GODHEAD. The term “Godhead” is a doublet of “Godhood” and is used to designate the state, dignity, condition or quality of a deity, or in Christian theology, of the self-revealed God. The terms occur as early as a.d. 1225, sometimes bearing the more explicit sense of the one divine essence in distinction from personal or hypostatic distinctions within God’s nature. Although encyclopedias a generation ago carried rather extensive essays under these headings (Bradley, A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis), the terms have fallen into increasing disuse, though Godhead occurs more frequently than Godhood. B. B. Warfield noted that the disfavor of substantives ending in -head “has been followed by a fading consciousness...of the qualitative sense inherent in the suffix. The words accordingly show a tendency to become simple denotives” (“Godhead,” ISBE, II, 1268b). Most contemporary expositions simply use the term as a strong synonym for “God.” The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1966) uses the capitalized “Godhead” for “the essential being of God; the supreme Being.” But Webster’s Unabridged now lists first the lower case “godhead” in the sense of deity or divine nature, and in secondary meanings curiously employs the capitalized form for “one of the Trinity” as well as for “the triune God” and “the Deity.” It is true that the term “Godhead” was used from the 16th cent. to designate the divine nature of Jesus Christ, as well as the essential nature of the triune God.

The word “Godhead” was used by KJV trs. to tr. three related Gr. words in three different passages; τὸ̀ θεῖον (Acts 17:29); θειότης, G2522, (Rom 1:20); θότητος (Col 2:9). The first word was in general Gr. use for “the divine,” which pagan religions saw in almost everything, and Paul employed it in addressing a heathen audience, but in a context that urges personal faith in the living God. The second word was used by non-Christians both of Artemis at Ephesus and also later of the imperial cult, and emphasized that quality that gives the divine, as deity, the right to man’s worship; Paul uses the term in association with the Creator’s power upon which all creatures are dependent. The third word, which emphasized deity at the highest possible level, is applied by Paul to the incarnate Logos: all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Christ bodily.

The term “godhead” or “godhood” cannot be applied to the divine essence in distinction from the attributes, since the glory of God is precisely the totality of His attributes, and the attributes constitute His essence. God’s being is a living unity, in the sense that each attribute is identical with His essence; the attributes are human distinctions, but they have their basis in the divine nature, and are affirmed in view of God’s self-revelation. God is the infinite and eternal Spirit, the source, support, and end of all things. He is revealed in Scripture as Lord, Light and Love—the sovereign creator, preserver, and judge of the universe; the righteous source of moral and religious truth; and the Father of spirits, whose provision of redemption for sinners through the gift of His only Son is the supreme manifestation of agape.

The Biblical emphasis on divine immutability (Ps 33:11; Heb 1:12; James 1:17) has been under special attack in recent modern theology. It is now often argued by neo-Protestant writers that this insistence on the immutability of God is a by-product of speculative Gr. notions of God as a static being, whereas the God of the Bible allegedly is a God of “becoming” as well as of “being.” Adduced in support of this idea are the passages about God’s “repentance” or supposed change of mind, coupled with a process philosophy of creation (as by Samuel Alexander and A. N. Whitehead) as including growth in God’s experience through His relation to the world; sometimes the doctrine of the Trinity is similarly invoked, in view of the incarnation of the Logos and of the two natures of Christ.

The word “repent” is indeed used of Yahweh in numerous OT verses (1 Sam 15:35; Ps 106:45) but the sense is anthropomorphic, and hardly inconsistent with the overall emphasis on God’s changelessness (Num 23:19; 1 Sam 15:29; Ps 110:4) (A. Richardson, A Theological Word Book of the Bible [1950], 191). The tendency of modern evolutionary theory, moreover, has been to exaggerate the immanence of God and to modify His transcendence and independence of the universe (see God). The God of the Bible—of predestination, creation, calling, justification, reconciliation, and glorification—is assuredly not an isolated static being, but He is not on that account changeable and mutable. Expositions of the incarnation and atonement of the Logos promotive of the notion that the Godhead suffers, and correlating this denial of divine impassibility with doubts about divine immutability, are usually predicated on the prior abandonment of the Chalcedonian doctrine of two natures.