Does God ever genuinely change His mind — or is 'divine immutability' a Greek philosophy import we've been smuggling into the Bible?

• J9

  Jordan 921mo ago

  I went to a Reformed seminary. I believed in classical immutability with my whole chest. Then my daughter was diagnosed with a terminal illness and I prayed like I've never prayed before and she recovered when doctors said she wouldn't. You want to tell me that was always 'timelessly decreed' and my prayers were just a puppet show? I can't. I won't. Something HAPPENED when I prayed. God moved. I felt it. You can call that anthropopathism if you want but it was real.

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• A

  Alex4w ago

  I've pastored for 22 years. I've watched people lose their faith over this exact question — not because the answer isn't there, but because we refuse to sit in the tension honestly. We hand people either a God who is so immutable He might as well be a theorem, or a God so reactive He's basically anxiety-ridden. The real God of Scripture is neither. He is stable enough to be trusted and relational enough to be loved. Whatever that means philosophically, THAT is where I'm planting my flag.

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• L

  Liam1mo ago

  The theological gymnastics people do to maintain 'immutability' while reading Exodus 32 is honestly exhausting. Moses literally argues God out of genocide. God RELENTED. That's the word. If that's just 'anthropomorphic language,' then how do we trust ANY language in the Bible to actually describe God? You can't have it both ways.

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• E_

  Elena _x1mo ago

  I just want to point out that Jonah is literally in the Bible SPECIFICALLY to make this point. God says Nineveh will be destroyed. Nineveh repents. God doesn't destroy them. Jonah gets MAD — and not for no reason. He knew God might relent and he didn't want Him to. The whole book is built around God's ability to change course in response to human action. If that's just 'anthropomorphism,' the book has no plot.

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• HK

  Hana K.4w ago

  If you disagree that the 'it's just anthropomorphism' move is intellectually honest, I challenge you to explain why God TOLD Moses what He was about to do if He already timelessly knew Moses would intercede and He would relent. What was the point of the announcement? Was He performing for Moses? Lying? Testing him? Every option is weird except the one where God genuinely meant it and Moses genuinely changed the outcome. Explain that to me without using the word 'mystery' as a trapdoor.

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• DT

  Drew T.1mo ago

  Hard disagree. God being immutable is not Greek smuggling — it's what makes Him trustworthy. If God can actually change His mind based on our arguments, then He's not omniscient and He's not sovereign. You've just described a being who can be surprised, manipulated, and outmaneuvered. That's not the God of the Bible. That's a very powerful man. Immutability is the ONLY coherent foundation for trusting His promises.

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• S

  Sam4w ago

  That response is technically correct and also the most pastorally tone-deaf thing I've read all week. Telling a parent 'your experience isn't reliable theological data' is how you drive people away from the church forever. Truth without compassion isn't actually truth, it's just being right in a way that harms people.

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• MK

  Morgan K.1mo ago

  Thomas Aquinas literally said God is actus purus — pure actuality with no potentiality whatsoever. Nothing new can happen IN God. He can't learn, feel, or be affected by anything outside Himself. Now read the Psalms and tell me that's the God David was talking to. I'll wait.

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• M

  Morgan1mo ago

  Can I ask a genuine question here? If God timelessly knows all things and never changes, then what exactly is prayer doing? Like, not being snarky, I genuinely want someone who holds the classical view to explain what happens in the transaction when I pray. Am I just... discovering what was always going to happen? Because that feels hollow.

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• TL

  Taylor L.4w ago

  My issue with the 'it's just anthropomorphism' crowd: at what point does that move become a blank check to dismiss any biblical description of God you find theologically inconvenient? God loves? Anthropomorphism. God is angry? Anthropomorphism. God is jealous? Anthropomorphism. If every affective description is just a concession to human understanding, you've replaced the biblical God with a concept. A concept can't save you.

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• DS

  Diego S.1mo ago

  The distinction classical theists make is between God's NATURE (unchangeable — His holiness, love, faithfulness, etc.) and His ACTIONS (responsive to creation). He doesn't change WHO He is. He responds to what we do. That's not Greek philosophy. That's basic covenantal logic. The covenant itself establishes conditions. When Israel repents, God responds differently than when they're in rebellion. The conditions changed. God's character didn't. This is actually quite simple.

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• Z

  Zara1mo ago

  ok I grew up Baptist and we were just told 'God is the same yesterday today and forever' from Hebrews 13 and that was the whole conversation. nobody ever told me the verse is about God's FAITHFULNESS and character consistency, not a metaphysical claim about timelessness. I genuinely feel a little cheated.

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• L

  Liam1mo ago

  Open Theism is absolutely a heresy and I'll die on that hill. If God doesn't know the future exhaustively then Isaiah 46:10 is meaningless. 'Declaring the end from the beginning' — how does an ignorant deity do THAT? Open Theism worships a god who is basically gambling alongside us and hoping it works out. No thank you.

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• AR

  Avery R.1mo ago

  immutability comes straight from Plato and Aristotle. the early church fathers were STEEPED in Greek philosophy and they read it back into Scripture. Augustine basically admitted this. we adopted a pagan conception of deity and then tortured the biblical text to make it fit. God in the Bible is relational, responsive, passionate. He grieves. He regrets. that's not a PR move to make Him relatable, that's who He actually IS.

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• ZT

  Zara T.4w ago

  Here's the thing nobody is saying: both classical immutability AND full divine passibility (the idea that God genuinely changes and feels in the way humans do) have serious problems. Classical immutability risks making God a philosophical abstraction. Full passibility risks making God dependent on creation and undermining His aseity. The serious theologians are trying to find a third way — something like 'God is freely self-determined to be affected by what He has created' — and it's hard and incomplete and maybe that's where we should be sitting with humility rather than shouting at each other.

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• RS

  Ravi S.1mo ago

  Hermeneutics 101 doesn't mean the emotional descriptions in the Psalms are LESS TRUE. Maybe — just a thought — they're MORE true than the abstracted philosophical categories, because they come from actual encounter with God rather than armchair reasoning about what a perfect being MUST be like. The mystics said as much for centuries.

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• NL

  Nina L.1mo ago

  Open Theism is the answer and nobody wants to say it out loud because it got labeled a heresy and everyone ran for cover. Greg Boyd and Clark Pinnock made serious biblical cases that God genuinely does not know all future free decisions in advance — not because He's limited, but because the future doesn't exist yet to be known. That's not a weakness. That's what makes the relationship REAL.

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• J

  Jamie4w ago

  Both of the last two people are right and that's the whole problem with this conversation. The intellectual framework and the pastoral reality keep crashing into each other and we haven't figured out how to hold both. Maybe that's okay. Maybe God is big enough to be real in the lived moment AND coherent in the philosophical frame and we just can't see how yet.

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• D

  Drew1mo ago

  Respectfully, that distinction is doing a LOT of heavy lifting and I'm not sure the biblical text actually supports it as cleanly as you're suggesting. Where does Scripture say 'God's nature is immutable but His actions are contingent'? That's a THEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK being applied to Scripture. Which is fine! But let's be honest about what we're doing instead of pretending it's just plain reading.

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• L9

  Liam 921mo ago

  The passage everyone ignores is 1 Samuel 15:11 — 'I regret that I have made Saul king' — and then three verses later it says 'the Glory of Israel does not lie or have regret, for he is not a man that he should have regret.' IN THE SAME CHAPTER. So either Samuel is a terrible editor or the Bible is doing something sophisticated with the word 'regret' that simple literalism can't capture. This isn't Greek philosophy. This is internal biblical tension that needs actual exegesis.

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• M

  Morgan4w ago

  The person above who brought up their daughter recovering from illness — I want to respond to that directly and kindly. I'm so glad she's well. But I think we have to be careful about building our theology from our experiences rather than the other way around. People prayed just as fervently for children who didn't recover. If your experience proves God changes His mind, what does their loss prove? Our experiences are real but they're not reliable theological data.

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• IR

  Iris R.1mo ago

  Process theology makes God dependent on the world for His own experience and development. At that point you've abandoned the God of Scripture entirely and replaced Him with a cosmic co-traveler. Hard pass. Some ideas deserve to be dismissed without a full reading seminar.

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• QM

  Quinn M.1mo ago

  My professor called it 'the most important question in Christian theology nobody is asking in the pew.' He was right. What you believe about divine immutability shapes everything — your view of prayer, providence, suffering, free will, the nature of love itself. And most Christians have just inherited Aquinas filtered through their denominational confession and never questioned it once.

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• A

  Alex4w ago

  ngl I came into this post thinking it was gonna be a boring theology nerd fight and it is but I also cannot stop reading it. someone is getting roasted every three comments and somehow also making me rethink things I thought I settled in college. this is the most productive fight I've seen on Christian internet in months.

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• D

  Drew1mo ago

  ok but nobody in my small group has EVER had this conversation and honestly that's a bigger problem than whatever the answer is. we just sing 'How Great Thou Art' and skip over the fact that God apparently changed His mind like seven times in the Pentateuch alone. the average churchgoer has no idea this tension even exists.

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• T

  Taylor1mo ago

  The Psalms are poetry. You don't build systematic theology from the emotional register of poetry any more than you build cosmology from Job 38. The Psalms describe how God APPEARS and FEELS to human beings in relationship. That's different from ontological claims about the divine nature. This is hermeneutics 101.

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• Q

  Quinn1mo ago

  Process theology solves all of this and Christians are too scared to even engage it fairly. Whitehead. Hartshorne. God is genuinely affected by creation, genuinely grows in relationship with it, genuinely responsive. Before you say 'heresy,' ask yourself whether you've actually read the primary sources or just the evangelical dismissals of them.

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