I used to wonder why we Christians say that 'God is love', not 'God is loving'. 'God is loving' is fine, because 'loving' is an adjective, so it is a modifier, explaining the attribute of God being full of love (it seems that the linguist has always been dormant in me). Well, now that I am a student of literature, I found that it is just a personification, a literary technique. A quick recapitulation, as I wrote before:
When the first letter of a word is capitalised, it is like a name of a person, so we say that the word is personified. Other notable examples would be 'Mother Nature' and 'Death'. Think of those two words carefully -- if you are imaginative maybe you will conjure images of benevolent mother and grim reaper. So you see, personification firstly changes the status of the intangible to the tangible. Fear, nature, death -- those are abstract concepts and are difficult to picture. What personification does is giving them bodies -- embodying them in real objects, bringing them from imaginary to real plane. What's more, they are not just tangible objects, but persons. With personalities, with emotions, with will, with mind; it's a Being.
Then it makes sense. God is, then, not only loving, but the very embodiment of love. Seen in this light, John 1:1 also makes a lot of sense:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
-- Jn. 1:1
'The Word' is translated from the Greek word logos [λόγος], from which we derive logic and all our -logies; basically, knowledge. Here we can see also that God is also the embodiment of knowledge itself.
But it should be noted that this is not, and should not be regarded as, simple personification.
First, as the name suggests, personification seeks to make a person out of something, to the level that other persons, that is, we, can relate to. We borrow the attributes of 'Mother', for example, to describe Nature; something we can easily conjure images from. Sometimes, personification also borrows infallibility of humans, subject to passions and other things. This, of course, cannot be true for God, since an infallible God is not God.
Second, personification is a subset of metaphor, a literary technique. But when we say 'God is love', or 'the Word was God', we don't mean metaphorically, but literally: God is the very embodiment of all His attributes. In other words, the Being God is, is identical to His attributes, literally. When Moses asked God for His name, God replied: "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14). God just is.
For these two reasons, this concept is, to be sure, not just simple personification. This concept can be summed up as divine simplicity, originating from Thomas Aquinas, or, some may argue, the ancient Greek philosophers.
I will leave the more theological and philosophical discussions to the Wikipedia page and the references therein. Be warned that divine simplicity, despite its name, is not simple. Goes without saying.
But it should be noted that this is not, and should not be regarded as, simple personification.
First, as the name suggests, personification seeks to make a person out of something, to the level that other persons, that is, we, can relate to. We borrow the attributes of 'Mother', for example, to describe Nature; something we can easily conjure images from. Sometimes, personification also borrows infallibility of humans, subject to passions and other things. This, of course, cannot be true for God, since an infallible God is not God.
Second, personification is a subset of metaphor, a literary technique. But when we say 'God is love', or 'the Word was God', we don't mean metaphorically, but literally: God is the very embodiment of all His attributes. In other words, the Being God is, is identical to His attributes, literally. When Moses asked God for His name, God replied: "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14). God just is.
For these two reasons, this concept is, to be sure, not just simple personification. This concept can be summed up as divine simplicity, originating from Thomas Aquinas, or, some may argue, the ancient Greek philosophers.
I will leave the more theological and philosophical discussions to the Wikipedia page and the references therein. Be warned that divine simplicity, despite its name, is not simple. Goes without saying.
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