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Question

Good morning, Father Angelo,

I am sending you this email to ask you a question:  what does it mean and what does the immutability of God entail?  I thank you in advance for your reply!

Martin

Answer

Dear Martin,

  1. It is in God’s nature as an absolutely perfect and eternal being to not mutate. 

If He could mutate, He would go from the power to the action and He would move to find something He still does not possess.  But then, He wouldn’t be God anymore.  

  1. Aristotele, the ancient pagan philosopher, reached the understanding that God is pure act, that He is a motionless motor.  He moves, without going through the potency to the act, without becoming.   
  2. The Sacred Scripture confirms these philosophical conclusions and says that “with him there is no such thing as alteration, no shadow caused by change.” (James ch.1,17).  Already in the Old Testament we read that: “God is not a human being who speaks falsely, nor a mortal, who feels regret” (Nm 23, 19) e anche: “For I, the Lord, do not change” (Mal 3,6).
  3. In the Summa Theologica, St Thomas writes: “But since God is infinite, comprehending in Himself all the plenitude of perfection of all being.  He cannot acquire anything new, nor extend Himself to anything whereto He was not extended previously. Hence movement in no way belongs to Him.  So, some of the ancients, constrained, as it were, by the truth, decided that the first principle was immovable” (I, 9,1).
  4. In The Confessions, Saint Augustine attests that “Will you say that these things are false which Truth tells me, with a loud voice in my inner ear, about the very eternity of the Creator:  that His essence is changed in no respect by time and that His will is not distinct from His essence?  Thus, He doth not will one thing now and another thing later, but He willeth once and for all everything that He willeth–not again and again; and not now this and now that.  Nor does He will afterward what He did not will before, nor does He cease to will what He had willed before.  Such a will would be mutable and no mutable thing is eternal.  But our God is eternal” (XII, 15).
  5. In the Sacred Scripture are found expressions that would suggest some mutability about God, such as: “God regretted”…..But, all these expressions are none other then anthropomorphic ways, and that is, they express in a human manner that the realities subject to God changed by His eternal and divine will.   
  6. God’s immutability might suggest a rigidity of the divine being, as if God were inert, inactive and without life.  Of course, for us whose lives are defined by time and see how everything changes, it could give this impression.  But, the Sacred Scripture says that “ For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion, and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity” (Wisdom 7, 24).  Although immutable, God is fullness of life and activity.  By His will, everything lives and it is in motion.

          For God’s immutable and blessed plans to be fully realized upon you, I remember 

          you in my prayers and I bless you.

          Father Angelo