God's Incommunicable Attributes: One of these things, is not like the others...

Below is a table listing some of God’s incommunicable attributes. The italicized editorial comments in the second column are not meant to indicate that I call the attribute into question, because I most assuredly do not. They merely represent how the imponderability of the attribute might manifest itself in the form of questions that keep me up at night.

I have given, in the third column, a 0-10 mystery index to the attribute, where the higher the index the greater the mystery.

You will notice that one of these attributes is not like the others.

Attribute	Imperfect Understanding	Mystery Index [0-10]
Omnipotence	God can do anything He desires. Then why does God, if He is also good, permit such suffering?	9
Omnipresence	God is always present in all places. What does that even mean? Is it his actual presence or “merely” that his senses reach everywhere? How to imagine anything that is infinite?	9
Omniscient	God has perfect, complete knowledge.  He never learns, nor does he forget.  God cannot grow in knowledge, understanding, or wisdom.  Is human fee will an illusion? If so, why are we accountable?	9
Sovereignty	God is the supreme being who answers to no one and who has the absolute right to do with his creation as he desires. Why then is it apparently his will that some are lost and endure eternal damnation?	8
Self-existence	God is not dependent upon anything else for his existence.  He is uncaused--the infinite Being who has always existed.  It is unfathomable to imagine an existence that extends to the infinite past. Our mind demands that everything has a beginning.	10
Transcendence	God transcends space and time in that he is not dependent on them nor affected by them. God has no here nor there. God has no arrow of time, past, present, or future. God has no history. What do all the time references to God mean?	10
Immutability	Why, tis simple! God doesn’t change!	0

The incommunicable attribute of immutability doesn’t appear to cause any furrowed brows. It is nothing more than “’God doesn’t change.’ Next question.”

Is this really the only incommunicable attribute of God with a three-word definition “God doesn’t change” that is immediately and perfectly understandable, even by a child? Or, is it possible that we trivialize it?

We trivialize it. We assume we know exactly what it means from our non-transcendental existence and forget, unforgivably, that God is transcendental. An immutable non-transcendental being would be a stone statue. But an immutable transcendent being—now that being can certainly appear to be changing to us all the time. An immutable transcendent being (God) can look at us one moment and deem us filthy and unacceptable in our own righteousness, and look at us, an instant later, as pure and acceptable in Christ’s righteousness. An immutable transcendent being (God) actually can, from our perspective (and so for us it is real) be pleased with us one moment and angry the next.  Such a being does, from our vantage point, have changing emotions. These emotions are undoubtedly anthropomorphic, but they mean something, lest we make the Holy Spirit the worse inspirer of scripture ever. For He inspired phrases like “God was angry/pleased” over and over, while seemingly incapable of inspiring, instead: “It was as if God was angry.”

I don’t know how to explain immutability. But when I consider it in light of God’s transcendence (and omniscience) the best model I can come with is to liken it to, in toto, the past.  Our past. We are in some manner transcendent of the past. We are, in principle, omniscient regarding the past. The past cannot change. It is immutable. And yet the past is a collection of threads that were in constant change. I think (just my model) that in a similar manner all time is already “laid out” for God. He is, if you will, also transcendent of our future, and so in that sense nothing about Him can change because everything already is.

US : PAST :: GOD : ALL TIME

Immutability, when thought of properly, will overload and break your mystery index meter. You’ll have to order a new one, preferably one with a logarithmic scale. Not only is it not the simplest of God’s attributes, It is so mysterious there is actually only one safe conclusion that we can draw from it, and that is this: God’s promises are true.

I am really annoyed when the trivial view of immutability is used to argue for Divine Impassibility. ¹ Strip away the jargon and other pedantic window dressing from the way modern so-called theologians write about impassibility and you always, if you dig deep enough, find this argument:

P1: God is Immutable

P2: Emotions imply change

C: Therefore God has no emotions

Corollary: the myriad scripture passages attributing emotions to God are all anthropomorphisms.

This is a textbook example of a syllogistic fallacy.

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¹ After a great deal of study (and after removing the aftertaste of some really awful modern writing) I came to affirm the historic doctrine of Divine Impassibility. But not the way it is taught, with the syllogistic fallacy as described above, that forces one to argue that all references to God’s feelings are anthropomorphic. That is simply not true, and in fact it as dangerously wrong, and it is not the historic viewpoint. If you are reading a book that argues that way—get a better book. One that understands that passions are not the same thing as emotions. It is Divine Impassibility, not Divine Stoicism. God is not Spock.