It’s hard to write a short book about a big subject, let alone an infinite one, but that’s just what Samuel Parkinson has done in his “The Fountain of Life: Contemplating the Aseity of God” (Crossway, 2026). The first in Crossway’s “Contemplating God” series, Parkinson manages to hit a sweet spot of dogmatic, biblical, pastoral, and most of all, contemplative reflection on God’s nature — especially upon his attribute of aseity.
While initially sounding pretty abstract and metaphysical compared to the mercy or love of God, aseity is actually one of my favorite attributes to emphasize in my pastoral ministry to college students, and Parkinson admirably introduces readers both to the theological content and the spiritual payout of this truth.
But what is the aseity of God? Traditionally it is the “from-himselfness” or “of-himselfness” or independence of God. It is the affirmation that God — being the first, necessary, absolute, uncreated, and unchangeable bedrock of all other realities possesses all that he has and needs from himself and no other. You get yourself from a billion other realities—your oxygen, DNA, food, shelter, sense of humor — all of these things have been derived from your environment, parents, teachers, benefactors in the past and the present. You are a radically dependent being.
God is the opposite of that.
As God reveals to Moses, God is the great “I AM” who never became, but always has been all that he will ever be (28). God doesn’t and cannot owe anyone anything. Nobody has fed him, clothed him, or housed him. Nobody has lent him five bucks, taught him a new trick, or given him some insider knowledge he did not previously possess. As Paul preached to the Stoics, God doesn’t stand in need of us; it is we who need him (Acts 17:24-25; TFOL, 19).
And this makes sense when you reflect — as Parkinson does to great effect — upon the fact that God made you and all other things ex nihilo, out of nothing, by the sheer word of his power. Everything else that has ever been and ever will be got what it is in terms of its existence from God in the first place. In which case, anything we’ve ever given back to God is like a five-year-old giving dad a Christmas gift paid for with the money he got from dad in the first place.
But that is framing things negatively.
One of the best things Parkinson does in this little work is to keep from framing the aseity of God as a purely negative attribute about what God is not; in fact, it is primarily about the fullness of overflowing, vital, pulsating, eternally complete life that God always is and has been. God has everything he has ever needed to be who he is at all times and in all places and in all ways. God’s life is utterly full to the brim with the Goodness of God-ness.
Importantly, this fullness is not flat, monochrome, impersonal, or unipersonal. One of the great strengths of this work is the pains to which Parkinson goes to demonstrate from Scripture that the fullness of God’s life is the fullness of his intra-trinitarian being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is of himself, possessing life ever-abundantly, precisely because from eternity he has been one God who exists as Father eternally generating the Son and the Spirit who is their shared life of love.
One of the surprising benefits of this book is an accessible, but clean and forceful, defense and exposition of the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son. Parkinson demonstrates that this doctrine is an essential component of our understanding of God as Triune that grounds our ability to recognize God as fully of Himself.
More than that, it grounds our paradoxical participation in this glorious reality. The aseity of God grounds the absolute distinction and differentiation of God’s life from ours, it is true. But gloriously enough, it also grounds our participation in the life of God. God’s life within the Trinity is infinite, full, perfect, and complete within himself. And yet it is precisely as the Life that needs nothing from beyond himself that God becomes the source of life to all that is beyond himself.
As Parkinson notes, Jesus makes a radical and audacious claim in his dispute with the Pharisees after healing on the Sabbath, “For as the Father has life in himself, he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). This is why the Son has the authority to call people up from the grave in resurrection life (v. 27), giving life to whomever he wills (v. 5:21), even eternal life (v. 5:24).
The eternal generation of the Son by the Father, which results in the Son being of same substance with the Father, results in his having the same of-himselfness as God. But it is also what makes him the Fountain of Life for all who place their faith in him and are given the gift of the Spirit.
God’s perfection, as it were, spills over and out into our own lives, both in our original creation and in our re-creation! His truly eternal life—the life that is above and beyond time—flows into our time-bound life, which extends on forever in an increasing intensity, joy, and delight as we grow in our capacity to know and love our infinite God.
And why does God do this? Not because he needs us, but just because he loves us. Indeed, the aseity of God is in many ways the ontological ground of the grace of God, who gives and saves not to satisfy some lack in himself, but out of an over-abundance of joyous delight in himself.
In many ways, this has not so much been a review as a preview, an imitative contemplation of the aseity of God that scratches the surface of what Parkinson’s little book offers. For anyone looking for an inviting, accessible resource to encourage you, your Bible study, or parishioners to contemplate and delight in God, I commend to you this volume.
Derek Rishmawy serves as the campus minister for Reformed University Fellowship at the University of California, Irvine.