Recently, I was reminded of some sound admonitions I had read many years ago from J. Oliver Buswell in his 1962-1963 work entitled A Systematic Theology of the Christian Religion. I was reminded of how prescient he was in anticipating some theological issues we are facing now, over sixty years later, and I thought it would be profitable to share some of his thoughts with the blog’s readers. First, consider these words from his treatment of the doctrine of divine immutability:
The notion that God’s immutability is a complete inactivity, a timeless mental and spiritual immobility, is found in the writings of some of our best theologians, but is nowhere supported by the Scriptures.
Probably the clearest expression of the error of static immutability is found in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, who taught that in God there is no “potentiality” but all is actuality. Thomas’ doctrine that God has no potentiality, but is fully actualized, is extremely baffling unless it is seen as a corollary of his two doctrines of degrees of reality and timeless eternity. If some things are more real than others and if God is the most real, and if God is timeless, there is in Him no potentiality; He cannot do in the future anything He has not already done, for all His acts are one single timeless act.
The terms “potentiality” and “actuality” are discussed at great length in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Potentiality is dunamis in Greek, and actuality is energeia. To a student of the New Testament the statement that there is no dunamis in God, the logical result of Thomas’ Aristotelian assumptions, would seem to be a complete reductio ad absurdum. Yet we have “orthodox” contemporaries who stand by Thomas against Calvin and the Scriptures, and allege that in God there is no potentiality.
Thomas’ view on this subject is found almost everywhere in his writings. A few sample statements will suffice. “… the first being must of necessity be in act, and in no way in potentiality. For although in any single thing that passes from potentiality to actuality, the potentiality is prior in time to the actuality, nevertheless, absolutely speaking, actuality is prior to potentiality; for whatever is in potentiality is reduced to actuality only by some being in actuality. Now it has been already proved that God is the First Being. It is therefore impossible that in God there should be any potentiality….” (ST I q 3 a 1). “God is pure act without any potentiality” (Ibid. a 2). “… since in God there is no potentiality … it follows that in Him essence does not differ from being. Therefore, His essence is His being ….”
The implications of the doctrine that God is “pure act,” “fully realized,” that in Him there is “no potentiality (dunamis)” are devastating. Omnipotence, creation with a before and after, predictive prophecy of future acts of God, incarnation in time (chronos and kairos), the atoning act once for all (eph hapax), the interval in the grave, the resurrection, the future resurrection of the dead, future judgment, all these chronological acts of God are reduced to illusions or paradoxes. (Vol. 1, pp. 52–53)
Buswell also anticipates an issue that has become prominent in recent years, especially among a number of Reformed Baptists and Presbyterians who have followed the thinking of Aquinas and have therefore pressed a particular view of the impassibility of God that many of us find problematic. This view denies any passions or emotions in God and ascribes any biblical assertions of emotions in God to mere anthropopathism. Buswell is quite forceful in his opposition to such a position, and, once again, his treatment is worthy of our consideration. On this issue he relies, in part, on the work of Charles Hodge:
Charles Hodge calls attention to the doctrine which would take all feeling out of the word “love” as an attribute of God. He says, “The Schoolmen and often the philosophical theologians tell us that there is no feeling in God. This, they say, would imply passivity or susceptibility of impression from without, which, it is assumed, is incompatible with the nature of God.… love, therefore, [such philosophers define] as that attribute of God which secures the development of the rational universe.…” But Hodge argues that such a view is “in real contradiction to the representations of God in the Old Testament and … the New Testament.” Hodge concludes, “Here again we have to choose between a mere philosophical speculation and the clear testimony of the Bible, and of our own moral and religious nature. Love, of necessity, involves feeling, and if there be no feeling in God, there can be no love.”
If the word for love, agape, has been reduced by some to innocuous frigidity, frozen nothingness, what will they do with the word “compassionate feelings, oiktirmoi”? “I intreat you therefore by the compassionate feelings, oiktirmoi, of God that ye present …” (Rom. 12:1). “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassionate feelings, ton oiktirmon, and the Father of all consolation, who hath consoled us upon every occasion of trouble so that we should be able to console those in every trouble through the consolation with which we are consoled ourselves by God” (2 Cor. 1:3, 4). Here God’s compassionate feelings are alleged as the grounds of His comforting us, as our compassionate feelings are to be the grounds of our comforting others in trouble. To this end we are exhorted, “As elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with the affections of compassionate feeling, splagchna oiktirmou …” (Col. 3:12).
As if to make doubly sure that we understand God’s attitude toward us as one of literal and not merely symbolical compassion and sympathy, the Scripture distinguishes between God’s act of mercy, implied in the verb eleeo, and God’s compassionate feelings, implied in the verb oikterio. “I will show acts of mercy toward him toward whom I show acts of mercy, and I will have compassionate feelings toward him toward whom I have compassionate feelings” (Rom. 9:15). The distinction between the two Greek verbs of this text is similar to that between the Hebrew word chanan and racham in Exodus 33:19, from which Romans 9:15 quotes.
In the statement in the Westminster Confession that God is “a most pure spirit … without body, parts, or passions,” it seems clear that the Westminster fathers understood the word “passions” as bodily passions, as the word “parts” refers to bodily parts. The words refer to Him as an incorporeal spirit. A. A. Hodge says, “… we deny that the properties of matter, such as bodily parts and passions, belong to him.” Certainly the Confession does not deny that God the Son, in the incarnation, assumed bodily attributes without resigning His divine attributes, nor does it deny that God has feelings toward His creatures.
Unless we wish to reduce the love of God to the frozen wastes of pure speculative abstraction, we should shake off the static ideology which has come into Christian theology from non-Biblical sources, and insist upon preaching the living God of intimate actual relationships with His people. God’s immutability is the absolutely perfect consistency of His character in His actual relationships, throughout history, with His finite creation. Does ever a sinner repent, there is always joy in the presence of the angels (Luke 15:7, 10). Does ever a child of God, “sealed” by the Spirit, fall into sin, the Holy Spirit is “grieved” (Eph. 4:30). (Vol. 1, pp. 55–57).
I, for one, am grateful for this timely warning from a theologian whom I believe to be underappreciated today. I hope the blog’s readers will find his words as appropriate for our day as I do.
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