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Indeed, the Bible more than philosophy informs our worship when we sing about God's changelessness. "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" ("There is no shadow of turning with thee") reverberates with echoes of James 1:6 (with God "there is no variation or shadow due to change"). And the classic hymn "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise" rephrases Isaiah with these words: "We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree, / And wither and perish but nought changeth thee."

These and other passages should keep us from reading the Bible's anthropomorphisms simplistically. If we took them at face value, we should as likely sing Joan Osborne's 1995 hit "What If God Was One of Us" in church. Her song impoverishes the glorious idea of the Incarnation and turns God into a poor bewildered "stranger on the bus / trying to make his way home."

What happens when God is said to change his mind? Here the proponents of classical theism and openness part ways.

The classic understanding is that God speaks about himself anthropomorphically or analogically (as suggested by the cartoon that appears here) all the way through Scripture—not just in a few places. In every noun, verb, and adjective God has used to present himself, certain notions of limitation and moral inadequacy apply to the human word that must be deleted when we apply it to God. So when God appears to change in response to Nineveh's repentance, the antediluvian's evils, or King Saul's failures, we recognize the anthropomorphic nature of the speech and seek the analogical meaning in it. At the heart of the idea of anthropomorphism is the idea that though we speak of God by means of human analogy, we do not have access to the inner workings of his mind. Thus the classical approach makes no attempt to psychologize God in human terms. It follows the prophet Samuel's idea that God "is not a man that he should repent" (1 Samuel 15:29, RSV). The openness theologians, on the other hand, seem to take this language as a clue to the working of God's mind, and they try to fit all that is said about his immutability, his plan for history from beginning to end, and his sovereign control over all that comes to pass into the frame of a mind-changing God. Thus they psychologize God. They treat what is said of God as having only one layer of meaning (that is, univocal) rather than analogical. God is thus pictured as like us in a way that merits Voltaire's observation that God made man in his own image and ever since man has been seeking to return the compliment.

Historic Christian theology would criticize this confusion of the analogical with the univocal by saying it reflected a certain carelessness in theological method. But modern evangelical exponents of the classical view have their own problems in speaking of God. They need to rethink the doctrine of analogy. Much fresh labor on working out this analogical nature of revelation is needed before either position can be stated adequately. The critiques on both sides are premature.

The openness theologians often complain that the teaching of an unchanging God is more dependent on Greek philosophy than on the Hebrew Scriptures. While the Scriptures do teach an unchanging God, the theology taught in many of our seminaries owes as much to medieval scholasticism as it does to the Bible. Luther and other Reformers managed to resist some of these philosophical influences, but they were employed by the seventeenth-century Swiss theologian Turretin, picked up by the great Princeton theologians—Alexander, Hodges, and Warfield—and then transmitted to Louis Berkhof.

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February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2