Contemplating The One Who Remains The Same: Augustine, Swinburne, and Psalm 102 On The Relation Between Divine Immutability and Theological Reason

Modern Theology 0:0 Month 2019 DOI:10.1111/moth.
12587
ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)
ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)
CONTEMPLATING THE ONE WHO

REMAINS THE SAME: AUGUSTINE,
SWINBURNE, AND PSALM 102 ON
THE RELATION BETWEEN DIVINE
IMMUTABILITY AND THEOLOGICAL
REASON
JARED MICHELSON
Abstract
This article defends a classical doctrine of divine immutability by contending that the most influential objections lodged
against it by theologians and philosophers such as Richard Swinburne–i.e. that divine immutability is speculative rather
than practical, is philosophical rather than biblical, and fails to cohere with a ‘personal’ God who relates to creatures–are
rooted in a particular construal of theological reason. I diagnose Swinburne’s account of theological reason with the help
of Karl Barth’s interpretation of Anselm, and put forth a contrasting account of divine immutability, rooted in a distinct
approach to theological reason, through a theological interpretation of Psalm 102, an analysis of the Creator/creature
distinction, and an examination of Augustine’s De trinitate.
Introduction
In the midst of theological debate, it is easy to disregard the subtle effects exerted by divergent
approaches to theological reason, which often implicitly determine the sorts of dogmatic argu-
ments and biblical interpretations various interlocutors find intuitively plausible. One particular
controversy in which divergent approaches to theological reason lie buried beneath surface-level
disagreements is discussion surrounding the doctrine of divine immutability. I explicate this di-
agnosis through identifying two divergent approaches to theological reason with the help of Karl
Barth’s Anselm: Fides Quarens Intellectum. Barth distinguishes between a ‘classical’ approach
to theological reason (which he associates with Anselm), rooted in the distinction between crea-
ture and Creator and involving inseparable moments of ‘reception’ and ‘speculation,’ and a rival
approach to theological reason which he terms ‘anthropological.’ After describing these two rival
perspectives, I proceed to sketch a doctrine of divine immutability rooted in this ‘classical’
Jared Michelson
University of St. Andrews, St. Mary’s, The School of Divinity, St. Andrews, Fife, KY16 9JU, UK
Email: jaredrmichelson@gmail.com
© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

2 Jared Michelson
approach to theological reason through a theological interpretation1 of Psalm 102, an analysis of

the Creator/creature distinction, and an examination of Augustine’s De trinitate. I form my
sketch of the doctrine of divine immutability with the help of these three particular sources, be-
cause in each case we find the convictions undergirding Barth’s ‘classical’ approach to theolog-
ical reason funding intuitions and judgments which lead to the affirmation of the doctrine of
divine immutability. Likewise, dialoguing with these three specific sources begins to address the
most common critiques of the doctrine of divine immutability which one encounters in, for ex-
ample, philosopher and philosophical theologian Richard Swinburne: that divine immutability is
philosophically rather than biblically derived, is impractical and overly speculative, and under-
mines the ‘personality’ or ‘relationality’ of God. As we proceed to engage specifically with
Swinburne’s critiques, we will find that his objections to traditional approaches to divine immu-
tability are derivative from his approach to theological reason which approximates the approach
which Barth termed ‘anthropological.’ So while a debate can still be had concerning divine im-
mutability–and I provide some reasons why, even prescinding from his account of theological
reason, one might find Swinburne’s critique of divine immutability dogmatically inadequate–
this particular debate regarding a locus within the doctrine of God is clarified by tracing its der-
ivation from disagreements regarding theological reason. Therefore, I aim to defend both a
traditional doctrine of divine immutability and the approach to theological reason which under-
girds it.
Theological Reason and the Doctrine of God

In an article for the Christian Century in 1939, Karl Barth famously identifies a little book of
theological interpretation as ‘the real document’ in which he succeeded in ‘deepening’ his ap-
proach to theological reason by conclusively rejecting ‘anthropological’ dogmatic foundations.2
Barth’s distinctive Christologically grounded approach to theological reason might lead one to
mistakenly conclude that the short work which he references–Anselm: Fides Quaerens
Intellectum–consists merely in the projection of Barth’s own views onto the medieval saint. That
Barth discovers in the Monologion and Proslogion a partner in arms sharing a consonant ap-
proach to theological reason suggests that while Barth himself develops this approach through an
insistent and unyielding Christological focus, he is able to recognise in Anselm–and we might
add, in a classical stream of reflection stretching prior to and following upon Anselm himself–an
approach to theological reason which evinces similar aims, values, and norms (even if it parts
ways with respect to some crucial matters).
In part, what Barth gleans from this classical approach is a shared insight that when engaging
in the theological task,
even the most worthy descriptions are only relatively worthy . . . [for God] alone is true and
real, unique and in a category all his own and known only to himself. Therefore, every one
of the categories known to us by which we attempt to conceive him is, in the last analysis,
not really one of his categories at all. God shatters every syllogism.3
1
Theological interpretation of scripture is sufficiently diverse and wide-ranging to prohibit quick summary. For one
helpful introduction and taxonomy, see Daniel J. Treier, ‘Biblical Theology and/or Theological Interpretation of
Scripture? Defining the Relationship’, Scottish Journal of Theology 61, no. 1 (February 2008): 16–31.
2
Karl Barth, ‘How My Mind Has Changed in This Decade Part Two’, The Christian Century 101, no. 22 (July 1984):
684.
3
Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His
Theological Scheme (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick Press, 1975), 29.

Contemplating the One who Remains the Same 3
This implies that every ‘theological statement . . . even the highest and the best,’ which attempts ‘to
reproduce [the] Word in thought or in speech is inadequate.’4 Barth strikingly concludes that this
conception of theological reason entails that even the most faithful and cautious dogmatics is inevi-
tably a speculative exercise.5 This, because our conceptions of God in this life are inevitably com-
prised of halting attempts to express the inexpressible reality of God in categories not innately suited
to attest the superabundant reality of the divine being. Crucially, the irreducible inadequacy of our
theological speech is not grounded in the opacity of the divine being, but in the excessive clarity and
objectivity with which God confronts us, i.e. as Barth says, in the fact that the Creator, unlike crea-
tures, is alone ‘true and real’ without qualification, not being reducible to any genus. Theology
therefore consists in inadequate attempts to express something of the uncreated God in creaturely
terms. Hence, there is an inevitable, mutually informing correlation between theological reason and
the doctrine of creation. As Sigurd Baark argues in his recent account of the often insufficiently
recognised speculative dimension to Barth’s theology, Barth’s account of ‘speculative theology’
amounts to a post-Kantian mode of engaging with problems traditionally subsumed under the head-
ing of ‘the theological problem of analogy.’6 Barth himself identifies his approach to theological
speculation and the concept of analogy, and in so doing, emphasises that theology’s speculative di-
mension is not in conflict with but derivative from its receptivity to divine revelation:
Theology itself is a word, a human response; yet what makes it theology is . . . the Word
which it hears and to which it responds . . . . [Theology’s] entire logic can only be a human
ana-logy to that Word; analogical thought and speech do not claim to be, to say, to contain,
or to control the original word. But it gives a reply to it by its attempt to co-respond with it;
it seeks expressions that resemble the ratio and relations of the Word of God in a
proportionate and, as far as feasible, approximate and appropriate way. Theology’s whole
4
Ibid., 29.
5
Barth continues (my translation): ‘Not all “speculative” theology says the truth. But even so the theology that says
the truth is “speculative.”’ ‘Nicht alle spekulative Theologie sagt die Wahrheit. Aber auch die Theologie, die Wahrheit
sagt, ist spekulative.’ Karl Barth, Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselms Beweis Der Existenz Gottes Im Zusammenhang
Seines Theologischen Programms, edited by Eberhard Jüngel and Ingolf U. Dalferth (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag,
1981), 29. It is precisely because of the inadequacy of our creaturely terms for speaking about God–what Barth terms the
‘conditionality’ of our thinking about God ‘in speculo’ (in a glass or mirror, drawing on 1 Cor. 13:12)–that theology must
be ‘spekulative.’ Ibid. This, because theology seeks to witness to revelation with inadequate creaturely terms unsuited to
denote God, and will therefore be constantly trying, failing, and seeking again to speak of God in diverse and provisional
ways. Barth consistently polemicises against unregulated speculation, by which he means to–minimally–reject any ap-
proach insufficiently normed by the concrete revelation of God in Christ. However, my use of the term ‘speculative’ to
denote a certain constructive aspect of theological reasoning is drawn from Barth himself (spekulative). See also the
important recent monograph, whose primary aim is to reclaim and rightly define the ‘speculative’ aspect of Barth’s the-
ology, Sigurd Baark, The Affirmations of Reason: On Karl Barth’s Speculative Theology (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018). While theology, for Barth, is speculative, this is to be sharply distinguished from ‘irrelevant specula-
tion.’ Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. in 13 parts edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (New
York: T. & T. Clark, 1956–75), I/1, 301. For a summary of Barth on ‘irrelevant speculation,’ see James Gordon, ‘A
“Glaring Misunderstanding”? Schleiermacher, Barth and the Nature of Speculative Theology’, International Journal of
Systematic Theology 16, no. 3 (July 2014): 317-18. If one accepts Gordon’s (following George Hunsinger’s) description,
for whom Barth’s rejection of ‘irrelevant speculation’ involves the claim that ‘Any concept applied to God, therefore,
must be gained from or modified by God’s gracious self-revelation and not elsewhere’, then the sort of speculation we
discuss here–which is necessarily paired with ‘reception’–is not the objectionable sort of ‘irrelevant speculation’ to
which Barth objects. Cf. George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: The Shape of His Theology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991), 51.
6
Baark, The Affirmations of Reason, 10-11. Baark likewise notes the breadth of what might be included under the
label ‘speculative.’ His account of Barth’s development reminds us that while Barth’s version of speculative theology has
genuine antecedents in Anselm and other traditional thinkers, he is also influenced by the problematics of post-Kantian
idealism and Hegel’s paradigmatic response. Ibid., 2-3, 10-11, 93-109, 224-28, 280-82. I have benefited from Baark’s
account of Barth’s speculative theology and see it as broadly consonant with my own. See in particular: Ibid., 198-207,
224-28.

4 Jared Michelson
illumination can be only its human reflection, or mirroring (in the precise sense of ‘specu-
lation’!); and its whole production can be only a human reproduction. In short, theology is
not a creative act but only a praise of the Creator and his act of creation.7
As the conclusion to the following citation makes clear, this speculative approach likewise–and
somewhat paradoxically–suggests that the idiom through which theological reason should be repre-
sented is through images of ‘reception’ rather than ‘creation,’ of seeking to trace the rational linea-
ments inherent in something disclosed, rather than to discern an unknown substance. Theological
reason is both receptive and speculative because theology consists, as A.N. Williams states, in ‘a
following of divine logic, expressed in human form,’8 an act of creaturely mimesis, which reiterates
the features of the divine self-disclosure in creaturely terms and categories.9 Or, more traditionally
and simply stated, theological reason is faith seeking understanding. In sum, theology’s speculative
dimension–i.e. its speaking about that which exceeds our grasp in creaturely terms and categories–
and its receptive dimension–i.e. the character of theology as a tracing of the rationality proper to an
object of which we are always recipients rather than creators–are mutually reinforcing aspects of
theological reason.
Martin Westerholm outlines the account of theological reason Barth explicates in dialogue
with Anselm in similar terms. Barth rejects, on the one hand, a version of theological realism
which forgets the distinction between Creator and creature and treats God as ‘another object in
the world’ through the false assumption that creaturely categories straightforwardly apply to
him. Such an approach fails to appreciate the speculative dimension of theological reason. On
the other hand, Barth likewise rejects a theological idealism (associated with Kant and neo-Prot-
estantism) which makes the activities of human consciousness the basis for thinking God, thereby
subordinating ‘God’s life to the movements of creaturely spirit.’10 This theological idealism
consists in an overly creative approach to theological inquiry, which fails sufficiently to appreci-
ate theology’s receptive dimension. In Gaunilo–Anselm’s famous opponent–Barth locates the
precursor to the approaches of Descartes, Kant, and neo-Protestantism from which he seeks to
extricate himself. According to Barth, the self-referential mode by which Gaunilo objects to
Anselm’s famous ontological argument exposes the ‘standpoint’ from which Gaunilo’s theolog-
ical reasoning proceeds. It is Gaunilo’s own self-consciousness and self-perception which form
the measure and standard for his thinking of God.11 In other words, as Westerholm concludes,
whereas for Gaunilo
nothing can be more foundational to thought than its awareness of its own existence as the
ground and norm of its activity . . . . [For Anselm,] the mind is reordered by the reality that
is known. On this model, understanding is present where thought not only begins with the
reality of God, but also allows this reality to constitute the space in which it functions so that
it cannot understand itself apart from this reality.12
7
Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, trans. Grover Foley (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Company, 1979), 17.
8
A. N. Williams, The Architecture of Theology: Structure, System, and Ratio (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 13.
9
Ibid., 131-32.
10
Martin Westerholm, The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 212.
11
Ibid., 222. I will not assess here the details of Gaunilo’s argument, nor his debate with Anselm.
12
Ibid., 222-23.

For Barth, Anselm, and the classical line of reflection which Anselm represents, theological reason
itself–not merely the conclusions which it draws–must be normed by the relation which creatures
bear to theology’s object. By contrast, the ‘anthropological’ approach to which Barth objects begins
with a consideration of the immanent features of creaturely existence or humanity and allows these
considerations to overdetermine both what God ‘must be like’ and how properly ordered reason
must proceed in the theological sphere. Quite differently, the approach of ‘faith seeking understand-
ing’ expects that our understanding of what counts as rational, and likewise our conception of the
various terms and categories employed in dogmatics, will be reconstituted and reshaped as we come
to know God.
Barth is right to identify this classical account of theological reason associated with Anselm as
consonant with, though not identical to, his own approach. Yet within contemporary theology,
one finds approaches to theological reason which reflect something of–what Barth termed–a
more ‘anthropological’ focus, in which the conditions of creaturely existence and subjectivity
exert a more pervasive influence upon the criteria by which one positively or negatively evalu-
ates particular theological judgments. Some of the most common critiques of the doctrine of di-
vine immutability, such as Swinburne’s, exhibit the features of this ‘anthropological’ approach.
The claim that an immutable God is impersonal or non-relational, for example, depends upon
judgments regarding the characteristics required for genuine ‘relationality’ and ‘personhood.’
For Swinburne, these characteristics are tightly defined by the features of human personhood and
relationality, which provide a set of criteria which any being that is ‘personal’ or ‘relational’ must
exhibit.13 What is rejected in such an account is the assumption of the classical approach to theo-
logical reason that every term applied to God is unsuitable to denote divine perfection. For this
classical perspective, any term predicated of God, including ‘personhood,’ will need to be
stretched and moulded to be even relatively suitable to denote this sui generis object of inquiry.
Further, the anthropological approach of Swinburne (and many others), leads to a mode of bibli-
cal interpretation in which instances of divine relationality narrated in scripture are thought to
require that God possess various features, such as mutability, which human persons exhibit in
their interpersonal relations. At first glance, it may seem that advocates of this ‘anthropological’
approach are merely interpreting scripture’s descriptions of divine relationality straightfor-
wardly. Yet the assumption that if God’s personal relations are to be genuine this requires onto-
logical changes within the divine being (a claim which goes beyond the explicit teaching of
scripture14), depends upon a methodological assumption that any version of relationality not
highly similar to human relationality is less than truly or fully ‘relational.’ Correspondingly, the
sorts of biblical interpretations and theological arguments the defender of traditional versions of
divine immutability finds credible are likewise shaped by the account of theological reason to
which she adheres. In the case of the defender of divine immutability, this is often something
more akin to the ‘classical’ approach to theological reason which Barth gleans from Anselm. In
sum, a debate about a doctrine like divine immutability will remain superficial if one attends
solely to the more ‘immediate’ questions regarding the interpretations of particular texts or the
coherence of certain metaphysical construals of divine perfections or relations while neglecting
to interrogate the assumptions regarding theological reason undergirding different approaches to
the doctrine. This amounts to, in nuce, what we proceed to argue and expand upon in the
following.
Let us now turn to provide a sketch of the doctrine of divine immutability. Along the way, we
will keep in view those common contemporary charges contra divine immutability–i.e. that it is
13
This is a summary of the case I hope to substantiate in what follows.
14
See the following discussion of scripture as ‘metaphysically underdetermined.’

6 Jared Michelson
unbiblical, impractical, and implies a God that is impersonal15–for, as we will find, when one
approaches both scripture and the doctrine of creation with a classical approach to theological
reason in view, these issues of biblical interpretation, of what counts as a ‘practical’ doctrine, and
of what it might mean for God to be ‘personal,’ are all cast under a different light. In what fol-
lows, we dialogue in particular with Augustine because, first, he is a significant source for the
account of theological reason epitomised in Anselm and thereby influencing Barth,16 and second,
because for Augustine, a rightly ordered account of theological reason is explicated through a
consideration of the distinction between the immutable Creator and mutable creatures.17 Thus,
dialoguing with Augustine helps to perspicuously demonstrate the manner in which the doctrine
of divine immutability is embedded within this ‘classical’ approach to theological reason.18
You are the Same

‘Long ago you laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands. They
will perish, but you endure; they will all wear out like a garment. You change them like clothing,
15
Another important set of objections relate to an immutable God’s relation to time and to the possibility of an im-
mutable God assuming human flesh. My focus here is upon the doctrine of divine immutability as a locus within the
doctrine of God, and thus these objections–more properly addressed within the loci of divine eternality and Christology
respectively–while important, will not be the focus here. For some important responses (which also summarise the de-
bate), see Timothy Pawl, In Defense of Conciliar Christology: A Philosophical Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2016), 179-209. Brian Leftow, ‘Presentism, Atemporality, and Time’s Way’, Faith and Philosophy 35, no. 2 (2018):
173–94.
16
For a broad treatment of Augustine’s approach to theological reason, particularly in De trinitate, see A.N. Williams,
‘Contemplation: Knowledge of God in Augustine’s De Trinitate’, in Knowing the Triune God, edited by James J. Buckley
and David S. Yeago (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), 121–46. For the link between
Augustine’s and Anselm’s accounts of theological reason, see: Williams, The Architecture of Theology, 142-47.
17
One might wonder why I do not exposit Barth’s own account of divine immutability. Barth’s account of divine
immutability, expounded under the heading of divine constancy in Church Dogmatics, II/1, is subtle and simultaneously
innovative and traditional. He steadfastly maintains a doctrine of immutability with various antecedents in the tradition,
but likewise, insists that ‘God’s immutability is not immovability,’ identifying various missteps in prior accounts of di-
vine immutability which he fears threaten to undermine this insight. Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, 592. For Barth’s
exposition of divine immutability, see Ibid., II/1, 490-522. Although I have identified a commonality between Barth’s
approach to theological reason and that which I identify in both Anselm and Augustine, which correspondingly leads to
his similar but not identical approach to the doctrine of divine immutability, at those crucial moments when they diverge,
I tend to favour the approach of Augustine. This is not due to disagreements with Barth’s own constructive account of the
doctrine, but because I am less convinced than Barth that the livingness of the divine being is undermined by the Platonic
influences upon the Fathers or by a theology of God as actus purus. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/1, 493-96. Bruce
McCormack attends to a number of passages across the breadth of the Church Dogmatics, demonstrating Barth’s consis-
tent affirmation of divine immutability. Bruce L. McCormack, ‘Divine impassibility or simply divine constancy?’ in
Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, edited by James Keating and Thomas Joseph White (Grand
Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009), 151-73. Immutability, as McCormack demonstrates, serves
for Barth to secure the absolute correspondence between God’s life in se and ad extra. For Barth, ‘If in Christ . . . God is
not unchanged and wholly God, then everything that we may say about the reconciliation of the world . . . is left hanging
in the air’ (emphasis added). Church Dogmatics, IV/1, 183. McCormack’s innovative reinterpretation of Barth’s doctrine
of election (which I do not follow) upholds that God’s attributes and/or characteristics are possessed eternally and im-
mutably. It is just that for McCormack, God eternally self-determines himself as Jesus Christ. There is no mutability in-
volved, for this eternal self-determination has nothing metaphysically or temporally prior to it. For an interpretation of
Barth harder to square with divine immutability, see Paul Dafydd Jones’s interpretation of election as the ‘self-transfor-
mation’ of the divine being. Paul Dafydd Jones, The Humanity of Christ (London: T. & T. Clark, 2011), 89-90.
18
This does not imply that a ‘classical approach’ to theological reason dictates the precise counters of one’s approach
to divine immutability. As the prior footnote outlines, Barth’s account of divine immutability is not identical to
Augustine’s or Anselm’s, but a ‘classical’ approach to theological reason does lead one to identify the immutability of the
divine being as a key aspect of the Creator-creature distinction, as per Barth, Anselm, and Augustine. Cf. Barth, Church
Dogmatics, II/1, 500-3. Anselm, The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and G.R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), Mono. 24-5. Augustine, Confessions, ed. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991),
XI.iv.6.

and they pass away; but you are the same, and your years have no end’ (Psalm 102:25-27,
NRSV).19 Psalm 102 helps us ascertain why scripture’s acclamations of the God whose ‘years
have no end’ have often been taken to require an ontological affirmation of divine immutability.
Hebrew Bible scholar Richard Clifford summarises this text and, in so doing, provides a fitting
description of something like the account of theological reason I will proceed to lay out with the
help of Augustine and the Psalmist:
The psalmist’s own mortality brings thoughts of God, eternal and unchanging, and of the
place, Zion, where this God meets mortals. In the psalm, God is at once distant and near,
transcendent yet found in a particular place. Oneself is not the starting point of conversation
with God. Rather, divine eternity and grandeur, at first sight perhaps off-putting, turn out to
be an entry into a new relationship with God.20
We will return to the various themes Clifford identifies, but for now, let us merely note that the affir-
mations of Psalm 102 do not speak merely to the constancy of the divine purposes, or the consis-
tency or faithfulness of the divine will.21 Instead, it contrasts Creator with creation, arguing that the
One who brought the earth and heavens into existence endures, rather than ‘perishing’ and ‘wearing
out’ like those things which are made. The Psalmist’s claim is therefore irreducibly ontological,22
while not assuming a particular ontology per se.
I take it that–to use a turn of phrase from Oliver Crisp–most of scripture is ‘metaphysically
underdetermined,’23 in that scripture’s claims do not, or we might say should not be interpreted
to require the adoption of a particular metaphysic. Scripture’s claims therefore admit of transla-
tion into diverse metaphysical frameworks24 (so, for example, I do not see why the claims of
19
For a modern history of interpretation of Psalm 102, as well as a discussion of various issues related to its possible
redaction history, see: Andrew Witt, ‘Hearing Psalm 102 within the Context of the Hebrew Psalter’, Vetus Testamentum
62, no. 4 (2012): 582–606. His canonical approach coheres well with the interpretation I myself offer.
20
Richard J. Clifford, Psalms 73-150 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2003), 143.
21
This is a common way of understanding biblical passages which historically were interpreted as pointing to the
immutability of the divine being. Cf. D.J. Verseput, ‘James 1:17 and the Jewish Morning Prayers’, Novum Testamentum
39, no. 2 (1997): 178. Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 219.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘God Everlasting’ in Inquiring about God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010),
153-54.
22
The sort of metaphysical reading I engage in is a controversial one, and assumes a canonical, theological approach
to scripture, which seeks to discern some authoritative unity amidst the plurality and diversity of scripture’s witness.
Such an approach need not be uncritical or ahistorical, although, in my case at least, it assumes that metaphysical presup-
positions and interpretations are inevitable for all readers. For a similar approach, cf. Christoph Schwöbel, ‘The Trinity
between Athens and Jerusalem’, Journal of Reformed Theology 3, no. 1 (2009): 40-41. As an example of a rival ap-
proach, in his (in many regards) insightful piece on the theology of the Psalms, Hans-Joachim Kraus begins his treatment
of the ‘Perfections of Yahweh’ by stating, ‘our point of departure must be the conclusion that all Yahweh’s perfections
are attributes of his self-expression and his actions. Therefore the question of his “essence,” the essentia Dei, is one that
cannot be properly raised.’ Hans-Joachim Kraus, Theology of the Psalms, trans. Keith R. Crim (Minneapolis, MN:
Fortress Press, 1992), 41. By way of rationale for this forbidding of ontological claims, Kraus refers to his prior state-
ments regarding divine livingness. Yet when one examines those statements, one finds contrasts between a ‘personal’ and
‘living God’ and a ‘fixed principle’ or a God produced by a ‘general ontology.’ As he succinctly states: ‘Yahweh is a God
of justice and not a deity of being.’ Ibid., 24, 32, 42. What might seem at first glance like an historical-critical objection
to our way of proceeding does not concern a difference of opinion regarding the origin, compilation, or historical back-
ground or context of the biblical text, but concerns differing theological convictions regarding whether the livingness,
personality, and free activity of God are hindered or enhanced through ontological description.
23
Oliver Crisp, Analyzing Doctrine: Toward a Systematic Theology (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2019).
24
However, this is not to say that the adoption of a metaphysical framework is a purely formal matter with no mate-
rial consequences for dogmatics. Scriptural teaching puts constraints upon the sorts of metaphysical frameworks a theo-
logian may employ, and likewise, makes claims for which a given metaphysical framework must be able to account.
Thanks to Aaron Cotnoir for this point.

8 Jared Michelson
Psalm 102 could not be incorporated into a doctrine of God sketched in terms of either a rela-
tional or a constituent ontology).25 Additionally, as John Webster argues, particular metaphysical
construals are best understood as ministerial rather than magisterial, in that metaphysical con-
cepts or systems recruited for service in systematic theology are employed ex post facto, as tools
which aid in developing a ‘descriptive anatomy of the economy to which scripture testifies.’26
This ministerial approach to the relation between scripture and metaphysics–in which we receive
divine instruction from scripture, but then speculatively attempt to reason and speak on the basis
of divine self-disclosure in creaturely forms and idioms which are themselves inadequate to their
object–reflects the classical approach to theological reason for which I am contending.
Although Psalm 102 does not necessarily require a specific metaphysical construal of divine
immutability, this does not mean it is not making an ontological claim, for the Psalmist concerns
himself with distinguishing God’s form of existence from creaturely being. We find the Psalmist
offering a set of contrasts. Created being is in the process of perishing, of decay, while the being
of the Creator is endlessly enduring. Creation is ever changing and always passing away, whereas
the Creator remains the same. Correspondingly, the author of Hebrews stunningly applies the
worshipful ascriptions of Psalm 102 to Jesus Christ as part of his/her cumulative citations of
passages from the Hebrew Bible which are employed to extol the superiority of both Christ’s
person and the revelation he brings over even the most exalted angelic messenger. The author of
Hebrews’s citation of Psalm 102 therefore likewise provides the Christian theologian with a ra-
tionale for seeing the lack of change within the divine being as rooted fundamentally in the dis-
tinction between Creator and creature. Thus, Psalm 102 instructs us in two crucial matters: first,
whatever God’s immutability consists in and however we proceed to speculatively explicate it,
divine immutability is rooted in the distinction between Creator and creature, and second, this
distinction is not merely a matter of the fidelity of the divine purpose or will, but concerns the
form of existence, the being, of creature and Creator respectively.27
The ontological distinction between the unchanging Creator and mutable creation noted by the
Psalmist (as well as in other passages of scripture) should be the primary source for the doctrine
of immutability. This is not to say that Psalm 102 in itself requires or demands the particular
construal of divine immutability which follows. Rather–following upon the account of theolog-
ical reason we have outlined–in light of the theologian’s reception of the divine disclosure re-
vealed in passages such as Psalm 102, theologians like Augustine seek to speculatively construe
divine immutability using their own metaphysical apparatus in a manner which secures scrip-
ture’s claims. As Thomas Weinandy has argued, it was reflection upon the doctrine of creation ex
nihilo, i.e. the introduction of being entirely with no proceeding potency or substratum of any
kind, which was thought to require ascribing to God the sort of existence which was already fully
in act, or correspondingly was being itself. Such a conception leads to a doctrine of divine immu-
tability, for if God is being itself or is fully in act, then God possesses no potential to change from
one finite configuration of being to another. For Weinandy–and Thomas who he is most directly
expositing–a creature whose actuality is limited by a principle of potency, i.e. a nature, has a
limited share in the plenitude of being’s perfection, whereas God who is fully in act and is the
25
On the distinction between relational and constituent ontologies, cf. Peter van Inwagen, Existence: Essays in
Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 202-18.
26
John Webster, ‘Perfection and Participation’, in The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom
of God?, ed. Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2011), 389.
27
Cf. Katherine Sonderegger, who contends that Psalm 102 exposits the distinction between Creator and creature,
rooting the distinction in God’s infinitude, necessity, eternality, and permanence. Katherine Sonderegger, ‘The Absolute
Infinity of God’, in The Reality of Faith in Theology: Studies on Karl Barth, Princeton-Kampen Consultation, 2005,
edited by Bruce L. McCormack and G.W. Neven (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 31, 48-49.

source of all the perfections we see in creatures already possesses the full array of all possible
perfection.28 Thus, on such an account of the distinction between Creator and creature, there is,
quite literally, nothing else for God to change into. The only possible change could be a defection
from being towards non-being.
Correspondingly, Augustine’s mature account of immutability commonly contrasts God who is
unchanging Being itself with mutable creatures, for ‘anything that can change even though it does
not, is able to not be what it was; and thus only that which not only does not but also absolutely
cannot change deserves without qualification to be said really and truly to be.’29 Therefore, ‘there is
no modification in God because there is nothing that can be changed or lost.’30 As A.H. Armstrong
outlines, noting the relation between the doctrine of creation and divine immutability:
The contrast between the immutability of God and the mutability of the creature is one of
the great recurring themes in Augustine’s thought. Creaturely mutability is not for him a
defect or imperfection in the creature, an unnecessary falling short of an attainable ideal. It
is intrinsic to creatureliness; it is the inescapable consequence of not being God and so
being absolutely and continuously dependent on God for first existence and continuance in
being.31
Mutability and immutability are rooted–as in Psalm 102–in the doctrine of creation, denoting a fun-
damental contrast between dependent creature and a se Creator. ‘Heaven and earth exist, they cry
aloud that they are made, for they suffer change and variation. But in anything which is not made and
yet is, there is nothing which previously was not present. To be what once was not the case is to be
subject to change and variation.’32 God is immutable because God has nothing, nor could God have
anything, added to God’s plenteous existence, for ‘God exists in the supreme sense, and the original
sense, of the word. He is altogether unchangeable, and it is he who could say with full authority “I
am who I am.”’33 In all these instances, we see the insistence that as the source of creaturely being,
God is distinguished as that which, by virtue of being the plenteous source of all creaturely life, is
incapable of receiving any additional perfection.
In objection to such lines of argument, Richard Swinburne–after citing Summa theologiae I,
q.9, a.1–replies: ‘an obvious response to this point is to suggest that the perfection of a perfect
being might consist not in his being in a certain static condition, but in his being in a certain
process of change.’34 Swinburne rejects any defence of divine immutability which assumes a
priori that to be immutable is better, i.e. ‘more perfect,’ than to be mutable.35 Yet I worry this
28
Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M., ‘God and Human Suffering’, in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human
Suffering, 104-9. Thomas Aquinas, The ‘Summa Theologica’ of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English
Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), I, q.9, a.1. Cf. Gilles Emery, O.P., ‘The Immutability of the
God of Love’, in Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering, 27-32.
29
Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1991), 1.3. I read Augustine as
speaking implicitly in categories resembling the act and potency distinction, following the interpretations of Rowan
Williams, On Augustine (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2016), 67-71. Simon Oliver, ‘Augustine on Creation,
Providence and Motion’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 18, no. 4 (October 2016): 378-88, 396. Joshua
Nunziato, ‘Created to Confess: St. Augustine on Being Material’, Modern Theology 32, no. 3 (July 2016): 369.
30
Augustine, The Trinity, 5.5.
31
A. Hilary Armstrong, ‘St Augustine and Christian Platonism’, in Augustine: A Collection of Critical Essays (New
York: Anchor Books, 1972), 5-6.
32
Augustine, Confessions, XI.iv.6.
33
Augustine, De doctrina christiana, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1.32.35. Cf.
34
Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, 234.
35
I will more fully engage with Swinburne’s views in the following section.

10 Jared Michelson
misses Aquinas’s point–one which we have unearthed in Augustine as well–misunderstanding

him to be employing perfect-being style reasoning in isolation from wider dogmatic commit-
ments. Instead, Thomas is expounding upon the logic of the doctrine of creation out of nothing:
‘There is some first being, whom we call God; and that this first being must be pure act, without
the admixture of any potentiality, for the reason that, absolutely, potentiality is posterior to act.’36
The first being, who unlike all created things has life ‘in and of himself,’ must already be fully in
act, which makes possible the omnipotent act of granting existence out of nothing. Thus, God is
unchanging not because change is viewed negatively out of a philosophical prejudice, but be-
cause God as the one who introduces being out of nothing must already eminently possess all the
perfections of being in Godself. These claims cry out for expansion, but in the interests of avoid-
ing debates over the particular metaphysics involved, I merely note the parallel with Psalm 102;
God is unchanging because the Creator who has ‘life in and of himself’ is not subject to the
change and decay proper to created things brought into being.
Let us further delve into the dogmatic function of Augustine’s account of divine immutability,
unveiling its relation to theological reason’s orientation to the creature’s contemplative end in
God and to its speculative and receptive dimensions. Augustine begins De trinitate questioning
how, given the inevitability that creatures will speak of God on the basis of the categories of
creaturely existence,37 we can engage in this task in a manner which respects the distinction be-
tween Creator and creature. He offers a hermeneutical solution. We are licensed to speak about
God on the basis of God’s revelation in holy scripture, but we must purify those predicates en-
dorsed by scripture which positively compare God to creaturely things with those instances in
which scripture tell us of those attributes which ‘are peculiar to God and do not occur anywhere
in creation.’38 Crucial amongst these distinguishing attributes is divine immutability, as Augustine
continues, in the process citing Psalm 102:
True immortality is unchangingness, which nothing created can have as it is peculiar to the
Creator. James too makes the point: Every best bounty and every perfect gift is from above,
coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no change nor moving shadow
(Jas 1:17), and so does David: You will change them and they shall be changed, but you are
the selfsame (Ps 102:27). So then it is difficult to contemplate and have full knowledge of
God’s substance, which without any change in itself makes things that change, and without
any passage of time in itself creates things that exist in time. This is why it is necessary for
our minds to be purified before that inexpressible reality can be inexpressibly seen by them;
and in order to make us fit and capable of grasping it, we are led along more endurable
routes, nurtured in faith as long as we have not yet been endowed with that necessary
purification.39
According to Augustine, both James 1 and Psalm 102 identify our understanding of God’s unchang-
ingness as tied up with God’s causality; with either the good gifts God gives to creatures, as in
James, or with the most fundamental creative gift of existence itself, as in Psalm 102. These passages
and others like 1 Tim. 6:16, are examples of those instances in which scripture contrasts the exis-
tence of the Creator with creatures, thereby providing an apophatic check upon the comparative as-
criptions scripture directs us to predicate of God. The citation concludes with Augustine contrasting
36
Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, I, q.9, a.1,
37
Augustine, The Trinity, 1.1-2.
38
39
Augustine, The Trinity, 1.2-3.

our current existence as viators–in which we inevitably speak of God in categories drawn from crea-
turely existence–with final blessedness in which our vision is purified beyond its natural capacities
for an eternal contemplation of God.
As should be clear, Augustine’s account of speaking about God by virtue of the ‘things which
are made’ is not a process of unaided natural reasoning, nor of pure philosophical analysis, but
concerns a course of intellectual ascesis in which, through the mediation of faith, we are led by
the Spirit’s illumination of holy scripture to speak at least relatively adequately of the Creator
according to the categories of mutable creation.40 At the heart of Augustine’s account of theolog-
ical reason is his subordination of knowledge–i.e. the proper but derivative question of how to
make good use of temporal things–to wisdom, which concerns the contemplation of things eter-
nal.41 For Augustine, theology is a movement ‘through knowledge toward wisdom,’ as we are
purified and prepared for our end of rapturous divine contemplation.42 Seeking to know God in
faith–i.e. to discern something of God’s unchanging perfection from the things which are
made43–is therefore not a procedure of insular intellectual self-gratification, but a spiritual exer-
cise in which, through the work of the Spirit, we are sanctified and prepared for ‘the fullness of
our happiness, beyond which there is none else . . . to enjoy God the three in whose image we
were made.’44
The doctrine of divine immutability which emerges from this contemplative vision of theolog-
ical reason becomes one of the primary armaments of the Christian against the troubles and
confusions of temporal life. As Craig Hefner argues, Augustine’s doctrine of divine immutability
is an ‘existential doctrine,’ for God’s unchanging perfection is that which, through our union
with Christ, preserves our personal integrity from the vicissitudes of change and flux, as well as
the sorrows of temporal life.45 In revelation, ‘God sent us sights suited to our wandering state, to
admonish us that what we seek is not here, and that we must turn back from the things around us
to where our whole being springs from.’46 This stable happiness for which we long is something
we attain only ‘by the road he has made in the humanity of the divinity of his only Son,’ and
concerns, through Christ, being purified by faith for a rapturous contemplation of the divine
being which ‘has absolutely nothing changeable about its eternity or its truth or its will; there
truth is eternal and love is eternal; there love is true and eternity true; there eternity is lovely and
truth is lovely too.’47 In loving God for God’s own sake, we rightly order our loves, placing as
supreme in our affections a stable (i.e. immutable) source of delight and goodness which is
40
Michael Allen similarly notes that for Augustine, ‘God’s naming of himself [in Exodus 3] provides an epistemic
check on human efforts to know God–God is not an item in the universe . . . . The negative qualification given in the first
divine name limits even the historical identification of God given in the second divine name, providing a narrative clue
for how to read these Scriptural narratives for divine identity.’ Michael Allen, ‘Exodus 3 after the Hellenization Thesis’,
Journal of Theological Interpretation 3, no. 2 (2009): 188-89. Cf. Allen’s description of divine immutability as a
‘linguistic qualifier,’ which coheres well with my own analysis. Ibid., 187-88.
41
42
43
This is not a matter of natural, non-redeemed reason rising unaided step by intellective step to a knowledge of the
divine being and perfections (the question of natural theology is not directly at issue here, though it is not irrelevant).
What is at issue is the possibility that creaturely reason, redeemed and restored by the Spirit and participating in the
Father’s manifestation in the Son, might be enabled to ‘read’ both creation and Holy Scripture as books of signs which
direct the creature to their triune Creator, Redeemer, and perfect end.
44
45
Craig A. Hefner, ‘“In God’s Changelessness There Is Rest”: The Existential Doctrine of God’s Immutability in
Augustine and Kierkegaard’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 20, no. 1 (January 2018): 65-83.
46
47

12 Jared Michelson
unchanged by the vagaries of creaturely life.48 Thus, by exercising faith oriented towards con-
templating the One who remains the same, the saints find consolation in the midst of life’s inex-
plicable sufferings and injustices, being armed with hope for action for the sake of God and
neighbour, knowing that God ‘will turn to my good whatever adversity he sends upon me in this
sad world.’49 This is another crucial aspect of the classical approach to theological reason. As
John Webster summarises, ‘The setting of theology is not simply the immanent sphere of human
inquiry, but the transcendent vocation of rational creatures.’50 For such a contemplative account
of theological reason, the economy of salvation becomes the horizon in which reason operates
and through which it takes its bearings, and the end of theological reason is not knowledge for
its own sake, but the enjoyment of God.
From this brief journey through Psalm 102 and Augustine’s De trinitate, an obvious implica-
tion can be drawn. For Augustine, the doctrine of divine immutability is an attempt to engage
with scripture, and in particular, the distinction scripture draws between Creator and creature.
This does not reflect a naive insistence that scripture is univocally clear as to divine immutability,
but rather reflects an account of theological reason which assumes the inadequacy of creaturely
concepts for speaking of the divine life, and therefore constructs a hermeneutical strategy in
light of theology’s receptive and speculative dimensions. It is because humans, even the human
authors of scripture, must speak of God through terms and categories drawn from the creaturely
realm that those common scriptural claims which denote the divine being by comparison with
creatures must be chastened by those instances in which Creator and creature are distinguished,
and vice versa. Both comparative and contrastive ascriptions relativise one another, as the crea-
turely intellect seeks to inadequately but faithfully follow the lines of the self-manifestation of
God in scripture, employing terms and categories which are in themselves improperly suited to
speak of divine perfection.
This leads to a corollary implication. The function of divine immutability is not to represent
God as remote, unresponsive, or ‘impersonal,’ but to qualify God’s personal engagement with
creatures in light of the Creator-creature distinction. David Burrell, in a manner parallel to
Augustine’s hermeneutical strategy, distinguishes between those formal features of God which
serve to contrast divine and creaturely existence–such as simplicity, eternity, and immutability–
and those substantive attributes drawn by analogy with the attributes of creatures.51 For Burrell
(and Augustine), an attribute like immutability serves to qualify our positive predications, such
that when we say that God is loving, or even that God repents or changes God’s mind, we do so
in a way which honours the distinction between God and creatures. With this strategy in mind,
we can follow Hebrew Bible scholars such as Walter Moberly, who, after an insightful survey of
the Hebrew Bible’s treatment of the claim that God ‘repents’ (‫)םחנ‬, argues that the superficial
contradiction of 1 Samuel–which alleges both that God ‘repents’ (1 Sam. 15:11) and that God
‘will not lie or repent; for he is not a man, that he should repent’ (1 Sam. 15:29)–are not in ten-
sion. In the first place, he cites Robert Dentan and Walther Eichrodt, who contend that this sup-
posed contradiction is ‘a part of the intrinsic problem of the human need to speak of God with
analogical language drawn from the human realm, in which affirmations (the kataphatic) need to
48
On the practical applications of a theology rooted in contemplation, cf. Matthew Levering, Scripture and
Metaphysics: Aquinas and the Renewal of Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 22.
49
The Heidelberg Catechism, Q.26.
50
J.B. Webster, The Domain of the Word: Scripture and Theological Reason (London: Bloomsbury T. & T. Clark,
2012), 134.
51
David Burrell, ed., ‘Distinguishing God from the World’, in Faith and Freedom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2004), 5-6.

be balanced by denials (the apophatic).’52 He concludes that this approach, which is parallel to
the approaches of Augustine and Burrell we have identified, ‘is readily intelligible and makes
good sense as a way of tackling the problem of God’s both repenting and not repenting.’53 Yet he
likewise adds that there is more to be said along the same lines, for the claim that God does not
repent aims to eliminate God’s acts ‘from possible associations . . . with the lack of integrity and
lack of faithfulness that regularly characterise human speech.’54 Thus, those claims which speak
of God not repenting tend to contrast God with those who lie, and with, more broadly, the mortal
and creaturely, whereas those claims which speak of God repenting denote God as one engaged
in ‘responsiveness in relationship.’55
Moberly’s approach to a different set of texts than those more directly in our purview here il-
lustrates a mode of reading similar to Augustine’s. God, for Augustine, engages in relations with
creatures, and these relations are inevitably described in creaturely terms. Therefore, speaking of
God as responsive is not inappropriate but necessary in light of scripture’s diverse witness. Yet
this affirmation requires a corresponding apophatic moment which determines that the mode of
divine interaction is characterised by God’s immutable perfection as Creator, which utterly dis-
tinguishes God from creatures.56 Thus God can even be said to ‘repent,’ but not like a creature,
and therefore, in a mode which is consistent with the apophatic affirmation that the God of Israel
‘is not a son of man, that he should repent’ (Num. 23:19). Augustine therefore predicates
‘changes’ of God, but only on the basis of the change that occurs in creatures through their rela-
tions with God, not on the basis of an ontological change that occurs in God’s being.57 ‘Anything
that can begin to be said about God in time which was not said about him before is said by way
of relationship, and yet not by way of a modification of God, as though something has modified
him.’58 Rather, ‘he is called something with reference to creation . . . [which] does not involve
anything happening to God’s own substance, but only to the created thing to which the
52
R.W.L. Moberly, Old Testament Theology: Reading the Hebrew Bible as Christian Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Academic, 2013), 129.
53
Moberly, Old Testament Theology, 130.
54
Moberly, Old Testament Theology, 132.
55
Ibid.
56
See Eleonore Stump’s reflection upon similar themes in Aquinas. Eleonore Stump, The God of the Bible and the
God of the Philosophers (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2016).
57
This prefigures something akin to the scholastic notion of mixed or unreal relations, which contends, as W.
Matthew Grant argues, that were God not to create, there would be ‘no change in God’s real, intrinsic features or prop-
erties.’ Thus, it ‘is not the claim that statements predicating of God a relationship to creatures are not really true, or that
they are perhaps just metaphorical. Rather, the teaching concerns the ontology for the relations between God and crea-
tures.’ W. Matthews Grant, ‘Can a Libertarian Hold That Our Free Acts Are Caused By God?’, Faith and Philosophy:
Journal of the Society of Christian Philosophers 27, no. 1 (January 2010): 26-27. In sum, while one might speak of mere
Cambridge changes in God in view of God’s relations to creatures, bringing about effects in creatures does not change
the intrinsic or essential properties of God, and thus, in sharp contrast to creatures, there is no sense in which God is
constituted by relations ad extra. Ibid., 29. A Cambridge change ‘is a change in the descriptions (truly) borne by the
thing.’ Chris Mortensen, ‘Change and Inconsistency’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University The Metaphysics Research Lab, 2004) https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/
entries/change/ (accessed Winter 2016, emphasis added). While extrinsic accounts of God’s knowing and willing such as
Grant’s are controversial (and entering fully into this debate is beyond our current purview), Grant employs such an ac-
count to solve a range of objections related to divine immutability, divine simplicity, and God’s relation to creatures, cf.
W. Matthews Grant, ‘Aquinas, Divine Simplicity, and Divine Freedom’, Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 77 (January 2003): 129–44. W. Matthews Grant, ‘Must a Cause Be Really Related to Its
Effect? The Analogy between Divine and Libertarian Agent Causality’, Religious Studies 43, no. 1 (2007): 1–23. W.
Matthews Grant, ‘Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing’, Faith and Philosophy
29, no. 3 (July 2012): 254–74.
58

14 Jared Michelson
relationship predicated of him refers.’59 What can be missed in such claims is that Augustine
maintains that we must speak of God as changing in response to creaturely reality. This is be-
cause in this life we speak of God in terms of creaturely categories and relations, and given our
creaturely situatedness, to say God is unrelated to creatures, or to fail to note changes in the re-
lation between creatures and God, would be incorrect and inappropriate. As Augustine relays in
the midst of one of the most beautiful passages of his Confessions, ‘You love without burning,
you are jealous in a way that is free of anxiety, you “repent” (Gen 6:6) without the pain of regret,
you are wrathful and remain tranquil. You will a change without any change in your design.’60
We see here Augustine predicating relationality and responsiveness of God in a manner that
never loses sight of the distinction between Creator and creature. Therefore, Augustine relativ-
ises each positive claim about God’s responsiveness in light of a further insistence that each di-
vine change or response concerns a ‘modification’ in us rather than in God’s being. Both the
apophatic and the cataphatic moments are irreducible.
Simply stated, the account of immutability I wish to affirm in dialogue with Augustine affirms
that God relates to creatures, cares for creatures, values creatures, and even responds to creatures,
but denies that God does any of these things in the same way as creatures relate to one another.
Furthermore, one of the primary ways of distinguishing God’s unique form of relationality from
creaturely relationality is by affirming that in order for God to do all of this, the divine being need
not be transformed, changed, or altered (i.e. it is immutable).61 This does not mean that somehow
creation does not ‘matter for God,’ or that God’s love for creatures is threatened or diminished.
Quite the opposite.
Because God’s infinitely extended relations to created things neither add to nor subtract
from his being, his work of bringing into being and maintaining creatures is wholly
59
60
Augustine, Confessions, I.iv.4.
61
For responses to various objections to this approach, see in particular footnotes 15 and 57. Barth may not accept
this characterisation of divine immutability, fearing it depends upon a ‘Greek conception of God’ in which God’s acts do
not ‘in any way affect His Godhead.’ Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 84-85. However, it is difficult to identify where Barth’s
position is materially different. To be sure, Barth is intent to emphasise that the incarnation ‘matters for God’ (and as
previously noted, I disagree with his negative evaluation of certain traditional construals of divine immutability), but it
is difficult to assess whether for Barth something ‘affecting’ the Godhead involves any change in the divine being. There
are good reasons to think otherwise. Consider for example Tyler Wittman’s recent comparison of Thomas Aquinas’s view
of mixed relations with Barth. For Thomas, the relation between God and creatures is ‘real’ on the side of the creature
(since the creature’s being is effected and even constituted by its relation to God) but merely ‘logical’ on the side of God
(since God’s being is not expanded or altered by his relations ad extra). Wittman aligns Barth with the ‘real’ relations
view of certain late medieval nominalists and Protestant Scholastics. However, as Wittman explains, it is unclear whether
the difference between the ‘real’ and ‘mixed’ views under discussion here is more formal or material (this is not to say
that such formal matters do not have material consequences, as Wittman himself demonstrates). As Wittman outlines,
Francisco Suárez argues that the difference between these two views is formal, for those nominalists who affirm a ‘real’
relation do not deny the qualitative distinction between God and creatures, they simply think that speaking about God’s
relation to creatures as (metaphysically) real on God’s side need not signal any sort of ontological growth, expansion, or
transformation within the divine being. Tyler Wittman, God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl
Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 244-50, 287-88. Wittman plausibly associates such a position
with Barth. For Barth, what takes place in election and the covenant of grace is ‘a determination of divine essence: not
an alteration (Veränderung) but a determination (Bestimmung).’ Church Dogmatics, IV/2, 84. Karl Barth, Die Kirchliche
Dogmatik (München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1932), IV/2, 92. As George Hunsinger argues, despite the ways in which
Entscheidung, Beschluss, and selbst bestimmenden are often interpreted, election for Barth in no way transforms or alters
the divine being; it rather orients the dynamism of divine actuality ‘toward [a] particular circumstance or to a particular
goal.’ George Hunsinger, Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic,
2015), 80. If such a view is correct, then while Barth has an ‘actualistic’ ontology shaping his account of the divine being
and attributes, within this framework he ends up articulating a fairly robust account of divine immutability. Locating the
precise material points of discontinuity between Barth’s and Augustine’s respective accounts of immutability is by no
means simple (nor does my argument depend upon doing so).

benevolent and beneficent. God is in himself infinitely happy, in need of nothing from the
creature: how could the perfect be perfected? His work of creation is pure generosity: he
makes things for their own sake, not for his.62
The genuineness of God’s love and care for creatures is not grounded in some putative transforma-
tion within God’s being, but rather in the utterly gratuitous transformation (and creation) of the
creature’s being, as God gives ‘life to the dead and calls into being things that were not’ (Rom. 4:17b
RSV). It is precisely because God gains nothing by his acts ad extra that God’s relations to creatures
are so uniquely, even divinely, gracious and loving. This approach to biblical interpretation, rooted
in Augustine’s account of theological reason, aims to respect the diversity of scripture’s attestations.
It views the pluriformity of scripture’s witness as a necessary component in the jointly receptive and
speculative process of the creature’s speaking of God in terms and categories not innately suited to
attest divine perfection. Surprisingly perhaps, it is opponents of traditional formulations of divine
immutability–such as Nicholas Wolterstorff for example63–who are often tempted to flatten this di-
versity, contending that scripture consistently and repeatedly presents God as changing in response
to relations with creatures as an agent or interpersonal actor. We can agree, scripture does speak in
such terms, but the theologian striving to read scripture canonically must nuance such passages with
the apophatic qualifications of Numbers 23:19, James 1:17, Malachi 3:6, or Psalm 102:24-27.
All of this reflects a contemplative approach to theological reason rooted in the doctrine of
creation and attentive to theological reason’s speculative and receptive dimensions. It presumes
an innate unfittingness of creaturely terms and categories to denote divine perfection, and there-
fore argues ‘that whatever we say about that unchanging and invisible nature, that supreme and
all-sufficient life, cannot be measured by the standard of things visible, changeable, mortal and
deficient.’64 Yet of course it also presumes, in the midst of this unfittingness and unlikeness, that
the creature in its mutability is a mirror in which God’s unchanging perfection is discerned. It is
because we come to know the invisible, unchanging, and immortal through the visible, change-
able, and mortal, that theology must proceed with corresponding apophatic and cataphatic mo-
ments, presenting a God who relates to us, yet without essential change.
Objecting to Divine Immutability

We have already begun to respond to the most common objections to the doctrine of divine im-
mutability. I take these objections to be that, in the first place, divine immutability erects a deity
unresponsive to creatures and less than personally related to creaturely need and that, in the
second, divine immutability represents a philosophical rather than biblical portrait of divine
perfection (we have already more comprehensively addressed the notion that the doctrine is
62
John Webster, ‘Non Ex Aequo’, in Within the Love of God: Essays on the Doctrine of God in Honour of Paul S.
Fiddes, edited by Anthony Clarke and Andrew Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 106-7.
63
‘The biblical writers . . . present God as acting within human history. The God they present is neither the impassive
god of the Oriental nor the non-historical god of the deist.’ This biblical vision of ‘God as an agent within history,’ which
in Wolterstorff’s reckoning contrasts sharply with the eternal and immutable God of classical theism, is so ‘basic to the
biblical writings . . . [that in order to affirm a classical account of divine immutability] one would have to regard the
biblical speech about God as at best one long sequence of metaphors pointing to a reality for which they are singularly
inept, and as at worst one long sequence of falsehoods.’ Wolterstorff, ‘God Everlasting’, 133. It is undoubtedly true that
the biblical authors present God as an agent acting in history, but Wolterstorff seems to understand the biblical witness
as ‘one long sequence of metaphors’ making basically the same point again and again, without any suggestion that bib-
lical claims regarding God as acting within human history contrast with other claims which distinguish God’s mode of
existence and agency from creatures. Such passages mark off the divine being as more than merely ’an agent . . . acting
within human history.’ Ibid.
64

16 Jared Michelson
speculative rather than practical). It is my contention that, at least in Swinburne’s case, these
objections derive from an account of theological reason lacking the features we identified in the
broad, varied tradition including Barth, Anselm, and Augustine.65
Swinburne argues that
[t]he God of the Hebrew Bible, in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all have their
roots, is pictured as being in continual interaction with humans–humans sin, then God is
angry, then humans repent, then God forgives them; humans ask God for this, then God
gives them this, then they misuse it, then God takes it away; and so on. A totally immutable
God is a lifeless God, not a God with whom one can have a personal relationship . . . .
However, like every other substance, God could not change in respect of his essential
properties.66
Swinburne goes on to allege that traditional notions of divine immutability, since they cannot be
supported by scripture, must be the result of ‘Neoplatonic dogma’67 which crept into the Christian
tradition in the second and third centuries, overpowering the clear affirmations of scripture regard-
ing God’s responsive relations with creatures. Swinburne’s claim that ‘the Hebrew Bible shows no
knowledge of’ a traditional notion of divine immutability,68 and Swinburne’s own correspondingly
revised account of immutability which asserts only that God, ‘like every other substance,’ does not
change in essential properties, seems quite straightforwardly to contradict Numbers 23:19, James
1:17, Malachi 3:6, and Psalm 102:24-27. Swinburne’s ‘weak sense’ of divine immutability–which
merely alleges that whatever is included amongst God’s essential properties cannot change–means
that God’s immutability is not distinct from the immutability proper to every substance.69 Thus,
unlike for Psalm 102 and Hebrews, for Swinburne God’s immutability is not something distin-
guishing Creator from creature, but is a property God shares in common with ‘every other sub-
stance.’ By contrast, for the Psalmist, God’s ‘remaining the same,’ whatever it entails–and thus
even if one does not fill out this notion in the same terms as Augustine–is not something God shares
with creatures.
Swinburne continues, contending that for traditional versions of divine immutability
God in his one timeless moment is aware of all that humans do, angry at their sinning, for-
giving them as they repent . . . . [but] such a God would not be a God in interaction with
ourselves; real anger at our sin is anger without infallible knowledge that we would subse-
quently repent; real forgiveness involves a new unplanned reaction to the repentance.70
65
It is crucial not to flatten the many differences between these figures. Yet the commonalities regarding this broad
account of theological reason we have identified, and the manner in which a robust doctrine of divine immutability is
rooted within this vision, underlies why the ‘anthropological’ approach to theological reason ascendant in many streams
of theology today–and in a different way, in Barth’s own day–is at odds not with a single figure, but with various and
divergent streams of the Christian theological tradition. Simply stated, my argument is not that the approach to theolog-
ical reason and divine immutability in Augustine, Anselm, or Barth is identical, but rather that the genuine commonalities
which emerge in their approaches, when set against the backdrop of the contemporary critics of divine immutability like
Swinburne, begins to represent approaches to theological reason and divine immutability like Swinburne’s as something
of an outlier. Yet insofar as Swinburne is an outlier, this is only from this broader historical perspective, for approaches
similar to his own are increasingly widespread in contemporary theology. See footnote 71.
66
Swinburne, Coherence of Theism, 233.
67
Ibid., 234.
68
Ibid., 236.
69
Cf. Ibid., 232.
70
Ibid., 242.

What leads Swinburne to these conclusions? Why must ‘real forgiveness’ involve an ‘unplanned
reaction’? Why must ‘real anger’ involve no awareness of subsequent repentance? In other words,
why must a God who does not interact with us in the way we interact with one another be relating in
a manner which is less than real? Here we see why one might conclude that Swinburne is operating
with an account of theological reason which is more ‘anthropological,’ in the sense which Barth
identified at the outset, than Augustine’s. This is not a crude allegation of anthropomorphising, but
the observation that for Swinburne, the conditions of human life and subjectivity exert a substantive
influence in determining what God must be like if God is to be personal.
Swinburne’s argument is a function of his wider account of theological reason. This approach
is not restricted to Swinburne, but is common in certain strands of analytic theology.71 Swinburne
begins The Coherence of Theism by straightforwardly defining theism as a belief that ‘God’ re-
fers to ‘a person without a body (that is, a spirit),’72 or, as he states in The Christian God, ‘God
is thus (in my terminology) a soul, for whose existence and operation no body’ is required.73
Furthermore, these terms–person and spirit/soul–like other terms such as ‘omnipotent, omni-
scient, perfectly good,’ etc., ‘are understood in ordinary senses–given certain definitions of these
words rather than other definitions.’74 As he explains in his more extended discussion of divine
predication: ‘[A]lthough theology uses ordinary words to denote ordinary properties, it claims
that the properties cited are manifested in unusual combinations and to unusual degrees. God is
a powerful person–but a very much more powerful person than any person with whom we are
ordinarily acquainted. His power, unlike the power of human rulers, is combined with great
goodness. Human persons have bodies; he does not. And so on.’75 For Swinburne, the terms
‘person’ and ‘powerful’ apply to God in the same ‘ordinary’ way in which they apply to human
persons, and what counts as ‘ordinary’ is defined by the conditions of creaturely subjectivity and
existence. It is merely the combination of properties God possesses (such that for example God’s
power is combined with great goodness), and the degree to which those properties are manifested
(such that God is powerful in the same sense as creatures, but only more so), which distinguishes
God from creatures. In terms of the predicate ‘personality,’ God is ‘personal’ in precisely the
same sense as human persons, only disembodied. There is no sense that our concept of personal-
ity must be revised in light of God’s self-disclosure.
Swinburne allows that in certain instances a theologian may be forced to use words ‘in a wider
sense than their mundane senses,’76 which involves ‘altering a few of the semantic and/or syn-
tactic rules for its use.’ Swinburne–misleadingly–labels this ‘analogical predication.’77 In The
71
Brian Davies’s influential description of Swinburne’s, as well as other analytic theologians and/or philosophers of
religion such as Alvin Plantinga’s, adherence to what Davies terms theistic personalism is illuminating here. Brian
Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Cf. Alvin Plantinga,
Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), vii. Brian Davies, The Reality of God and the
Problem of Evil (London: Continuum, 2006), 31-57. Roger Pouivet, ‘Against Theistic Personalism: What Modern
Epistemology Does to Classical Theism’, European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 10, no. 1 (March 2018): 1–19.
Howard Robinson, ‘The “Perfect Person” Conception of God, versus the Traditional Conception: Is the Difference so
Great?’ Religious Studies 53, no. 3 (September 2017): 293–306. For similar examples of ‘theistic personalism’, and the
manner in which its more ‘anthropological’ construal of theological reason–diminishing classical notions of the unsuit-
ability of creaturely terms for denoting divine perfection, often through the denial or reinterpretation of divine incompre-
hensibility (Mullins) or analogy (Wolterstorff)–correlates with a denial of traditional accounts of divine immutability, see
e.g. Wolterstorff, ‘Alston on Aquinas on Theological Predication,’ and ‘God Everlasting,’ in Inquiring about God,
112-56. R.T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
72
Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, 1. Cf. Ibid., 4, 104.
73
Swinburne, The Christian God (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 127.
74
75
Ibid., 56.
76
Ibid., 60.
77
Ibid., 65. The following footnote explicates why this is a ‘misleading’ designation.

18 Jared Michelson
Coherence of Theism, divine personality is identified as a univocal, rather than analogical pred-
icate.78 However, in The Christian God, he suggests that God is analogically personal, because
unlike human persons, who–on Swinburne’s view–could continue as persons through the course
of a transformation of their nature, God essentially possesses the divine nature, and thus God’s
continuity of experience (which for Swinburne is basic to personhood) could not continue
through a change of nature.79 Note the vast difference between the sort of analogy employed in
the ‘classical’ conception of theological reason previously outlined80 and Swinburne’s own ac-
count of analogy, which involves the application of a predicate understood in its ‘mundane’ sense
with designated tweaks of the original concept (in this case, God is a person just like a human
person–who represents the ‘paradigm’ of personhood–but disembodied and necessarily existing
in the same nature). Because of these differing accounts of analogy, our argument is unaffected
if the predicate ‘personal’ is univocally or analogically (in Swinburne’s sense) applied to God.
Alston provides six classes or modes of theological predication: straight univocity, modified
univocity, special literal meanings, analogy, metaphor, and symbol.81 What Swinburne labels
‘analogy’ seems better classed under what Alston refers to as ‘modified univocity’ and ‘special
literal meanings.’ When, in The Coherence of Theism, the label ‘person’ specifies God as per-
sonal just as human persons are, but disembodied, Swinburne is employing modified univocity
(since other persons can be disembodied), whereas in speaking in The Christian God of God as
personal just as humans are, but necessarily existing in God’s nature, Swinburne is employing
‘special literal meanings’ (in that the terms employed are used literally or even univocally but
take on unique combinations of properties which apply solely to God).82 Thus, from the perspec-
tive of the classical approach to theological reason, Swinburne rejects analogy altogether.
Further, Swinburne allows for only a severely limited use of even his own version of analogy,
as–in his reckoning–employing analogy too often results in a form of triviality in which ‘virtu-
ally nothing’ is conveyed by theological language.83
Swinburne thus represents a radically different account of theological reason in which analogy
is the exception rather than the rule for predicating attributes of God (i.e. Swinburne seeks to
use literal descriptors to denote God and resorts to his own–deflated–version of analogy only
as a last resort). Barth, Augustine, and Anselm’s shared conviction that creaturely concepts are
unsuited for application to the divine being is thoroughly rejected by Swinburne. He thus un-
surprisingly suggests that gaining a conceptual grasp of divine personhood is a relatively simple
task for one familiar with the human rational subject:
Conceive of some person gradually ceasing to be affected by alcohol or drugs, and their
thinking remaining fully rational, however scientists interfere with her brain. Conceive too
that she ceases to feel any pains, aches, or thrills . . . . She gradually finds herself aware of
what is happening in bodies other than her own and other physical objects at any place in
space . . . . She sees both the insides and the outsides of all things. She remains able to talk
and wave her hands about, but finds herself also able to move, as an instrumentally basic
action, anything else that she chooses . . . . She can do these things without needing to act
78
Swinburne classes the claim that God is an ‘omnipotent spirit’–which defines God as an all-powerful disembodied
person (ibid., 108)–as a univocal rather than analogical predication. Ibid., 91.
79
Swinburne, The Christian God, 156-57.
80
See in particular Ibid., 2-3.
81
William P. Alston, ‘Functionalism and Theological Language’, American Philosophical Quarterly 22, no. 3
(1985): 221.
82
Ibid.
83

through brain events or other physical events in order to do so. However, although she finds
herself gaining these strange powers, she remains otherwise the same–capable of thinking,
reasoning, wanting, hoping, and fearing. The existence of such a person would entail, in-
deed would constitute, the existence of an omnipresent spirit.84
For Swinburne, divine personality is quite straightforwardly presented as an aggrandised version of

a human subject. In sum, for Swinburne, our subjectivity, and likewise, our own temporal, personal
engagements with one another form the determinative context within which real personhood and
relationality must be understood. There is little indication of the apophatic qualifications we noted
in Augustine, or the insistence upon the unsuitability of creaturely concepts for application to the
divine being we identified in Barth.
What counts as real for Swinburne is determined by the horizon of creaturely and tempo-
ral life; the speculative and receptive aspects of theological reason–as they are articulated in
the classical approach we outlined–exert little influence on his argumentative procedure. The
Augustinian insistence that the terms, categories, and conditions of creaturely life are applied to
God in a manner which is always inadequate to the divine being is explicitly rejected, demon-
strating Swinburne’s neglect of theology’s ‘speculative’ dimension. Yet the receptive dimension
is likewise lacking, not because Swinburne has no operative account of revelation, but because
there is little indication that the norms and procedures of theological reason itself would be in-
fluenced by the object into which theology inquires.
Swinburne’s discussion of ‘personality’ exemplifies why his contrasting approach to theolog-
ical reason can be characterised as ‘anthropological,’ in Barth’s sense. He begins by identifying
the necessary conditions for human subjectivity and relationality, and proceeds to assess whether
the God of the Bible (or the God of certain traditional theologies) fits those characteristics. In so
doing, Swinburne affirms a transparency to our own self-perception that Augustine, particularly
in a work like Confessions, consistently undercuts. As Jean-Luc Marion remarks, a ‘terrifying
gravity’ suffuses Confessions, because throughout there occurs an ‘abyssal deconstruction of self
that must be consented to in order to receive the self finally from God.’85 Thus, for Marion,
Confessions is not an auto- but hetero-biography, a discovery of the self for the first time in en-
counter with God.86 Or, as Rowan Williams states:
It is not that there is a problem with the finite subject addressing the infinite God, moving
from the known to the unknown; it is more that, once we have recognised how obscure we
are to ourselves we somehow see that only in relation to the infinity of God can we get any
purchase on the sort of beings we are–moving through time and ‘growing into’ ourselves in
the encounter with an inexhaustible other.87
For Augustine, the categories employed in a doctrine of God, in this case personality, are not as-
sumed to be fixed and perspicuous to us prior to our engagement with God in God’s self revelation.
Rather, not only do we fail to grasp what it would consist in for God to be personal prior to revela-
tion, we are not in a sufficiently stable and self-aware situation so as to fully comprehend what it
might mean for we ourselves to be persons before engaging with God in God’s self-disclosure.
84
Ibid., 114.
85
Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2012), xv.
86
Ibid., 45.
87
Williams, On Augustine, 4.

20 Jared Michelson
Hence Augustine’s famous claim that when I refuse to remain content with my self-perception, and
begin instead to understand myself ‘in your eyes I have become a problem to myself, and that is my
sickness.’88 From an Augustinian perspective, the account of theological reason which Swinburne
employs appears emaciated with respect to the receptive aspect of theological reason. The assump-
tion that we priorly possess a sufficient understanding of various possible divine predicates–such as
personality–represents a failure to hope and faithfully expect that our own self-understanding and
perception is to be reconstituted in coming to know God.89
If one rejects this ‘classical’ approach to theological reason, and allows our human interactions
with one another to define the scope of what qualifies as real relationship, then perhaps one has
little choice but to conclude that any sort of ‘interaction’ or ‘personal relationship’ not cast in
these terms is epiphenomenal.90 However, one might further press Swinburne regarding whether–
given his anthropological perspective–a number of affirmations in addition to divine temporality
and mutability will be required to secure that God engages in real relationship. Once one has
accepted that personal interactions must be defined by the horizon of creaturely life, should one
not insist that a genuine relationship forms and creates the identity of those involved? Surely an
intimate, ‘responsive’ relationship is not one in which both parties enter into relationship with
fully formed personal identities and a fully formed moral character apart from encounter with the
other. Robert W. Jenson, in a way similar to Swinburne, argues that ‘the Bible’s language about
God is drastically personal: he changes his mind and reacts to external events, he makes threats
and repents of them . . . . If we understand this language as fundamentally inappropriate, as “an-
thropomorphic,” we do not know the biblical God. Persons do all these things, precisely to be
personal.’91 Yet Jenson, with rigorous consistency, does not rest content with a limited and con-
strained affirmation of divine mutability, but argues that ‘the life of any person is both one event
and many events. Therefore, to grasp myself whole, I must grasp the mutual dramatic coherence
of the events of my life.’92 Therefore, if God is to be personal, God’s life, character, and moral
attributes–his identity–like ours, must be a product of the dramatic coherence of the personal
history God engages in alongside other personal agents apart from Godself. ‘God is what hap-
pens to Jesus and the world. That an event happens to something does not entail that this some-
thing must be metaphysically or temporally prior to it. God is the event of the world’s
transformation by Jesus’ love, the same love to which the world owes its existence.’93 For Jenson,
God’s engagement with the world, and particularly the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is
the establishment of the divine identity, which remains ‘uncertain’ until God’s personal history
88
Augustine, Confessions, X.xxxiii.50.
89
Cf. Justin Stratis’s recent engagement with Richard of St. Victor. According to Stratis, Richard is keen to empha-
sise the loving relationality of the three persons, while rejecting that divine personality is to be strictly identified with
personality in the creaturely sphere. He concludes that ‘while Richard assumes that “person” must be a meaningful term
when applied to God in the Quicumque, even so, its meaning “is specified and determined by reference to the divine
nature”.’ Justin Stratis, ‘A Person’s a Person, No Matter How Divine? The Question of Univocity and Personhood in
Richard of St Victor’s De Trinitate’, Scottish Journal of Theology 70, no. 4 (November 2017): 385-86.
90
This may be granting too much. For those more taken with Swinburne’s general way of proceeding than I myself
am, see William Mann’s consideration of ‘six different notions of personhood put forth in the philosophical tradition,
each offered as an individually necessary if not sufficient condition of personhood.’ Mann concludes that in every in-
stance, there is no reason why an immutable God could not be personal. William E. Mann, ‘Simplicity and Immutability
in God’, in God, Modality, and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 44-56.
91
Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1: The Triune God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 222.
92
Jenson, Systematic Theology: Volume 1, 221.
93

with us is brought to a close.94 Such an approach contradicts Swinburne’s account of the attri-
butes of divine freedom and necessity,95 yet it is unclear why Swinburne’s adherence to these
other attributes does not threaten the reality of God’s relationality in the same way he fears tra-
ditional accounts of divine immutability do.
While the vision of divine immutability I have presented is at odds with both Jenson’s and
Swinburne’s doctrine of God, Jenson salutarily demonstrates Swinburne’s failure of consistency,
for Swinburne refuses to follow his own account of theological reason and dogmatic methodol-
ogy to its logical conclusion. If God must be mutable because this is how humans relate to one
another, then should not God’s identity and moral character be the product of his interpersonal
interactions in history, since this is how things stand with human persons? Human character and
virtue is shaped and formed by interpersonal interactions with others. It is something attained,
rather than possessed complete and whole prior to one’s interpersonal relations and history. How,
on Swinburne’s methodology, could he fail to apply this aspect of human relationality to God,
thereby agreeing with Jenson that if God is to be really personal, his identity must be ‘uncertain’
prior to his interpersonal relations ad extra? If Swinburne adhered consistently to his dogmatic
methodology, it would require a far more radical reconstruction of the doctrine of God, in which
God is not merely mutable with regards to certain relations or forms of knowledge, but mutable
even in regards to character (i.e. mutable in goodness, graciousness, fidelity, etc.), for again, this
is precisely how things stand for human agents and persons (my moral goodness is evaluated
and constituted only in and through my interpersonal history with others). Swinburne’s attempt
to allow the conditions of human relationality and mutuality to determine the character of divine
mutability, but to preserve untouched the immutability of the divine character and identity, seems
to amount to an inconsistent application of his anthropological approach to theological reason.
One could press further. Swinburne, from both philosophical and biblical motivations, con-
tends that God is a spirit.96 Yet once one has adopted the ‘anthropological’ approach to theolog-
ical reason as Swinburne has, one wonders how divine immateriality can be consistently
maintained. One might ask whether human relations can easily be extracted from our embodi-
ment. Are our bodies so much dross, which we are free to regard as inessential to our personal
relations? Swinburne himself insists otherwise: ‘If God is to create creatures with limited free
choice to make deeply significant differences to themselves, each other, and the physical world
for good or ill, he must make them embodied.’97 Yet ‘God is essentially bodiless . . . . God is thus
(in my terminology) a soul.’98 If one is to follow Swinburne’s anthropological approach, defin-
ing the context for personality within the horizon of human temporal life, why is embodiment not
essential for relationality? Swinburne argues above that human agency–specifically the ability to
94
95
For Swinburne, divine freedom entails that nothing ‘acts from without on him to determine or in any way influence
how he will act; nor does he act at one period of time so as casually to influence how he himself will act at another,’ while
his account of divine necessity requires that God’s existence be ‘the uncaused ultimate substance who is the active cause
of all else, such that nothing else can have caused there to be this divine individual rather than that one.’ Richard
Swinburne, The Christian God, 128, 148. Thus, both predicates rule out that God’s identity can be the product of God’s
engagements with creatures in time.
96
Swinburne, Coherence of Theism, 103.
97
Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 130 (emphasis added).
98
Swinburne, The Christian God, 127. Swinburne explores the notion of divine embodiment, and in fact affirms a
very limited form of divine embodiment, albeit one that is still compatible with the claim that ‘God has no body.’
Swinburne, The Existence of God, 49. Swinburne’s intent is to argue that even if there is a very limited form of ‘embod-
iment’ applicable to God, i.e. merely that fact that ‘he can move and has knowledge of all parts of the material universe,’
this is not a ‘substantial form’ of embodiment like humans possess. Ibid., 49-50. Thus it does not meaningfully impinge
upon my argument above.

22 Jared Michelson
‘make a difference’ with respect to others–requires embodiment, and it seems reasonable to con-
clude that to be persons in relation we need at least this minimal notion of agency. Thus, if for
Swinburne human personality requires embodiment, how can he–consistent with his theological
method–again stop short of allowing the conditions of our own personal engagements to set the
terms for divine personality? If God must be mutable and temporal to be personal because this is
how we are personal, and if our personality requires embodiment, why not conclude that God
must be embodied to be personal? If one is to follow Swinburne’s ‘anthropological’ approach, it
seems one needs do far more than affirm divine mutability to ensure divine relationality, but will,
presumably, be required either to find in God’s creation of the world the cosmic embodiment
through which God comes to achieve God’s identity, or–again with unflinching consistency–to
affirm with Jenson that even apart from the incarnation, the triune God is embodied.99 Of course
these possibilities have been explored in modern theology, and it seems to me that rigorous con-
sistency might lead Swinburne down the well-worn tracts of process theism or some other such
approach. What seems untenable and inconsistent is to allow the mutability of human relations
to define divine relationality and yet fail to correspondingly apply the same procedure to other
human features such as embodiment.
Of course Augustine presents us with an altogether different option over against this ‘anthro-
pological’ approach. It is the utter incomparability of God which confronts us in revelation. In
light of God’s stability and self-sufficiency, it is our own world which can begin to feel epiphe-
nomenal. In light of God’s burning love, it is our own personal relations which can begin to
appear vacuous. In view of the non-reciprocity of God’s works ad extra, we come to question
not divine kindness and generosity, but whether our own most gracious actions ever really de-
serve the name. What commends Augustine’s procedure to me is not mere philosophical bias,
but the Hebrew Bible. In those loci classici for discussions of divine immutability to which
Moberly directs us, scripture continually instructs us to understand God’s personal interactions
as unlike those of human creatures (Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29). Therefore I conclude
with Augustine that when speaking of divine personality or relationality, like all else we predi-
cate of God, we must keep in view the utter distinction between Creator and creation, allowing
the horizon of God’s ineffable reality to be the context within which theological reason unfolds.
Conclusion
A theology which treats first God, and only then creatures insofar as they are referred to God as
their source and end, is continually reminded that the determinative horizon of theological rea-
son is the tracing of God’s acts in creation, providence, reconciliation, and redemption–of the
missions of Son and Spirit–back to the inner life of God. For such an approach, the notion that
an immutable deity must be unresponsive and unrelated to creaturely existence because God
does not relate to creatures in the same way in which they relate to one another, represents an
undermining of the speculative and receptive aspects of theological reason. It fails to allow the
Creator-creature distinction to concretely inform the norms and processes by which the theolo-
gian reasons. Yet, if in all predicative acts we speak of the uncreated in terms of the creaturely,
God should thereby be rendered not less than but more than personal. God’s love is rendered
more, rather than less intense by its immutable fixation upon divine perfection and creaturely
good. God’s ‘personality’ is rendered more, rather than less dynamic, by the pure actuality of the
inner-triune relations which constitute the three-in-one. Yes, the relation between God and
99
Robert W. Jenson, Visible Words: The Interpretation and Practice of Christian Sacraments (Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress Press, 1978), 33-35.

creatures is utterly unlike inter-creature relations, but it is precisely this disparity which allows
it, as Augustine argues, to unify our disparate existences, holding out the hope of eternal rest in
the joyful contemplation of the unchanging perfection of God.100 The hope of Augustine is not
in a God who is personal just as we are but to a greater degree, a God who–like us–grows and
develops, and enters onto the world stage as one actor among others competing for space. Rather,
Augustine trusts in a source of life and truth of a fundamentally different order, who can hold our
lives together and give us genuine rest. It is this summum bonum who, without sacrificing im-
mutability, ‘allied himself to us in our originated [i.e. temporal and mutable] condition, and so
provides us with a bridge to eternity.’101
100
Cf. Augustine, The Trinity, 4.25.
101
Augustine, The Trinity, 4.22. Thanks are due to Oliver Crisp (whose comments led to a reframing of the piece),
Aaron Cotnoir, Jeff Porter, Adam Renberg, and anonymous reviewers from Modern Theology. The argument has been
significantly influenced by their indispensable feedback and critiques.

Contemplating The One Who Remains The Same: Augustine, Swinburne, and Psalm 102 On The Relation Between Divine Immutability and Theological Reason

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Contemplating The One Who Remains The Same: Augustine, Swinburne, and Psalm 102 On The Relation Between Divine Immutability and Theological Reason

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Modern Theology 0:0 Month 2019 DOI:10.1111/moth.

CONTEMPLATING THE ONE WHO

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

approach to theological reason through a theological interpretation1 of Psalm 102, an analysis of

Theological Reason and the Doctrine of God

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

You are the Same

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

misses Aquinas’s point–one which we have unearthed in Augustine as well–misunderstanding

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Objecting to Divine Immutability

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

For Swinburne, divine personality is quite straightforwardly presented as an aggrandised version of

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

© 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

You might also like