The term big is confining. The term God to you is defined, but rather more out of philosophy than scripture. It has a very hegelian feel, which i don’t find is very heretical, but a hegelian isn’t about being rational or care if challenged on rational lines. Hegelian is about creating something different. I thought that your 2000 is much closer to a biblical model. “God is” is not confining. God is love (1 john 4:8), but love is not God. God has nothing that He needs from us.. God does not love everyone. How can He love what has the wrath of God already on (John 3: 36)?. Everything is about His glory (1 cor 10:23). God loves some and hates others and Does to us what He sees is best to have His glory magnified (Roman 9). God doesn’t need us one bit, except to have His glory be given to Him by something other than Himself (Rev 14:7)

We are not co-creator with God. God is creator and Him only (Gen 1:1) And the future is with a new heaven and a new earth that Jesus Christ reigns over all of His followers and those who rejected Christ will be in eternal torment. Forever. (Rev 20,21)

I don’t understand how our conversation wasn’t relevant.

I’ve posted here for awhile as Πωμω Βρυισινγς (pomo bruisings, teehee). I like my handle, since it relates my friendly neighborhood e-thug disposition a bit more than a dull set of initials, so I’d like to keep it if possible. That is a valid email address that I’ve listed.

You are certainly welcome here – and I do welcome and encourage dialogue.

Please read the commenting policy and I’d ask that you adhere to the policy.

Adam – sorry if I crossed the line – I enjoy your blog and I wouldn’t want to do anything that would make me unwelcome here.

This conception moreover is pre-Christian. You can find it in plato’s Parmenides or perhaps Sophist, and if not there then certainly in the neo-platonists, pagan and Christian.

I often have to resist the temptation to confuse theology and logic. I tend to want to use logic to fill in the gaps in order to come up with a water-tight description/explanation of God or God’s nature. But the harder I try to define God, the more that I risk filling in the gaps and the mysteries with purely human notions that are likely neither accurate nor appropriate. Does God demonstrate elements that would suggest immutability? Yes. Does God demonstrate elements that would suggest mutability? Yes. Is there the possibility that we cannot come up with a logical, consistent explanation that reconciles these two notions into a definitive statement about God’s mutability or immutability? Yes.

So while the question of God’s immutability might be interesting to discuss, and while it might be relevant to a larger, more philosophical conversation about divinity in general, when it comes to my “everyday beliefs” about God and that which I know about God from the Bible, from theology, and from my own experiences, I have to say that the larger question of mutability rarely enters my mind.

But in some earlier comment, the question was brought up about why we bother praying if God can’t/won’t/doesn’t change. I firmly believe that God hears prayers and acts in the world. I believe that God responds to the ever-changing needs of the world, and that God’s ability to change and move are central to God’s ability to act.

So…is it a useful distinction to talk about God “being changed” as opposed to “choosing to change?” Or is this just further splitting hairs?

Yes, process theology and the Greek notion of the Good beyond being are incompatible, and well if you need me, I’ll be in Athens.

Why don’t I help Amos and Liz a bit with the format:

“it would seem that a topic on pomomusings should be mutable. . .

Scripture is silent. . .

But I say, ‘the grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of Adam will endure for a good ten or fifteen minutes until a genuinely theological topic starts to steal the thunder from his seminary term paper.’”

I think our conversation bears directly on what you have written. Why not weigh in?

Maybe it would make a great post, but i really would love to hear your thoughts on contradictory passages in scripture.

Much thanks!

EP

Thanks so much for clarifying your thoughts. Much appreciated!

EP

I reserve the moral right to call ideas ridiculous. The idea that the world is flat is ridiculous. With all due respect, if you’re going to get into an intellectual conversation, you ought to be prepared for your ideas to be challenged. I said one of the ideas you mentioned was ridiculous (and I have my reasons for saying that). I never said YOU were ridiculous. You are not the same as your ideas.

I have thought about it for a while and can only come to the conclusion that you think the idea of God being mutable is ridiculous because you are boxed in by your beliefs and cannot really consider that you may be wrong about something you believe. Because when you think about it, if you had never believed one way or the other, immutability is probably more strange than mutability. One thing that I have learned in the last couple of years is to hold my beliefs loosely and I think it has created a space in my life that gives God a lot more room to work in my life and teach me.

Now I think this is actually more offensive than calling any particular idea ridiculous. You assume that I have not been open-minded about the idea of divine immutability because, of course, only a simpleton could still believe such an antiquated notion. I suppose it couldn’t be the case that I have spent several years contemplating this problem, and that I even spent a good deal of my life thinking that God must be mutable, only to come to the tentative conclusion now, at this point, that God must, in fact, be immutable. But that IS the case. I am an open-minded person – I just haven’t been convinced on the basis of reason and Scripture that we ought to confess that God’s nature is mutable. I don’t think God’s being a “a someone” is ridiculous because I’m too narrow-minded to think otherwise. I don’t think it makes sense to worship “a someone.” At its worse, this ends up functioning too much like idolatry (Feuerbach).

And to your last line, that you hold your beliefs loosely and think such holding has created a space for God to teach you. Same here. And I think God has taught me, though doubting and thinking, that divine nature qua divine nature doesn’t change.

At the same time, immutability also suggests a static nature, a God who is like rock– not in rock’s ever-reliability sense, but in the sense that it never does anything. It just sits there. Forever. (Leave aside geological timescales in the analogy.) A God like this can’t “become man,” because immutable things can’t “become”.

So I don’t think we can either assume an understanding of God’s immutability that flows from a particular abstract philosophical notion of what God “must be like”, or one that flows from our usual understanding of things in the world and how they work and are worked upon. Neither quite jives with the scriptural witness, at least. God at least _as seen in the world_ does change. He was a guy who was born a baby, grew up, and went through the process of death. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that God’s _nature_, or God’s being in the eternal sense outside of the universe, changes. I don’t entirely know how to reconcile the two, but I think we have to understand that both qualities are there, change and unchange, at least from the perspective within the created universe.