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 Does a Perfect God Look Like?
The “classical view of God” refers to the view of God that has dominated Christian theology since the earliest Church fathers. According to this theology, God is completely “immutable.” This means that God’s being and experience never changes in any respect. God is therefore pure actuality (actus purus), having no potentiality whatsoever, for potentiality is a power to change which, as I just said, is ruled out in classical theology.
God is therefore also timeless (sequence-less), for “before” and “after” signifies some sort of change which, again, God is incapable of. Finally, God is “impassible” in classical theology, meaning that God is “above” experiencing emotion. To experience emotion God would have to be affected by something outside of himself, but this is impossible if God has no potentiality for change. Ancient philosophers and classical theologians thought all of these things were implied in the belief that God is “perfect.”
This concept of perfection comes to full fruition in a Greek philosopher named Parmenides, but it gained its most influential advocate in Plato who followed on Parmenides’ heels. In the Republic Plato argues that the gods must be unchanging, for all change can only be for the better or for the worse, and what is perfect cannot be improved or diminished. So, what is perfect must be completely unchanging. The argument is repeated ad nauseum by later Greco-Roman philosophers and then repeated by many early church theologians.
Think about this argument for a moment. Imagine a person walking around in a very upbeat mood who then encounters a friend who is despairing over the recent death of her child. Do you think the grief of the friend would alter the mood of this person? Wouldn’t it be grotesque if this person remained “immutable” in their upbeat demeanor while interacting with her grieving friend? Isn’t it the case that the more perfect this person was, the more deeply they’d be affected by their grieving friend? If they were in fact a perfect person, they wouldn’t be improved by this encounter, and they certainly wouldn’t be diminished by it. But they would be changed by it – precisely because they’re perfect.
This is the fatal flaw in Plato’s argument, and the fatal flaw in classical theology. The eternally-the-same and affected-by-nothing conception of perfection is completely non-relational and impersonal. It could perhaps be applied to timeless principles, but not to a personal being. Yet, from the earliest times Christian theologians applied this line of reasoning to the God of the Bible.
If we instead think of perfection in personal terms while acknowledging that God is perfect, the last thing we’d conclude is that God is completely unchanging, devoid of potentiality, sequence-less, or devoid of emotion. Instead, if we think of perfection in personal terms, the picture of God we get is one in which he is deeply affected by his relationships with those he creates. Of course, God’s character and nature is eternally-the-same, but his experience of his creation would be perpetually changing as he relates to perpetually changing people in a perpetually changing world.
Is this not exactly the picture of God we get in the Bible? Where in the Bible is there any hint that God’s experience of the world is unchanging and non-sequential? The God of the Bible is continually acting and responding. He plans, and then alters plans in response to new situations. He rejoices, grieves, gets angry, experiences disappointment, etc. While his sense of time is radically different form ours – as you’d expect from a being who has always existed – he nevertheless relates to humans in sequence (how else can one being relate to another?).
Most important, out of unfathomable love, the God of the Bible became a human being. Talk about God having the capacity to change and to be deeply affected by another! To me, one of the most shocking – and disappointing – mysteries of history is how bright Christians, who were taught to look to Jesus to know what God is like (e.g. Jn. 14:7-9), ended up asserting that God is immutable, devoid of potential, non-sequential, and impassible. I believe it’s time to lay this misconstrued Greek concept of perfection to rest.
Category: General
Tags: Attributes of God, Classical Theism, God, Jesus, Open Theism
Topics: Attributes and Character
Related Reading

15 Reasons Open Theism is TRUE (a reply to Andrew Wilson)
Article by Dan Kent Recently, Andrew Wilson shared an impressive critique of open theism called: “Responding To Open Theism In Fourteen Words.” Andrew’s article didn’t persuade me, but it did challenge me (seriously!). Below I will respond to each of the words Andrew presents. But first I will add one word of my own (if…

“Whatever it means, it cannot mean that.”
pure9 via Compfight Roger Olson wrote a great article a couple of days ago entitled Why (High) Calvinism Is Impossible. He points out that there is no way to understand God as “good” while also believing in double predestination. The idea that God predestines some to heaven and a vast majority to hell for his “glory”…

The Only Thing That Matters Is Love: The Kingdom of God (Part 3)
To say that living in Calvary-quality love is the most important thing in our life is to grossly understate its importance. This stands in distinction from how we typically define the Kingdom of God. But it stands in line with the fact that Jesus is the Kingdom of God. Paul says the “the only thing…

One Hope
When Jesus was crucified by his enemies instead of conquering his enemies, the hope of Jesus’ disciples came crashing down in utter despair. They had hoped that Jesus would establish the kingdom of God in the same way that other kingdoms were established. However, the resurrection reveals that the kingdom of God is not like…

Free Will in the Bible
Scripture portrays humans as having minds and wills of their own. They are, in a real (though limited) sense, creators of their own behavior and determiners of their own destinies—whether this behavior and destiny is in line with God’s will or not. This fundamental assumption is demonstrated in a variety of ways throughout Scripture. It…

What is the significance of Revelation 3:5?
“If you conquer, you will be clothed like them in white robes, and I will not blot your name out of the book of life…” If God is only the God of certainties, it is not clear how he can honestly speak in conditional terms (“If you conquer…”) and it is not clear why he…