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The Utterly Absolute and the Totally Related: Change in God
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
According to Malachi 3, v. 6 God declares that ‘I the Lord do not change.’ Citing this text and presenting arguments which conclude that God is ‘the unchanging first cause of change,’ Aquinas maintains that God, as the ‘first existent’ which is ‘sheerly actual and unalloyed with potentiality’, evidently ‘cannot change in any way.’ This doctrine, whether assumed as axiomatic or defended by reasoning, has been widely accepted throughout the history of Western theism. Reflection, though, suggests that it is also a doctrine which, while supposedly expressing the faithful’s belief, in effect creates a considerable tension between the faith which in practice governs the lives of many such people and the understanding which in theory identifies its basic character. Although, for example, the faithful may consider God to become compassionately aware of their needs as they arise, may look to God for intervening grace, and may pray for divine action to produce changes in their situation, rational reflection on theism apparently requires that God be held to be immutably and timelessly the same in every respect. Consequently some have considered that there is a fundamental discrepancy between the God in whom believers actually put their trust and the deity described in reputedly ‘correct’ theological understanding.
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- Copyright © 1987 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 3, 1.
2 ibid., la, 9, 1.
3 One such argument maintains that change in what is perfect can only be towards relative degrees of imperfection and hence is inappropriately ascribed to the divine; cf. Hartshorne, Charles, Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984, p. 2Google Scholar.
4 cf. Hartshorne, Charles, Man's Vision of God and the Logic of Theism, Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1964, pp. 3ffGoogle Scholar; A Natural Theology for Our Time, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1967, pp. Iff.
5 For bibliographical details of Hartshorne's publications, cf. Process Studies, 6/1, Spring 1976 pp. 73—93 and 11/2, Summer 1981, pp. 108—112. Age (he was born in 1897) has not stopped him writing and he has continued to produce further material since then, including three books, Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes; Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: an Evaluation of Western Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983Google Scholar; and Creativity in American Philosophy, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984Google Scholar.
6 Hartshorne's Man's Vision of God, p. vii.
7 cf. Hartshorne, Charles, Reality as Social Process, Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press and Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1953, p. 110Google Scholar; Man's Vision of God, pp. 6ff.
8 cf. Hartshorne, Charles, Whitehead's Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935—1970, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1972, p. 162Google Scholar.
9 cf. Hartshorne, Charles, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, London: SCM Press, 1970, p. 44Google Scholar.
10 Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God, p. 256.
11 Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, pp. 44, 46.
12 Hartshorne, Whitehead's Philosophy, p. 76.
13 cf. ibid., pp. 84ff.
14 Hartshorne, Charles, The Logic of Perfection and Other Essays in Neoclassical Metaphysics, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1962, pp. 42fGoogle Scholar.
15 As for the argument that temporal successiveness is not appropriately to be applied to the divine reality, David Hume makes what is still a valid point, namely, that it is nonsense to speak of the Deity as having an ‘intelligent nature’ while having a ‘mind, whose acts and sentiments and ideas are not distinct and successive.’ A mind which is ‘totally immutable’ (which it would be if it were timeless) is a mind that has ‘no thought, no will, no sentiment … or in a word, is no mind at all'—Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, Part IV.
16 Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 43. 254
17 Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, edited by Griffin, D R and Sherburne, D W, New York: Free Press, 1978, p. 343Google Scholar.
18 Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, p. 24; cf. pp. 19ff.
19 Charles Hartshorne, , Aquinas to Whitehead: Seven Centuries of Metaphysics of Religion, Milwaukee: Marquette University Publications, 1976, pp. 15fGoogle Scholar.
20 cf. Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time, p. 4.
21 cf. Charles Hartshorne, Anselm ‘s Discovery: A Re‐Examination of the Ontological Proof for God's Existence, La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, pp. 26ff; Man's Vision of God, pp. 6ff; Logic of Perfection, p. 35.
22 Hartshorne, Anselm's Discovery, p. 26.
23 Although Hartshorne vigorously defends the ontological argument in the form of a modal argument about the necessity of the divine existence, I argue that it does not show that God exists but that the mode of the divine existence, if God exists, is that of necessary existence—cf. ‘Some Comments on Hartshorne's Presentation of the Ontological Argument’ in Religious Studies, October 1968, and ‘An Introductory Survey of Charles Hartshorne's Work on Ontological Argument’ in Analecta Anselmiana, Band 1, 1969. Nor, furthermore, is it the case that the greatest being in fact must be the proper object of worship and so necessarily God: the recognition, though, that the greatest actual being is not a proper definition of God is an advance in Anselm's thought from the Monologion to the Proslogion.
24 Hartshorne, Anselm's Discovery, p. 44.
25 Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 38.
26 Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time, p. 3; cf. p. 17.
27 Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 40.
28 Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time, p. 5.
29 ibid., pp. 12ff; cf. p. 4; Man's Vision of God, p. 3.
30 cf. Hartshorne, Logic of Perfection, p. 40—but, as will be noted later, Hartshorne is concerned to make clear what is properly meant by ‘perfection’ in relation to the divine.
31 Hartshorne, Charles and Reese, William L, Philosophers Speak of God, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 16Google Scholar.
32 ibid., p. 22.
33 cf. Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God, p. 346.
34 Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time, pp. 136f.
35 Hartshorne, Anselm's Discovery, p. 131.
36 cf. ibid., pp. xf, 38f.
37 cf. Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy, p. 249.
38 cf. Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God, pp. 25Iff.
39 ibid., p. 265.
40 cf. Hartshorne, A Natural Theology for Our Time, p. 105; cf. Aquinas to Whitehead, pp. 43f.
41 ibid., p. 43.
42 ibid., p. 44.
43 cf. Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, pp. 227ff.
44 Hartshorne, Charles, The Divine Relativity: A Social Conception of God, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1948, pp. 19fGoogle Scholar.
45 Hartshorne, Man's Vision of God, p. 298.
46 cf. Jennings, Theodore W Jr., Beyond Theism: A Grammar of God‐Language, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 247, n. 20Google Scholar.