We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
What do you think of Thomas Aquinas’ view of God?
Question: You have written (in Trinity and Process) that the relational God of the Bible is the antithesis of the immutable God of Thomas Aquinas. Could you explain this?
Answer: Aquinas and much of the classical theological tradition borrowed heavily from Aristotle’s notion of God as an “unmoved mover.” God moves the world but remains unmoved himself. Among other things, this entails that God is not reciprocally related to the world. Indeed, for Aquinas, God relates to the world only by relating to himself as the cause of the world. He thus wrote that the relationship between God and the world is real to the world but not to God.
I don’t see how this view of God is at all compatible the central truth of the Christian faith that God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ. If we grant that Christ—rather than Aristotle—most decisively reveals who God is, it’s hard to see how we can justify the conclusion that God is not reciprocally related to his creation. God is so affected by the plight of humans and of all creation that he become a human to save us and creation from the devil’s oppression.
So far as I can see, this relational and vulnerable view of God is the most exalted and beautiful conception of God ever imagined. Though his intention was to articulate the greatness of God, I view Aquinas’ “unmoved mover” conception as being insulting to God.
Category: Q&A
Tags: Classical Theism, God, Open Theism, Q&A
Topics: Attributes and Character
Related Reading
How do you respond to Proverbs 21:1?
“The king’s heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he wills.” Calvinists sometimes argue that this passage teaches that everything every government official ever does is the result of the Lord turning their heart. In light of the hideous things many government officials have done (e.g.…
Who Rules Governments? God or Satan? Part 2
In the previous post, I raised the question of how we reconcile the fact that the Bible depicts both God and Satan as the ruler of nations, and I discussed some classical ways this has been understood. In this post I want to offer a cross-centered approach to this classical conundrum that provides us with…
What is the significance of Ezekiel 22:29–31?
The Lord says he “sought for” someone to stand in the breech for Israel “but I found none.” Hence Israel experienced the wrath of God. If everything that shall ever come to pass is eternally fixed in the divine mind, God would have foreknown that no one would respond to his call for a Moses-like…
How do you respond to Jeremiah 25:8–12?
The Lord says to the nations: “Because you have not obeyed my words” (vs. 8), “this whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation, the land of…
The Incarnation: Paradox or Contradiction?
We’re in the process of flushing out the theology of the ReKnew Manifesto, and we’ve come to the point where we should address the Incarnation. This is the classical Christian doctrine that Jesus was fully God and fully human. Today I’ll simply argue for the logical coherence of this doctrine, viz. it does not involve…
What is the significance of 1 Samuel 2:27–31?
Because Eli “scorned” God’s sacrifices and did not punish his sons for their vile behavior, the Lord says, “‘I promised that your house and your father’s house would minister before me forever.’ But now the Lord declares, ‘Far be it from me! Those who honor me I will honor, but those who despise me will…