The Goodness of God and Goodness of Scripture

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, marke, learne, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given vs in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

In the Collect for the Second Sunday of Advent, Thomas Cranmer draws our attention to God, Scripture, and prayer as the cause, nourishment, and joy of the Christian life. Living in the domain of the pragmatic, it is all too easy to pass over the first line and figure out how to read Scripture. Cranmer’s first line resists this impulse: we need to believe, trust, and apprehend the blessed Lord to read Scripture rightly. But how? We need to slow down, pay attention to God, and humbly look for guidance. In this essay, I invite you to pay attention to God with the guidance of Thomas Aquinas’s comments on Psalm 16 and 19. 

Cranmer encourages us to see something about God and his relationship to Scripture so that we may receive all that Scripture gives, and the Psalms, with Aquinas, help us see what that “something” is: divine goodness. The Psalms are not a random choice. Cranmer’s prayer discloses an intimate relationship between God and Scripture, one exemplified in many Psalms. Take Psalm 119:68 as an example: “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.” Here, as with Cranmer’s prayer, we find a way of thinking about Scripture we are not quite used to: God, who is good, teaching and communicating himself in Scripture, without reference to human authorship or Christ. Thomas Aquinas’s exposition of divine goodness and Scripture follows a similar path. He is a felicitous guide to our prayer with Cranmer.

“Blessed Lord” 

When we pray “Blessed Lord,” what mysteries are we intoning? God is completely happy, delightful, and the cause and source of all delight. The Lord who blesses the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and the pure in heart is himself completely blessed, happy, and delightful. Aquinas sees a close connection between Beatitude and goodness, as he says in a comment on hope: the object of our hope is “the good under a double aspect, since it regards God both as eternal beatitude and the giver of beatitude.” The blessed Lord is good. 

Aquinas’s comments on Psalm 16:2 illuminate our understanding of and desire for the Lord’s goodness. Psalm 16 moves believers to cling to God,  and in Psalm 16:2, the Psalmist expresses his hope and faith in God as the reason God leads us to cling to him: “You are my God, for you have no need of my goods.” Faith trusts in God because of what God is. Thomas’s translation unveils the reality this text gives: 

And this is proper to God, since his goodness is infinite and nothing can be added to him, since he is substantial goodness reaching out to every goodness as the sun does through its light, not by participation but through his very being illuminating all.

How does Aquinas see divine goodness so clearly here? The Psalm describes something true of God by contrasting God with his creation in the context of faith. We need God, but God does not need anything; he does not need “my goods.” Why? The answer is implicit in the word “good.” God does not need my goods because God is good and gives goodness. God does not need any good thing in creation because he is goodness itself. Every good in creation is a gift of God. He is the giver of all good things. 

Three points display Aquinas’s reading of Psalm 16:2 as it sheds light on the “Blessed Lord” of Cranmer’s prayer.

First, God has no need of my goods because his goodness is infinite and complete. If we were to take all the good things in the universe—sunrises, babies’ smiles, galaxies—throughout all of time and space—the creation of the universe, the seven wonders of the world, all the beautiful art ever made—we simultaneously glimpse the goodness of God and do not even come close to touching the infinitely complete and completely infinite goodness of God.

Second, Aquinas names God’s complete and infinite goodness as simply what God is: “substantial goodness.” We intuit this as readers of Scripture: The Lord, who created a good world, saved Israel from Egypt, and raised Jesus from the dead, is Goodness itself. Of course, Aquinas is not comprehending God in these words, but these words communicate the heart of the matter: God is good, the good of all goods, goodness itself.

Third, as he is completely good, he gives his goodness to everything, without increase or decrease. That is what Aquinas means when he says, “God reaches out to every goodness.” God creates and sustains everything by his goodness, power, and presence. God is completely giving goodness, so he gives his goodness, creating, sustaining, and leading all creation to their appropriate end. Here we recognize the doctrines of creation, providence, and consummation; Thomas sees all these within and, somehow, as God’s substantial goodness. God is complete and giving goodness; that is why we exist, can trust in him, desire him above all else, and enjoy him eternally. The one in whom all things live and move and have their being, as Paul says in Acts 17:28, is good; he is the Blessed Lord. 

“Caused”

Aquinas says that God is complete and giving goodness. This means he fittingly illuminates everything by his very being, so creatures receive and tend towards him as participations and imitations of his goodness. God’s goodness shapes his creation. God is the creator, and everything else is his creation. “Cause” in Cranmer’s prayer signals that Scripture is created; it is a creature of God. Aquinas tells his students two things about the God-creature relation, which help us make sense of Cranmer’s prayer.

First, creatures receive everything they are from God. Since God is completely good, every good thing—think about the six days of creation—is a substantial dependent creaturely participation and imitation of God’s own goodness. To be a creature is, by definition, to participate and imitate God. God is the complete giver, and creatures receive everything they are from God. Second, he says the creatures tend towards God. God creates every creature to imitate him according to its specific and given nature. Rocks imitate God’s immutability, trees, his stability, and the red-winged blackbird, his beauty. God created humanity to imitate and participate in God’s goodness as image-bearers in a unique way: they enjoy and imitate God in their knowledge and affections. 

Does Thomas's understanding of the God-creature relation merge creation into God? The answer is no, and goodness is the key. Only God is the complete giver who is good, while everything else depends on, receives from, and tends toward God. There is a deep intimacy between God and his creatures, and an infinite distinction. God’s goodness curates the God-creature relation and distinction. God is the blessed Lord who is so complete that he gives all creatures existence, beauty, and goodness. He is so infinitely good and complete that his giving neither increases nor decreases; that is how totally good and absolutely giving God is. Now we understand something of what it means for the blessed Lord to “cause.”  What, then, is Scripture? It must be the case that Scripture is a creature, since it is not God and, as Cranmer says, is caused by God. Further, like humanity, Scripture must be a unique creature of God. How does God’s goodness help us understand the “Scripture” the blessed Lord causes?

“All Holy Scripture”  

At the end of Psalm 16, the Psalmist unfolds his hope in God for future things; he says, “You have made known to me the ways of life,” as Aquinas’s translation puts it. What are the ways of life? Thomas sees Sacred Scripture here. They are the “writings and precepts which make up the way to beatitude.” God is good. He creates humanity to enjoy his goodness, and so he gives Sacred Scripture to lead us in the way of happiness, blessedness, or beatitude. Psalm 19 helps us see how this is so by paying attention to God’s goodness.

Psalm 19 is a hymn of praise to God, the giver of all things. The Psalmist praises God for two things: creation and Scripture. In 19:7-10, he praises God for the gift of Scripture because it communicates the divine goodness and sweetness to the faithful in its very words. 

The Law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, the decrees of the Lord are sure, making wise the simple…. More to be desired are they than fine gold…

Aquinas encourages us to see God in relation to Scripture here, in a participatory register. First, he says that Scripture is good because it infuses God’s goodness into our hearts by converting the heart, purifying the desires, and communicating the truth, wisdom, and holy fear of God Himself. Scripture does what God does because it participates in God’s goodness. Second, Scripture is more desirable than any other created thing—it is better than all the riches in the world; all the sweetest things one could have—why? Because it communicates God. Scripture gives spiritual sweetness; it calms, refreshes, and delights the heart of believers with God himself. 

Scripture is a unique participatory creature because it communicates God to the soul. Thomas explains: God is the delightful good, the greatest delight one could imagine, and Scripture communicates to our minds and affections God’s unchanging, eternal, beautiful, infinite goodness. God is so good that he causes Scripture to teach us the truth, entice us with his sweetness, and lead us to his delightful beauty. There is nothing better than God, and Scripture is a unique creature that gives us the Lord, who is simply the best. Scripture receives God’s goodness and sweetness in its words to communicate his goodness and sweetness to the faithful. Scripture is a unique participation in God’s goodness for the care of souls; it is, as Cranmer says, “written for our learning.” 

Apprehending God’s goodness and Scripture’s unique creaturely existence enables us to appreciate the latter half of Cranmer’s prayer. We pray for the grace to read Scripture according to its nature and purpose: to taste and see the Lord’s goodness. Take Psalm 16 as an example. The words of Psalm 16 feed us with the divine goodness, to cure our souls of their sin-sick desires for what is not God—idolatry and sin—and lead us into the green pastures and the flowing hills of his eternal, infinite, beautiful goodness. In so doing, Psalm 16 presents to us a microcosm of Scripture’s nature and purpose: it is a beatific creature that perfectly receives and communicates God’s goodness in its words. The Lord is good, so he gives us his goodness in Scripture to lead us to his glory. 

Aquinas’s comments unveil an astounding doctrine of God, creation, and Scripture as the engine of our prayer, reading of Scripture, and ensuing praise. A rephrasing of Cranmer’s prayer summarizes what Aquinas shows us: “Good Lord, who has authored all holy Scripture to cure our hearts…” To that end, let us receive the Good Lord in our hearts by hearing, reading, and inwardly digesting Scripture day and night so we may taste and see his goodness. In doing so, we follow the grain of our created and redeemed natures and the grain of the created nature of Scripture: by Scripture we tend towards God in faith, desire him in hope, and obey him in love, so that one day we may embrace and hold fast to him, our everlasting life.