The Real Question (1)
“Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” Jonah 3:9 NIV
Who knows? – The king of Nineveh asked one of humanity’s most important questions. Does God change His mind? When the king of Nineveh asked this question, it was possible to imagine an empirical answer. Yes, He does. No, He doesn’t. The answer was determined by looking at the evidence in God’s decisions. But since the time of the Church fathers, this is no longer a legitimate question. The answer is no longer found in an examination of God’s actions. It is found in doctrine. Evidence is irrelevant. Tertullian wrote, “A better god has been discovered who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment.”[1]
“By the fourth century C. E., the theory that God was impassible was a generally recognized principle. For Augustine, also, the Hebrew Bible predicated passions in God ‘whether because of peculiar features in the diction of the original language, or whether mistakenly in order to speak intelligibly to men.’ He would ‘feel it to be a desecration and blasphemy,’ were any one really to suppose God passible.”[2]
What this means is that Christian theology moved in a different direction than Hebrew Scripture. Unfortunately, within a few centuries Jewish thought followed the same philosophical path. The answer to the king’s question became moot. The question itself is mistaken. Consider Anselm’s answer:
But how are You at once merciful and impassible? For if You are impassible You do not have any compassion; and if You have no compassion Your heart is not sorrowful from compassion with the sorrowful, which is what being merciful is. But if You are not merciful whence comes so much consolation for the sorrowful?
How, then, are You merciful and not merciful, O Lord, unless it be that You are merciful in relation to us and not in relation to Yourself? In fact, You are merciful according to our way of looking at things and not according to Your way. For when You look upon us in our misery it is we who feel the effect of Your mercy, but You do not experience the feeling. Therefore You are both merciful because You save the sorrowful and pardon sinners against You; and You are not merciful because You do not experience any feeling of compassion for misery.[3]
There seems to be little difficulty in elaborating the consequences of a doctrine of immutability in terms of God’s existence and nature (although I believe this is radically mistaken). But when immutability forces the believer to acknowledge the additional consequence that God is necessarily untouched by human emotions, that God experiences no counterpart to our suffering and pain, and that He cannot feel any form of compassion upon His creatures (even though we imagine that He does), something has gone wrong. More often than not it is just these sorts of feelings of comfort and acceptance which are integral elements of the believer’s initial experience of God. These assertions are deeply rooted in the Biblical narrative[4] and just as deeply a part of the life of practicing faith. In fact, it is difficult to understand how invocations to come into fellowship with God could have any persuasive effect at all if God is so removed from the human situation that He cannot share in any way in the lot that is ours. This interpretation of religious experience comes under direct attack when rational theology seems to assert that such experience is only relevant to our perspective—that God qua God is not the kind of being who ever could share our human condition. Of course, it makes a mockery of the claim that “Jesus” is God.
Heschel clarifies the point: “This is the mysterious paradox of Hebrew faith: The All-wise and Almighty may change a word that He proclaims. Man has the power to modify His design. . . . God is greater than His decisions.”[5]
Did you understand Heschel’s remark? This is the paradox, not an answer. There is no answer. There is only the paradox of a Sovereign God who does change His mind. Go figure!
Topical Index: change, impassibility, paradox, Tertullian, Anselm, Jonah 3:9
[1] Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, I, 27.
[2] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 83 citing Augustine
[3] Anselm, St. Anselm’s Proslogion: With A Reply On Behalf Of The Fool By Gaunilo And The Author’s Reply To Gaunilo, trans. by M. J. Charlesworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), Chapter VIII, p. 125.
[4] Cf. Exodus 2:23-25.
[5] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 66.
