Divine Immutability

Some elements of the "classical" Christian concept of God have come under fire within contemporary Evangelicalism. I personally have not seen many critiques which have actually understood the material being critiqued; this is especially common with divine immutability, simplicity, and eternity (not to mention eternal generation and procession). For now, I will deal with immutability, and try to find a mode of expression which accords with contemporary intuitions better.

I do not claim that this starting account is quite the same as what the medievals were saying; it is a first attempt, and I plan on spiraling down to a more precise and historically continuous notion in time. But the key insight is that change is a relative property: something which has changed, has changed from something. Change is never a brute thing, but always within a context.

So, how do we measure change if it is relative? The same way that we do all other relative properties: by setting a fixed point from which everything else is compared. We use a coordinate system which has an origin (actually, a more accurate analogy would be the reality of space and time despite their relativity, or the truth of mathematics despite the fact that our attempts at it must always start from certain formal axioms which cannot capture its completeness; but for right now, it's just an analogy for the purpose of guiding a gestalt shift, so the details will get tidied up later).

By saying that God is immutable, we are saying that God is this fixed point. All change is measured relative to God, who is the first cause of all (and so the starting point of change), the ultimate end of all (and so the goal of change), the exemplar cause of all (and so setting the boundaries on change), and the most perfect being (and so setting the standard for completeness of being). On this view, by definition God cannot change. It just doesn't make any sense; everything is measured by God. If per impossibile God were to change, rather what would happen would be that everything else would change relative to God.

What this does not imply is that God cannot act. The problem is, we think of action as cause, then effect (such as with Hume's critique, or Kant's category of causation in his Critique of Pure Reason). Causation is, however, at the same time as its effect; that's what it is to cause something. It must be one event. But if this is the case, then immutability cannot be an issue for causation, as everything could be caused in a single "moment." To put it another way, if two agent perform the same act with the same result, and one agent does it faster than the other, then we say that the faster agent is more proficient. The limit case of this is a being who can do all things at once, without taking any time to perform an action, as omnicompetent. There would be no two "moments" to form a relation, and thus to talk about change in this being.

Next, I'll talk about divine eternity, and what could possibly be meant by a "moment" or an eternal present.