, his creatures, exist in a dependent, derived, finite, fragile way, but our Maker exists in an eternal, self-sustaining, necessary way—necessary, that is, in the sense that God does not have it in him to go out of existence, just as we do not have it in us to live forever. We necessarily age and die, because it is our present nature to do that; God necessarily continues forever unchanged, because it is his eternal nature to do that. This is one of many contrasts between creature and Creator.”⁵ – J.I. Packer

Footnotes:
¹ Louis Berkof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1941), 58.
² Norman Geisler, Systematic Theology (Bloomington, MN: Bethany House, 2003), 58.
³ Augustine, Confessions 11.5.
⁴ A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1961), 34.
⁵ J.I. Packer, Concise Theology (Tyndale, 2001

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