Faith & Spirit Quote by William Ames

Ames is doing something both devout and intellectually disciplined: refusing to let talk about God float off into mood, metaphor, or private intuition. In a single line, he insists that theology has a method. God is not approached by projection ("who we need Him to be") but by attributes, the structured vocabulary of divine description that Protestant scholastics treated as the closest thing to reliable data.

The phrasing matters. "Tell us" quietly centers human limitation: we don't scale the heavens; we receive what can be known. Yet Ames immediately tightens the claim by doubling it: "what He is and who He is". "What" sounds like essence, being, metaphysical reality; "who" gestures toward personhood and relation. That pairing is a Puritan signature move, stitching together the abstract God of the philosophers with the covenant God of Scripture. Ames is saying you cannot separate ontology from intimacy: God's "being" is not an impersonal force, and God's "person" is not a sentimental character study.

The subtext is polemical. Early 17th-century English Reformed thinkers were arguing on multiple fronts: against Catholic accusations that Reformed faith was anti-intellectual, against mystical strains that blurred God into experience, against rationalist confidence that reason alone could map the divine. Attributes become the guardrails. They limit what can be said (no improvising) while authorizing robust speech (not silence). In Ames's world, naming God's attributes isn't trivia; it's an act of worship that also functions like quality control for belief.