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The Pagan Dogma of the Absolute Unchangeableness of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Rem B. Edwards
Rem B. Edwards
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy, University of Tennessee
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Extract

In his Edifying Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard published a sermon entitled ‘The Unchangeableness of God’ in which he reiterated the dogma which dominated Catholic, Protestant and even Jewish expressions of classical supernaturalist theology from the first century A.D. until the advent of process theology in the twentieth century. The dogma that as a perfect being, God must be totally unchanging in every conceivable respect was expressed by Kierkegaard in such ways as:

He changes all, Himself unchanged. When everything seems stable (for it is only in appearance that the external world is for a time unchanged, in reality it is always in flux) and in the overturn of all things, He remains equally unchanged; no change touches Him, not even the shadow of a change; in unaltered clearness He, the father of lights, remained eternally unchanged.1

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 305 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 305 note 1 Kierkegaard, Soren, Edifying Discourses (New York, Harper & Row, 1958), p. 256.Google Scholar

page 305 note 2 Ibid. p. 262.

page 306 note 1 I See for example Psalm 90: 1–4, Psalm 93: 2, Isaiah 40: 28.

page 306 note 2 Pegis, Anton C., ed., Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York, Random House, 1945), I, 70.Google Scholar

page 307 note 1 Even here the Bible may not be entirely consistent. One might get a doctrine of the mora educability of God from Genesis 18: 22–33, and Kierkegaard got a doctrine of a divine teleological suspension of moral righteousness from the Abraham story in Genesis 22. I claim only that those Biblical writers who affirm God's unchangeableness do so only with respect to his righteousness or goodness.

page 307 note 2 Pegis, I, 75.

page 307 note 3 Ibid. pp. 71, 72.

page 307 note 4 Aristotle spoke of divine substances as ‘impassive and unalterable’. McKeon, Richard, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, Random House, 1941), p. 881.Google Scholar

page 308 note 1 Deane, Sidney Norton, tr., St Anselm (LaSalle, Open Court Publishing Co., 1954), PP. 13–14.Google Scholar See also St Thomas Aquinas' insistence that God ‘loves without passion’ (Pegis, I, 216), and that ‘Mercy is especially to be attributed to God, provided it be considered in its effect, but not as an affection of passion…To sorrow, therefore, over the misery of others does not belong to God’ (Pegis, I, 226).

page 309 note 1 See Nahm, Milton C., ed., Selections from Early Greek Philosophy (New York, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1964), p. 55.Google Scholar Classical theology did not follow the Pythagoreans in associating ‘good’ with ‘finite’, and ‘bad’ with ‘infinite’, however. But their association of ‘good’ and other attributes above with ‘male’ and ‘evil’ with ‘female’ shows that male chauvinism has some of the same historical roots as does classical theology. As John Cobb, Jr. and David Griffin have pointed out, God in classical theology ‘seems to be the archetype of the dominant, inflexible, unemotional, completely independent [read “strong”] male. Process theology denies the existence of this God.’ Cobb, John B. Jr and Griffin, David, Process Theology (Philadelphia, The Westminster Press, 1976), p. 10. See also pp. 61–2 and 133–5.Google Scholar

page 309 note 2 Jowett, B., tr., The Dialogues of Plato (New York, Random House, 1937), I, 645.Google Scholar

page 309 note 3 McKeon, , p. 885.Google Scholar

page 310 note 1 Jowett, , II, 19.Google Scholar

page 310 note 2 Rylaarsdam, J. C., ‘Exodus, Introduction’, The Interpreter's Bible (New York, Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1952), I, 838.Google Scholar

page 311 note 1 Colson, F. H. and Whitaker, G. H., trans., Philo (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1930), III, 11–101.Google Scholar

page 311 note 2 Ibid. III, 41.

page 311 note 3 Ibid. p. 19.

page 311 note 4 Ibid. pp. 26–27.

page 311 note 5 Ibid. 1, 13.

page 311 note 6 Ibid. p. 179.

page 312 note 1 Roberts, Alexander and Donaldson, James, trans., The Ante-Nicene Fathers (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), III, 246.Google Scholar

page 312 note 2 Ibid. pp. 273, 276, 497.

page 312 note 3 Ibid. p. 316.

page 312 note 4 Ibid. p. 276.

page 312 note 5 Ibid. p. 484.

page 312 note 6 Ibid. p. 324.

page 312 note 7 Kirk, G. S. and Raven, J. E., The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 273.Google Scholar

page 313 note 1 Berdyaev, Nicolas, The Destiny of Man (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1954) P. 28.Google Scholar