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If God is eternal, he is immutable and his relationship with the world is without change. Luther and Kierkegaard agree that this is the case, but disagree whether the idea of necessity adequately captures God’s relationship with the world. Luther inherits the idea of necessity from the Scholastics, but rejects their distinction between absolute and conditional necessity. We can only trust ...
- Knut Alfsvåg
Feb 26, 2018 · Luther inherits the idea of necessity from the Scholastics, but rejects their distinction between absolute and conditional necessity. We can only trust God’s promises if there from God’s point ...
- Knut Alfsvåg
- Doctrinal Location and Proportion
- Doctrinal Isolation and Ossification
- Energizing The Doctrines
- Trinitarian Immutability
- God Is Immutably For Us
The first step towards better appreciating the doctrinal connections before us, is to correctly locate them. Charles Spurgeon linked God’s immutability and promises: “If I thought that the notes of the bank of England could not be cashed next week, I should decline to take them; and if I thought that God’s promises would never be fulfilled—if I tho...
When our doctrines are incorrectly located or proportioned, problems arise. If God’s immutability is considered apart from his promises, then God’s unchangeableness is viewed as the property of a distant, impersonal God. God’s otherness is stressed in a way that does not benefit or reach out to us. When the promises of God are viewed apart from God...
Recognizing the links between the doctrines before us energizes and refreshes each of them. The immutable God who grants us soteriological promises is qualitatively different from an immutable God who does not do so. The Christian life attempted in isolation from God’s promises is fundamentally different from one that depends upon the promises. Dep...
The Trinity is revealed in the economy of salvation. In the incarnation, Father, Son and Spirit are each revealed to be divine in a way that upholds monotheism. Even while all works of God are inseparably the work of each person, so the distinctiveness of Father Son and Spirit gives rise to each being associated with particular actions. It is possi...
The exercise of reading through this essay is itself a disciplined work of theological reasoning. The careful consideration of how God’s immutability and covenant promises are situated and related one to another, has an impact on our Christian living. We begin to sense that our greatest needs are indeed fully and unreservedly met in God. We discove...
This makes sense especially in light of Descartes’s famously deriving his conservation principle for quantity of motion using God’s immutability as a premise (CSM1: 240).Then, given that God is immutable, we can be sure that the items we understand as necessary are understood to have always been thus and to remain so eternally. 8 Otherwise, God’s operation in the world would change ...
cal formulations of immutability, the notion can be rescued - duly qualified. The key is Duns Scotus' notion of synchronic contingency: i.e. the possibility of something not being the case at the same time, rather than later on (66). This allows us to untie the knot between immutability and necessity. What God wills
Sep 17, 2024 · A detailed examination of this text reveals that although Kierkegaard emphasises the immutability of God, immutability here does not imply that God can only be discussed from the perspective of ‘necessity’ or ‘unchangeable’. This understanding of immutability originates from a reflection on classical metaphysics.
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Jan 1, 2005 · 1. Immutability. Before examining the role, if any, that God's immutability actually plays in Descartes's explanation of the necessity of the eternal truths, it may be helpful to have a working account of God's immutability. To be immutable is not merely to be unchanging, but rather to be unable to change.
