Position · 400

Classical Theism

The view that God is eternal, unchanging and simple, and knows all things, including every future free choice, with complete certainty.

History

Roots

Classical theism grew from two sources at once. The first was Scripture’s insistence that God does not change: “For I the LORD do not change” (Malachi 3:6), the Father of lights “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17), the God who declares “the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:9–10). The second was the Greek philosophical habit of thinking about a perfect being, which Hellenistic Jews such as Philo of Alexandria had already used to read the Bible. The Early Church fathers borrowed that vocabulary, mostly to say what God is not: not bodily, not made, not subject to passion or decay.

The Trinitarian fights sharpened it. Arius taught that the Son was a creature and could in principle change; the Council of Nicaea (325) anathematised anyone who called the Son “changeable or alterable,” and Athanasius argued that only an unchanging Son could be truly divine and truly able to save. Immutability became a test of orthodoxy as much as a philosophical claim.

Causes

Augustine gave the position its lasting shape. In Confessions XI (New Advent) he argued that God made time along with the world, so there was no “before” in which God waited, and that God’s “years are one day,” a day that “is not daily, but today.” In City of God XI.10 he called God simple because God “is what he has,” with no gap between God and his goodness or wisdom (New Advent). In City of God V.9–10 he answered Cicero, who had argued that if God foreknows everything then nothing is up to us: “our wills themselves are included in that order of causes which is certain to God, and is embraced by His foreknowledge” (New Advent).

Boethius, writing in prison around 524, added the classic definition of eternity: “the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment” (Consolation of Philosophy V, Project Gutenberg). God does not foresee the future so much as see all times as present, the way a person watching someone walk does not make them walk. Anselm’s Proslogion (1078, CCEL) applied the same logic to divine feeling: God is compassionate “in terms of our experience” but not in terms of his own being (ch. 8).

Thomas Aquinas gathered all of this into a system in the Summa Theologiae (1265–1274). He treats simplicity first (I q.3), then immutability (q.9) and eternity (q.10). On future free acts he followed Boethius: God’s “glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality,” so contingent things are known infallibly without being made necessary (q.14 a.13). Jewish and Muslim philosophers, Maimonides and Avicenna among them, built closely parallel accounts in the same centuries.

Influence

The church wrote these attributes into its official teaching. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) confessed one God, “eternal and immeasurable, almighty, unchangeable, incomprehensible and ineffable,” with “one absolutely simple essence” (Papal Encyclicals). The Reformation did not touch the doctrine of God. The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) describe God as “without body, parts, or passions,” and the Westminster Confession (1646) adds that he is “immutable, immense, eternal” and that to him “nothing is … contingent or uncertain” (ch. 2). John Calvin explained the biblical passages where God “repents” as accommodation to human understanding (Institutes I.17.12–14, CCEL). The First Vatican Council (1870) restated it for Catholics: God is “one, singular, completely simple and unchangeable spiritual substance” (Dei Filius, ch. 1, Papal Encyclicals).

Because both Calvinism and Arminianism took these attributes for granted, their quarrel was about how God’s knowledge relates to his decree, not whether he knows the future. Classical theism was the common ground for Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant theology until the nineteenth century, and it still is for most of their official teaching.

Key ideas and contributors

Simplicity. God is not made of parts: not body and soul, not essence and existence, not substance and attributes. His goodness, power and wisdom are not separate qualities he possesses but the one God described from different angles. Aquinas made this the first thing said about God, and most of the other attributes follow from it (SEP, “Divine Simplicity”, secondary).

Immutability. A God who could change would either gain something he lacked or lose something he had, and a perfect being can do neither. God’s relations to creatures, Aquinas argued, are real in the creatures but not in God; when the world changes, God does not (I q.13 a.7; SEP, “Immutability”, secondary).

Timeless eternity. God does not live through a sequence of moments. All of time is present to him at once (Psalm 90:2, 2 Peter 3:8). This is what lets classical theists hold that God knows future free acts without causing or fixing them by his foreknowledge (SEP, “Eternity in Christian Thought”, secondary).

Impassibility. God is not acted on by creatures and does not suffer emotional change. Classical theists do not mean God is cold. They mean his love is a settled, perfect act rather than a reaction, and that biblical language of grief or anger describes how his unchanging will meets changing human conduct.

Exhaustive foreknowledge. God knows every future event, including every free choice, with certainty. Classical theists disagree on how. Thomists ground it in God’s eternal knowledge of what he wills and sustains. Luis de Molina’s Concordia (1588) added “middle knowledge,” God’s knowledge of what any free creature would do in any situation. The Jesuit-Dominican dispute over this ran through the papal Congregatio de Auxiliis (1597–1607), which ended without a ruling. Richard Muller has argued that Jacobus Arminius drew on Molina’s idea (God, Creation, and Providence in the Thought of Jacob Arminius, 1991).

Key controversies

Freedom and foreknowledge. If God already knows I will do something tomorrow, can I do otherwise? Cicero thought not and gave up foreknowledge; Augustine and Boethius kept both. Nelson Pike revived the problem in “Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action” (Philosophical Review, 1965), and it has been argued in philosophy journals ever since (SEP, “Foreknowledge and Free Will”, secondary). Molinism, the Boethian eternal present and the Ockhamist distinction between “hard” and “soft” facts about the past are the main classical replies. Fausto Sozzini and the seventeenth-century Socinians took the other road and denied that God knows future free acts at all, which made them the forerunners of later open theists.

The Hellenization charge. Adolf von Harnack’s History of Dogma (1886–1890, Archive.org) argued that early theology turned the gospel into Greek metaphysics. Later critics applied that to the doctrine of God: simplicity and impassibility, they said, came from Plato and Aristotle, not from Israel’s living God. Classical theists answer that the fathers used Greek terms to defend biblical claims against pagan ones, and that the God of Exodus 3:14 (“I am who I am”) already points toward a being who simply is (Exodus 3:14).

Suffering and the cross. Process theologians following Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne recast God as changing and affected by the world. Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God (1972, Archive.org) argued from the cross and from the Holocaust that a God who cannot suffer cannot love. After the twentieth century, a “suffering God” became the working assumption of much Protestant theology. Classical theists reply that in Chalcedonian Christology the Son suffers in his human nature, and that a God who needs to suffer to love would be less able to help, not more.

Simplicity under analytic attack. Alvin Plantinga’s Does God Have a Nature? (1980, Archive.org) argued that if God is identical with each of his properties, then God is a property, which is absurd. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “God Everlasting” (1975) argued that a God who acts in history must be in time. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann’s “Eternity” (Journal of Philosophy, 1981) defended the Boethian view, and the debate over timelessness is still open (R. T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 2016).

Open theism. The sharpest challenge came from evangelicals. The Openness of God (1994, Archive.org), by Clark Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, argued that the Bible shows a God who takes risks, changes his mind and does not know future free choices because they do not yet exist to be known. They pointed to texts where God relents or learns (Genesis 6:6, Genesis 22:12, Jonah 3:10). Gregory Boyd’s God of the Possible (2000, Archive.org) and Pinnock’s Most Moved Mover (2001, Archive.org) followed. Critics such as Bruce Ware (God’s Lesser Glory, 2000) and John Frame (No Other God, 2001) answered that open theism cannot account for predictive prophecy and leaves God unable to guarantee his promises. The Evangelical Theological Society affirmed exhaustive foreknowledge in 2001, and in 2003 voted on expelling Pinnock and Sanders; neither vote reached the two-thirds needed (IEP, “Open Theism”, secondary). See Open Theism.

Classical theism against “theistic personalism.” Since the 2010s a revival has pushed back on evangelicals who kept foreknowledge but dropped simplicity or impassibility. Brian Davies used “theistic personalism” for the view that God is a very great person among things; James Dolezal’s All That Is in God (2017) argued that much modern evangelical theology had drifted into it. The 2016 evangelical dispute over the eternal subordination of the Son fed this, since critics argued that ranked wills within the Trinity are hard to square with simplicity (see God and Trinity). Defenders of the modified view answer that full simplicity makes God’s free choice to create look necessary.

East and West. Eastern Orthodox theology affirms simplicity, but Gregory Palamas distinguished God’s unknowable essence from his uncreated energies, in which believers truly participate. Western critics since Barlaam of Calabria have said this divides God; Palamites reply that the Western identity of essence and act makes real union with God impossible. Whether Thomist and Palamite simplicity can be reconciled remains debated.

What remains unresolved

The real disagreement is over what makes God perfect. Classical theists say perfection means lacking nothing and therefore changing in nothing; their critics say a perfect love must be moved by those it loves. Both sides claim Scripture. One reads the texts about God relenting through the texts about God not changing; the other reads them the other way round. A God who cannot be affected can seem distant, and a God who can be affected can seem uncertain of his own promises.