Chapter 03, God the Incarnate Son, The Incarnation, "Change" in God

“Change” in God

            The very title of this section may be offensive to some who hold to a particular understanding of divine immutability.  Often, the argument comes from Greek philosophers who argue something along these lines:  God is perfect.  Because of God’s perfection, God cannot change in any way, shape or form, because every change (by their definition) must be a becoming better or a becoming worse or a growing form less to more mature.  If God changes, he is either becoming better (in which case, he was not perfect before), or he is becoming worse (in which case, he is not perfect now).  This has been assumed to be the Judeo-Christian understanding of God’s “unchangingness” and there are some passages in the Old Testament that can be read in such a way as to support this view.  Things such as (Malachi 3:6) “I, the Lord, do not change; therefore you, O sons of Jacob, are not consumed.”  However, even this verse implies that the unchanging being of God should be thought out in terms of faithfulness and trustworthiness rather than in static terms.

            The strongest argument against such a static conception of God’s immutability lies in two actions of God that are each unique in their own way.  The first of these is the creation of the universe out of nothing.  Unlike any idea that the universe is co-eternal with God or that there is a kind of logical necessity to creation (it had to be what it is and could not have been otherwise), Christian faith declares that God created the universe ex nihilo (out of nothing).  If this is the case, there once was “a time” (though, strictly speaking, time did not exist until God created the universe) when God was not yet Creator and now, God is Creator.  God, of course, was always able to create, but the free decision to become Creator is a change in God that overthrows the Greek understanding of immutability yet remains faithful to the Jewish.

            Unless there was any doubt that creation implied a kind of “becoming” for God, Christian faith bolsters and amplifies this claim with what is arguably the single most significant action ever taken by God.  The Incarnation.  We read in the New Testament that God became human “when the fullness of time came” (Galatians 4:4).  Before the time when the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and she conceived and gave birth to Jesus, the second Person of the Trinity was not intimately joined to human nature.  Since that time, he has been.  There is a sense that there is “change” in God inasmuch as the one who once was not a partaker in human nature now is.  Again, this is eminently faithful to the Jewish concept of “unchanging,” but it flies in the face of the Greek, static view.  Once again, it must be stressed that this is not a conclusion reached through abstract reasoning, but is based on the concrete act of God in Christ where we see that God has done a new thing, even for God and it is only in light of that fact that we dare to say that there is change in God in any sense.