God unchanging?

Words that often get bandied around when talking about what God is like include “omnipotent”, “omnipresent”, “omniscient” and so on. So far, so good. These attributes are derived from the Biblical narrative, in which God is described as being all-powerful, being present anywhere and everywhere, as knowing everything since the beginning of the world and to the end of the world. However, there’s another description of God that’s often used – unchanging. The idea here is that God does not change Her mind, does not regret decisions, cannot be affected by outside influences. And this idea does not come from the Bible.

Instead, the idea of God being immutable comes directly from Greek philosophy. By the time of Christ, many of the Greek philosophers had become strict monotheists – they rejected the old polytheistic pantheon and instead held that there was but a single God, who was the supreme being. Accordingly, they described this philosopher’s God as embodying all their highest concepts, and these included the idea that God must be immutable (i.e. could not change in any way) and impassible (i.e. could not be affected by anything) – because, to them, change implied imperfection. That is, if God was perfect then any change would make God less perfect; if God was not perfect then God would not the the highest conceivable being and hence not be God.

Unfortunately, this idea crept into Christian thought early in the Church’s history and has done untold harm since. This is because the God actually described in the Bible is forever changing Her mind, regretting decisions, being influenced by human beings. The Old-Testament reading at Morning Prayer today was from Samuel, telling the story of how Saul lost his kingship over Israel. In this story, Saul disobeys God’s instructions and, as a result, God regrets Her decision to make Saul king; God decides to remove the kingship from his family and give it to someone else, and tells Saul that God will do so. In many other places, we see God changing Her mind, deviating from courses of action that God has declared that She will follow.

In Her dealings with humankind, God is infinitely malleable, infinitely able to change course while still achieving Her ends.

Impassibility is even worse than unchangeability for Christian faith. If God cannot be affected by human beings then that puts paid to any idea of prayer as interaction with God, as conversation. It also removes any idea of loving relationship because to love means that we are affected by our beloved – it is impossible to love without allowing the beloved to affect us. An impassible God merely looks down dispassionately from on high at the antics of creatures on Earth, neither loving nor hating. An impassible God does not, cannot, regret Her decisions.

In Her dealings with humankind, God is infinitely loving, infinitely concerned to share Her self with Her creations.

Of course, there is a Biblical element to all this talk. The Bible often talks of God as unchanging – the same yesterday, today and forever. However, this is talking quite clearly about God’s character, not God’s mind. That is, God’s attitudes and intentions are the same; God’s decisions are not. Indeed, even within the book of Samuel, even in this story of God regretting Her choice to make Saul king and tearing the kingdom away from him, we find Samuel declaring that “He is not a man that He should change His mind”. And yet we have heard of Moses causing God to turn aside from the course God had declared.

It’s not as simple as “God cannot change”. The Bible tells us of many occasions on which God changed Her mind, and we must take that seriously in our thinking about God.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 10:15am on 05 July 2005
Category: Faith, Features, Musing

Hey, I was struggling with that passage this morning too (I blogged on it here ). Your posting is really helpful (although still leaves me with other questions!)

Daniel Walters () (URL)
12:17pm on 05 July 2005

Good point but I was distracted by your need to refer to The Father, The Son and the Spirit as “Her”

Rey () (URL)
1:15pm on 05 July 2005

Thanks for the positive comments.

Rey,
I use “She”/“Her” of God as a reminder that God is neither male nor female, to balance out all those male pronouns. The alternatives I’ve seen always seem even clumsier than using She. I’m sorry if it was too distracting, though. There is good Biblical precedent for using feminine language of God – Holy Wisdom (often thought of as the OT parallel to the Holy Spirit) is usually feminine and, in the Psalms, God is described in feminine terms, as a mother hen sheltering her chicks under her wing.

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
3:28pm on 05 July 2005

Great post, John.

Whatever it might mean for God to change and feel pain – and I’m sure we’d agree that it’s not straightforward – we can’t keep ignoring this aspect of biblical revelation.

graham () (URL)
3:31pm on 05 July 2005

I have struggled with this question since I was a child. I asked a pentecostal preacher that my friend introduced me to and she just stared at me. The revelation came different to me. God does not change…He changed His course of action according to human change. He acts according to Who He is, Love and Justice. Perfect and unchanging. His character cannot change, thus the Great I AM
I agree that God most definitely changes course of action, according to human events and choices.

cwv warrior () (URL)
8:39pm on 07 July 2005

John,
This reasoning only works if you hold that God is, a) bound by time and b) cannot know the future. If you are agreeing that God is omniscient, then doesn’t that premise remove the possibility that God changes his mind? If God knows everything, he knows the future (or what we consider the future) and would not change his mind because of what we do – because he already knew we would do it.

You’re sharp enough that I don’t need to quote scripture to demonstrate that God knows all, and knows it before we do it. Therefore, how can you come to this conclusion?

Hammertime () (URL)
04:14am on 09 July 2005

Hammer,
My reasoning, such as it is, isn’t bound by either of those constraints. My point is that, if we look at the Bible, we simply do not see a God who is immutable and impassible. We see a God who acts and reacts to human beings. God’s character is unchanging, but God is continually changing Her actions in response to us.

Omniscience and foreknowledge don’t pose much of a problem. For example, we could posit that God’s decisions depend on the conditions that prevail “at the time”. So, under one set of circumstances, God makes one decision known to us humans. We then act upon it, and the new set of circumstances that this creates means that God now makes a different decision. This doesn’t make God capricious – it means that God acts in order to create the circumstances that enable God to make the “correct” decision. In other words, God acts within Creation to bring about God’s purposes. And it doesn’t mean that God’s initial decision was illusory. It was a genuine decision to act towards a certain end; it’s just that the intention is more complex than we might have assumed.

However, my main point in the post was to say that we should look to see what God is really like, without imposing arbitrary categories like “immutability” that actually come from outside the JudaeoChristian story, and that are at odds with it.

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
09:39am on 09 July 2005

Excellent stuff, John. A specially good example of this is when Abram bargains with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there are any righteous to be found there…God knew at the beginning what the final outcome would be, but gave this beautifully clear demonstration that he does respond to the prayers of his children in agreeing to Abram’s request that he modify his plans for destruction.
I do agree with Dan, though, that God’s behaviour in the Samuel passage is not exactly as we’d prefer to imagine…but then God in the O.T often reflects the attitude of the O.T. world.

Kathryn () (URL)
09:15am on 10 July 2005

Kathryn,
I miss the change with Abraham – God says he will destroy it, and he does. The discussion with Abraham seems far more likely to have meant to emphasize the utter lack of righteousness of the inhabitants than a potential to “change God’s mind”.

John,
Your comment was much more clear than your post. There is, indeed, a big difference between God changing his mind and progressive revelation. Thanks!

Hammertime () (URL)
11:30am on 15 July 2005

Hammer,
I think I’d want to sit somewhere between those two extremes you mention. I don’t think God changes God’s mind in any capricious way, but nor do I believe it is only about progressive revelation (i.e. God doesn’t change at all, only our knowledge of God changes). I’d say that God genuinely changes God’s mind because of what we do – but that this change of mind is part of God’s own plan. To that extent, the initial decision is provisional or theoretical, because we might say that God “knows” that God won’t actually do it even as God declares the intention.

pax et bonum

[John] () (URL)
11:55am on 15 July 2005

scripturally i would say that God does not change his mind..he merely changes his announced plans sometimes when there were prior conditions to allow for the chnage…God stated in advance that he will give mercy to the repentant nations, so even though he stated he would destroy a said nation, it is conditional on their failure to repent..when God chooses to forgive him, he is merely changing an announced intention that was conditional before. However, since God knows both the future and what would occur if humans changed things by free will..he did not actually change his mind..He knew from the beginning what would happen…it is merely our failure at points to realize in the Bible that certain statements by God were conditional.

a site on the subject
http://www.tektonics.org/gk/godchangemin..

Josh
04:40am on 29 August 2005