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
Is the open view the only view that is compatible with the Incarnation?
Question: You have said that the Open view of God is the only view that squares with the Incarnation and the only view that truly exalts God’s greatness. On what basis do you say this? Answer: The revelation of God in the Incarnation is the ultimate expression of God’s willingness and ability to change that…
How Calvinism Misses the Point About Salvation
Calvinists sometimes argue that various passages in John teach that the Father chooses and then “draws” certain people to Christ. Those who are “drawn” certainly come to Christ (John 6:37) while all who are not drawn remain in their sin. For example, John portrays Jesus as repeatedly teaching that “no one can come to me…
Is Free Will compatible with Predestination?
Question: Isn’t “freedom” simply our ability to do what we want? And if this is so there seems to be no incompatibility between saying that a person is “free” on the one hand, but predestined (or at least foreknown) by God, on the other. But why do you say that freedom is not compatible with…
Summer Q&A!
Greg Boyd and Paul Eddy recently hosted a Summer Q&A for all three services at Woodland Hills Church. If you’ve ever wanted to sit and listen to these guys talk about a wide range of topics off the top of their heads, this is your chance! Good stuff folks! Our friend Jesse Ward was kind…
How do you respond to Ephesians 1:4-5?
Question: Ephesians 1 refers to believers as predestined before the foundation of the world. How do you reconcile this with your view that free actions of people (like choosing to believe in Christ) can’t be predestined or even foreknown ahead of time? Answer: It took three hundred years before anyone in Church history interpreted the…
What is the significance of 2 Kings 20:1–7?
The Lord tells Hezekiah “[Y]ou shall die: you shall not recover” (vs. 1). Hezekiah pleads with God and God says, “I will add fifteen years to your life” (vs. 6). If everything about the future was exhaustively settled and known by God as such, his prophecy to Hezekiah that he was going to die would…