C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 68 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session takes the hardest passages head on: God sorry that he made man, God regretting Saul’s kingship, God changing his mind when Moses intercedes, God adding fifteen years to Hezekiah’s life. Can the unchangeable God do any of that? The teachers refuse both easy answers, that the texts are mere figures of speech, and that God really learns and changes, and build a third. Listen for the pairing of ontological immutability with relational mutability; it is the key the rest of the course will use.
The session opens by gathering the names the philosophers have given the Creator: the uncaused cause, the uncreated creator, the unmoved mover who began all motion, Anselm’s greatest conceivable being, the necessary being. The course’s own picture, God as that which is above the arch, simply combines them all. The review matters because of where the class is about to travel: in a land of a billion people and countless gods, every deity worshiped exists below the arch, and a god below the arch, however mighty, is by the textbook definition no God at all, only a stronger being, as a father seems all-powerful to his three-year-old. Without creation ex nihilo there is no God, which is why these necessary attributes are worth the labor: they are the common ground on which every worldview conversation can begin.
The third necessary attribute is immutability: God is not subject or susceptible to change, unchangeable in his being and in the attributes of his character. Like the others, it cannot be partially communicated; a being either can change or cannot, with no middle ground, just as one is either timeless or in time. God cannot decide to emphasize a little more grace this millennium and a little more righteousness the next. And the doctrine follows necessarily from what has come before: change requires a before and an after, a succession of moments, and the One above the arch has no before and after. A simple, eternal being must be immutable; the necessary attributes stand or fall together.
The same difficulty that shadowed simplicity returns: how does the unchangeable One enter a changing world? Philippians 2 says Christ emptied himself, the passage the church has long discussed under the Greek word kenosis, and the question of what he emptied himself of can only be answered after the necessary attributes are settled. Empty Christ of even one necessary attribute and they all fall, and he is no longer God. The Reformers’ sentence from last session, the finite cannot contain the infinite, points the way the course will take when it reaches Christology: whatever the emptying means, it cannot mean the surrender of godness.
First Samuel 15 declares that the Glory of Israel will not lie or change his mind, for he is not a man that he should change his mind. Hebrews 13 confesses that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever, a verse of enormous comfort and worth memorizing. The teachers add a striking observation: even if Scripture had never said it, it would still be true, because once Yahweh is confessed as the One above the arch, unchangeableness belongs to him by definition. Scripture sometimes states what is already philosophically necessary, and sometimes, as with the existence of God, largely assumes it.
Then the objections, taken seriously and read aloud. Genesis 6: the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart. First Samuel 15, the very chapter that denies God changes his mind, verse 11: I regret that I have made Saul king. Exodus 32: God, burning with anger at the golden calf, tells Moses to stand aside so he may destroy the people and start over, Moses intercedes, pleading God’s own promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, and the text says the Lord changed his mind about the harm he had said he would do. Isaiah 38: Hezekiah, told by the prophet to set his house in order and die, weeps and prays, and God adds fifteen years to his life. Sorrow ordinarily implies a changed conclusion; regret ordinarily means if I had it to do over, I would not. What is to be done with these texts?
Exegetically, the teachers grant, the texts alone could be read either way: a God genuinely surprised, persuaded, and changed, or a God who knows the outcome, whose anger is real, and who is working his unchanging plan out with Moses’ intercession included in it. What decides between them is everything the course has established: a God who is talked out of his intention by a better argument is a God only below the arch, which is no God. Scripture elsewhere agrees, Ephesians 1 says God works all things after the counsel of his will, and Daniel 4 that he does according to his will among the host of heaven, so the philosophy and the wider text together narrow the two readings to one. God knew what Moses would pray; the anger was real; the intention was real; and the whole exchange unfolded inside a plan that never changed.
The session’s key formulation: above the arch, God is ontologically immutable; below the arch, he is relationally mutable. God in his being is static, unchanging; God in his dealings is dynamic, responding differently as situations differ. Grudem’s way of putting it, which the teachers prefer to the older habit of waving such texts away as mere figures of speech: these passages are true expressions of God’s present attitude or intention with respect to the situation as it exists at the moment, and if the situation changes, the expression of his intention changes with it. The change is in the relation, never in the being. When Israel repents, the God who never changed now stands differently related to a people who have.
The classical tradition includes a doctrine the course’s notes omit but the teachers pause to present honestly: impassibility, that God is without passions, since to be saddened or gladdened seems to require experience, before and after, time. On that older view, every text of divine sorrow or joy is purely anthropomorphic, language shaped to our size, like the hand of God on a being who has no parts. The teachers respectfully take a step away: the language is partially anthropomorphic, but more real than that. God truly experiences, eternally, in the eternal now, and that experience plays out in time as real sorrow, real anger, real joy. The illustration is a wedding: knowing that troubles will surely come does not make the joy of the wedding day less real, nor the grief less real when the troubles arrive. Just so, God’s foreknowledge of sin does not make his anger at sin theatrical. He is a dynamic God below the arch precisely because he is the unchanging God above it.
Immutability also settles an ancient temptation. Reading divine wrath in the Old Testament, blood staining the robes of the warrior in Isaiah 63, and divine love in the New, God so loving the world, some in the early church went the heretical way and concluded these could not be the same God. The course answers on two fronts: the Old Testament rightly read presents a patiently loving God, giving nations chance after chance to repent, and immutability guarantees that the Father is no less loving than the Son and the Son no less just than the Father. The unchanging God is totally loving and totally just across both Testaments, and the persons of the Trinity never divide his character between them.
The next attribute needs careful wording. Omnipresence does not mean God’s being is spread out through space, a little in the table, a little in the chair, thinly everywhere, which is closer to pantheism than to Christian doctrine, nor that God is an infinitely extended space, a very large being, or a concentration hovering over one galaxy. Grudem warns against every spatial picture, and the astronaut who circled the moon and reported that he did not see God saw exactly what the doctrine predicts, while remaining every moment in God’s immediate presence. Stated positively and doubly: in his transcendent omnipresence, everything is in God’s immediate presence, nowhere is far from him; and in his immanent presence below the arch, God is present wherever he chooses to be, and in special ways, his glory filling the tabernacle and the temple, and by sobering implication, his presence in some sense withdrawn where he judges. Not one inch of travel brings a creature closer to the God who is not spatial; and no place a person should not be is any less in his presence.
The second commandment in Exodus 20 forbids making any likeness of God, and the golden calf shows why the command exists apart from the first: Aaron did not announce a new god but pointed at the calf and named it the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, confining the unconfinable to a shape. Even the ark of the covenant teaches the lesson: a wooden box with a golden lid, holding the tablets, a jar of manna, and Aaron’s rod, a photo album of what God has done, never a likeness of what he looks like. Solomon confesses at the temple’s dedication that heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain God, much less a house. And Psalm 139 asks where a man could flee from God’s presence: heaven, Sheol, the wings of the dawn, the remotest sea, and finds God already there, a text that speaks both of the presence none escape and of the God who pursues his own.
The final attribute of the session is aseity, from the Latin for from oneself: God is from himself, in no way a contingent being. Creatures are contingent through and through, dependent on air, food, causes, circumstances; God is the only absolutely independent being, the final and primary cause of all things, preceded by no cause, self-existent, and in need of nothing, not creation, not worship, not us. He did not create out of an itch or an unmet need; he was completely self-fulfilled without the universe. Scripture speaks it plainly: in Psalm 50 God owns every beast of the forest and the cattle on a thousand hills, and if he were hungry he would not tell us, for the world is his; in Acts 17 Paul tells the Athenians, keepers of an altar to an unknown god, that the Lord of heaven and earth does not dwell in handmade temples nor is served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives all people life and breath and everything; and in Micah 6 the people ask what mountain of sacrifices could appease God, and the prophet answers that he has shown what he requires: to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with him. The pagan gods live in perpetual need of appeasement because everything below the arch is contingent; the true God wants much from his people and needs nothing.
The session closes where the incommunicable attributes keep converging: the name from the burning bush in Exodus 3, I AM WHO I AM, the tetragrammaton, rendered by the ancient Greek translators as the being one, the existing one. One name carries simplicity, eternality, immutability, omnipresence, and aseity at once: not I am becoming, not I am contingent, but I AM, the one who necessarily exists. These things, the teachers note, are to a large degree self-evident to careful philosophical thought, which is why they make common ground with every worldview; what comes next week cannot be reasoned to from below. The course turns to the communicable attributes, the ones expressed below the arch, righteousness, love, and their companions, where God is known not merely as the necessary being but personally.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why do the teachers say that a god below the arch, however powerful, is no God at all?
2. Why can immutability not be partially communicated to creatures?
3. Why does change require time?
4. Why can the kenosis of Philippians 2 not mean Christ surrendered a necessary attribute?
5. What striking observation do the teachers make about Hebrews 13:8?
6. What makes 1 Samuel 15 especially interesting for this doctrine?
7. In Exodus 32, what does the text say happened after Moses interceded?
8. How does the course decide between the two exegetically possible readings of these passages?
9. What is the session’s key formulation about God and change?
10. How does Grudem describe the passages where God relents?
11. Where do the teachers land on the classical doctrine of impassibility?
12. What does the wedding illustration explain?
13. How does immutability answer those who split the wrathful Old Testament God from the loving New Testament God?
14. Which statement about omnipresence do the teachers correct?
15. Why does the golden calf episode illuminate the second commandment?
16. What is aseity?
17. How do Psalm 50 and Acts 17 express God’s aseity?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 5 is complete.
The pairing of ontological immutability with relational mutability means God’s anger at sin and his response to repentance are both fully real, inside a plan that never changes. How does that reframe the way you pray, especially prayers of intercession like Moses’ prayer in Exodus 32?
The teachers step carefully away from strict impassibility: God truly experiences sorrow, anger, and joy. Which biblical scene of God’s emotion means the most to you, and what changes if you take it as fully real rather than a mere figure of speech?
Aseity says God needs nothing, not creation, not worship, not you, and yet he wants much from his people. How does serving a needless God free you from serving him anxiously, as the nations appeased their gods?
The confession of the God who does not change, from 1 Samuel 15: the Glory of Israel will not lie or change his mind, for he is not a man, that he should change his mind.
The lecture’s own directions for the week: meet with others over the group discussion questions, since theology is done in community and not alone, and keep working the hard passages of this session, Genesis 6, Exodus 32, and Isaiah 38, with the above-the-arch and below-the-arch distinction in hand until it becomes your own. The course turns next to the communicable attributes of God: the righteousness, love, and goodness in which he is known personally.