The Nature of God

In Reading Response 1, I asked students the following question:

Think like the first philosophers and Socrates; what is the “one over the many” with respect to the nature of God?  It is tempting to think of God as “omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient”, but these are just qualities of God, not God’s essence.  What is God’s essential nature?  Explain why you think so.

Their answers varied considerably:

God's nature is LOVE: 7

God's nature is GOD: 7

God's nature is GIVER: 3

God's nature is CREATOR: 3

God's nature is MERCY (GRACE): 3

God's nature is EVERYTHING: 3

God's nature is POWER: 2

God's nature is PERFECTION: 2

God's nature is GOODNESS: 2

God's nature is HOLINESS: 2

That's 9 distinct conceptions of God amongst 34 students.  

And that doesn't include the 7 students which thought God's nature was unknowable (4) or consisted of many things (3).

I have two initial thoughts:

First, these students likely did not know how to express their views on the nature of God.  The smallest bit of philosophical training would have provided them with the following classic understanding of his nature, "A being so great none could be greater" from Anselm."  So "the greatest being" is classically thought to be God's nature.  This category seems to capture all of these various understandings of God's nature in a way that is intelligible (but maybe not).    

Second, many of the students who were in the majority-who answered "love" or "God", did so on a Biblical basis, citing, for instance, "God is Love" (1Jn. 4: 8, 16) or "I am that I am" (Ex. 3:14).  But this seems a bit inappropriate in a Philosophy class where, as has been stated many times in many ways, reason and observation are our sources of knowledge.  We are adherents of a tradition of wise men, not priests or prophets.  Furthermore, the answers are either useless (I love my wife, God is love, so I God my wife) or circular (God is God).  

These thoughts coalesce into the following claim: Christians need to be Philosophers to make sense of their faith.