“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.” –Malachi 3:6

Brian Leftow writes, as he offers a treatment on Divine Immutability for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Still, it is surprising that Western theists have held DDI. For Western Scriptures seem to conflict with DDI. Some Scriptural texts depict human sin as making God sadder than he was (e.g., Gen. 6:6), then bringing God to new decisions, e.g., to flood the world. According to John, “the Word became flesh” (1:14), i.e., God took on a human nature he did not always have. So Western theism’s Scriptural roots seem to deny DDI. Yet by the first century C.E., DDI was central to the main theory of God’s nature, “classical theism.” In such “classical theist” writers as Augustine and Aquinas, being immutable makes God atemporally eternal (see e.g. Aquinas, ST Ia 9–10), and eternality is God’s distinctive mode of being. So DDI is at the roots of such writers’ understandings of God’s nature. And though Scotus and Ockham led a revolt against divine atemporality, they and their followers maintained DDI, and it ruled the theological roost till the 19^th century. So one wonders: what made DDI so attractive for so long?[1]

As Leftow underscores, the doctrine of divine immutability has reigned supreme throughout the classical tradition of the church’s theological development. This tradition of thinking God as actus purus (pure being) was handed down to and appropriated by the scholastics Reformed. Here is how the Westminster Confession of Faith articulates its affirmation of God’s immutability:

There is but one living, and true God, who is infinite in being and perfections, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will, for his own glory, most loving, gracious merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, the rewarda of them that diligently seek Him, and withal, most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. (Westminster Confession II.1)

The idea is that nothing extrinsic to God or intrinsic to God can proffer any sort of movement or ‘change’ in God’s being. If God could move (i.e. respond etc.), on this view, this would imply that God has potency, has a remainder left off in his inner-being that has the potential to be moved one way or the other. The doctrine of immutability is intended to stave off such thinking about God by understanding Him to be pure act, or pure being; some like Thomas Aquinas, a la Aristotle, might call Him the Unmoved Mover, or the Actual Infinite. But as Leftow alerts us to the biblical disclosure of God, it makes it appear as if God does have passions; that God does have emotional responses to His creatures and creation’s state in general.

Maybe there’s an inherent, even damning problem with thinking God’s categories from heathen philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. Maybe the Protestant Christian ought to allow the Word of God and its res in Jesus Christ, as God’s Self-revelation for the world, to determine its own shape. As Thomas Torrance rightly notes, we ought to follow a kataphysical (according to its own nature) approach when thinking God; that we ought to be scientific in the way we approach the way we think God after God. In other words, maybe we ought to allow God’s Self-revelation to impose Godself upon us, and from an evangelical level think who God is into the theological of who He is for us in His inner-processions as those are revealed for us ad extra in the economy and missions of His life for us in Jesus Christ. What if in that Revelation there are the proper categories for thinking God under the pressures that come with the weight (glory) of His own spoken Word for us (Deus dixit) in Jesus Christ? Karl Barth understands and develops how thinking God’s constancy rather than immutability might look as we do so through an effort of serious Christ concentration:

But it is not true that the immutable as such is God. The real truth is—and it is very different—that God is “immutable,” and this is the living God in His freedom and love, God Himself. He is what He is in eternal actuality. He never is it only potentially (not even in part). He never is it at any point intermittently. But always at every place He is what He is continually and self-consistently. His love cannot cease to be His love nor His freedom His freedom. He alone could assail, alter, abolish or destroy Himself. But it is just at this point that He is the “immutable” God. For at no place or time can He or will He turn against Himself or contradict Himself, not even in virtue of His freedom or for the sake of His love. What He does in virtue of His freedom for the sake of His love will never be the surrender but always at every point the self-affirmation of His freedom and His love, a fresh demonstration of His life. This self-affirmation is never anywhere an act of holy egotism, but always everywhere an act of the righteousness in which He establishes His glory over all things. And as an act of His righteousness His self-affirmation must be understood as necessary, not subject to any doubt or temptation. The answer, therefore, to the question: “What is immutable?” is: “This living God in His self-affirmation is the immutable.” The immutable is the fact that this God is as the One He is, gracious and holy, merciful and righteous, patient and wise. The immutable is the fact that He is the Creator, Reconciler, Redeemer and Lord. This immutability includes rather than excludes life. In a word it is life. It does not, therefore, need to acquire life from the impulse of the created world, or above all from the emotions of our pious feeling. It not only has nothing whatever to do with the pagan idea of the immobile, which is only a euphemistic description of death, but it is its direct opposite. It does not require, then, and sentimentalisings in sham concealment or embellishment of its terrible reality. For it is not this fearful reality. It is the reality of life and not of death. God’s constancy—which is a better word than the suspiciously negative word “immutability”—is the constancy of His knowing, willing and acting and therefore of His person. It is the continuity, undivertability and indefatigableness in which God both is Himself and also performs His work, maintaining it as such and continually making it His work. It is the self-assurance in which God moves in Himself and in all His works and in which he is rich in Himself and in all His works without either losing Himself or (for fear of this loss) having to petrify in Himself and renounce His movement and His riches. The constancy of God is not then the limit and boundary, the death of His life. For this very reason the right understanding of God’s constancy must not be limited to His presence with creation, as if God in Himself were after all naked “immutability” and therefore in the last analysis death. On the contrary, it is in and by virtue of His constancy that God is alive in Himself and in all His works. The fact that He possesses selfhood and continuity itself makes Hims the living One that He is, and is the basis and meaning of His power and might, the inner divine secret of the movement and wealth itself in which He is glorious on His throne and in all the heights and depths of His creation.[2]

This is a beautiful treatment, indeed, reformulation of a doctrine of divine immutability offered by brother, Barth. The highpoint in this foray from Barth, I think, is his critique of pagan (as Christian) conceptions of immutability as immobility; which as Barth rightly notes is really just code for death. That is an astonishing, but quite right claim made by Barth. As Christians we ought to be thinking along with Barth, with reference to who God is, as if God is who He has revealed Himself to be as a koinonial and eternal co-inhereing relationship of triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit love. In other words, the God of the Christians is not death, but the God of life, who indeed is Life. For this reason, and others not noted here, I believe we should abandon the philosophical language of immutability, and instead use the better grammar of Divine constancy. We can have our theological cake and eat it too. We can affirm all the hopes and dreams that immutability proponents desire without actually having to appeal to the philosophical conundrums associate with appealing to the heathen (Aristotle, Plato et al.) in order to provide a proper Christian grammar for the living God. God does indeed respond and have passions, but those are all fully actualized and realized in His inner-life; it is just that God is a God of Gracious movement—viz. He wanted to create creatures to be able to participate in the eternal movement of His love life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.   

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[1] Brian Leftow, “Immutability,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 11-16-2020.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §31: Study Edition Vol 9 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 58-9.