You're simply dishonest. I knew you'd say something stupid like this.
There are literally hundreds of things I could quote, even thousands. It's simply idiotic that I'm being forced to quote anything so obviously the case but here goes nothing....
"Aquinas (like Augustine) derived the doctrine of divine immutability (DDI) from the deeper classical-theist doctrine of divine simplicity (ST Ia 9). If God is simple, God has no parts of any sort. Now when a thing changes, it becomes partly different. Were this not so, no change would have occurred. But it cannot become different in
every respect. For if it did, it would become different with respect to being identical with this thing. If first we have something identical with this turnip and then we have something not identical with it, the turnip has not changed, but disappeared and been replaced by something else. So whatever changes must stay partly the same (else there was not change in one selfsame surviving thing). Thus whatever can change is divisible in some way into what would stay and what would go if it changed. If so, a simple God cannot change. Moreover, classical theists- as well as such critics as Scotus and Ockham- universally understood God’s simplicity as ruling out possession of accidents. Of course, what has no accidents cannot change in accidents. Further, a simplicity which rules out accidents cannot itself be an accidental property, and must therefore be essential. Thus such simplicity dictates not just no actual accidental change but immutability. DDI’s connection with divine simplicity and the classical theist theory of God’s perfection which centers on divine simplicity is one of the deepest reasons for DDI’s broad historical appeal;...." - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Immutability means God does not change in any way. Impassibility, a corollary to immutability, means that God does not experience emotional change in any way; he does not suffer." - The Immutability and Impassibility of God - Matthew Barrett (professor of Christian theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, editor-in-chief of Credo, director of the Center for Classical Theology and the author of the award-winning Simply Trinity.)
Immutability is what it means for God to be God. He is eternal, necessary, free from all composition, and devoid of potentiality; he is pure act, pure form, unadulterated essence. “If God were not immutable, he would not be God” (
Reformed Dogmatics vol 2 page 154). As the God who is, he cannot change, for any kind of change would diminish his being. “All that changes ceases to be what it was. But true being belongs to him who does not change” (Herman Bavinck
Reformed Dogmatics vol 2 page 154).
Furthermore, Bavinck argues that we must not soften immutability by locating it in ethical realm only, or by insisting that God is his own cause (causa sui) of actualization (RD 2:156-57). Every change is foreign to God, whether in time, in location, or in essence. God is pure actuality (pursus actua), a perfect and absolute being without any capability (potentia) for nonbeing or being different than he is (RD 2:157).
"Divine
immutability is best summarized by Shedd: “the unchangeableness of [God’s] essence, attributes, purposes, and consciousness” [2]. So this is an absolute immutability. This not only denies that God
does change, but also that God has
any ability to change. Far from being some sort of real, ontological “inability” in God, we must understand that to change is to either suffer defect, if it is a change for the worse, or else to have previously been defective, if it is a change for the better. Consequently, this defect
per se is no power.
This truth also implies that both God’s
incommunicable attributes and
communicable attributes are unchangeable. And this further means that both God’s
natural attributes and what we might terms his
personal attributes are also unchangeable. He must have no “new nature, new thoughts, new will, new purpose, or new place” [3]. We will see a consequence to this that puts divine immutability on a collision course with modern theology. Over the past century and a half, theologians have set about to answer popular concerns over God’s relatability to us. The trouble with this is that, even where it is motivated by serious answers to pain and suffering, God will not be better for us by being less of himself. -
Divine Immutability - Reformed Calssicalist
2. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 284.
3. Charnock. Discourses, I.317.
Notice the almost verbatim argument these men use that Plato recorded Socrates using!
I could literally go on for a week multiplying quote upon quote upon quote from as many varied sources that you care to count. If you deny the truthfully of this definition it will be proof that you are a liar.
No, those are the proof-texts that Calvinists and other Augustinian theologians use to prop up the doctrine of immutability. Those passages teach that God CHARACTER does not change, which IS NOT the doctrine of immutability.
Saying it doesn't make it so!
Saying that particular thing makes you an idiot.
It isn't subjective. Words means things, Jon, and you don't get to just redefine what words mean so that you can keep using them to make yourself feel like you still believe in a particular doctrine. Why would anyone even want to do such a thing, anyway? Where is the pay off? Why cling to a hollowed out version of a doctrine that no one who knows anything at all about what they're talking about would agree with? Why use a term that 99.9% of the others who use it will believe it means something other than what you claim it means? Is it because you desire to lie to them? That doesn't make sense. Are you lying to yourself? Why would you do that?
In short, if you actually do believe that the only aspect of God that cannot change is His moral character then you are in agreement with my side of this debate. I encourage you to simply drop the pretense and acknowledge that what virtually the entire rest of Christianity means by the doctrine of immutability is a gross overstatement of the biblical truth.
