Immutability (Wesley Hill)
http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/01/the-impassible-god-of-the-bible First, I want to suggest that whether impassibility is a “metaphysical a priori”—a conviction brought to Scripture from somewhere else—is precisely what’s up for debate in recent theology. To say that the doctrine is not “self-evident in Scripture, nor necessary in order to hold a fully biblical . . . understanding of God” is to state one side of the argument, not an agreed-upon conclusion. The recent biblical and patristic work I gestured toward in my column—the work of folks like Michael Allen, Paul Gavrilyuk, Matthew Levering, and Kevin Vanhoozer, to which I’d add names like Donald Gowan, David Bentley Hart, Janet Martin Soskice, and Scott Swain, among others—is aimed at showing that impassibility is an entailment of specifically biblical affirmations. Their argument, in brief, is this. It is, chiefly, the biblical doctrine of creation—that God is responsible for anything existi...